Tag: Life

How It Is

Karl Duffy2 Comments

More unseasonal weather today. With visitors arriving one would prefer things to be different. But then again, one nearly always prefers things to be other than they are, and this attitude can mean that we miss the opportunities in what is actually here:

When we explore this mind-state of dukkha, we find that it is created by a deep aversion to being with How It Is right now. This silent, unconscious war with How It Is unwittingly drives much of our behaviour: We reach for the pleasant. We hate the unpleasant. We try to arrange the world so that we have only pleasant mind-states, and not unpleasant ones. We try to get rid of this pervasive state of unsatisfactoriness in whatever way we can – by changing things “out there”.  By changing the world.

Thoreau, through his quiet investigation of his own mental states in the quiet at Walden Pond discovered this very same phenomenon of underlying unsatisfactoriness. He called it “desperation” –  “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation….” Thoreau’s quiet desperation is precisely dukkha. He saw that ordinary mind seems chronically ill at ease with How It Is.

Stephen Cope, The Wisdom of Yoga

Let go of the small sense of self.

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Meditation comes  alive through a growing capacity to release our habitual entanglement in the stories and plans, conflicts and worries that make up the small sense of self, and to rest in awareness. In meditation we do this simply by acknowledging the moment-to-moment changing conditions — the pleasure and pain, the praise and blame, the litany of ideas and expectations that arise. Without identifying with them, we can rest in the awareness itself, beyond conditions, and experience what my teacher Ajahn Chah called jai pongsai, our natural lightness of heart. Developing this capacity to rest in awareness nourishes samadhi (concentration), which stabilizes and clarifies the mind, and prajna (wisdom), that sees things as they are.

Jack Kornfield, A Mind like Sky: Wise Attention, Open Awareness.

Still the mind in order to love

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The eternal moment is outside of time, is not a part of our past or our future, and yet it is lived amidst all our everyday activities. It is in the eternal moment that love is born. Love does not belong to time, and its timeless quality is well known to all lovers. The lover has to learn to still the mind in order to catch the moment and stay true to love’s unfolding. Wayfarers tread a path that leads from illusions of time to the eternal moment that belongs to the soul.

Llewellyn Vaughan-Le, Signs of God

Sunday Quote: Living well

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My most inspiring thought is that this place, if I am to live well in it,

requires and deserves a lifetime of the most careful attention.

Wendell Berry

Finding space in our inner chatter

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Silence, a stilling of not only the voices outside but the inner voices, the roof brain chatter. Now, without the babble or words – inner and outer – I watch my mind, notice when a thought arises. I turn my attention inward, asking, “Who is thinking this thought?” As the mind turns to look, the thinker seems to disappear. But a focus comes from asking, a clearing, a deepening. No “me,” but a presence. Awareness.

When I first worked in a restaurant, I used to daydream of a mute helper, someone who had no interest whatsoever in speaking, She…wouldn’t tell about her plans for vacation, the fights with her mother, the ins and outs of her most recent relationship. In my daydream of a mute helper, I was envisioning a future version of myself, of course. My imagination was sending directions, subtle hints as to how to proceed. How to glimpse the sky, how to open into vastness. The odd thing is that in addition to this sense of spaciousness, I’m starting to feel close to people, to understand and sympathize with them on a new level, to participate in their lives in unexpected ways, to notice those around me as something more than irritants, as subjects rather than objects.

Kimberly Snow, In Buddha’s Kitchen

When boring becomes interesting

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Like anger and other emotions, boredom most often fools us into diverting our energies entirely to an external situation. This it keeps us from liberating ourselves by seeing our relationship to the emotion itself. We make a big mistake about boredom when we think that it comes because of a particular person or situation or activity. So much of our restlessness in meditation practice and in our daily lives comes from this fundamental misunderstanding. How often do we try to find something new to recapture our interest, something more stimulating or more exciting? 

To realize that boredom does not come from the object of our attention but from the quality of our attention is truly a transforming insight. Fritz Perls, one of those who brought Gestalt therapy to America, said, “Boredom is lack of attention”. Understanding this reality brings profound changes in our lives. Then boredom becomes a tremendously useful feedback for us. It is telling us not that the situation or person or meditation  is somehow lacking, but rather that our attention at that time is half-hearted.

Joseph Goldstein, Insight Mediation