Tag: impermanence

Stilling the continual movement

Karl Duffy2 Comments

More insightful teaching on the basic human dynamics of “continual movement” beneath a lot of the suffering in the mind,  from my favourite source. These dynamics can become more apparent as exterior stimuli are reduced due to the Covid-19 lockdown and we can experience a greater interior restlessness.

We live with many options. If we get bored with looking at a painting, we read something; when that becomes boring, we go for a walk, perhaps visit a friend and go out for dinner together, then watch a movie. The pattern is that each new arising, or “birth” if you like, is experienced as unfulfilling. In this process of ongoing need, we keep moving from this to that without ever getting to the root of the process. Another aspect of this need is the need to fix things, or to fix ourselves — to make conflict or pain go away. By this I mean an instinctive response rather than a measured approach of understanding what is possible to fix and what dukkha (suffering)  has to be accommodated right now.

Then there’s the need to know, to have it all figured out. That gets us moving too. This continued movement is an unenlightened being’s response to dukkha. That movement is what is meant by … “the wandering on” – within this life, we can see all these “births,” — the same habit taking different forms. And each new birth is unsatisfactory too, because sooner or later we meet with another obstacle, another disappointment, another option in the ongoing merry-go-round. High-option cultures just give you a few more spins on the wheel.

Ajahn Sucitto, Turning the Wheel of Truth

A dark companion

Karl Duffy1 Comment

I am re-reading John O’Donohue’s book of blessings these days, reminding me of the key place that hospitality had in the Celtic spiritual tradition and see how that applies to the challenging moments of life, prompting me to see if I can create a space for growth to occur:

Now this dark companion has come between you.
Distances have opened in your eyes.
You feel that against your will
A stranger has married your heart.

Nothing before has made you
Feel so isolated & lost.

When the reverberations of shock subside in you,
May grace come to restore you to balance.
May it shape a new space in your heart
To embrace this illness as a teacher
Who has come to open your life to new worlds.

May you find in yourself
A courageous hospitality
Toward what is difficult,
Painful, & unknown.

May your fragile harvesting of this slow light
Help to release whatever has become false in you.
May you trust this light to clear a path
Through all the fog of old unease & anxiety
Until you feel arising within you a tranquility
Profound enough to call the storm to stillness.

May you keep faith with your body,
Learning to see it as a holy sanctuary
Which can bring this night-wound gradually
Toward the healing & freedom of dawn.

May you be granted the courage & vision
To work through passivity & self-pity,
To see the beauty you can harvest
From the riches of this dark invitation.

May you learn to receive it graciously,
And promise to learn swiftly
That is may leave you newborn,
Willing to dedicate your time to birth.

John O’Donohue, Blessing for a Friend, on the Arrival of Illness (extracts),  from Benedictus

Start over, each moment

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The gift of remembering and binding time creates the illusion that the past stands to the present as agent to act, mover to moved.

Living thus from the past, with echoes taking the lead, we are not truly here, and are always a bit late to the feast

Alan Watts

The preciousness of life

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Move through life living from one moment to the other, wholly absorbed in the present, carrying with you so little from the past that your spirit could pass through the eye of a needle; as little distracted by the worries of the future as the birds of the air and the flowers of the field. You will be attached to no person or thing, for you will have developed a taste for the symphony of life. And you will love life alone with the passionate attachment of your whole heart and your whole soul and your whole mind and all your strength. You will find yourself traveling unencumbered and free as a bird in the sky, always living in the Eternal Now. And you will have found in your heart the answer to the question, “Master, what is it that I must do to get Eternal life?”
Anthony de Mello s.j., The Way to Love

Right now it’s like this

Karl Duffy3 Comments

There is a lot in our current reality that we do not like,  or we would prefer to be different:

One point that Ajahn Sumedho would stress regularly, is that loving things is not the same as liking them. Having kindness for ourselves or for other beings is not the same as liking everything. We often come a cropper by trying to make ourselves like everything. This is a completely wrong approach. We’re not trying to like everything, rather we’re recognising that everything belongs. Everything is part of nature: the bitter as well as the sweet, the beautiful as well as the ugly, the cruel as well as the kindly. The heart that recognises that fundamentally everything belongs is what I would describe as being the heart of kindness, the essence of kindness. If we get that really clear within us, and begin to train ourselves to recognise it, we realise that we can cultivate this quality of radical acceptance.

Ajahn Amaro, Radical Acceptance

A simplification

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These days we have to reduce our activities, which creates conditions that are good for meditation practice. And in an associated way, meditation practice creates the conditions of mind which helps us to work with the new situation.

Sitting in meditation is essentially simplifying space. Our daily lives are in constant movement: lots of things going on, lots of people talking, lots of events taking place. In the middle of that, it’s very difficult to sense what we are in our life. When we simplify the situation, when we take away the externals and remove ourselves from the ringing phone, the television, the people who visit us, the dog who needs a walk, we get a chance to face ourselves.

Charlotte Joko Beck