My experience is what I agree to attend to,
Only those items I notice shape my mind.
William James, American psychologist and philosopher.
Tag: Awareness
Seeing that things arise and pass away
Let not a person revive the past
Or on the future build his hopes
For the past has been left behind
and the future has not been reached.
Instead with insight let him see
Each presently arisen state,
Let him know that and be sure of it,
Invincibly and unshakeably.
Today the effort must be made;
Tomorrow Death may come, who knows?
No bargain with Mortality
Can keep him and his hordes away
But one who dwells thus ardently,
Relentlessly, by day and night –
It is he, the Peaceful Sage has said,
Who has had a single excellent night.
The Buddha
Sunday Quote: Awareness
In a crumb of bread the whole mystery is.
Paddy Kavanagh, Irish Poet, The Great Hunger
Learning from the return of Spring
If we were not so single-minded
about keeping our lives moving
and for once could do nothing
perhaps a huge silence
might interrupt this sadness
of never understanding ourselves
and threatening ourselves with death.
Perhaps the earth can teach us
as when everything seems dead
and later proves to be alive.
Pablo Nerudo, Keeping Quiet
The address of life
“I have arrived” is our practice. When we breathe in, we take refuge in our in-breath, and we say “I have arrived”. When we make a step, we take refuge in our step, and we say “I have arrived”. This is not a statement to yourself or to another person. “I have arrived” means I have stopped running, I have arrived in the present moment, because only the present moment contains life.
Stopping running is a very important practice . We have been running all our life: we believe that peace happiness and success are present in some other place and time. We don’t know that everything – peace happiness and stability – should be looked for in the here and now. This is the address of life – the intersection of here and now.
Thich Nhat Hahn, Happiness
Finding the life you ought to be living
This is an absolute necessity for anybody today. You must have a room, or a certain hour or so a day, where you don’t know what was in the newspapers that morning, you don’t know who your friends are, you don’t know what you owe to anybody, you don’t know what anybody owes to you. This is a place where you can simply experience and bring forth what you are and what you might be. This is the place of creative incubation. At first you may find that nothing is happening there. But if you have a sacred place, and use it, and take advantage of it, something eventually will happen….
Most of our action is economically or socially determined and does not come out of our life… the claims of the environment upon you are so great, that you hardly know where the hell you are! What is it you intended? You’re always doing things that are required of you; this minute, that minute, another minute! Where is your “bliss station”?” Try to find it! Put on the music that you really love… or the book you want to read. Get it done! And have a place in which to do it! There you’ll get the “thou” feeling of life. If you follow your bliss, you put yourself on a track that has been there all the while, waiting for you. And the life that you ought to be living is the one you are living.
Joseph Campbell, The Power of Myth; Sacrifice and Bliss.
