Tag: Life

Perfect your love

Karl Duffy1 Comment

Imperfections are part of the display of life. Joy and sorrow, birth and death are the dance of existence throughout which our awakened consciousness can shine. Yet we long for perfection. The perfect partner, house, job, boss, and spiritual teacher.….

Novelist Florida Scott Maxwell writes, “No matter how old a mother is, she looks at her middle-age children for signs of improvement. ” You are told that if you do enough therapy, work out at the gym, eat an especially healthy diet, watch documentaries on TV, manage your cholesterol, and meditate enough, you will become more perfect. Forget the tyranny of perfection. The point is not to perfect yourself. It is to perfect your love. Let your imperfections be an invitation to care.

Jack Kornfield, The Tyranny of Perfection

When you feel lost

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When we feel lost we sometimes need to take time, to stand still, and let the outside world speak to us, rather than just listening to the voices in our own minds.

No two trees are the same to Raven.
No two branches are the same to Wren.
If what a tree or a bush does is lost on you,
You are surely lost.

Stand still.

The forest knows
Where you are. You must let it find you.

David Wagoner, Lost [estract]

The reality

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It’s quite illusory to hang on to a private, hidden, truer self apart from how you actually are,

even if therapy promotes this grand illusion and profits from it.

Instead, the realism of Heraclitus: You are how you are.
  

James Hillman

Sunday Quote: An Autumn chant

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Gate gate pāragate pārasaṃgate bodhi svāhā

[“Gone, Gone, Gone beyond, Completely gone to the Other Shore. Oh what an Awakening”]

The final lines of the Heart Sutra considered by some Buddhists the perfection of all wisdom –  Pragya Paramita- finding a pace of rest, a stability that is beyond all coming or going.

Who is in control?

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The mind is a superb instrument if used rightly. Used wrongly, however, it becomes very destructive.

To put it more accurately, it is not so much that you use your mind wrongly – you usually don’t use it at all. It uses you. This is the disease.

You believe that you are your mind. This is the delusion. The instrument has taken you over.
 

Eckhart Tolle

A new day, a new week

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Is it possible to meet each other or to meet the flower, the bird, or the new day without anything interfering?

And if the past does come up, to see that it is memory coming up? And not be ruled by it, not be compelled and narrowed down by it? To see it and to wonder whether it has to interfere?

Toni Parker