Tag: impermanence

Not a straight line

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The way to the goal seems chaotic and interminable at first and only gradually do the signs increase that it is leading anywhere. The way is not straight but appears to go around in circles. More accurate knowledge has proved it to go in spirals: the dream-motifs alway return after certain intervals to definite forms, whose characteristic it is to define a center. And as a matter of fact the whole process revolves about a central point or some arrangement round a centre.

Carl Jung, Psychology and Alchemy

Sunday Quote: Inner work

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When you try to understand everything, you will not understand anything.

The best way is to understand yourself, and then you will understand everything

Shunryu Suzuki roshi, Zen Mind, Beginniers Mind

What causes our agitation

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There is a Noble truth about the arising of suffering:

It arises with a thirst for more, that is …always running here and there.

That is, a thirst for sense-input, a thirst to be something, a thirst to not be something.

The Buddha, The Turning of the Wheel Sutta

Sunday Quote: Underneath all the noise

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Water is free from the birth
and death of a wave.

Thich Nhat Hahn

Undisturbed

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I gaze on myself in the stream’s emerald flow,
Sit on a boulder by a cliff.

My mind, a lonely cloud,
Leans on nothing, needs nothing
From the world and its endless events.

HanShan, Chinese Buddhist and Taoist poet

The mind is all stories

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Dipa Ma taught that the mind is all stories, one after another, like nesting dolls. You open one, and another is inside. Open that one, and there is another story emerging. When you get to the last nesting doll, the smallest one, and open it, inside of it is – what? It’s empty, nothing there, and all around you are the empty shells of the stories of your life

Amy Schmidt, author, Dipa Ma: The Life and Legacy of a Buddhist Master

[Dipa Ma, 1911 – 1989 was an Indian meditation teacher of Theravada Buddhism, who had a big influence on early teachers in the Insight Meditation Society in Barre Massachusetts]