Of course we can always imagine more perfect conditions, how it should be ideally, how everyone should behave. But it is not our task to create an ideal. It’s our task to see how it is, and to learn from the world as it is. For the awakening of the heart, conditions are always good enough.
Ajahn Sumedho
We drift in and out of knowing our aliveness. Pain, worry, fear, and loss can muffle and confuse us. But ……aliveness is not a judge in a talent show. Aliveness shows itself in response to wholeheartedness, when we can say yes to life, and work with what we’re given, and stay in relationship — to everything.
Mark Nepo, Everyone has a gift
O human, see then the human being rightly:
the human being has heaven and earth and the whole of creation in itself, and yet is a complete form,
and in it everything is already present, though hidden.
Hidlegard of Bingen
It’s hard to tell the difference between sea and sky,
between voyager and sea.
Between reality and the workings of the heart.
Haruki Murakami, Kafka on The Shore
I find myself more and more teaching what seems most essential; to help people access intelligent and comfortable awareness. If this awareness becomes a steady orientation, it’s possible to live and grow in this personal world; here is a sense of safety with its fundamental goodwill. The tricky detail being that it is not personal; it’s before the personal conditions arise.
And this means that the sources of the programs and attitudes that become a person get revealed: dis-ease, restlessness and having to do something, or feeling guilty and inadequate that one isn’t doing (or in fact being) whatever it is that one should be – while not knowing what that is. Not that any of that is your fault. Essentially this dukkha (suffering) is not personal, not specific; and it isn’t resolved by doing anything other than tackling its program. It’s non-specific because its source is the pressurised space of one’s unsettled awareness. That then colours everything that the personality forms out of.
Ajahn Sucitto
A lot of modern society is driven by the distraction industry – advertising, shopping, surfing the net. It is not a new phenomenon. Nietzsche wrote in 1874 that “haste is universal because everyone is in flight from himself”, but modern technologies of escape, like the smartphone or the tablet, make it even more pervasive and difficult to develop the silence within which is necessary for good health.
All mystics – Catholic, Christian, non-Christian, no matter what their theology, no matter what their religion – are unanimous on one thing: that all is well, all is well. Though everything is a mess, all is well. Strange paradox, to be sure. But, tragically, most people never get to see that all is well because they are asleep. Spirituality means waking up. Most people, even though they don’t know it, are asleep.
People don’t really want to be cured. What they want is relief; a cure is painful.
Anthony de Mello sj, Spirituality means waking up.
Mindfulbalance 