Unique

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If you don’t look at things through your concepts, you’ll never be bored. 

Every single thing is unique. 

Every sparrow is unlike every other sparrow despite the similarities. 

It’s a great help to have similarities, so we can abstract, so that we can have a concept. 

It’s a great help, from the point of view of communication, education, science. 

But it’s also very misleading and a great hindrance  to seeing this concrete individual. 

If all you experience is your concept,  you’re not experiencing reality,  because reality is concrete. 

The concept is a help, to lead you to reality, but when you get there, 

you’ve got to intuit or experience it directly.

.
Anthony de Mello. sj.

photo david friel

 

How we look and what we see

horizon4

The real voyage of discovery
consists not in seeing new landscapes
but in having new eyes

(Le véritable voyage de découverte ne consiste pas à chercher de nouveaux paysages, mais à avoir de nouveaux yeux)

Marcel Proust

Just realize

looking backward

Your true Self is always Present, Happiness is always Present.
You do not have to work at attaining it,
just remove the obstacles by which you cannot see it.
The hindrance is only one: Attachment to the past.

Sri H.W.L. Poonja ( Papaji),  The Truth Is

Starting over, again and again

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That we go numb along the way is to be expected. Even the bravest among us, who give their lives to care for others, go numb with fatigue, when the heart can take in no more, when we need time to digest all we meet. Overloaded and overwhelmed, we start to pull back from the world, so we can internalize what the world keeps giving us. Perhaps the noblest private act is the unheralded effort to return: to open our hearts once they’ve closed, to open our souls once they’ve shied away, to soften our minds once they’ve been hardened by the storms of our day.

Mark Nepo, Hearing the Cries of the World

photo Daniel Francisco madrigal Moller

Allowing things to sit

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“Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror.
Just keep going. No feeling is final.”

Rainer Maria Rilke, Beauty and Terror

I was intrigued reading over these words, just this morning  as I sat watching my faithful pup breathe out a most-contented sigh : It’s as if in these short moments, simple flecks of time, he is able to surrender fully to all of life and that which life brings us. And just by breathing in…he settles in.

A friend joked the other day that he and his dog both suffered the troubles of a “5 minute memory”…as if, this was such a very bad thing. But, perhaps that is the trick of it, isn’t it? To allow things to sit, for only just a little bit — and then bid them farewell as they slip away into another day.

“No feeling is ever final.” Too often, we find ourselves struggling to hold onto happiness — fearing it forever lost in the wash of emotions that life carries with it. And we are left to wonder, how we may embrace the absolute richness of this life when we ourselves appear to weaken. How do we create a happiness that is big enough to experience all of these moments — the fear, the pain, the heartache and sorrow, and that will also allow for continuous gratitude, as well?

It’s this very impermanence that creates a space of ‘fully living.’  So, my dears, instead of worrying so very much over ‘what might have been’… “ flare up like a flame and make big shadows” .. for true happiness to settle in.

Pema Chodron, Finding Happiness Amongst Uncertainty

photo eugene0126jp

Staying in the present moment

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When we wake up in bed on Monday morning and think of the various hurdles we’ve got to jump that day, immediately we feel sad.

Bored and bothered.

Whereas actually we’re just lying in bed.

Alan Watts

photo christoper michel