A thousand secrets are hidden in simply sitting still.
Karlfried Graf Dürckheim, German psychtheorapoist and zen teacher
Tag: Awareness
The stones and bricks that make up life
Just this day, with its work, and travel, its meetings and discussions, and its weather, roads, stones and plants. We do not need to add more.
Mind as fences, walls, tiles, and pebbles
is nothing other than fences, walls, tiles, and pebbles.
There is no additional mud or water.
Dogen.
photo ardfern.
No longer trying to become
My thought is almost never directed on knowing myself as I am in this moment…and again in this moment. It is difficult for the thought to remain on what is, because it is based on memory and is constantly visualizing the possibility of becoming. How to …resist the desire to become, in favor of simply what is? It is difficult for my thought to stay in front of the unknown. This means abandoning belief in everything it knows, even the trace of the preceding moment. To stay in front of the unknown my mind must be profoundly silent. This is a silence that is not obtained by suppressing or by sacrifice. I do not make the silence. It appears, when the mind sees that by itself alone, it cannot be in contact with something it cannot measure, something higher. Then the mind no longer seeks, it does not try to become.
Gurdjieff’s pupil, Jeanne De Salzmann, (1889 – 1990) Reality of Being
We will never be here again
The gods envy us.
They envy us because we’re mortal, because any moment may be our last.
Everything is more beautiful because we’re doomed.
You will never be lovelier than you are now.
We will never be here again.
Homer, The Iliad
photo huykhanhthai
The simplest practice
That is the wonderful thing about the breathing, and the reason it is such a helpful object of attention. It is both perfectly ordinary (we are all doing it, all the time) and extremely special (if we weren’t doing it, we’d be dead)… Everybody breathes. It is also extremely portable. We take it everywhere we go. So if you choose to practice with the breathing, it has the advantage of always being there. No matter how many times you forget it throughout the day, you can always take it up again. There’s another in-breath. There’s an out-breath.
Larry Rosenberg, Breath by Breath
Our true nature
The death of the self may be full of the fear of letting go, of stepping off into the void, thinking that nothing will stop our fall, not recognizing that the void is our true nature. The void is the vastness in which we are occurring, it is the truth itself, and the whole idea of “someone” stepping off is just another bubble passing through. And we don’t any longer need to define who we are, because who we become each moment is so much more than what we ever imagined. There’s no need to limit who we really are with any definition. We are all of it. And only the contents of this vastness of mind, once identified with as a separate self, limit who we are.
Steven Levine, A Gradual Awakening
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