The nature of the mind is comparable to the ocean.
The incessant movement of waves on the surface of the ocean prevents us from seeing its depths.
If we dive down there are no more waves;
there is just the immense serenity of the depths….
Pema Wangyal Rinpoche
More unseasonal weather today. With visitors arriving one would prefer things to be different. But then again, one nearly always prefers things to be other than they are, and this attitude can mean that we miss the opportunities in what is actually here:
When we explore this mind-state of dukkha, we find that it is created by a deep aversion to being with How It Is right now. This silent, unconscious war with How It Is unwittingly drives much of our behaviour: We reach for the pleasant. We hate the unpleasant. We try to arrange the world so that we have only pleasant mind-states, and not unpleasant ones. We try to get rid of this pervasive state of unsatisfactoriness in whatever way we can – by changing things “out there”. By changing the world.
Thoreau, through his quiet investigation of his own mental states in the quiet at Walden Pond discovered this very same phenomenon of underlying unsatisfactoriness. He called it “desperation” – “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation….” Thoreau’s quiet desperation is precisely dukkha. He saw that ordinary mind seems chronically ill at ease with How It Is.
Stephen Cope, The Wisdom of Yoga
Meditation comes alive through a growing capacity to release our habitual entanglement in the stories and plans, conflicts and worries that make up the small sense of self, and to rest in awareness. In meditation we do this simply by acknowledging the moment-to-moment changing conditions — the pleasure and pain, the praise and blame, the litany of ideas and expectations that arise. Without identifying with them, we can rest in the awareness itself, beyond conditions, and experience what my teacher Ajahn Chah called jai pongsai, our natural lightness of heart. Developing this capacity to rest in awareness nourishes samadhi (concentration), which stabilizes and clarifies the mind, and prajna (wisdom), that sees things as they are.
Jack Kornfield, A Mind like Sky: Wise Attention, Open Awareness.
The eternal moment is outside of time, is not a part of our past or our future, and yet it is lived amidst all our everyday activities. It is in the eternal moment that love is born. Love does not belong to time, and its timeless quality is well known to all lovers. The lover has to learn to still the mind in order to catch the moment and stay true to love’s unfolding. Wayfarers tread a path that leads from illusions of time to the eternal moment that belongs to the soul.
Llewellyn Vaughan-Le, Signs of God
My most inspiring thought is that this place, if I am to live well in it,
requires and deserves a lifetime of the most careful attention.
Wendell Berry
Words are the cognitive contraptions we use to work our way through a world of uncertainty. Words can free us: as symbols they are essential to distance us from experience enough to compare and contrast and reveal patterns in a complex universe. Seeing those patterns with ideas framed in our mind also enables us to communicate those insights to others. In these ways words are a wonderful gateway to understanding and sharing.
Yet words can also entrap us. If we do not recognize the limitations of their boundaries, if we see them as real, their top-down influences on our lives can be devastating. We can come to believe that “intelligence” is something we are either born with, or not. We can think that “we” are good and “they” bad. We can even feel that “I” is something so real and important that “you” don’t matter. Letting go of such top-down influences is the art of mindful awareness. The receptivity of presence allows us to unleash the shackles that automatically enslave us.
Daniel J. Siegel. The Mindful Brain
