I know that nothing has ever been real
without my beholding it.
All becoming has needed me.
My looking ripens things
And they come toward me, to meet and be met.
Rainer Maria Rilke, The Book of Hours: Love Poems to God
The quality of life is in proportion to the capacity for delight.
The capacity for delight is the gift of paying attention.
May Sarton
Practice is about suspending those entrenched habits of mind that actually cut us off form the very weird fact of being here at all. We spend so much of our lives inhabiting a fictitious future or nostalgically indulging in memories and reminiscences that we fail to notice this extraordinary thing that is happening to us right now. It has taken four billion years of evolution to generate this kind of organism with this kind of brain, and yet we wake up in the morning and feel bored.
Stephen Bachelor, in an interview with Wes Nisker, Inquiring Mind
A very common familiar analogy for being awake is the sun that is always shining behind the clouds. The clouds cover the sun, but the sun is still there….This precious unique moment is always here, always accessible to us. It never went anywhere. But we spend so much time pushing it away and resisting it and not liking the form in which it is happening, that we miss it. This is like the clouds coming in. We identify more with the clouds of our nature than with the sun. Pretty much, that happens again and again. What’s always available to us – which we can come back to, to connect with – is the vastness and openness of our heart and mind in any moment of time.
Pema Chodron, Clouds and Sun
A woman said to Suzuki Roshi that she found it difficult to mix practice with the demands of being a householder. “I feel that I am trying to climb a ladder, but for every step upwards I slip back two steps” “Forget the ladder” Suzuki Roshi told her. “When you are awake everything is right here on the ground” He explained how the desire to gain anything means you miss the reality of the present. “When you realize the truth that everything changes, and find your composure in it, there you find yourself…” The goal is to let go of anything special and meet each moment with beginners mind.
Jack Kornfield, “Enlightenment” in Inquiring Mind
Most western therapies are based on theories of personality; they are geared toward knowing, rather than not-knowing. An unspoken assumption in the therapeutic world is that we should always know who we are, and if we don’t that a real problem. So when an old maladaptive identity starts to break down, this may be frightening for client and therapist alike…. At times like this I rely on my own realization that none of us really knows who we are, that this is the nature of our being, that if we have a true self at all, it somehow lies in the heart of the unknowingness that opens up when we inquire deeply into our existence, and that we can hang out on the edge of this unknown, we may discover how to let ourselves be, without having to be something.
John Welwood, Toward a Psychology of Awakening
We must sense that we live in a world which in some respects is mysterious; that things happen and can be experienced which remain inexplicable; that not everything which happens can be anticipated. The unexpected and the incredible belong in this world. Only then is life whole. For me the world has from the beginning been infinite and ungraspable.
