Tag: impermanence

Until you go down

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I know that any kind of defeat or humiliation is not the American way, but it is surely the biblical way. There the pattern is rather clear, and there is no going up until you go down. Only our strong cultural bias, or a culpable blindness, would allow us to miss this central biblical theme that is everywhere in plain sight.

In the early part of the lovely Joseph saga, where in classic sibling rivalry and jealousy, Joseph’s brothers throw him into the cistern, and then sell him into slavery to assuage any guilt over actually killing him. As always, some “manufactured difference” is used to justify the crime, so they write him off as a “master of dreams”! Oppositional energy never knows what it is for, it just knows what it is against. It is sort of a sad substitute for vision, yet negative people feed on it.

Richard Rohr, Lenten meditations

no exit

Karl Duffy1 Comment

We live in a world that is not perfectible, a world that always presents you with a sense of something undone, something missing, something hurting, something irritating.

From that minor sense of discomfort to torture and poverty and murder, we live in that kind of universe. The wound that does not heal – this human predicament is a predicament that does not perfect itself. But there is the consolation of no exit, the consolation that this is what you’re stuck with.

Rather than the consolation of healing the wound, of finding the right kind of medical attention or the right kind of religion, there is a certain wisdom of no exit: this is our human predicament and the only consolation is embracing it. It is our situation, and the only consolation is the full embrace of that reality.

Leonard Cohen

Service

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The greatest tragedy of our lives is not that freedom is not possible, but that we pass our years trapped in the same patterns…

We are caught in a trance of unworthiness, of not being enough, and because of that trance we turn against ourselves and others.

When we begin to trust the goodness in ourselves, we begin to relax. We begin to open.

From that openness, a natural kindness begins to emerge – an expression of our true nature

Tara Brach, Radical Acceptance

Don’t wait

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A new month

The way to have the life we want is to receive more deeply the life we have.

Sometimes we keep our own life at arm’s length, thinking we’ll wait until circumstances improve before giving it all we’ve got.

But life is just a reflection of consciousness, so it’s never going to give any more to us than we give to it.

Don’t wait for a perfect life; breathe in the life that’s already perfect.

Marianne Williamson

Presence

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Presence is when you’re no longer waiting for the next moment,

believing that the next moment will be more fulfilling than this one.

Eckhart Tolle,

Sunday quote: Light persists

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I perceive that whilst everything around me is ever changing, ever dying,
there is underlying all that change a living power that is changeless,
that holds all together, that creates,dissolves and recreates…

for I can see that in the midst of death, life persists,in the midst of untruth, truth persists,
in the midst of darkness, light persists.


Mahatma Gandhi