No creature ever falls short of its own completion.
Wherever it stands it does not fail to cover the ground
Dogen
Tag: Mindfulness
Our true nature
The death of the self may be full of the fear of letting go, of stepping off into the void, thinking that nothing will stop our fall, not recognizing that the void is our true nature. The void is the vastness in which we are occurring, it is the truth itself, and the whole idea of “someone” stepping off is just another bubble passing through. And we don’t any longer need to define who we are, because who we become each moment is so much more than what we ever imagined. There’s no need to limit who we really are with any definition. We are all of it. And only the contents of this vastness of mind, once identified with as a separate self, limit who we are.
Steven Levine, A Gradual Awakening
Not needing to know
We just need to remember to practice relaxing into our life, in all its joys and sorrows, and to relinquish the need to know what’s going to happen next. The third element of patience is acceptance of the truth, meaning that we accept our experience as it is – with all its suffering – rather than how we want it to be. We recognize that because our experience is continually changing, we don’t need it to be different than it is. This acceptance of “things as they are” requires profound wisdom and compassion, which takes a long time to evolve; we must therefore develop a long-enduring mind that will enable us to understand time from a radically new perspective.
Michele McDonald, Finding Patience
Always new
I have discovered that it is necessary, absolutely necessary, to believe in nothing. That is, we have to believe in something which has no form and no color – something which exists before all forms and colors appear. This is a very important point. No matter what god or doctrine you believe in, if you become attached to it, your belief will be based more or less on a self-centered idea… But if you are always prepared for accepting everything we see as something appearing from nothing... then at that moment you will have perfect composure.
Suzuki Shunryū, Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind
What is actually happening
When we put down ideas of what life should be like,
we are free to wholeheartedly say yes to our life as it is.
Tara Brach
The smallest thing
To study a single speck of dust is to study the whole universe
Dogen, 1200 – 1253
And he also showed me a little thing, the size of a hazelnut, lying in the palm of my hand. It seemed to me as round as a ball. I gazed at it and thought, ‘What can this be?’ The answer came thus, ‘It is everything that is made.’ I marveled how this could be, for it was so small it seemed it might fall suddenly into nothingness. Then I heard the answer, ‘It lasts, and ever shall last, because God loves it. All things have their being in this way.’
Julian of Norwich, 1342 – 1416, Revelations of Divine Love
photo US National Archives and Records Administration: Records of the Environmental Protection Agency
