There are very few human beings who receive the truth, complete and staggering, by instant illumination.
Most of them acquire it fragment by fragment, on a small scale, by successive developments, cellularly, like a laborious mosaic.
Anaïs Nin
The news is dominated by heatwaves in Europe, something Ireland is immune to…
Traveler: What kind of weather are we going to have today?
Shepherd: The kind of weather I like
Traveler: How do you know it will be the kind of weather you like?
Shepherd: Having found out, sir, I cannot always get what I like, I have learned always to like what I get. So I am quite sure we will have the kind of weather I like.
Anthony de Mello, sj, The Heart of the Enlightened: A Book of Story Mediatations
Ajahn Sumedho advises: ‘Don’t take your life personally.’
That sounds disorienting, and it is: but what replaces the solid isolated self is respect for the sensitivity and clarity with respect to the boundless heart – that we all can have access to. This sense, this awakening to citta, can widen one’s cosmos and give it balance: my feelings, my rights, my time, and my opinions have to be felt through the heart, but they don’t have to be such an exclusive concern.
Ajahn Sucitto
Emotions are not solid entities.
They are events that arise, manifest, and pass away.
When we observe them with mindfulness, we see that they are just energies in the mind, conditioned by various factors.
They don’t belong to us; they simply flow through us.
Joseph Goldstein, Mindfulness: A Practical Guide to Awakening
In time, we start to notice how all experience arises and passes away – sensations, emotions, even our sense of self. We see that nothing is solid or permanent. A thought comes, and we recognize it as just a thought, not a command or an absolute truth. A feeling of anger arises, and instead of being consumed by it, we see it as a passing energy in the body and mind.
This is where true freedom lies – not in controlling experience, but in being with it fully, without identification. Awareness is like the sky: thoughts and emotions are like clouds that drift through. The sky doesn’t hold onto them or resist them; it simply allows them to come and go.
Larry Rosenberg, Breath by Breath: The Liberating Practice of Insight Meditation
Everything that arises passes away.
This is not a pessimistic truth, but a liberating one –
when we stop demanding permanence from a world that cannot provide it, we find peace.
Andrew Olendzki, Unlimiting Mind: The Radically Experiential Psychology of Buddhism
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