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
Sunday Quote: Inner work
Tag: impermanence
What causes our agitation
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
Water is free from the birth
and death of a wave.
Thich Nhat Hahn
Undisturbed
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
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]
A flash of lightning
A lot of thunderstorms these days in Ireland
The Buddha often used images to try to convey some of this sense of all appearances arising, with nothing we can hold on to. He said life is like a rainbow, an echo, a dream, a drop of dew on a blade of grass, a flash of lightning in a summer sky.
What does a deeper glimpse into this truth of change offer us, ultimately? We see that there is a tender, exultant beauty to every hour, in fact to every minute we have just because we are alive. ..The fragility and dynamism of life is what makes it so vital. Every experience, every encounter, every realized desire, and every unfulfilled longing that comes into our lives is moving, changing…
Life is short, and it is sacred
Sharon Salzberg, Real LIfe: The Journey from Isolation to Openness and Freedom
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