Tag: Awareness

Not aiming

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The Second ArrowDon’t aim at success. The more you aim at it and make it a target, the more you are going to miss it. For success, like happiness, cannot be pursued; it must ensue, and it only does so as the unintended side effect of one’s personal dedication to a cause greater than oneself or as the by-product of one’s surrender to a person other than oneself.

Happiness must happen, and the same holds for success: you have to let it happen by not caring about it. I want you to listen to what your conscience commands you to do and go on to carry it out to the best of your knowledge. Then you will live to see that in the long-run — in the long-run, I say! — success will follow you precisely because you had forgotten to think about it.

Viktor Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning

Having an attentive eye

Karl Duffy1 Comment

File:An Autumn Field - geograph.org.uk - 615320.jpg

To the attentive eye, each moment of the year has its own beauty,

and in the same field, it beholds, every hour,

a picture which was never seen before, and which shall never be seen again.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Not letting it become our whole world

Karl Duffy1 Comment

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Experiencing the power of faith doesn’t mean we’ve annihilated fear or denied it or overcome it through strenuous effort. It means that when we think we’ve conquered fear only to be once again overcome by it, we can still go on. It means feeling our fear and still remaining in touch with our heart, so that the fear does not define our entire world

Sharon Salzberg, Faith

….into the nature of things

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Eyes to see

In our meditation and insightful understanding of the way things are, we see that beauty, refinement, pleasure are impermanent conditions — as well as pain, misery and ugliness. If you really understand that, then you can enjoy and endure whatever happens to you. Actually, much of the lesson in life is learning to endure what we don’t like in ourselves and in the world around us; being able to be patient and kindly, and not make a scene over the imperfections in the sensory experience. We can adapt and endure and accept the changing characteristics of the sensory birth and death cycle by letting go and no longer attaching to it. When we free ourselves from identity with it, we experience our true nature, which is bright, clear, knowing; but is not a personal thing anymore, it is not ’me’ or ‘mine’.

Ajahn Sumedho, Mindfulness, the Path to the Deathless

Staying in the present, not the past

Karl Duffy2 Comments

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As strange as it may sound, meditation may reveal that we are happier than we thought we were. We may discover that ancient conditioning rather than present circumstances is causing our dissatisfaction, and that this moment is quite sufficient or even wonderful, and we simply hadn’t noticed.

Wes Necker, Buddha’s Nature

 

Balance in nature and in life

Karl Duffy3 Comments

dawn light2

There are as many nights as days, and the one is just as long as the other in the year’s course. Even a happy life cannot be without a measure of darkness, and the word happy would lose its meaning if it were not balanced by sadness. It is far better to take things as they come along with patience and equanimity

Jung.