Tag: Life

Being just in the now and not in time

Karl Duffy3 Comments

File:Vintage looking Clock Sign of Möbel Hansson in the Old Town in Stockholm Sweden (6116259031).jpg

I was at an event yesterday where a speaker said that a certain tribe in the Amazon have no concept of time, no words for “week” or “month”. Strange, since we allow these ideas exert such pressure on us. They, on the contrary, do not think of time as a “thing”, or understand the idea of “I haven’t got the time”, racing against the clock to get something completed.  This allows them to relate differently to the moment; they are not persecuted by an idea of a perfect moment, or relate to it just through the thinking faculty; they are grounded in the now, no matter how it is:

If your relationship to the present moment is not right,

nothing can ever be right in the future,

because when the future comes,

it’s the present moment.

Eckhart Tolle

photo arjan richter

Where your life is

Karl Duffy6 Comments

muine

What I want to say is
that the past is the past,
and the present is what your life is,
and you are capable
of choosing what that will be,
darling citizen.

So come to the pond,
or the river of your imagination,
or the harbor of your longing,

and put your lips to the world.
And live
your life.

Mary Oliver, from Mornings at Blackwater

photo of the River Barrow at Bagenalstown, Co Carlow,  May 18th 2015.

Kindness with ourselves today

Karl Duffy2 Comments

File:Lake Piano.jpg

In actual life it requires the greatest art to be simple, and so acceptance of oneself is the essence of the moral problem and the acid test of one’s whole outlook on life.  That I feed the beggar, that I forgive an insult, that I love my enemy…  all these are undoubtedly great virtues…  But what if I should discover that the least amongst them all, the poorest of all beggars, the most impudent of all offenders, yea, the very fiend himself – that these are within me, and that I myself stand in need of the alms of my own kindness, that I myself am the enemy who must be loved – what then?

Jung, Psychology and Religion: West and East, Chapter V, “Psychotherapy or the Clergy,” 519-520

photo ras67

Noticing the ordinary

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File:Munich - Two boys playing in a park - 7328.jpg

Never forget that every mind is shaped by the most ordinary experiences.

To say that something is ordinary is to say that it is of the kind that has made the biggest contribution to the formation of your most basic ideas

Paul Valéry, French poet and philosopher, 1871 – 1945

photo jorge royan

Sunday Qute: Space

Karl Duffy3 Comments

File:Centaurus A halo.jpg

Develop a mind that is vast like space

where experiences both pleasant and unpleasant can appear

without conflict,  struggle, or harm

The Buddha, Majjhima Nikaya

photo ESA/Hubble

Holding on too tightly

Karl Duffy3 Comments

File:Fluffy Clouds (7574100516).jpg

Not that difficult to grasp in the weather here in Ireland this last week. Not so easy to grasp in our inner lives:

Nothing in its essence is one way or the other. All around us the wind, the fire, the earth, and the water, are always taking on different qualities; they’re like magicians. We also change like the weather. We ebb and flow like the tides, we wax and wane like the moon. We fail to see that like the weather, we are fluid, not solid.

And so we suffer.

Pema Chodron, Comfortable with Uncertainty

photo of clouds in Malahide,  Dublin,  by Miguel Mendez