Tag: Awareness

Letting the mind settle

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Muddy water is best cleared by leaving it alone

Alan Watts

Seeing our attachments

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Most practice gets caught in the area of fiddling with our environments or our minds. ” My mind should be quiet”. Our mind doesn’t matter; what matters is non-attachment to the activities of the mind. And our emotions are harmless unless they dominate us – that is, if we are attached to them – then they create dis-harmony for everyone. The first problem in practice is to see that we are attached. As we do consistent, patient practice we begin to know that we are nothing but attachments; they rule our lives. But we never lose an attachment by saying it has to go. Only as we gain true awareness of its true nature does it quietly and imperceptibly wither away; like a sandcastle with waves rolling over, it just smooths out and finally Where is it? What was it? …

Charlotte Joko Beck

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Stillness through non-interference.

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Ajahn Chah would  explain that the mind’s nature is still, yet it’s flowing. It’s flowing, yet it is still. He would use the word “citta” for the knowing mind, the mind of awareness. The citta itself is totally still. It has no movement; it is not related to all that arises and ceases. It is silent and spacious. Mind objects — sights, sounds, smell, taste, touch, thoughts, and emotions — flow through it. Problems arise because the clarity of the mind gets entangled with sense impressions. By contemplating our own experience, we can make a clear distinction between the mind that knows (citta) and the sense impressions that flow through it. By refusing to get entangled with any sense impressions, we find refuge in that quality of stillness, silence, and spaciousness, which is the mind’s own nature. This policy of  non-interference allows everything and is disturbed by nothing.

Ajahn Amaro, Small Boat

If you are attentive

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The present moment is filled with joy and happiness.

If you are attentive, you will see it.

Thich Nhat Hanh, Peace is Every Step

 

An active state

Karl Duffy4 Comments

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People of our time are losing the power of celebration. Instead of celebrating we seek to be amused or entertained. Celebration is an active state, an act of expressing reverence or appreciation. To be entertained is a passive state – it is to receive pleasure afforded by an amusing act or a spectacle…. Celebration is a confrontation, giving attention to the transcendent meaning of one’s actions.

Abraham Heschel

…or failing to notice

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The range of what we think and do is limited by what we fail to notice.

And because we fail to notice that we fail to notice there is little we can do to change

until we notice how failing to notice shapes our thoughts and deeds.

R.D. Laing