Come, my friends,
T’is not too late to seek a newer world.
Alfred Lord Tennyson, Ulysses
Sunday Quote: Horizons
Tag: Meditation
Your own master
Do you know where the disease lies which keeps you from reaching enlightenment? It lies where you have no faith in yourself.
When faith in yourself is lacking you find yourself hurried by others in every possible way. At every encounter you are no longer your own master; you are driven about by others this way and that. All that is required is all at once to cease leaving yourself in search of something external. When this is done you will find yourself no different from the Buddha.
From the Rinzai Roku, the recorded sayings and doings of Zen master Rinzai Gigen Zenji, died 866 CE
How we see
Consumed with anger,
The world is an ugly place.
Bathed in happiness,
The world is a wonderful place.
But….aha! It’s the same world.
Taitetsu Unno, 1929 – 2014, scholar and author on Pure Land Buddhism, Shin Buddhism: Bits of Rubble turn into Gold
Knowing Eggs
Once, when I was in college, I wrote home complaining about the food, and my mother sent me a Julia Child cookbook. In the book was a section on dealing with eggs in which she said that the sign of a really good cook is knowing eggs. And so I took an egg out. You can watch an egg – you can learn certain things just by watching it, but you don’t learn very much. To learn about eggs you have to put them in a pan and try to make something out of them. If you do this long enough you begin to understand that there are variations in eggs, and there are certain ways that they react to heat and ways that they react to oil or butter or whatever. And so by actually working with the egg and trying to make something out of it, you really come to understand eggs.
And it’s the same with the mind: unless you actually try to make something out of the mind, try to get a mental state going and keep it going, you don’t really know your own mind. You don’t know the processes of cause and effect within the mind. There has to be a factor of actual participation in the process. That way you can understand it. This all comes down to being observant and developing a skill.
Thanissaro Bhikkhu, The Path of Concentration & Mindfulness
Outside
There is no reality except the one contained within us.
That is why so many people live such an unreal life.
They take the images outside them for reality and never allow the world within to assert itself.
Hermann Hesse Demian
Daily prayers
What I know in my bones is that I forgot to take time to remember what I know.
The world is holy. We are holy. All life is holy.
Daily prayers are delivered on the lips of breaking waves, the whisperings of grasses, the shimmering of leaves.
Terry Tempest Williams, 1955 – American writer, educator, conservationist, Talking to God: Portrait of a World at Prayer.
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