Tag: balance

The reacting mind

Karl Duffy2 Comments

File:Toronto Picnic.jpg

Let’s suppose that rain washes out a picnic. Who is feeling negative? The rain? Or YOU? What’s causing the negative feeling? The rain or your reaction? When you bump your knee against a table, the table’s fine. It’s busy being what it was made to be – a table. The pain is in your knee, not in the table. The mystics tell us that reality is all right. Reality is not problematic. Problems exist only in the human mind. Reality is not problematic. Take away human beings from this planet and life would go on, nature would go on in all its loveliness and violence. Where would the problem be? No problem. You created the problem. You are the problem. You identified with “me” and that is the problem. The feeling is in you, not in reality. 

Anthony de Mello, sj.

photo andreas duess

It better happen this way

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File:Strokestown 1 (14005111178).jpg

Every day, we give precedence to our mind’s thoughts over the reality unfolding before us. We regularly say things like, “It better not rain today because I’m going camping” or “I better get that raise because I really need the money.” Notice that these bold claims about what should and shouldn’t be happening are not based on scientific evidence; they’re based solely on personal preferences made up in our minds. Without realizing it, we do this with everything in our lives — it’s as though we actually believe that the world around us is supposed to manifest in accordance to our own likes and dislikes. If it doesn’t, surely something is very wrong. This is an extremely difficult way to live, and it is the reason we feel that we are always struggling with life.

Michael SInger, The Surrender Experiment

photo Irish Defense Forces

Arising and returning

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File:Specimen of four wild hyacinth flowers blossoming, ca.1920 (CHS-5438).jpg

The “10,000 is things”expression for all that happens in a life, or in the world of our experience. They arise and pass away, continually rearranging themselves,  and we have to learn how to work with this reality:

The ten thousand things arise together;

In their arising is their return.

Now they flower, and flowering sink homeward, returning to the root.

The return to the root is peace.

Peace: to accept what must be

and to know what endures.

In that knowledge is wisdom

Lao Tzu

Not striving

Karl Duffy1 Comment

File:Hoffkirchen (5520092012).jpg

You don’t have to do anything to acquire happiness. The great Meister Eckhart said very beautifully, “God is not attained by a process of addition to anything in the soul, but by a process of subtraction.” You don’t do anything to be free, you drop something. Then you’re free. 

Anthony de Mello, sj.

photo paul nelhams

The Hearts Actions

Karl Duffy7 Comments

File:Song thrush near Faringdon Folly - geograph.org.uk - 682555.jpg

Everything has two endings – a horse, a piece of string, a phone call.

Before a life, air.
And after.

As silence is not silence, but a limit of hearing.

As some strings, untouched, sound when no one is speaking.

So it was when love slipped inside us.

As this life is not a gate, but the horse plunging through it.

The heart’s actions
are neither the sentence nor its reprieve.

Salt hay and thistles, above the cold granite.
One bird singing back to another because it can’t not

Jane Hirshfield, born 1953, American poet:  Come,  Thief: Poems

photo brian robert marshall

Noticing what is right

Karl Duffy2 Comments

photo

We often ask, “What’s wrong?”

Doing so we invite painful seeds of sorrow to come up and manifest. We feel suffering, anger and depression and produce more such seeds. We would be much happier if we tried to stay in touch with the healthy, joyful seeds inside of us and around us.

We should learn to ask “What is not wrong?” and be in touch with that.

Thich Nhat Hanh, Peace is Every Step