Being one with life is being one with Now. You then realize that you don’t live your life, but life lives you.
Life is the dancer, and you are the dance.
Eckhart Tolle, A new Earth: Awakening to your Life’s Purpose
How to live life
Tag: Awareness
Clear flowing water
Our original nature is like clear water. Born again into a world of wildly changing forms, though having no essential form of our own, we take on the shapes of the containers we are poured into. We become sons or daughters and are told to think of ourselves in that manner. Acculturated, we bend to the curves of that arbitrary modality. Slowly we freeze into that shape. The straighter and harder the edge the more we are praised as being someone of merit….
But water is water. Melting, it remembers; evaporating, it ascends. When you let go of control of the universe, when you let go of everything, only the truth remains. Your actions come out of the present. There is no force. Fully present. Able to respond, not out of personal desire, but out of a sense of the appropriateness of things. You respond from the flow itself, or perhaps better stated, the flow responds to itself. Letting go of the little mind, of your suffering, is simpler than you think, though it’s the hardest work you will ever do.
Stephen Levine, A Gradual Awakening
Sunday Quote: What’s needed
Bien commencer amène à bien terminer
A good beginning makes for a good conclusion
French proverb
Wings will be given
You are uneasy riding the body?
Dismount. Travel lighter. Wings will be given.
Be clear like a mirror, reflecting nothing.
Be clean of pictures and the worry that comes with images.
Gaze into what is not ashamed or afraid of any truth.
Contain all human faces in your own without any judgment of them.
Be pure emptiness.
What is inside that? you ask. Silence is all I can say.
Lovers have some secrets That they keep.
Rumi
Complicating things
Dhamma is simple:
Live with love and be aware.
It is only the mind that complicates this teaching and says that it is not enough.
Michael Kewley, Former Buddhist monk, currently teaching courses on Awareness and meditation
The real end
Unhappiness, discontent or suffering results from the tension between desire and the lack of the thing desired. Now there are two possible approaches to overcoming this unhappiness. One is to obtain the object desired, to secure possession of it; the other is to eliminate the desire.
If we carefully examine the happiness that comes from satisfying desire, we would find that such happiness is unreliable and insecure. This happiness depends on external things. These objects of desire are inevitably impermanent, and when we are separated from them we become unhappy. Thus even in the midst of happiness we become vulnerable to suffering.
Therefore the Buddha points out that true happiness is to
be achieved by taking the opposite approach, the approach of eliminating our desires. If we eliminate the desire our mind remains satisfied, content and happy no matter what our external situation may be. The Buddha says that this principle can be carried through
all the way to the total uprooting of craving. This is the cessation of craving, the end of suffering (dukkha) here and now.
Bhikkhu Bodhi, Nibbana
