Our minds can’t accept the fundamental genuineness and all-rightness of our lives.
We are actually very resistant to this reality.
We hate it because it is too simple, and we persistently think we need more.
Norman Fischer
our basic goodness
Tag: heart
Sunday Quote: Filled with awe
Teach us to discover the worth of each thing, to be filled with awe and contemplation,
to recognize that we are profoundly united with every creature as we journey towards your infinite light.
Pope Francis, Laudato Si
The Serenity that is Always Here
There is a full moon this evening – the Harvest Moon.
The moon here represents our original mind: luminous, complete and unstained, not disturbed by fear or by having to explain itself. The lake is our ordinary everyday experience, which can get agitated by worries and anticipations. When stirred, the moon seems fragmented. When we are still and at ease, the water becomes clear and the moon is revealed, an indescribable and serene completeness.
吾心似秋月，
碧潭清皎潔。
My heart-mind is like the autumn moon,
in a clear and bright jade-green lake.
Nothing can compare with it
– how can I explain it in words?
Hanshanzi, Chinese Buddhist monk, poet, and spiritual writer
Open door
Leave the door open for the unknown, the door into the dark.
That’s where the most important things come from,
where you yourself came from, and where you will go.
Rebecca Solnit, A Field Guide to Getting Lost
The silent witness
I think there is only one subject worth my attention and that is the precognition of the spiritual side of the world and, within this recognition, the condition of my own spiritual state.
Mary Oliver, Winter Hours
We in the West think that the mind is everything, but all Eastern practice is to get beyond the mind to the point of the silent witness, where you’re witnessing yourself, where you’ve gone beyond the ego, beyond the self. The Indian tradition rests on what the West has largely lost: that there are three levels. There is the level of the body and the level of the mind, which the Western world thinks is the end. But beyond the body is the spirit. It’s the Atman, the pneuma of St. Paul, another dimension where we go beyond the mind, the senses, and the feelings, and we’re aware of the transcendent reality.
And that is the goal of life, to get to that.
Bede Griffiths
Already here
Whenever we are seeking happiness,
it is in fact our innate happiness that is seeking us.
The happiness we seek is the happiness we are.
Rupert Spira
