Tag: Be fully present

Eating breakfast

Karl Duffy1 Comment

We sometimes think that happiness comes from special circumstances or lofty insights, involving practices which require great effort, rather than the simple day-to-day circumstances before us:

Dropping off body and mind is good practice.

[There is]…nothing fundamental to rely on, including not others, not self, not sentient beings, and not causes or conditions.

Although this is so, eating breakfast comes first.

Dogen, 1200-1253, founder of the Soto branch of Zen Buddhism.

(“Dropping off body and mind” refers to sitting meditation)

You know you have to follow

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There is a road always beckoning.

When you see the two sides of it

closing together at that far horizon

and deep in the foundations of your own heart

at exactly the same time,

that’s how you know it’s the road

you have to follow.

that’s how you know

it’s where you have to go.

That’s how you know.

It’s just beyond yourself,

it’s where you need to be.

David Whyte, Just Beyond Yourself

Summary of all teaching

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The ten directions converging,

Each learning to do nothing,

This is the hall of Buddha’s training;

The mind is empty, all is finished.

P’ang Yün (Layman Pang) 740-808

As things are

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Tathata, which means “suchness” or “like-this-ness,” is used in Buddhism to mean “reality,” or the way things really are. This poem by Dongshan (807-869) reminds us to work with things as they are in our lives, rather than our thoughts as to how our life should be.

The teaching of thusness has been intimately communicated by buddhas and ancestors.
Now you have it, so keep it well.

Filling a silver bowl with snow,
hiding a heron in the moonlight —
Taken as similar they’re not the same;
when you mix them, you know where they are.

Sunday Quote: Not demanding more

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Nor with impatience from the season asked
More than its timely produce; rather loved
The hours for what they are.

Wordsworth, The Prelude, Book 5

Not the conditions

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The mind exists in a state of “not enough” and so is always greedy for more. Boredom means the mind is hungry for more stimulus, more food for thought, and its hunger is not being satisfied. If you can stay bored and restless and observe what it feels like to be bored and restless, you bring awareness to the feeling and there is suddenly some space and stillness around it. So even boredom can teach you who you are and who you are not. You discover that a “bored person” is not who you are.

Boredom is simply a conditioned energy movement within you. Neither are you an angry, sad, or fearful person. Boredom, anger, sadness, or fear are not “yours”, not personal. They are conditions of the human mind. They come and go. Nothing that comes and goes is you. “I am bored.” Who knows this? “I am angry, sad, afraid.” Who knows this? You are the knowing, not the condition that is known.

Eckhart Tolle