Tag: Joy

On not setting targets

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Again and again I therefore admonish my students in Europe and America: Don’t aim at success –  the more you aim at it and make it a target, the more you are going to miss it. For success, like happiness, cannot be pursued; it must ensue, and it only does so as the unintended side effect of one’s personal dedication to a cause greater than oneself or as the by-product of one’s surrender to a person other than oneself. Happiness must happen, and the same holds for success: you have to let it happen by not caring about it. I want you to listen to what your conscience commands you to do and go on to carry it out to the best of your knowledge. Then you will live to see that in the long-run … success will follow you precisely because you had forgotten to think about it

Viktor Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning

Genuine happiness comes from gently working with the mind

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If we could put as much effort into cleaning up our minds as we do sweeping our houses, washing our clothes and doing the dishes, we would likely be at ease. But when we talk about cleaning like this, people don’t know what we are getting at…I’ve come to think it’s because people don’t seek their own dwelling place. We scrub and sweep elsewhere. We don’t make our minds clean, so there is always confusion. We are always looking outside.

…These days there is only force and hurry. Mangoes are never sweet now. They are forced. Before they are ripe they picked and artificially ripened. This is done because people want to get them in a hurry. So when you eat them you find they are sour. To get something good, you have to allow it be sour first, according to its own natural way. But we pick them early and then complain that they are sour. For the most part things are imitations. We grasp the things that are false and uncertain as real…If the mind does not see and realize, there is no path to clarity. 

Ajahn Chah, Being Dharma

Where meaning is found

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The holiest of all holidays are those

Kept by ourselves in silence and apart;

The secret anniversaries of the heart

When the full river of feeling overflows

Longfellow, Holidays

Sunday Quote: Giving

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Love is an activity, not a passive affect; it is a “standing in,” not a “falling for.”

In the most general way, the active character of love can be described by stating that love is primarily giving, not receiving.

Erich Fromm

Taking our thoughts very seriously

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These trains of thought and states of mind are constantly changing, like the shapes of clouds in the wind, but we attach great importance to them. An old man watching children at play knows very well that their games are of little consequence. He feels neither elated nor upset at what happens in their game, while the children take it all very seriously. We are just exactly them.

Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche

The colour of our inner movie

Karl Duffy2 Comments

Thoughts can be our best friends and our worst enemies. When they make us feel that the entire world is against us, every perception, every encounter, and the world’s very existence become sources of torment. It is our thoughts themselves that rise up as enemies. They stampede through our mind in droves, each one creating its own little drama of ever-increasing confusion. Nothing is right outside because nothing is right inside. When we get a close look at the tenor of our everyday thoughts, we realize the extent to which they color the inner film that we project onto the world….. According to Andrew Solomon, “In depression, all that is happening in the present is the anticipation of pain in the future, and the present qua present no longer exists at all.” The inability to manage our thoughts proves to be the principal cause of suffering. Learning to tone down the ceaseless racket of disturbing thoughts is a decisive stage on the road to inner peace.

Matthieu Ricard, Happiness