To the attentive eye, each moment of the year has its own beauty,
and in the same field, it beholds, every hour,
a picture which was never seen before, and which shall never be seen again.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Tag: Be fully present
Staying in the present, not the past
As strange as it may sound, meditation may reveal that we are happier than we thought we were. We may discover that ancient conditioning rather than present circumstances is causing our dissatisfaction, and that this moment is quite sufficient or even wonderful, and we simply hadn’t noticed.
Wes Necker, Buddha’s Nature
Sunday Quote: Autumn begins
Don’t prolong the past,
don’t invite the future,
don’t be deceived by appearances,
just dwell in present awareness.
Patrul Rinpoche
Preoccupied
I often think that if the rest of creation could actually speak,
it would be looking at us wondering why we quibble about the details of living out our lives
when everything around us and everything inside us is so utterly and totally unique.
David Whyte, What to Remember when Waking
Training the heart
Our entire life has been training. The question is: training in what? This question means: training in which direction? If we train ourselves to reach for a snack or pick up the phone to text-message whenever we feel frightened or bored, this is definitely training. The next time we feel uncomfortable we will also tend to reach for some comfort outside ourselves, eventually establishing a deeply ingrained habit, another brick in the wall of our mental prison. Are we training in how to distract ourselves from inner discomfort or anxiety? Are we training in numbing ourselves in the face of fear, or training in waking up? Training in opening the heart, or training in shutting down?
Gaylon Ferguson, Fruitless Labor
Living with meaning
Yesterday was a long rainy day here in Ireland and a sense of autumn approaching has settled into the days. So I will post for the next few days some reflections on maturing and deepening, and the meaning of fruitfulness in life, as opposed to just indicators of “success”.
The central paradox of our current feel-good culture is that we grow progressively more and more uncertain and less and less persuaded that our lives really mean something. Feeling good is a poor measure of a life, but living meaningfully is a good one, for then we are living a developmental rather than regressive agenda. We never get it all worked out anyway. Life is ragged, and truth is still more raggedy. The ego will do whatever it can to make itself more comfortable; but the soul is about wholeness, and this fact makes the ego even more uncomfortable. Wholeness is not about comfort, or goodness, or consensus — it means drinking this brief, unique, deeply rooted vintage to its dregs.
James Hollis, Finding Meaning in the Second Half of LIfe
photo Scmtb49
