Overthinking

It is imperative to cut off the mind road.

If you do not cut off the mind road, you will be a ghost, clinging to the grass.

Wu Men Hui-k’ai,, 1183–1260, Chinese Chán master

Sufficient meaning

I have frequently seen people become neurotic when they content themselves with inadequate or wrong answers to the questions of life. They seek position, marriage, reputation, outward success or money, and remain unhappy and neurotic even when they have attained what they were seeking. Such people are usually confined within too narrow a spiritual horizon.

Their life has not sufficient content, sufficient meaning. If they are enabled to develop into more spacious personalities, the neurosis generally disappears

Jung, Autobiography

A big empty space

A long weekend here in Ireland.

My home can be anywhere, heaven or earth.
All I need is room in my heart.
And a good source of water, of course.

You need room in your heart . . . a big empty space
To sort out what’s real from what’s not.

Hsu Yun, 1840 – 1959, renowned and influential Chinese Chan Buddhist master

Parts

“You know, you’re a little complicated after all”

“Oh no”, she assured him, “I’m not really,

I’m just a – I’m just a whole lot of different people”

F. Scott Fitzgerald, Tender is the Night

Don’t Know Mind

In this whole world, everyone searches for happiness outside, but nobody understands their true self inside. Everybody says, “I, I want this, I am like that” . . . But nobody understands this I.

Before you were born, where did your I come from? When you die, where will your I go? If you sincerely ask, “What am I?”, sooner or later you will run into a wall where all thinking is cut off.

We call this “Don’t know”.

Zen is keeping this Don’t Know Mind always and everywhere.

Seungsahn Haengwon, 1927 – 2004, Korean Seon (Zen) master and founder of the international Kwan Um School of Zen.

Opening the eye of the mind

Repeatedly turn the mind toward what is known:

All things are of the nature to change.

Our only inheritance is impermanence and the truth that conditions rise and fall.

Jessica Angima, Kenyan American artist and meditation teacher