Tag: Mindfulness

Beyond the mind

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We in the West think that the mind is everything, but all Eastern practice is to get beyond the mind to the point of the silent witness, where you’re witnessing yourself, where you’ve gone beyond the ego, beyond the self. The Indian tradition rests on what the West has largely lost: that there are three levels. There is the level of the body and the level of the mind, which the Western world thinks is the end. But beyond the body is the spirit. It’s the Atman, the pneuma of St. Paul, another dimension where we go beyond the mind, the senses, and the feelings, and we’re aware of the transcendent reality. And that is the goal of life, to get to that

Bede Griffiths, 1906 – 1993, Catholic Benedictine/ Camaldolese monk who lived in the ashrams of South India.

The starting place

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You are looking everywhere except within you,

and that is the only place where you are going to find the treasure,

the truth,

the beauty.

Osho

What wishes to grow?

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Whatever wishes to grow within you —a curiosity, a talent, an interest —

is life seeking its expression through you. Our old desire for comfort, even happiness,

may prove an impediment. We are here a very short time.

Let us make it as luminous and as meaningful as we can.

Time to stop being afraid, and time to show up as yourself.

James Hollis, Living an Examined Life: Wisdom for the Second Half of the Journey

Sunday Quote: Every ending is a beginning

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We arrive and we start again

Hazak, Hazak, Venithazzek [חֲזַק חֲזַק וְנִתְחַזֵּק ]

Be strong,

be strong,

Let us be strengthened

[or Let us strengthen one another]

The words traditionally chanted at the end of the reading of the books of the Torah

Comings and goings

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Does not just apply to people but to all experiences

When you do not block people from coming to you, when you do not stop people from leaving, and when your mind transcends both their coming and leaving, your spiritual practice is indeed accomplished.

Kim Jae Woong, Polishing the Diamond, Enlightening the Mind: Reflections of a Korean Buddhist Master

Living fully

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The world is wilder than that in all directions, more dangerous and bitter, more extravagant and bright.…Ezekiel excoriates false prophets who have “not gone up into the gaps.” The gaps are the thing. The gaps are the spirit’s one home, the altitudes and latitudes so dazzlingly spare and clean that the spirit can discover itself for the first time like a once blind man unbound. The gaps are the cliffs in the rock where you cower to see the back parts of God; they are the fissures between mountains and cells the wind lances through, the icy narrowing fjords splitting the cliffs of mystery.

Go up into the gaps. If you can find them; they shift and vanish too. Stalk the gaps. Squeak into a gap in the soil, turn, and unlock – more than a maple – a universe. This is how you spend the afternoon, and tomorrow morning, and tomorrow afternoon. Spend the afternoon. You can’t take it with you.

Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek