Tag: impermanence

We cling to our history with tenacity precisely because to think of ourselves in other ways is either intimidating or unimaginable. But the human psyche imagines more

The problem with complexes is that they have no imagination. They can only say over and over the phenomenological message of their origins.

But the psyche has a much larger perspective on our lives. It imagines much more for us than the ordinary ego can comprehend. …Just as we periodically clean the house, go through old clothes and discard the no longer germane, so we have to go through our accumulated histories, our driving attitudes, reflexes and responses and discard what is no longer useful, productive, relevant or serving growth.

James Hollis, Living an Examined Life: Wisdom for the second Half of the Journey

The sense of ‘me’ and ‘mine’ is the root of all suffering.

When you contemplate, ‘This is not me, this is not mine, this is not my self,’ you’re no longer identifying with experience.

You see the body, feelings, thoughts, and perceptions as they are – impermanent, conditioned phenomena – and you stop taking them personally. That’s how you drop self-view.

Ajahn Sumedho, The Four Noble Truths

Stepping into a new month

The idea that we should or even can know ourselves is a tyranny.

It assumes that clarity is always preferable to mystery, that explanation is always better than wonder.

But what if not knowing is the most honest relationship we can have with ourselves?

Adam Phillips,  British psychoanalytic psychotherapist and essayist, Missing Out: In Praise of the Unlived Life

The goal, if we can speak of a goal on the spiritual path, is not to be attained in the future.

It is the place we start from. It is within us. It is us, our essential self.

We cannot go towards it; we relax back into it

We are revealed as that

Rupert Spira

The precious tree of nondual mind

spreads throughout the universe

it bears compassion in flower and fruit,

though there is no other,

and nobody “doing good“

Tilopa, 988 – 1069, Indian tantric master and scholar, influential in the Buddhist Mahāmudrā/ Tibetian tradition