The real challenge lies in just being able to integrate awareness into the most ordinary things.
Ajahn Sumedho
Tag: Life
Desire to control
What [the Buddha] saw was that life is the permanent experience of suffering. This suffering is primarily occasioned by the ego’s desire to control – to control the environment, to control others, to control in proportion to our losses. The only path through and beyond this suffering, according to the Buddha, is the relinquishment of the desire to control, to let be, to go with the wisdom implicit in the transience of nature. This release is the proper cure for neurosis, for then one is not split off from nature, including ourselves, who are a part of nature. Such a relinquishment does not render one a slave to loss, but rather a participant in the act of letting go. Only letting go can bring peace and serenity […] None of us will likely attain Buddhahood, but we need not be eternal victims either.
James Hollis, Swamplands of the Soul: New Life in Dismal Places
Listen
Nature’s silence is its one remark, and every flake of world is a chip off that old mute and immutable block. The Chinese say that we live in the world of the ten thousand things. Each of the ten thousand things cries out to us precisely nothing.
Annie Dillard, Teaching a Stone to Talk
Allow things to blow through
More wise words from the Thai Forest tradition for when times are uncertain
When you are in an emotionally rocky state, the most skilful response may simply be to receive what you are feeling at the present moment with some clarity and sympathy; to sit quietly and allow things to blow through. Whatever the state, the initial response has to be – stay present and cultivate spaciousness. The way that cause and effect work is that even five minutes of not acting on or suppressing the present mind-state results in some kind of ease of diminution of pressure. Then we begin to recognize a natural sanity, a seed of Awakening that’s there when the doing stops. It’s not far off. But we do need to get in touch with and encourage it.
Ajahn Sucitto, Kamma and the End of Kamma
How it is
Of course we can always imagine more perfect conditions, how it should be ideally, how everyone should behave. But it is not our task to create an ideal. It’s our task to see how it is, and to learn from the world as it is. For the awakening of the heart, conditions are always good enough.
Ajahn Sumedho
Sunday Quote: Busy
What if we are so busy searching for worth
that we miss the sapphire sky and cackling blackbird.
Mackenzie Connellee, Suggestion, in Naomi Shihab Nye (ed.,) Time You Let Me In
