Samsara [the ongoing cycle of unsatisfactory experience]
is mind turned outwardly, lost in its projections;
nirvana is mind turned inwardly,
recognizing its nature.
Tulku Urgyen Rinpoche
Tag: balance
Here and now
It is possible to live happily in the here and now.
So many conditions of happiness are available — more than enough for you to be happy right now.
You don’t have to run into the future in order to get more.
Thích Nhất Hạnh
Seeking and finding
When someone is seeking, said Siddartha, It happens quite easily that he only sees the thing that he is seeking; that he is unable to find anything, unable to absorb anything, because he is only thinking of the thing he is seeking, because he has a goal, because he is obsessed with his goal.
Seeking means: to have a goal;
but finding means: to be free, to be receptive, to have no goal.
You are perhaps indeed a seeker, for in striving towards your goal, you do not see many things that are under your nose.
Herman Hesse, Siddhartha
Where to focus
Focus not on the rudeness of others,
not on what they’ve done or left undone,
but on what you have and haven’t done
yourself.
Dhammapada, 4
More than just you
You who let yourselves feel: enter the breathing that is more than your own.
The trees you planted in childhood have grown
too heavy. You cannot bring them along.
Give yourselves to the air, to what you cannot hold.
Rainer Maria Rilke, from Anita Barrows and Joanna Macy, In Praise of Mortality–Selections from Rainer Maria Rilke’s Duino Elegies and Sonnets to Orpheus.
Making choices
We seem to get daily reminders as to how our current society – and those who have positions of responsibility in it – seems to have lost its connection to any inner sense of values.
It is no measure of health
to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.
Jiddu Krishnamurti
