It’s easy to identify with all the places we have been hurt or abandoned,
but can we identify with the timeless wholeness that weathers every condition?
If we can’t, we may spend this life protecting ourselves
and never risk really living
Bonnie Myotai Treace Sensei
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
It never ceases to amaze me:
we all love ourselves more than other people,
but care more about their opinion than our own
Marcus Aurelius
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
You are in this time of the interim
Where everything seems withheld.
The path you took to get here has washed out; the way forward is still concealed from you.
“The old is not old enough to have died away;
The new is still too young to be born.”
You cannot lay claim to anything;
In this place of dusk, your eyes are blurred; and there is no mirror.
Everyone else has lost sight of your heart
And you can see nowhere to put your trust; You know you have to make your own way through.
As far as you can, hold your confidence.
Do not allow confusion to squander
This call which is loosening
Your roots in false ground,
That you might come free from all you have outgrown.
What is being transfigured here is your mind, and it is difficult and slow to become new.
The more faithfully you can endure here,
The more refined your heart will become for your arrival in the new dawn.
John O’Donohue, “For the Interim Time” in Benedictus: A Book of Blessings
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