La ruta nos aportó otro paso natural.
The path provides the natural next step.
Spanish palindrome – reading the same backwards as forwards. It is on the subject of pilgrimage or life’s journey , which, as we walk, returns us to our origins
Tag: impermanence
Grounded
Some of these old teachings are very beautiful. The fundamental insight is that we are always whole and alive, even right in the midst of difficulties. We thus loosen our identification with our story as something solid, as a permanent sense of agitation, weakness or illness.
A monk asked, “How can a person escape from birth, old age, sickness and death?”
Lingyun replied, “The green mountain is fundamentally unmoving,
But the floating clouds pass back and forth”
(Little is known of Lingyun Zhiqin, a disciple of Chinese Zen Master Guishan Lingyou (771 – 853). “Birth, old age, sickness and death” are shorthand for all the difficulties of life and its overall unsatisfactory nature).
A swinging door
Came across this image in Tim Burkett’s book Nothing Holy about It: The Zen of Being Just Who You Are, one of the best books I read last year. It is one of the most famous ideas of this great teacher… Easy to understand, not so simple to do.
We say “inner world” or “outer world,” but actually there is just one whole world. In this limitless world, our throat is like a swinging door. The air comes in and goes out like someone passing through a swinging door. If you think, “I breathe,” the “I” is extra. There is no you to say”I.” What we call “I” is just a swinging door which moves when we inhale and when we exhale. It just moves; that is all. When your mind is pure and calm enough to follow this movement, there is nothing: no “I,” no world, no mind nor body; just a swinging door.
Suzuki Roshi
The silent watcher
Be the silent watcher of your thoughts and behaviour.
You are beneath the thinker.
You are the stillness beneath the mental noise.
You are the love and joy beneath the pain
Eckhart Tolle
Holding our concepts lightly
Emptiness is the track on which the centered person moves.
Je Tsongkhapa, Tibetan Buddhist, (1357-1419)
To know emptiness is not just to understand the concept. It is more like stumbling into a clearing in the forest, where suddenly you can move freely and see clearly. To experience emptiness is to experience the shocking absence of what normally determines the sense of who you are and the kind of reality you inhabit. It may last only a moment before the habits of a lifetime reassert themselves and close in once more. But for that moment, we witness ourselves and the world as open and vulnerable.
Stephen Batchelor, Buddhism without Beliefs
Rehearsing and evaluating
It’s interesting to notice that we spend so much of our time rehearsing what we are going to say or do… we construct our reality by the stories we tell about it.
The evaluation I have in mind is ego centered: “Is this next episode in my life going to bring me something I like, or not? Is it going to hurt, or isn’t it? Is it pleasant or unpleasant? Does it make me important or unimportant? Does it give me something material?” It’s our nature to evaluate in this way. To the extent that we give ourselves over to evaluation of this kind, joy will be missing from our lives.
Charlotte Joko Beck, Nothing Special, Living Zen
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