Tag: impermanence

Don’t take it too personally

Karl Duffy2 Comments

The most profound change I’m aware of just now is a growing realization that life is not personal. This may seem a surprising or even strange view to those unfamiliar with Eastern spirituality, but it has powerful implications. It’s very freeing to see that events in my life are arising because of circumstances in which I am not involved, but that I’m not at the center of them in any particular way. They’re impersonal. They’re arising because of causes and conditions. They are not “me.” There is a profound freedom in this. It makes life much more peaceful and harmonious because I’m not in reaction to events all the time.

Phillip Moffitt,  It’s not Personal!

More teaching in nature

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File:2015-365-303 This Will Be The Last Ohio Rose? (22598266216).jpg

Following on from yesterdays post…Issa’s poems are very simple and very beautiful

Simply trust:
Do not the petals flutter down,
Just like that?

 Issa (1763-1828), Japanese Buddhist poet

photo: cogdogblog

Sunday Quote: Hear the bird’s song

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The forest is peaceful, why aren’t you?

You hold on to things, causing your confusion.

Let nature teach you.

Hear the bird’s song,  then let go.

Ajahn Chah

Understand that things change, drop the struggle

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The line from the Dhammapada, a compilation of sayings attributed to the Buddha, that seems the best expression of wisdom, is: “Anyone who understands impermanence, ceases to be contentious.”

Does that make sense to you on as many levels as it does to me? I understand it, primarily, as meaning “I have only a certain span of life allotted to me, so I don’t want to waste a single moment of it fighting.” Other times, if I catch myself on the brink of contention, the instruction reminds me, “Whatever is happening will change, and what I add to this situation is part of the change. Agonizing makes it worse.” And sometimes, if I remember that whatever is happening will cause results that I really cannot anticipate (although I often do and worry needlessly), I say to myself, “I have no idea whether this changed circumstance, which I resent, is actually a good or a bad thing in the long run. I can wait to see.”

Sylvia Boorstein, Happiness is an Inside Job

The teachers we need

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Life always gives us 
exactly the teacher we need 
at every moment. 
This includes every mosquito, 
every misfortune, 
every red light, 
every traffic jam, 
every obnoxious supervisor (or employee), 
every illness, every loss, 
every moment of joy or depression, 
every addiction, 
every piece of garbage, 
every breath. 

Every moment is the guru.

Charlotte Joko Beck

True freedom is related to absolute trust

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It is hard to find better guidance than this. Knowing it deep down would be so nice: to be without anxiety about my imperfections or messy reality or about what is not fully achieved in my life:

One thing, all things,  they move and intermingle without distinction.

To live in this realization

is to be without anxiety about imperfection.

The mind of absolute trust is beyond all thought, all striving,

is perfectly at peace,  for in it there is no yesterday, no today, no tomorrow.

Seng T’san, 7th Century Zen Patriarch,  Hsin Hsin Ming