The great Meister Eckhart knew that life was much greater than what he could grasp or make sense of. He reminds us that holding a space for what we do not know is just as important as our ideas and concepts about what is happening. What do we really know about ourselves, our experience, our world?:
“I ask God to rid me of God,” Meister Eckhart says.
The God, who is known and familiar, is far too small for him.
Dorothee Sölle, The Silent Cry: Mysticism and Resistance
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Enlightenment is not something you achieve. It is the absence of something.
All your life you have been going after something, pursuing some goal.
Enlightenment is dropping all that.
Charlotte Joko Beck
Everyone should sit firmly anchored in the place
where there is no better and worse.
Kodo Sawaki, 1880 – 1965, Japanese Sōtō Zen teacher
In practicing equanimity, we train in widening our circle of understanding and compassion to include the good and the bad, the beautiful and the ugly. It is more a matter of being fully engaged with whatever comes to our door. We could call it being completely alive. Training in equanimity requires that we leave behind some baggage: the comfort of rejecting whole parts of our experience, for example and the security of welcoming only what is pleasant. The courage to continue with this unfolding process comes from self-compassion and from giving ourselves plenty of time. If we continue to practice this way over the months and years, we will feel our hearts and minds grow bigger. When people ask me how long this will take, I say, “At least until you die.”
Pema Chodron, The places that scare you
The Real …expects nothing of speech
Le réel …n’attend rien de la parole.
Jacques Lacan, French Psychoanalyst, Ecrits
Part of waking up is becoming sensitive to how we become discouraged, how we close down, and where we go for false comfort. To wake up is to become aware of the tendency to judge ourselves, to take our failures personally, to fall into despair, self-pity, depression, frustration, anger, or wherever we tend to go when we believe the story that we are a person who can’t do it right. Seeing all of this is enough. Awareness is its own action. We don’t need to analyze it or impose changes based on our ideas of what should be happening. Just being awake to the present moment, as it is, and seeing clearly what is happening: this is transformative. We are simply awake here and now.
Joan Tollifson, Nothing to Grasp
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