Never be so focused on what you’re looking for
that you overlook the thing you actually find.
Ann Patchett, American author
Tag: Awareness
In the assumed, not in the now
It’s in the abstract, the assumed, the possible and ‘what others think’ that the mind holds its phobias – as life messages of abandonment or inadequacy … Those qualities aren’t there in specific direct experience: there’s painful and pleasant moments, but there are no life messages. However our daily world is commonly held in terms of non-specific generalizations, like its ‘another Monday,’ or, ‘a typical man’, or ,‘I dread meeting Janice, she’s always like this,’ or ‘I’m hopeless.’ In fact…. any sense of a lasting entity or state of being is an act of generalization. It’s a useful convention, but one that allows the mind’s neuroses and corruptions to be projected onto the here and now.
Ajahn Sucitto, The Low Point
Sunday Quote: Looking in the wrong places
How far I have to go to find you
in whom I have already arrived
Thomas Merton
photo mtaylor848
Seeing the difference
Mindfulness helps us get better at seeing the difference between what’s happening and the stories we tell ourselves about what’s happening, stories that get in the way of direct experience. Often such stories treat a fleeting state of mind as if it were our entire and permanent self.
Sharon Salzburg, Real Happiness: The Power of Meditation
Sunday Quote: How distance is shortened
Only from the heart
can you touch the sky
Rumi
photo nojavan
When we get silly thoughts
With the mind, you can apply inwardly the same attention. When your eyes are closed, you can listen to the inner voices that “speak” in the mind. They say “I am this…”I should not be like that”. You can use those voices for bringing you to the space between thoughts. Rather than making a big problem about the obsession and fears that go on in your mind, you can open your attention and see those obsessions and fears as mental conditions that come and go in space. This way, even an negative thought can take you to emptiness.
Ajahn Sumedho, The Mind and the Way
