Essential for working with what is unknown is an attitude of unknowing.
This leaves room for the phenomenon itself to speak.
It alone may keep us from delusions
James Hilmann, The Dream and the Underworld
photo: Solveig Askjem
Tag: Life
Simple presence
Moments of natural meditation are happening to us all the time. We pause at a stop sign while driving or taking a walk, just for a moment, preoccupations of that important meeting tomorrow or memories of yesterday’s flood of emails fall away. We are simply there, noticing other walkers and drivers, cars and sunlight, clouds and trees. A dog barks, and in the distance we hear a siren. For a fleeting moment we have a more intense experience of simple presence.
Gaylon Ferguson, Natural Wakefulness
Open to being surprised
Our capacity for surprise is often an unused blessing. With every appearance, it prods us to ask, “Beneath our problem-solving, what is life asking of us”? “Beneath our ideas of happiness or suffering, what does it really mean to live”? So often we try to change things, only to find that our honest engagement with experience often changes us. In trying to make life fit our needs, our sense of need is often softened or broken, until we fit life.
Mark Nepo, The Gift of Surprise
Photo: Steve Evans, Monastery Door, Ladakh,
Balance…
Happiness is not a matter of intensity,
but balance
Thomas Merton
photo Stephanie de Nadai
Our changing mind
What could be more unpredictable than our thoughts and emotions: do you have any idea what you are going to think or feel next? Our mind, in fact, is as empty, as impermanent, and as transient as a dream. Look at a thought: It comes, it stays, and it goes. The past is past, the future not yet risen, and even the present thought, as we experience it, becomes the past.
The only thing we really have is nowness, is now.
Sogyal Rinpoche, The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying
Whatever the weather
Appreciation is a relaxing and peaceful state of mind. It creates a space in which we can accommodate the vicissitudes of life. Complaint, on the other hand, is frustrating and painful. There’s an element of anger and fixation involved. We are believing our thoughts, taking them to be real. Our attachment to the concept of how we want things to be is stressful, because that concept is always disintegrating. What we wanted to happen is not happening. We think complaining is going to get the world back on our track, but really it results in our being deaf, dumb and blind to the present moment. When we complain, we’re saying that the world needs to change in order for us to be okay. If only our parent or partner would behave differently, if only the food were better, if only there were less traffic, if only the service were quicker—then we’d be happy.
Sakyong Mipham Rinpoche, No Complaints
