A monk asked Shito “How does one become free?”. Shito replied, “Who has bound you?”
That’s the question, who binds you? Don’t look outside, look into the mind, investigate the opinionated mind. Become familiar with its opinions and judgments; then you wont be so vulnerable to them. Our effort is to release the mind from its ordinary opinions and see revealed a new universe. Nothing binds us but the habituated mind.
Katherine Thanas, The Truth of This Life
How quietly I
begin again
from this moment
looking at the
clock, I start over
so much time has
passed, and is equaled
by whatever
split-second is present
from this
moment this moment
is the first.
Wendell Berry, Be Still in Haste
To believe means: To set free the indestructible in you, or more precisely: to be freed, or more precisely: to be indestructible, or more precisely, to be.
Croire signifie : libérer l’indestructible en soi, ou plus exactement : se libérer, ou plus exactement : être indestructible, ou plus exactement être.
Franz Kafka, 1883 – 1924, Journals
The first duty of love is to listen.
Paul Tillich, 1886 – 1965, German-American philosopher and theologian
From Ram Dass, who passed away just a few days ago
Now the whole idea of a meditative practice is the process of very simply extracting awareness from the identification with thought and sensation
The post-Christmas sales are in full flow… A lot of the activity in the modern celebration of this season comes from the lack of an ability to rest in how we are or where we are, right now, in our lives. When there is a sense of “not enough”, there is a tendency to seek more or other, through things or comparisons.
There is nothing accidental about the fact that we in the West are starved for some real sense of meaning and crying out for something that, in spite of all our apparent sophistication and material success, we are no longer even able to name. This western civilization of ours was created for a purpose. Until we start to discover that purpose again, our lives will be meaningless. Unless we touch our roots and make contact again with the essence of our past, we can have no future
Peter Kingsley. 1953 – Author, early Greek Philosophy scholar.
Mindfulbalance 