It’s easy to identify with all the places we have been hurt or abandoned,
but can we identify with the timeless wholeness that weathers every condition?
If we can’t, we may spend this life protecting ourselves
and never risk really living
Bonnie Myotai Treace Sensei
It’s the expectations of your own mind that are creating your hell. “I expected you to be…” When you get frustrated because something isn’t the way you thought, exmine your thinking, not just the thing that frustrates you. And you will see that a lot of your suffering is caused by your models about how the Universe ought to be. And your inability to allow it to be.
It’s like you come here and it’s a beautiful day, so you expect the next day is going to be beautiful. Then it rains, and you are disappointed. Isn’t it funny that when it rains, you should be disappointed? To take nature and allow nature, when it’s in its natural state, to make you miserable. It says something about you.
Ram Dass
To be happy at home
is the ultimate result of all ambition
Dr Samuel Johnson
Generally, ordinary thinking involves running between that and this.
You are reporting back to yourself all the time.
You do not just think; you think and then report back.
However, when this back and forth petty journey is not happening, there is a transcendental sort of thinking, so to speak. With this kind of thinking, you are seeing things precisely as they are, rather than having to refer back to anyone, because the whole being is seeing.
Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche, Milarepa, Lessons from the Life and Songs of Tibet’s Great Yogi
In your dealings with people, can you detect subtle feelings of either superiority or inferiority toward them? You are looking at the ego, which lives through comparison.
The ego’s identity depends on comparison and feeds on more. It will grasp at anything.
If all else fails, you can strengthen your fictitious sense of self through seeing yourself as more unfairly treated by life or more ill than someone else.
What are the stories, the fictions from which you derive your sense of self?
Eckhart Tolle, Silence Speaks
It never ceases to amaze me:
we all love ourselves more than other people,
but care more about their opinion than our own
Marcus Aurelius
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