Tag: heart

How It Is

Karl Duffy2 Comments

More unseasonal weather today. With visitors arriving one would prefer things to be different. But then again, one nearly always prefers things to be other than they are, and this attitude can mean that we miss the opportunities in what is actually here:

When we explore this mind-state of dukkha, we find that it is created by a deep aversion to being with How It Is right now. This silent, unconscious war with How It Is unwittingly drives much of our behaviour: We reach for the pleasant. We hate the unpleasant. We try to arrange the world so that we have only pleasant mind-states, and not unpleasant ones. We try to get rid of this pervasive state of unsatisfactoriness in whatever way we can – by changing things “out there”.  By changing the world.

Thoreau, through his quiet investigation of his own mental states in the quiet at Walden Pond discovered this very same phenomenon of underlying unsatisfactoriness. He called it “desperation” –  “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation….” Thoreau’s quiet desperation is precisely dukkha. He saw that ordinary mind seems chronically ill at ease with How It Is.

Stephen Cope, The Wisdom of Yoga

Opening to how things actually are

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Sometimes we experience dukkha quite directly in our meditation: our knees hurt and our backs hurt and our minds hurt. At other times it’s more subtle. We can’t seem to concentrate; we feel restless, we don’t think we are doing very well. Then our perception of suffering comes from seeing that we cannot control things. Many many times I told my teacher, Sayadaw U Pandita,  “Things are going very badly. My head hurts …and my mind is all over the place and I cannot practice. Things are really bad”.  He would just say, “That’s dukkha isn’t it”  I would look at him expectantly, waiting for him to tell me the magic trick, that one technique that would make all the suffering go away…… But all he would say is “That’s dukkha isn’t it”.

After a while I began to hear what he was saying. “This is a rightful perception”, he was telling me. “This isn’t just a personal drama. This is an opening into one aspect of life. This is part of how it is. This experience has to be seen and acknowledged.” You don’t have to immerse yourself in suffering or get lost in it; but in order to be fully open,  you have to let the truth of dukkha in as well. It does not mean that we should be passive or that taking action is never appropriate. Rather it means that we hurt ourselves most by fervently trying to control things so that we never have to suffer.

Joseph Goldstein, Suffering

Still the mind in order to love

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The eternal moment is outside of time, is not a part of our past or our future, and yet it is lived amidst all our everyday activities. It is in the eternal moment that love is born. Love does not belong to time, and its timeless quality is well known to all lovers. The lover has to learn to still the mind in order to catch the moment and stay true to love’s unfolding. Wayfarers tread a path that leads from illusions of time to the eternal moment that belongs to the soul.

Llewellyn Vaughan-Le, Signs of God

Still water

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We can make our minds so like still water that beings gather about us that they may see, it may be, their own images, and so live for a moment with a clearer, perhaps even with a fiercer life because of our quiet.

W.B. Yeats, The Celtic Twilight

Creating places of no noise

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Since noise is increasing in all directions, the psychology of silence has taken on a special meaning. We are already so adapted to an abundance of screeching sound that we are surprised when stillness suddenly envelops us. Not that this happens very often. We begin to see that the whole question of our relation to the world, both positive and negative, centers in something like silence. So our service to the world might be simply to keep a place where there is no noise, where people can be silent together.

Thomas Merton, The Springs of Contemplation

Sunday Quote: Excuses

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The trick is not how much pain you feel – but how much joy you feel.

Any idiot can feel pain.

Life is full of excuses to feel pain, excuses not to live, excuses, excuses, excuses.

Erica Jong