Tell your heart that the fear of suffering
is worse than the suffering itself.
Paulo Coehlo, The Alchemist
Sunday Quote: our fears
Tag: impermanence
One purpose
In the Sufi Master Rumi’s “Table Talk”, there is this fierce and pointed passage:
“The master said there is one thing in this world which must never be forgotten. If you were to forget everything else, but were not to forget this, there would be no cause to worry, while if you remembered, performed and attended to everything else, but forgot that one thing, you would in fact have done nothing whatsoever.
It is as if a king had sent you to a country to carry out one special, specific task. You go to the country and you perform a hundred other tasks, but if you have not performed the task you were sent for, it is as if you have performed nothing at all.
So each person has come into the world for a particular task, and that is their purpose. If they don’t perform it, they will have done nothing.
Sogyal Rinpoche, The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying,
with nothing
The Absolute works with nothing.
The workshop, the materials are what do not exist.
Try and be a sheet of paper with nothing on it.
Be a spot of ground where nothing is growing,
where something might be planted,
a seed, possibly, from the Absolute.
Rumi
Stop fighting
Most of us have spent our lives caught up in plans, expectations, ambitions for the future; in regrets, guilt or shame about the past.
To come into the present is to stop the war.
Jack Kornfield
The changing of the year
When the stories of our life no longer bind us, we discover within them something greater.
We discover that within the very limitations of form, of our maleness and femaleness, of our parenthood and our childhood, of gravity on the earth and the changing of the seasons, is the freedom and harmony we have sought for so long.
Our individual life is an expression of the whole mystery, and in it we can rest in the center of the movement, the center of all worlds.
Jack Kornfield, A Path with Heart
Take the step
Let me fall if I must.
The one I will become will catch me
Baal Shem Tov, 1698 – 1760, Jewish mystic, regarded as the founder of Hasidic Judaism
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