Tag: Be fully present

The only ground

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You are so knitted into a day. You are within it; the day is as close as your skin. It is around your eyes; it is inside your mind. The day moves you, often it can weigh you down; or again it can raise you up. Yet the amazing fact is: this day vanishes. When you look behind you, you do not see your past standing there in a series of day shapes. You cannot wander back through the gallery of your past. Your days have disappeared silently and for ever. Your future time has not arrived yet. The only ground of time is the present moment.
 

John O’Donohue, Anam Cara

How naïve.

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A wooden spoon for stirring jam,
Dripping sweet tar, while in the pan
Plum magma’s bubbles blather.
For someone who can’t grasp the whole
There’s salvation in the remembered detail.
What, back then, did I know about that?
The real, hard as a diamond,
Was to happen in the indefinable
Future, and everything seemed
Only a sign of what was to come. How naïve.
Now I know inattention is an unforgivable sin
And each particle of time has an ultimate dimension.

Janisz Szuber, 1947 – 2020, Polish Poet, About a Boy Stirring Jam

Sunday Quote: Not seeing clearly

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In its deepest sense, suffering is intimately linked to a misapprehension of the nature of reality.

Matthieu Ricard, Happiness

Meaning

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When a person cannot find a deep sense of meaning

they distract themselves with pleasure

Viktor Frankl

A broken gong

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If you can keep yourself calm and quiet like a broken gong which does not resonate, you have realized Nibbana. There is no quarrelling in you.

Dhammapada Verse 134

The Buddha says, ideally, you want to make your mind like a broken gong. People can hit it but there is no reverberation

Thanissaro Bhikkhu

Never satisfied

Karl Duffy1 Comment

According to Buddhism, the root of suffering is neither the feeling of pain nor of sadness nor even of meaninglessness. Rather, the real root of suffering is this never-ending and pointless pursuit of ephemeral feelings, which causes us to be in a constant state of tension, restlessness and dissatisfaction. Due to this pursuit, the mind is never satisfied. Even when experiencing pleasure, it is not content, because it fears this feeling might soon disappear, and craves that this feeling should stay and intensify. People are liberated from suffering not when they experience this or that fleeting pleasure, but rather when they understand the impermanent nature of all their feelings, and stop craving them.

Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind