Tag: Awareness

Accepting where you are

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In human life, if you feel that you have made a mistake, you don’t try to undo the past or the present, but you just accept where you are and work from there. Tremendous openness as to where you are is necessary. This also applies to the practice of meditation, for instance.  A person should learn to meditate on the spot, in the given moment, rather than thinking, “…When I reach pension age, I’m going to retire and receive a pension, and I’m going to build my house in Hawaii or the middle of India, or maybe the Gobi Desert, and THEN I’m going to enjoy myself.  I’ll live a life of solitude and then I’ll really meditate”.   Things never happen that way.

Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche

In an age of hyper attention

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We are in the midst of one of the most profound cognitive shifts in our intellectual history, moving from a “deep attention” to a “hyper attention” society, to quote Duke University professor Katherine Hayles. She defines “deep attention” as the cognitive preference for input from only a single information stream, to be engaged for an extended period. “Hyper attention,” by contrast, is marked by a hunger for a high level of stimulation and a desire to shift rapidly among different information streams. Surfing the Internet while IM’ing and watching a YouTube video, all with music playing in the background: Yes. Reading 100 pages of a novel in one sitting or writing a term paper: No.  Evidence of this shift can be found just about everywhere in our culture…. And so one must ask: Where in our culture do we encourage sustained thinking and provide a quiet, reflective space to ponder, reflect and develop ideas? 

Vanessa Silberman, Mindfulness, Focusing the Mind’s Eye in the Digital Age, Dot Magazine.

Trying to find happiness in the wrong way

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I think it’s odd for people to say, “I meditate,” or “I don’t meditate.” It’s like saying either you work with your mind or you don’t. The reality is that whether or not we are working with our mind in formal meditation, one way or another we are always working with our mind. Most of the time we’re using it to meditate on “me.” We’re using it to become familiar with our immediate reactions to the world around us. Somebody has something we want, so we “meditate” on jealousy. We don’t get something we want, or we do get something we don’t want, so we “meditate” on anger. Our root meditation is, “What about me? Will I get what I want today?” Our mind is continuously chasing itself around, trying to secure happiness in all the wrong ways. Its speed and reactivity keep us under siege. There’s so little space that by the end of the day we feel physically exhausted. We are drained by our continual meditation on the mental fabrication known as “me.”

Meditation is about taming our mind by engaging our mind, with enthusiasm and inspiration. With practice we become grounded in the experience of basic goodness. This leads us toward a healthy sense of self.

Sakyong Mipham Rinpoche

Having room for everything and everyone

Karl Duffy1 Comment

The silence of the mind is like the space in a room. The spacious mind has room for everything. It is like the space in a room, which is never harmed by what goes in and out of it. In fact, we say “the space in this room,” but actually, the room is in the space, the whole building is in the space. We can apply this perspective to the mind, using the “I” consciousness to see space as an object. In the mind, we can see that there are thoughts and emotions —  the mental conditions that arise and cease. Usually, we are dazzled, repelled, or bound by these thoughts and emotions. We go from one thing to another, reacting, controlling, manipulating, or trying to get rid of them. So we never have any perspective in our lives. We become obsessed with either repressing or indulging in these mental conditions; we are caught in these two extremes. With meditation, we have the opportunity to contemplate the mind and the spacious mind has room for everything.

Noticing the space around people and things provides a different way of looking at them, and developing this spacious view is a way of opening oneself. When one has a spacious mind, there is room for everything. When one has a narrow mind, there is room for only a few things. Everything has to be manipulated and controlled, so that you have only what you think is right  – what you want there – and everything else has to be pushed out.  Life with a narrow view is suppressed and constricted; it is always struggle. There is always tension involved in it, because it takes an enormous amount of energy to keep everything in order all the time. If you have a narrow view of life, the disorder of life has to be ordered for you; so you are always busy, manipulating the mind and rejecting things or holding on to them. 

Ajahn Sumedho

Noticing the space around

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Most of our suffering comes from habitual thinking. If we try to stop it out of aversion to thinking, we can’t; we just go on and on and on. So the important thing is not to get rid of thought, but to understand it. And we do this by concentrating on the space in the mind, rather than on the thought.

Our minds tend to get caught up with thoughts of attraction or aversion to objects, but the space around those thoughts is not attractive or repulsive. The space around an attractive thought and a repulsive thought is not different, is it? Concentrating on the space between thoughts, we become less caught up in our preferences concerning the thoughts. So if you find that an obsessive thought of guilt, self-pity, or passion keeps coming up, then work with it in this way — deliberately think it, really bring it up as a conscious state, and notice the space around it. This way, we begin to have a perspective on the impermanent nature of thinking.

Ajahn Sumedho

An Invitation to happiness

Karl Duffy3 Comments

I love this time of year when the poppies grow alongside and inside the fields of wheat. With the wind of today and yesterday they sway, attracting our attention as we walk along the lanes.  They are a splash of colour on a grey day. However they do more. They are, as Mary Oliver says, an invitation to happiness. And then it dawns on me that innumerable things each day are the same.  Sure. like every one of us, I am tempted,  from time to time, to  “drown” in moments of darkness, but so many things  – like these flowers – remind me that I am given opportunities each day to collect  moments of colour, little miracles of light , that give me courage to go on and renew my  joy. They invite me to not just live life, but to celebrate it.

The poppies send up their orange flares; swaying
in the wind, their congregations
are a levitation

of bright dust, of thin and lacy leaves.
There isn’t a place in this world that doesn’t

sooner or later drown in the indigos of darkness,
but now, for a while, the roughage

shines like a miracle as it floats above everything
with its yellow hair.
Of course nothing stops the cold, black, curved blade from hooking forward—
of course loss is the great lesson.

But I also say this: that light is an invitation
to happiness, and that happiness,

when it’s done right, is a kind of holiness,
palpable and redemptive.
Inside the bright fields,

touched by their rough and spongy gold,
I am washed and washed in the river
of earthly delight—

and what are you going to do—
what can you do about it—
deep, blue night?

Mary Oliver, Poppies

Image by John Ecker | Pantheon Photography.