Tag: impermanence

The most wonderful moment

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“My dear friend, has the most wonderful moment of your life arrived?“

He wants to know if the most wonderful moment of your life has arrived. It would be a pity if such a moment does not arrive. We may have a tendency to say “It does not seem that it has arrived, this wonderful moment, but I am sure that it will arrive soon, sometime in the future”. That’s our tendency to answer.

But if we keep living like the way we have lived for the past twenty years, it will not arrive in the next twenty years. It might not arrive at all, that moment we call the “most wonderful moment in our lives“.

The Buddha said, you have to make the present moment into the most wonderful moment of your life. And this is possible, Because if you are able to go home to the present moment, to the here and the the now, become fully alive, become fully present, you can touch all the wonders of life within yourself and around you.

Transcribed from a talk by Thich Nhat Hanh

Our small efforts

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As I gaze on the icon of Mother and child, I realize that despite the enormous difficulty the world has always been in, Christ as a child was content to be in the world in the arms of one woman, his mother.

God’s action in the world is sufficient while operating in the limited dimensions of one individual, here shown contented in the arms of his mother.

Paul Quenon, Matter of the Heart, A Monk’s Journal, – a lovely profound book of reflections.

Following the star

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The important thing is not the finding, it is the seeking,

it is the devotion with which one spins the wheel of prayer and scripture, discovering the truth little by little.

If this machine gave you the truth immediately, you would not recognize it.

Ursula K. Le Guin

Serene

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Before the universe was born.
there was something formless and perfect
It is serene. Empty.
Solitary. Unchanging.
Infinite. Eternally present.
It is the mother of the ten thousand things.
For lack of a better name,
I call it the Tao.

Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching, 25

Sunday Quote: The secret

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Those who are willing to be vulnerable

move among mysteries

Theodore Roethke, American Poet, Straw for the Fire

A living myth

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The Winter Solstice – a day which held great spiritual and mythic significance for people down through the ages. All over the Northern Hemisphere, ancient festivals marked this, the shortest day of the year. The word in Irish –  Grianstad – means the stopping of the sun, a pause in the battle between darkness and light, where light eventually triumphs.

Jung realized that the problems of our time are rooted …above all in the loss of a living myth which would give meaning to our lives.

He saw that the dissociation of the conscious ego from what he called the primordial or instinctual soul presented a growing and unperceived danger to humanity. The more we emphasized reason and the supremacy of the rational mind, the greater the danger that instinct — whose power we have failed to acknowledge or understand — would drive, possess, delude and overwhelm us and the more we would fall victim to secular and religious ideologies and utopian goals which could ultimately lead us to destroy ourselves.

The paramount goal we need to focus on is reconnecting our conscious mind with the deeper dimension of the soul.

Anne Baring, The Dream of the Cosmos: A Quest for the Soul