We did not come to remain whole.
We came to lose our leaves like the trees,
The trees that are broken
And start again, drawing up on great roots;
Like mad poets captured by the Moors,
Men who live out
A second life.
Robert Bly, A Home in the Dark Grass
Awareness is not the same as thought.
It lies beyond thinking, although it makes no use of thinking, honoring its value and its power.
Awareness is more like a vessel which can hold and contain our thinking, helping us to see and know our thought as thought rather than getting caught up in them as reality.
Jon Kabat Zinn, Wherever You go, There you are
photo Wagner Machado Carlos Lemes
Mindfulness helps us get better at seeing the difference between what’s happening and the stories we tell ourselves about what’s happening,
stories that get in the way of direct experience.
Often such stories treat a fleeting state of mind as if it were our entire and permanent self.
Sharon Salzberg, Real Happiness, The Power of Meditation
photo frank kovalchek
The secret of the mountain is that the mountains simply exist, as I do myself: the mountains exist simply, which I do not. The mountains have no “meaning,” they are meaning; the mountains are. The sun is round. I ring with life, and the mountains ring, and when I can hear it, there is a ringing that we share.
Peter Matthiessen, the Snow Leopard
In the midst of this vast, unfathomable, ever-changing, dying, and renewing flow of life, the human brain ceaselessly engages in trying to fix for itself a state of permanency and certainty. Having the capacity to think and form pictures of ourselves, to remember them and become deeply attached to them, we take this world of pictures and ideas for real. We thoroughly believe in the reality of the picture story of our personal life. We are totally identified with it and want it to go on forever. The idea of “forever” is itself an invention of the human brain. Forever is a dream.
Toni Packer, The Work of this Moment
photo helgi halldorsson
