Pursue, keep up with, circle round and round your life, as a dog does his master’s chaise.
Do what you love. Know your own bone, gnaw at it, bury it, unearth it, and gnaw it still.
Thoreau
Do what you love
Tag: balance
The real end
Unhappiness, discontent or suffering results from the tension between desire and the lack of the thing desired. Now there are two possible approaches to overcoming this unhappiness. One is to obtain the object desired, to secure possession of it; the other is to eliminate the desire.
If we carefully examine the happiness that comes from satisfying desire, we would find that such happiness is unreliable and insecure. This happiness depends on external things. These objects of desire are inevitably impermanent, and when we are separated from them we become unhappy. Thus even in the midst of happiness we become vulnerable to suffering.
Therefore the Buddha points out that true happiness is to
be achieved by taking the opposite approach, the approach of eliminating our desires. If we eliminate the desire our mind remains satisfied, content and happy no matter what our external situation may be. The Buddha says that this principle can be carried through
all the way to the total uprooting of craving. This is the cessation of craving, the end of suffering (dukkha) here and now.
Bhikkhu Bodhi, Nibbana
Not realizing
Man is the only animal that can be bored,
who can feel discontented,
that can feel evicted from paradise
Erich Fromm
Radiant
Let the world be as it is
and learn to rock with the waves.
Remain ‘radiant,’ as Joyce put it,
‘in the filth of the world’.
Joseph Campbell
Our true nature
The winter solstice, in the northern hemisphere: the shortest, darkest day of the year
In dark times when we feel even more burdened and insecure, we should be contemplating our true nature more than ever. It can cheer us up on any day. Despite all the ups and downs of our life, we are fundamentally awake individuals who have a natural ability to become compassionate and wise. Our nature is to be cheerful. This cheerfulness is deeper than temporary conditions. The day does not have to be sunny for us to be cheerful. We are free of having to depend on something else to make us happy. We can bask freely in the natural radiance of our mind. This is the equanimity of true cheerfulness — nothing more, nothing less.
Sakyong Mipham Rinpoche, A Simple Sense of Delight
Dark and bright
We are the driven ones.
But the pressing on of time,
Takes us as small things
Into the everlasting.
All this rushing
Will soon be over;
For it is in lingering
That we receive insight.
All is in repose:
the darkness and the brightness,
the flower and the book.
Rilke, Sonnets to Orpheus First Part, 22
Mindfulbalance 