If we are willing to take an unbiased look, we will find that, in spite of all of our problems and confusion, all our emotional and psychological ups and down, there is something basically good about our existence as human beings. Every human being has a basic nature of goodness, which is undiluted and unconfused. That goodness contains tremendous gentleness and appreciation.
Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche
We have to cultivate contentment with what we have. We really don’t need much. When you know this, the mind settles down. Cultivate generosity. Delight in giving. Learn to live lightly. In this way, we can begin to transform what is negative into what is positive. This is how we start to grow up.
Ani Tenzin Palmo
This is the mystery and the pain of our lives: every one of us is exactly where we need to be, but we don’t know it. We’re looking for somewhere else to be. The spiritual odyssey, life’s deepest and most significant undertaking, involves a great effort and inevitably it leads us on through many disasters and troubles in the checkered course of our living and growing. And where to we end up? Back where we started from. Back to ourselves. Only now maybe with more wisdom.
Norman Fischer
The deepest words of the wise …teach us
the same as the whistle of the wind when it blows
or the sound of the water when it is flowing
Antonio Machado, Spanish poet, 1875 – 1939
As the days begin to shorten, we are reminded that darkness is as much of life as is light. And each day we have moments of birth and moments of loss. They give an opportunity in the practice of taking some aspects of ourselves and our lives with less importance, of letting go or dying to our fixed sense of self:
Die while you’re alive
and be absolutely dead.
Then do whatever you want:
it’s all good.
Bunan, 17th century Zen Master.
The third noble truth says that the cessation of suffering is letting go of holding on to ourselves. By “cessation” we mean the cessation of hell as opposed to just weather, the cessation of this resistance, this resentment, this feeling of being completely trapped and caught, trying to maintain huge ME at any cost.
Pema Chodron, The Wisdom of No Escape and the Path of Loving-Kindness
In most wisdom traditions there are practices where we remind ourselves of the fact that we will all grow ill and die, as a basic truth of human nature. In the Western Churches remembering those who have gone before us occurs at the start of November, as they took over the pre-existing importance of this time in the Celtic calendar. These practices are mainly designed to allow wisdom to grow and to encourage us to fully live each day, to see each day as a gift.
We must make good use of this life for the time we have left.
This brief flash of light, like the sun appearing through the clouds.
Kalu Rinpoche
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