Suffering is a sign that you’re out of touch with the truth. Suffering is given to you that you might open your eyes to the truth, that you might understand that there’s falsehood somewhere, just as physical pain is given to you so you will understand that there is disease or illness somewhere. Suffering occurs when you clash with reality. When your illusions clash with reality, when your falsehoods clash with truth, then you have suffering. Otherwise there is no suffering.
Anthony De Mello
Being one with life is being one with Now. You then realize that you don’t live your life, but life lives you.
Life is the dancer, and you are the dance.
Eckhart Tolle, A new Earth: Awakening to your Life’s Purpose
Our original nature is like clear water. Born again into a world of wildly changing forms, though having no essential form of our own, we take on the shapes of the containers we are poured into. We become sons or daughters and are told to think of ourselves in that manner. Acculturated, we bend to the curves of that arbitrary modality. Slowly we freeze into that shape. The straighter and harder the edge the more we are praised as being someone of merit….
But water is water. Melting, it remembers; evaporating, it ascends. When you let go of control of the universe, when you let go of everything, only the truth remains. Your actions come out of the present. There is no force. Fully present. Able to respond, not out of personal desire, but out of a sense of the appropriateness of things. You respond from the flow itself, or perhaps better stated, the flow responds to itself. Letting go of the little mind, of your suffering, is simpler than you think, though it’s the hardest work you will ever do.
Stephen Levine, A Gradual Awakening
Bien commencer amène à bien terminer
A good beginning makes for a good conclusion
French proverb
Dhamma is simple:
Live with love and be aware.
It is only the mind that complicates this teaching and says that it is not enough.
Michael Kewley, Former Buddhist monk, currently teaching courses on Awareness and meditation
One day I finally realized that I no longer needed a personal history and just like drinking I gave it up, and that, and only that, has made all the difference.
Carlos Castenada, Don Juan
