Tag: impermanence

It’s the expectations of your own mind that are creating your hell. “I expected you to be…” When you get frustrated because something isn’t the way you thought, exmine your thinking, not just the thing that frustrates you. And you will see that a lot of your suffering is caused by your models about how the Universe ought to be.  And your inability to allow it to be.

It’s like you come here and it’s a beautiful day, so you expect the next day is going to be beautiful. Then it rains, and you are disappointed. Isn’t it funny that when it rains, you should be disappointed? To take nature and allow nature, when it’s in its natural state, to make you miserable. It says something about you.

Ram Dass

Generally, ordinary thinking involves running between that and this.

You are reporting back to yourself all the time.

You do not just think; you think and then report back.

However, when this back and forth petty journey is not happening, there is a transcendental sort of thinking, so to speak. With this kind of thinking, you are seeing things precisely as they are, rather than having to refer back to anyone, because the whole being is seeing.

Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche, Milarepa, Lessons from the Life and Songs of Tibet’s Great Yogi

We must sense that we live in a world which in some respects is mysterious; that things happen and can be experienced which remain inexplicable; that not everything which happens can be anticipated. The unexpected and the incredible belong in this world. Only then is life whole.

Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections

In our yearning to be perfect, we have mistaken perfection for wholeness. We think we cannot love ourselves until we and others meet some external standard. Depression, anxiety – in fact, most neuroses and compulsions – are ultimately a defense against loving ourselves without condition.

We are afraid to look at the damp, dark, ugly yet exquisite roots of being that stretch deep into our survival chakra. We are fearful of finding that the spirit is not there, that our Home is empty, even as our outer home is empty. Yet it is in that place of survival, where the dark mother has been abandoned, that spirit longs to be embodied so that the whole body may become light.

Ego wants to be the god of our own idealized projection; spirit wants to be incarnated in our humanity where it can grow in wisdom through experience.

Marion Woodman, Jungian author and poet, Dancing in the Flames: The Dark Goddess in the Transformation of Consciousness