Sunday Quote: just be aware

Thinking is difficult,

that’s why most people judge.

Jung

achieving contentment this year

So, how can we achieve inner contentment?

There are two methods. One method is to obtain everything that we want and desire – all the money, houses, and cars; the perfect mate; and the perfect body. The Dalai Lama has already pointed out the disadvantage of this approach; if our wants and desires remain unchecked, sooner or later we will run up against something that we want but can’t have. 

The second, and more reliable, method is not to have what we want but rather to want and appreciate what we have.

        The Dalai Lama and Howard C. Cutler, The Art of Happiness: A Handbook for Living

Wipe the map clean

Most people move through the world following signs made by others (who had no idea what they were doing).

To find your destiny, wipe the map clean.

Then chart your own course by your heart’s magnetic pull toward true north.

Martha Beck 

Sunday Quote: The biggest fault

The fool,

with all his other faults, has this also,

he is always getting ready to live.

Seneca, quoting Epicurus in Letters from a Stoic

a new journey

A good journey begins with knowing where we are

and being willing to go somewhere else

Richard Rohr

A living myth

The Winter Solstice – a day which held great spiritual and mythic significance for people down through the ages. All over the Northern Hemisphere, ancient festivals marked this, the shortest day of the year. The word in Irish –  Grianstad – means the stopping of the sun, a pause in the battle between darkness and light, where light eventually triumphs.

Jung realized that the problems of our time are rooted …above all in the loss of a living myth which would give meaning to our lives.

He saw that the dissociation of the conscious ego from what he called the primordial or instinctual soul presented a growing and unperceived danger to humanity. The more we emphasized reason and the supremacy of the rational mind, the greater the danger that instinct — whose power we have failed to acknowledge or understand — would drive, possess, delude and overwhelm us and the more we would fall victim to secular and religious ideologies and utopian goals which could ultimately lead us to destroy ourselves.

The paramount goal we need to focus on is reconnecting our conscious mind with the deeper dimension of the soul.

Anne Baring, The Dream of the Cosmos: A Quest for the Soul