Tag: Be fully present

Lifelong search

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There is an internal landscape, a geography of the soul; we search for  its outlines all our lives.   Some  find it in the place of their birth; others may leave a seaside town,  parched, and find themselves refreshed in the desert.  There are those  born in rolling countryside who are really only at ease in the intense  and busy loneliness of the city.  For some, the search is for the  imprint of another; a child or a mother, a grandfather or a brother, a  lover, a husband, a wife, or a foe.  We may go through our lives happy or unhappy, successful or unfulfilled, loved or unloved, without ever standing cold with the shock of recognition, without ever feeling the  agony as the twisted iron in our soul unlocks itself and we slip at last into place.

Josephine Hart, Damage

Really see

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If only we could pull out our brain and use only our eyes.

Picasso

Listen

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The sounds of streams
are Buddha’s speech.
The coloured mountains
are Buddha’s pure body.

Night brings eighty-four thousand poems of Buddha.

Listen, someday you may awaken.

Su Shi, 1037 – 1101, Chinese calligrapher, essayist and poet.

Now

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There is one simple thing wrong with you – you think you have plenty of time….If you don’t think your life is going to last forever, what are you waiting for?

Why the hesitation to change?

Carlos Castaneda, Journey to Ixtlan

The Choice

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As we look forward to starting another month …

To dare is to lose one’s footing temporarily;

to not dare, is to lose one’s life

Søren Kierkegaard

Not adding more

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Not adding to our inevitable difficulties by lamenting, resisting, feeling sorry for ourselves, or making them into the story of our lives. One of the Buddhas most useful teachings: how we speak to ourselves about our challenges reduces our suffering.

Now a well-instructed person, when touched with a feeling of pain, does not sorrow, grieve, or lament, does not beat his breast or become distraught. So he feels one pain: physical, but not mental. As they are touched by that painful feeling, they are not resistant. No resistance-obsession with regard to that painful feeling consumes them.

Just as if they were to shoot a person with an arrow and, right afterward, did not shoot them with another one, so that they would feel the pain of only one arrow. In the same way, when touched with a feeling of pain, the well-instructed person does not sorrow, grieve, or lament, does not beat his breast or become distraught. They feels one pain: physical, but not mental

Their accepting or rejecting are scattered, gone to their end, do not exist. Knowing the dustless, sorrowless state, they discern rightly, are beyond becoming, have gone to the Further Shore.

The Buddha, The Sallatha Sutta