Tag: heart

Holding our concepts lightly

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Emptiness is the track on which the centered person moves.

Je Tsongkhapa, Tibetan Buddhist,  (1357-1419)

To know emptiness is not just to understand the concept. It is more like stumbling into a clearing in the forest, where suddenly you can move freely and see clearly. To experience emptiness is to experience the shocking absence of what normally determines the sense of who you are and the kind of reality you inhabit. It may last only a moment before the habits of a lifetime reassert themselves and close in once more. But for that moment, we witness ourselves and the world as open and vulnerable.

Stephen Batchelor, Buddhism without Beliefs

You don’t have to drown

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In fully allowing conditions to be what they are, we stabilize our hearts and find peace. It’s like putting a boat into water. We make an ark of truth: ‘Conditions are like this,’ and in that truth, we don’t adopt the conditions as our own. This is important: you can’t drain the sea, but you don’t have to drown.

Why we feel overwhelmed, as if we’re drowning, is because the heart is‘leaky.’ When it isn’t secure, perceptions and feelings flood in and cause it to sink

Ajahn Sucitto, Parami

Sunday Quote: Contentment comes from within

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 Every moment is an opportunity to come home…

Make an island of yourself,
make yourself your refuge;
there is no other refuge.

Digha Nikaya, 16

Why we are always restless

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The creator of the universe loves circles:

time and space are circles, the day is a circle, the year is a circle, the earth is a circle.

But when creating and fashioning the human heart, the creator only created a half-circle, so that there is something ontologically unfinished in human nature.

John O’Donohue

 

In the torment of the insufficiency of everything attainable,

we finally learn that here in this life all symphonies must remain unfinished.

Karl Rahner, sj., Catholic theologian

 

Giving attention

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We continually move in and out of wholeness and fragmentation, in and out of clarity and confusion, and in and out of a largeness of heart and smallness of mind. When whole and clear and large of heart, we seem to be carried along, part of something larger. When fragmented and confused and small of mind, we seem to be tossed about, lost in ways we don’t quite understand. And so we continually search for tools that will free us to be lifted by life’s currents and  not battered by them.

 One such tool is a frame of mind, an attitude by which we meet the world: it has to do with whether we are giving attention or getting attention. Giving attention steers us back to center, Giving attention is connective. On the other hand, getting attention is a form of drifting from center. If attention comes your way, well, enjoy, but cultivating and seeking it is paddling away from center. Getting attention is deceptively isolating. It ultimately leads to being seen but not held.

 Mark Nepo.

When we fall down

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A student asked master Sozan, “The teachings say that everyone who falls down on the ground must stand up again by relying on the ground. What is the meaning of to fall down?”

Sozan said, “If you affirm the situation, that is the answer.”

The student said, “What is the meaning of standing up?”

Sozan said, “Just stand up!”

“What is it to fall down?”

Sozan, Chinese Chan/Zen master, died 606 AD

We think hitting the ground, knocking over the barrier is a mistake, but the ground we hit, the failure we experience is not a mistake. The world is endlessly mysterious, experience is profound to a degree that will always surprise us. But it is never a mistake. To foster even a meager appreciation of that (and when we’re in the midst of a fall, meager is pretty big) is to begin to practice… It is the decision to stop complaining and to start paying attention. Contained in the fall is exactly what we need to stand. Everything we need is available, but we have to invite it. What is it to invite reality? 

Bonnie Myotai Treace Sensei M.R.O, Dogen Cubed