The transformation of fear does not mean that we no longer have fearful responses. It means that we no longer believe that those responses are who we are. This is what practice is about: learning to stop believing that our deep-seated reactivity is who we are. Who we really are is much bigger than any of our fear-based conditioned responses. When we can really experience fear, we can see through this false identification, perhaps even glimpsing a vaster sense of Being.
Ezra Bayda, Being Zen
One day I finally realized that I no longer needed a personal history and just like drinking I gave it up, and that, and only that, has made all the difference.
Carlos Castenada, Don Juan
It is always hard to believe that the courageous step is so close to us, that it is closer than we ever could imagine, that in fact, we already know what it is, and that the step is simpler, more radical than we had thought:
which is why we so often prefer to live in an almost world, why we prefer the story to be more elaborate, our identities to be safely clouded by fear, why we want the horizon to remain always in the distance, the promise never fully and simply made, the essay longer than it needs to be and the answer safely in the realm of impossibility.
David Whyte “Beginning” in Consolations: The Solace, Nourishment and Underlying Meaning of Everyday Words.
Unhappiness, discontent or suffering results from the tension between desire and the lack of the thing desired. Now there are two possible approaches to overcoming this unhappiness. One is to obtain the object desired, to secure possession of it; the other is to eliminate the desire.
If we carefully examine the happiness that comes from satisfying desire, we would find that such happiness is unreliable and insecure. This happiness depends on external things. These objects of desire are inevitably impermanent, and when we are separated from them we become unhappy. Thus even in the midst of happiness we become vulnerable to suffering.
Therefore the Buddha points out that true happiness is to
be achieved by taking the opposite approach, the approach of eliminating our desires. If we eliminate the desire our mind remains satisfied, content and happy no matter what our external situation may be. The Buddha says that this principle can be carried through
all the way to the total uprooting of craving. This is the cessation of craving, the end of suffering (dukkha) here and now.
Bhikkhu Bodhi, Nibbana
The small boat of the day sails into morning,
past the postman with his modest haul, the full trees
which sound like the sea, leaving my hands free
to remember. Moments of grace. Like this.
Carol Ann Duffy, Moments of Grace
Man is the only animal that can be bored,
who can feel discontented,
that can feel evicted from paradise
Erich Fromm
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