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
Way back in the ’80s, my guru asked me, “What is stress?” He had never heard of stress because he came from the Himalayas. I told him stress is the perception of threat: physical, emotional and psychological. After a while, he said, “You mean resistance to existence.” And he said, “If you don’t resist existence, you will have flow.” That’s the best advice.
Deepak Chopra in Wall Street Journal, November 2024, Deepak Chopra Doesn’t Believe You’re Too Busy to Meditate
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
All the possibilities of your human destiny are asleep in your soul.
You are here to realize and honour these possibilities. When love comes in to your life, unrecognized dimensions of your destiny awaken and blossom and grow. Possibility is the secret heart of time.
John O’Donohue, Anam Chara
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