Tag: Life

Preoccupied with expectation

Karl Duffy1 Comment

We are living in a culture entirely hypnotized by the illusion of time, in which the so-called present moment is felt as nothing but an infinitesimal hairline between an all-powerfully causative past and an absorbingly important future. We have no present. Our consciousness is almost completely preoccupied with memory and expectation. We do not realize that there never was, is, nor will be any other experience than present experience. We confuse the world as talked about, described, and measured with the world which actually is.

Alan Watts

Stillness

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The ten directions converging,

Each learning to do nothing,

This is the classroom of the Buddha’s training;

Mind’s empty, all’s finished.

P’ang Yün (Layman Pang) died 808, famous lay practitioner of Ch’an

Sunday Quote: Dazzled

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It must be a great disappointment to God

if we are not dazzled at least ten times a day

Mary Oliver, Blue Horses

The quiet ordinary things

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Happiness is
in the quiet, ordinary things.
A table, 
a chair, 
a book with a paper-knife stuck between the pages.
And the petal falling from the rose,
and the light flickering
as we sit silent.

Virginia Woolf, The Waves

What Guides us

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It’s a funny thing… but people mostly have it backward.

They think they live by what they want.

But really, what guides them is what they’re afraid of.

What they don’t want.

Khaled Hosseini, And the Mountains Echoed

Let it rain

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Necessary advice for life in Ireland, but in a more general sense it is a way of working with the mind. Once we fix on one desired result, inevitably the alternative seems a disappointment. Appreciation is a peaceful state of mind. 

For after all, the best thing one can do

when it is raining

is to let it rain.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, 1807 – 1882, American Poet