Meditation is the natural process of becoming familiar with an object by repeatedly placing our minds upon it. Whatever we’re doing, we always have a view; we’re always placing our mind on one object or another. For example, when we get up in the morning and we’re anxious about something, anxiety becomes our view for the day: “What about me? When will I get what I want?” The object of our meditation is “me.”
Sakyong Mipham Rinpoche
Today is the Spring Equinox – from the Latin “equal night”, when there is equal light and dark in our day – marking the beginning of Spring for countries in the Northern Hemisphere.
We, the older ones,
Call it Spring,
And we have been through it
Many times.
But there is still nothing
Like the children bringing home
Such happiness
In their small hands.
Mary Oliver, Children, It’s Spring
The simplest sentences contain the most challenging teachings…
Activate the mind without dwelling on anything
The Diamond Sutra
What does it take to use the life we already have in order to make us wiser rather than more stuck?
The answer to these questions seems to have to do with bringing everything that we encounter to the path. Everything naturally had a ground, path, and fruition. But it is also said that the path itself is both the ground and the fruition. The path is the goal. This path has one very distinct characteristic: it is not prefabricated. It doesn’t already exist. The path that we’re talking about is the moment-by-moment evolution of our experience, the moment-by-moment evolution of the world of phenomena, the moment-by-moment evolution of our thoughts and emotions. The path is uncharted. It comes into existence moment-by-moment and at the same time drops away behind us.
When we realize that the path is the goal, there’s a sense of workability. Everything that occurs in our confused mind we can regard as the path. Everything is workable.
Pema Chodron
Starting over, being open to all possibilities, not being bound by our familiar conclusions:
To observe anything – your mind must be free of any conclusion, any previous knowledge, otherwise you cannot possibly see ‘what is’. Isn’t that so? If I want to learn about you I must observe. I must observe, listen and not come to any conclusion. Conclusion is the image which divides you and me. So to observe, there must be no image, no conclusion, no formula. And in that lies our difficulty, because we live according to formulas, a formula set by another or a conclusion which we have come to according to our conditioning and experience. So can the mind be free of every conclusion, because a conclusion is in the field of time which is the past? You can’t conclude something about the future. You can conclude about the future according to your past conditioning, therefore your conclusion is always based on the past – past knowledge, past experience… various forms of knowledge.
So can the mind, to investigate something which is not of time, be free of conflict so that it can observe completely? This has been the enquiry of man right through the centuries: how is the mind to be so quiet, so still, without any distorting factor in it, so that it is capable of perception without any distortion?
J. Krisnamurti, Fourth Public Talk in New York 7 May 1972
To listen to the soul is to stop fighting with life – to stop fighting when things fall apart, when they don’t go our way, when we get sick, when we are betrayed or mistreated or misunderstood. To listen to the soul is to slow down, to feel deeply, to see ourselves clearly, to surrender to discomfort and uncertainty, and to wait.
Elizabeth Lesser, Broken Open
