Tag: Present moment

Trust in your experience

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This is an exquisite truth:
Saints and ordinary folk are the same from the start.
Inquiring about a difference
is like asking to borrow string when you already have a good strong rope.

Every Dharma is known in the heart.

After rain, the mountain colors intensify.
Once you become familiar with the design of fate’s illusions
Your ink-well will contain all of life and death.

from the great Hsu Yun, 1840 – 1959, renowned Chan (Zen) Buddhist, regarded as the greatest Buddhist teacher in China in the modern era.

found in Grainger, The Longing In Between: Sacred Poetry From Around The World

Sunday Quote: Stay Here, now

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Too much longing:

it separates us

like scent from bread,

rust from iron.

Jane Hirshfield, Sentencings [extract]

Seize the present

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The well-known Carpe Diem text. The original Latin is meaning is closer to “harvest the day” which gives perhaps a deeper sense than the popular translation:

Leucon, no one’s allowed to know his fate,
Not you, not me: don’t ask, don’t hunt for answers
In tea leaves or palms.

Be patient with whatever comes.
This could be our last winter, it could be many
More, pounding the Tuscan Sea on these rocks:


Do what you must, be wise, cut your vines
And forget about hope. Time goes running, even
As we talk.

Take the present, the future’s no one’s affair.

Horace, 65 – 8 BC, Roman Lyric Poet, Ode I. 11 translation Burton Raffel, The Essential Horace: Odes, Epodes, Satires and Epistles, 

Enlargement

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When stumped by a life choice, choose “enlargement” over happiness.

I’m indebted to the Jungian therapist James Hollis for the insight that major personal decisions should be made not by asking, “Will this make me happy?”, but “Will this choice enlarge me or diminish me?

Oliver Burkeman from his Guardian column

The subtle mysteries

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Always be joyful, no matter what you are. With happiness you can give a person life. Every day we must deliberately induce in ourselves a buoyant, exuberant attitude toward life. In this manner, we gradually become receptive to the subtle mysteries around us. And if no inspired moments come, we should act as though we have them anyway. If you have no enthusiasm, put up a front. Act enthusiastic, and the feeling will become genuine.
–

Rabbi Nachman of Bratslau 1772- 1810), Founder of the Breslov Hasidic movement.

It’s how you see

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Zen has an expression, “nothing special.” When you understand “nothing special,” you realize that everything is special. Everything’s special and nothing’s special. Everything’s spiritual and nothing’s spiritual.

It’s how you see, it’s what eyes you’re looking through, that matters.

Jon Kabat-Zinn