Tag: Awareness

You are all possibilities

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South West Coast Path above Pudcombe Cove

Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards. Søren Kierkegaard

… Look back down the path as if seeing your past and then south over the hazy blue coast as if present to a wide future,
recall the way you are all possibilities you can see and how you live best as an appreciator of horizons
whether you reach them or not,
admit that once you have got up from your chair and opened the door,
once you have walked out into the clean air
toward that edge and taken the path up high beyond the ordinary you have become
the privileged and the pilgrim
the one who will tell the story
and the one, coming back
from the mountain,
who helped to make it.

David Whyte, Mameen

Allowing and letting go

Karl Duffy1 Comment

We’ve never really accepted boredom as a conscious state. As soon as it comes into the mind we start looking for something interesting, something pleasant. But in meditation we’re allowing boredom to be. We’re allowing ourselves to be fully consciously bored, fully depressed, fed up, jealous, angry, disgusted. All the nasty unpleasant experiences of life that we have repressed out of consciousness and never really looked at, never really accepted, we begin to accept into conscious-ness not as personality problems any more, but just out of compassion. Out of kindness and wisdom we allow things to take their natural course to cessation, rather that just keep them going round in the same old cycles of habit. When we get used to looking through a dirty window everything seems grey, grimy and ugly. Meditation is a way of cleaning the window, purifying the mind, allowing things to come up into consciousness and letting them go.

Ajahn Sumedho,

More on being a witness today

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Gurdjieff, the Russian philosopher-mystic,  noted that if you set an alarm clock at night in order to get up early to get some work done, who you are in the morning when the alarm goes off is quite different from who you were the night before. In the morning you might even say, “Who the **** set that alarm clock?” A moment’s reflection will show you that you play many roles in the course of a day … and that WHO YOU ARE from moment to moment changes. There is the angry you, and the kind you, the lazy you, the lustful you –  hundreds of different you’s. Each of these “you’s” reflects an identification with a desire, or a feeling, or a thought. If, as we have seen, the work is to break these identifications, we can WORK effectively throughout each day by making each of these “you’s” objects, i.e., by breaking the identification with each of them. This is not so easy.

…[But] there is one technique which is known as adopting the role of the witness – and holding onto that role – ultimately, to the exclusion of all roles. The witness is not evaluative. It does not judge your actions. It merely notes them.  This point is important. Most of the time the inner voices of most people are continually evaluative. “I’m good for doing this” or “I’m bad for doing that.” You must make that evaluative role an object of contemplation as well. Keep in mind that the witness does not care whether you become enlightened or not. It merely notes how it all is.

Ram Daas, Be Here Now

Just witness, not judging yourself

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Maybe you have a hard time getting up in the morning. Just make that conscious. Maybe you are a night owl and you prefer waking up late, you find early morning’s difficult. You do not need to fit your mind’s image of the perfect meditator – just witness the struggle of your mind, or your discomfort. If your mind is bright or comfortable in the morning then notice that too. The more you witness and take refuge in the knowing mind, the more you will find that whatever needs to be discarded will be discarded. Whatever is not useful will just naturally fall away, but not through rejection or aversion,  simply through the knowing of the experience in each moment.

Ajahn Sundara, The Knowing Mind

Why accepting the ordinary is good

Karl Duffy1 Comment

It’s difficult to be ordinary and accept the triviality of our life. That’s why most of the time we feel frustrated, because we think somehow things are going to be different, or that they should be different, don’t we? We sense that life shouldn’t be just getting up in the morning, having breakfast, getting bored, having a cry with one’s spouse, going to the toilet, eating, getting bored at work, coming back, watching television, going to bed, getting up in the morning, and so on, day after day after day.  We feel that somehow there must be something else. So we go on a trip around the world – and we find that even on the other side of the world, we still have to get up, we still have to go to the toilet, we still have to eat, we still get happy and get bored with ourselves, we still get annoyed and depressed. We still get the same old “me” – whether it is here, on in California or in India or anywhere. So seeing the way things are is a very important realization because then we can actually work with life as it is, rather than expecting or dreaming about it.

Ajahn Sundara, Taking Refuge.

A day in the life

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Waking up in the morning, I vow with all beings
to listen to those whom I love, especially to things they don’t say.

Lighting a candle for Buddha, I vow with all beings
to honor your clear affirmation: “Forget yourself and you’re free.”

When I stroll around in the city, I vow with all beings
to notice how lichen and grasses never give up in despair

Watching a spider at work, I vow with all beings
to cherish the web of the universe: touch one point and everything moves.

When the racket can’t be avoided, I vow with all beings
to close my eyes for a moment and find my treasure right here.

With tropical forests in danger, I vow with all beings
to raise hell with the people responsible and slash my consumption of trees.

Watching gardeners label their plants , I vow with all beings
to practice the old horticulture and let plants identify me.

On reading the words of Thoreau, I vow with all beings
to cherish our home-grown sages, who discern the perennial Way.

Falling asleep at last I vow with all beings
to enjoy the dark and the silence and rest in the vast unknown.

Robert Aiken, Verses for Zen Buddhist Practice