Tag: impermanence

Winds may blow

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Awareness is the basis, or what you might call the “support,” of the mind. It is steady and unchanging, like the pole to which the flag of ordinary consciousness is attached. When we recognize and become grounded in awareness, the “wind” of emotion may still blow. But instead of being carried away by the wind, we turn our attention inward, watching the shifts and changes with the intention of becoming familiar with that aspect of consciousness that recognizes  Oh, “this is what I’m feeling, this is what I’m thinking”. As we do so, a bit of space opens up within us. With practice, that space – which is the mind’s natural clarity – begins to expand and settle.

Yongey Mingpur Rinpoche

Sunday Quote: Trust the process

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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

Grounded

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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

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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

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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

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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