Tag: Joy

Underneath your fears, your original face

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Who are you? Never mind all your fears and insecurities or all the things you have or would like to have. Forget that you want to be a better person.  I’m not asking who you believe yourself to be, but rather what you experience in those moments when you are not caught up in your wants and fears. What do you rely on to give meaning to your life? 

Even if you never consciously grapple with these questions about your true nature, certain circumstances will require you to pay attention. Life delivers you a series of challenges in the form of small and large good fortune, as well as petty and great misfortune. In the struggle to learn how to respond to the resulting joy, pain, and confusion, you are repeatedly challenged to seek and to act from your essence.

Phillip Moffit,  The Language of the Soft Heart

 

Once thoughts are quieted, the Original Face appears. Thoughts can be compared to clouds. When clouds vanish, the moon appears. The moon of suchness is the Original Face. Thoughts are also like the fogging of a mirror. When you wipe away all condensation, a mirror reflects clearly. Quiet your thoughts and behold your Original Face before you were born!

Daito, Zen Master, (1282-1337)

Everything in just one moment

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Alice: How long is forever?
White Rabbit: Sometimes, just one second.
Lewis Carroll

Sunday Quote: Already here

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O human, see then the human being rightly:

the human being has heaven and earth and the whole of creation in itself, and yet is a complete form,

and in it everything is already present, though hidden.  

Hidlegard of Bingen

Beyond limitations

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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