You don’t find peace on a mountain or in a cave;
you can travel to the place of the Buddha’s enlightenment
without getting closer to enlightenment.
What matters is being aware wherever you are, whatever you’re doing.
Ajahn Chah
Tag: heart
More on how the sense of self is formed
Ajahn Sucitto, Kamma, Self and Liberation
Deeper than what I feel
Felt meanings are volatile: they move our hearts and affect how we act. Yet real as it all these feelings seem, they do change; and if I follow them, then who I seem to be changes in accordance with them. When I am being ‘me, the harassed, overworked’ my manner will have a different flavour than when I’m ‘me, welcoming you to my home.’ Actually, I have quite a few selves, or subsidiary personalities, which take centre stage dependent on the situation, pressures and natural conditions like health. My world-view and motivation may change between one of these personae (these selves that we have within us) and the next – sometimes I can hardly believe it when someone reports back to me what I said when I was in a difficult mood. In fact, I might comment that ‘I wasn’t quite myself then.’ These ranging personae, of which any one can be occupying the ‘me’ space at a given time, are based on felt meanings that arise around one’s role, function, and relationship – as well as on physical health and current attitude. The most residual ones, the ones that really feel like me, are the ones carried in the heart: ‘I am the one who has to do all the work (and receives no recognition)’; ‘I am the one who can’t manage and needs others to make decisions for me…’ and so on. They direct us through event after event, and yet we might not even recognize them as such because the mind will imagine that the feeling is being created not from some internal bias, but from the situation that’s occurring around us.
Ajahn Succitto, Kamma, Self and Liberation
The secret signature
If you live the life you love, you will receive shelter and blessings. Sometimes the great famine of blessings in and around us derives from the fact that we are not living the life we love; rather, we are living the life that is expected of us. We have fallen out of rhythm with the secret signature and light of our own nature.
John O’Donohue
A space for beauty
Here one of the greatest theologians of the last Century reminds us to create some space for leisure and a beauty that is greater than us. If we get caught up in the drive for achievement and efficiency, we risk building a life that alienates us from our deepest selves by a focus on utility and speed for its own sake.
Beauty is the disinterested one, without which the ancient world refused to understand itself, a word which both imperceptibly and yet unmistakably has bid farewell to our new world, a world of interests, leaving it to its own avarice and sadness. We no longer dare to believe in beauty and we make of it a mere appearance in order the more easily to dispose of it. Our situation today shows that beauty demands for itself at least as much courage and decision as do truth and goodness, and she will not allow herself to be separated and banned from her two sisters without taking them along with herself in an act of mysterious vengeance. We can be sure that whoever sneers at her name as if she were the ornament of a bourgeois past – whether he or she admits it or not – can no longer pray and soon will no longer be able to love.
Hans Urs von Balthasar, The Glory of the Lord: A thrological Aesthetics
Sunday Quote: Within
Though we travel the world over to find the beautiful,
we must carry it with us or we find it not.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
