“No-thought” does not mean cutting off thinking – it means there is no fixation with regard to the free flow of our thinking. We don’t need to reify or solidify what we experience into my thoughts, my feelings. If self-grasping is present, then thoughts don’t flow. When we suffer, we are caught in the middle of the stories that we’re fabricating, and, in this way, we prolong our suffering.
Guo Gu, Silent Illumination
Set wide the window
Let me drink the day
Edith Wharton
We must learn to hold the tension between the reality of the moment and the possibility that something better might emerge. The insight at the heart of nonviolence is that we live in a tragic gap – a gap between the way things are and the way we know they might be. It is a gap that never has been and never will be closed. If we want to live nonviolent lives, we must learn to stand in the tragic gap, faithfully holding the tension between reality and possibility in hopes of being opened to a third way.
Parker J. Palmer
If we live everything,
life will be faithful to us.
John O’Donohue
The monk who bakes bread
no longer believes in the measure-for-measure God of the recipe books,
has little faith, if any, in the predestined endings set forth by timers,
the finely sifted claims to inerrancy held by cups and spoons.
Blended to life, call his a leavened devotion to resurrection
appearing from within each cracked tomb of grain,
the hunger that presses his hands dawn after dawn,
deep into the just-risen flesh.
Cowl white as the flour he scoops, mixes,
forms pat pat into loaves shaped like naves,
it is his chest, filled with the invisible yeast of breath,
that knows by heart the patient kneading together of days,
how long love takes to rise.
Daniel Skach-Mills, American poet.
A drop of water has the tastes of the water of the seven seas: there is no need to experience all the ways of worldly life.
The reflections of the moon on one thousand rivers are from the same moon: the mind must be full of light.
Hung Tzu-Ch’eng, 1572-1620, Chinese Philosopher
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