Tag: Present moment

Allow things to blow through

Karl Duffy4 Comments

More wise words from the Thai Forest tradition for when times are uncertain

When you are in an emotionally rocky state, the most skilful response may simply be to receive what you are feeling at the present moment with some clarity and sympathy; to sit quietly and allow things to blow through. Whatever the state, the initial response has to be –  stay present and cultivate spaciousness. The way that cause and effect work is that even five minutes of not acting on or suppressing the present mind-state results in some kind of ease of diminution of pressure. Then we begin to recognize a natural sanity, a seed of Awakening that’s there when the doing stops. It’s not far off. But we do need to get in touch with and encourage it. 

Ajahn Sucitto, Kamma and the End of Kamma

How it is

Karl Duffy4 Comments

Of course we can always imagine more perfect conditions, how it should be ideally, how everyone should behave. But it is not our task to create an ideal. It’s our task to see how it is, and to learn from the world as it is. For the awakening of the heart, conditions are always good enough.

Ajahn Sumedho

Dropping the storyline

Karl Duffy3 Comments

What does it look like to drop the story line of “me”? There was a baseball movie out recently in which a star pitcher is facing a star batter at a crucial point in the game. The pitcher is having a hard time focusing. He’s thinking about what would happen if the batter got a hit. He’s distracted by the fifty thousand fans shouting and waving. Then he says to himself, “Clear the mechanism.” All of a sudden the sound level in the movie drops into silence. Even though the fans are still moving and waving, you no longer hear them, reflecting what the pitcher is experiencing as he disengages from his own emotional noise. Then he says to himself, “Now just throw the ball to the catcher, like you’ve done a million times before.” In “clearing the mechanism” he was turning away from his preoccupation with the mental noise of “me,” from his fear-based thoughts about imagined results, about himself as a star, as someone special. Then he could enter the direct experience of simply throwing the ball.

Ezra Bayda, How to Live a Genuine Life

The extra tension in the mind

Karl Duffy4 Comments

Suffering can be differentiated from pain. There is pain in life, without doubt, but suffering is the extra tension in the mind that is unable to accommodate change and accept the truth of its experience. 

The first two noble truths are that life is difficult and that suffering is the tension in the mind that insists an experience be different from the way it is.

It’s the imperative in the mind that this moment be different that causes our suffering

Sylvia Boorstein, Greet this moment as a Friend

Quality time with yourself

Karl Duffy3 Comments

Find meaning. Distinguish melancholy from sadness. Go out for a walk. It doesn’t have to be a romantic walk in the park, spring at its most spectacular moment, flowers and smells and outstanding poetical imagery smoothly transferring you into another world. It doesn’t have to be a walk during which you’ll have multiple life epiphanies and discover meanings no other brain ever managed to encounter. Do not be afraid of spending quality time by yourself. Find meaning or don’t find meaning but ‘steal’ some time and give it freely and exclusively to your own self. Opt for privacy and solitude. That doesn’t make you antisocial or cause you to reject the rest of the world. But you need to breathe. And you need to be.

Albert Camus, Notebooks 1951–1959

The need to dominate

Karl Duffy1 Comment

Spoken 40 years ago but still applies to what is happening today…

I hope you live without the need to dominate, and without the need to be dominated. I hope you are never victims, but I hope you have no power over other people. And when you fail, and are defeated, and in pain, and in the dark, then I hope you will remember that darkness is your country, where you live, where no wars are fought and no wars are won, but where the future is. Our roots are in the dark; the earth is our country. Why did we look up for blessing — instead of around, and down? What hope we have lies there. Not in the sky full of orbiting spy-eyes and weaponry, but in the earth we have looked down upon. Not from above, but from below. Not in the light that blinds, but in the dark that nourishes, where human beings grow human souls.

Ursula K Le Guin, A Left handed Commencement Address, Mills College 1983