Tag: Joy

Beyond limitations

Karl Duffy2 Comments

Souls get big from opening out beyond the limitations of human knowledge and control.

Everyone is called to be a mystic of some sort, and being open to mystery and myth, the intuitive and the non-rational, to art and ritual, to nature and animals, to absurd ideas and outrageous fantasies gives the soul room to fashion a lovable and thoughtful human being. However simple your life, however ordinary and retiring, you can have a mega-soul, a vast source of vitality, and the capacity for pain and failure as well. You can be noble in your simplicity and deep and wide in your ability to contain life.

Thomas Moore

Distractions

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A lot of modern society is driven by the distraction industry – advertising, shopping, surfing the net. It is not a new phenomenon. Nietzsche wrote in 1874 that “haste is universal because everyone is in flight from himself”,  but modern technologies of escape, like the smartphone or the tablet, make it even more pervasive and difficult to develop the silence within which is necessary for good health.

All mystics – Catholic, Christian, non-Christian, no matter what their theology, no matter what their religion  – are unanimous on one thing: that all is well, all is well. Though everything is a mess, all is well. Strange paradox, to be sure. But, tragically, most people never get to see that all is well because they are asleep. Spirituality means waking up. Most people, even though they don’t know it, are asleep.

People don’t really want to be cured. What they want is relief;  a cure is painful.

Anthony de Mello sj, Spirituality means waking up.

A reminder about love: Will not run out

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Freud thought that each person possessed a fixed stock of affection. So if you love someone else you love yourself less.  Freud’s wrong. Love doesn’t run out. It’s the miracle of Elijah and the widow of Zarephath. The more we love another person, the more we love ourselves, and everything else, and the world. 

Anna Kamienska, A Nest of Quiet: A Notebook

Our view for the day

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Meditation is the natural process of becoming familiar with an object by repeatedly placing our minds upon it. Whatever we’re doing, we always have a view; we’re always placing our mind on one object or another. For example, when we get up in the morning and we’re anxious about something, anxiety becomes our view for the day: “What about me? When will I get what I want?” The object of our meditation is “me.”
Sakyong Mipham Rinpoche

Fresh

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Today is the Spring Equinox – from the Latin “equal night”, when there is equal light and dark in our day –   marking the beginning of Spring for countries in the Northern Hemisphere.

We, the older ones,
Call it Spring,
And we have been through it
Many times.

But there is still nothing
Like the children bringing home
Such happiness
In their small hands.

Mary Oliver, Children, It’s Spring

How we learn

Karl Duffy3 Comments

 

We learn, grow and become compassionate and generous

as much through exile as homecoming,

as much through loss as gain,

as much through giving things away as in receiving what we believe to be our due.

David Whyte