Many men go fishing all their lives
without knowing that it is not fish they are after
Henry David Thoreau
Tag: Awareness
Simply noticing the breath
Meditation is simply a question of being. You just quietly sit, your body still, your speech silent, your mind at ease, and allow thoughts to come and go, without letting them play havoc on you. If you need something to do, then watch the breathing. This is a very simple process. When you are breathing out, know that you are breathing out. When you breath in, know that you are breathing in, without supplying any kind of extra commentary or internalized mental gossip, but just identifying with the breath. There is no particular point on the breath on which you need to focus, it is simply the process of breathing. Twenty-five percent of your attention is on the breath and seventy-five percent is relaxed. Try to actually identify with the breathing, rather than just watching it.You sit quietly and let all thoughts and concepts dissolve. It is like when the clouds dissolve and the mist evaporates, to reveal the clear sky and the sun shining down. When everything dissolves like this, you begin to experience your true nature, to “live”.
Sogyal Rinpoche, Essential Advice on Meditation
Different ways of getting to heaven
Sometimes ideas can give us insight. Some other times, it can be simple little encounters, when for a brief second, the mind is stilled and we see into the heart of things. Their newness, or their beauty, shock us briefly, giving us relief from the preoccupations in our mind, or the routine of daily activity, and we are nourished within. We try to create some space for such moments today.
There is the heaven we enter
through institutional grace
and there are the yellow finches bathing and singing
in the lowly puddle.
Mary Oliver, Yellow
Sunday Quote: Already there
We have what we seek, it is there all the time,
and if we give it time,
it will make itself known to us.
Thomas Merton
Getting caught up in the content of our lives
For all of us, the experience of our entanglement differs from day-to-day. I know from personal experience how strong the habitual mind is. The discursive mind, the busy, worried, caught-up, spaced-out mind, is powerful. That’s all the more reason to do the most important thing — to realize what a strong opportunity every day is, and how easy it is to waste it. If you don’t allow your mind to open and to connect with where you are, with the immediacy of your experience, you could easily become completely submerged. You could be completely caught up and distracted by the details of your life, from the moment you get up in the morning until you fall asleep at night.
You get so caught up in the content of your life, the minutiae that make up a day, so self-absorbed in the big project you have to do, that the blessings, the magic, the stillness, and the vastness escape you. You never emerge from your cocoon, except for when there’s a noise that’s so loud you can’t help but notice it, or something shocks you, or captures your eye. Then for a moment you stick your head out and realize, Wow! Look at that sky! Look at that squirrel! Look at that person!
Pema Chodron.
Seeing the secret
Another writer, Eugene O?Neill, describing a moment – when he looked up at the stars in the night sky – when he saw something as if for the first time. Although difficult, we try to bring some of this quality to each encounter and each moment, not meeting them through the filters of our conditioning, fears or preconceived notions:
For a moment I lost myself – actually lost my life. I was set free! I dissolved in the…high dim-starred sky! I belonged, without past or future, within peace and unity and a wild joy, within something greater than my own life.. – to Life itself! To God, if you want to put it that way…. For a second you see the secret – and seeing the secret, are the secret. For a second there is meaning!
Eugene O’Neill, Long Days Journey into Night
