Tag: Be fully present

Six words to live by

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Don’t recall. Don’t imagine. Don’t Think. Don’t examine. Don’t control. Rest.

Tilopa ( 988–1069 } passed on this advice on  mahāmudrā meditation to Naropa, his successor.

  In the original Tibetan it contains just six words. The following translation attempts to tease out their full meaning:

Let go of what has passed.
Let go of what may come.
Let go of what is happening now.
Don’t try to figure anything out.
Don’t try to make anything happen.
Relax, right now, and rest.

Translation: Ken McLeod in Unfettered Mind

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Complete

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No creature ever falls short of its own completion.

Wherever it stands it does not fail to cover the ground

Dogen

Our true nature

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The death of the self may be full of the fear of letting go, of stepping off into the void, thinking that nothing will stop our fall, not recognizing that the void is our true nature. The void is the vastness in which we are occurring, it is the truth itself, and the whole idea of “someone” stepping off is just another bubble passing through. And we don’t any longer need to define who we are, because who we become each moment is so much more than what we ever imagined. There’s no need to limit who we really are with any definition. We are all of it. And only the contents of this vastness of mind, once identified with as a separate self, limit who we are.

Steven Levine, A Gradual Awakening

Not needing to know

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We just need to remember to practice relaxing into our life, in all its joys and sorrows, and to relinquish the need to know what’s going to happen next. The third element of patience is acceptance of the truth, meaning that we accept our experience as it is – with all its suffering – rather than how we want it to be. We recognize that because our experience is continually changing, we don’t need it to be different than it is. This acceptance of  “things as they are” requires profound wisdom and compassion, which takes a long time to evolve; we must therefore develop a long-enduring mind that will enable us to understand time from a radically new perspective.

Michele McDonald, Finding Patience

Always new

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I have discovered that it is necessary, absolutely necessary, to believe in nothing. That is, we have to believe in something which has no form and no color – something which exists before all forms and colors appear.  This is a very important point.  No matter what god or doctrine you believe in, if you become attached to it, your belief will be based more or less on a self-centered idea…  But if you are always prepared for accepting everything we see as something appearing from nothing... then at that moment you will have perfect composure.

Suzuki Shunryū, Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind

No gap

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thinking

At the moment of going there, just go there.

At the moment of coming here, just come here.

There is no gap

Dogen, Guidelines for Studying the Way