Become totally empty.
Let your heart be at peace.
Amidst the rush of worldly comings and goings,
observe how endings become beginnings.
Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching, 16
Tag: Awareness
Empty
Very windy these days, as first the tail end of the tropical storm passed over the country, and this morning Storm Ali shakes things up.
The first of the leaves start to fall.
The Heart Sutra says, “all phenomena in their own-being are empty.” “Own-being” means separate, independent existence… everything is a tentative expression of one seamless, ever-changing landscape. So no individual person or thing has any permanent, fixed identity.
Lewis Redmond, Emptiness: The Most Misunderstood Word in Buddhism
Thusness
For those who would see directly into essential nature, the idea of the sacred is a delusion and an obstruction: it diverts us from seeing what is before our eyes: plain thusness. And This, thusness, is the nature of the nature of nature. The wild in the wild
Gary Snyder, The Practice of the Wild
We shall dance
Our life is shorter than flowers.
Then shall we mourn?
No, we shall dance
Plant gardens
Dress in colours
And teach our children
To make the world more beautiful.
Because our life
Is shorter than flowers.
Toltec fragment
A motto for September
More from Chuang Tzu, just to start the month in a Taoist frame of mind:
Flow with whatever may happen and let your mind be free.
Stay centered by accepting whatever you are doing.
This is the ultimate.
That’s the key
The teachings about recognizing egolessness sound quite abstract, but the path quality of that, the magic instruction that we have all received, the golden key is that part of the meditation technique where you recognize what’s happening with you and you say to yourself, “Thinking.” Then you let go of all the talking and the fabrication and discussion, and you’re left just sitting with the weather – the quality and the energy of the weather itself. Maybe you still have that quaky feeling or that churning feeling or that exploding feeling or that calm feeling or that dull feeling, as if you’d just been buried in the earth. You’re left with that. That’s the key: come to know that.
Pema Chodron, The Wisdom of No Escape
