Don’t change: Desire to change is the enemy of love.
Don’t change yourselves: Love yourselves as you are.
Don’t change others: Love all others as they are.
Don’t change the world: It is in God’s hands and he knows.
And if you do that….. change will occur marvellously in its own way and in its own time
Yield to the current of life unencumbered by baggage.
Anthony de Mello sj.
We all have an deep seated drive to seek happiness somewhere else, with special conditions
Reaching the mystery is nothing other than breaking through
and grabbing an ordinary person’s life.
Zen saying
When the mind is at peace,
the world too is at peace.
Nothing real, nothing absent.
Not holding on to reality,
not getting stuck in the void,
you are neither holy nor wise, just
an ordinary fellow who has completed his work.
P’ang Yün (Layman Pang) died 808, famous lay practitioner of Ch’an Buddhism
Hokusai says look carefully.
He says pay attention, notice.
He says keep looking, stay curious.
He says there is no end to seeing.
He says everyone of us is a child,
everyone of us is ancient,
everyone of us has a body.
He says everyone of us is frightened.
He says everyone of us has to find
a way to live with fear..…
He says look forward to getting old.
He says keep changing,
you just get more who you really are.
He says get stuck, accept it, repeat
yourself as long as it is interesting.
He says keep doing what you love...
It doesn’t matter if you sit at home
and stare at the ants on your veranda
or the shadows of the trees
and grasses in your garden.
It matters that you care.
It matters that you feel.
It matters that you notice.
It matters that life lives through you.
Contentment is life living through you.
Joy is life living through you.
Satisfaction and strength
is life living through you.
Peace is life living through you.
He says don’t be afraid.
Don’t be afraid.
Look, feel, let life take you by the hand.
Let life live through you.
Roger Keyes, 1942-2020 American professor of East Asian studies, art historian and poet, Hokusai says [extracts]
Hokusai (1760-1849) was a Japanese artist, best known as author of the woodblock print The Great Wave off Kanagawa.
And, if I may say it in a very condensed way, it is precisely the godlike in ourselves that we are ambivalent about, fascinated by and fearful of, motivated to and defensive against.
This is one aspect of the basic human predicament, that we are simultaneously worms and gods.
Abraham Maslow, Towards a Psychology of Being
Mind can only create the qualities of good and bad by comparing. Remove the comparison, and there go the qualities. What remains is the pure unknown: ungraspable object, ungraspable subject, and the clear light of awareness streaming through.
The pivot of the Tao is the mind free of its thoughts. It doesn’t believe that this is a this or that that is a that. Let Yes and No sprint around the circumference toward a finish line that doesn’t exist. How can they stop trying to win the argument of life until you stop?
Stephen Mitchell, The Second Book of the Tao
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