Tag: Present moment

Today’s obsession with more

Karl Duffy1 Comment

Today is the Feast of Saint Martin, traditionally a big day of celebration in all countries around Europe and the start of a period of fasting and preparation for Christmas. It was the last day of harvest celebrations and the following days saw a period of simplification and slowing down. Less, rather than more, was seen as the way to keep our bodies and minds in harmony with natural rhythms at this time of year.

The notion of a spirituality of subtraction comes from Meister Eckhart (c.1260-1327), the medieval Dominican mystic. He said the spiritual life has much more to do with subtraction than it does with addition.

Yet I think most Christians today are involved in great part in a spirituality of addition. The capitalist worldview is the only one most of us have ever known. We see reality, experiences, events, other people, and things — in fact, everything — as objects for our personal consumption. Even religion…worship services, and meritorious deeds become ways to advance ourselves…The nature of the capitalist mind is that things (and often people!) are there for me. Religion looks good on my résumé, and anything deemed “spiritual” is a check on my private worthiness list. 

Richard Rohr, Radical Grace

A new skin

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We seldom become all of who we are until forced to it….. I have come to believe that we are destined to be opened by the living of our days, and whether we like it or not, whether we choose to participate or not, we will in time, everyone of us, wear the deeper part of who we are as new skin. Either by erosion from without or by shedding from within – and often both – we are forced to live more authentically. And once the crisis that opened us passes, the real choice then becomes: Will we continue such authentic living?

Mark Nepo, The Book of Awakening

Sunday Quote: Part of something deeper

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No matter how small we feel in our daily situation,  we are always part of something  greater.

Even for the simple flight of a butterfly, 

all of the sky is necessary.

Paul Claudel,  1868 – 1955, French poet and dramatist. 

Même pour le simple envol d’un papillon, tout le ciel est nécessaire.

 

One world at a time

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Satisfaction is very close and simple: the strange happiness of completely joining with whatever we are doing in that moment… When the writer Thoreau was on his deathbed, a visitor asked him – “from where you lie, so close to the brink of the dark river, can you say how the opposite shore looks to you?”

It is said that he replied gently, “One world at a time”

Susan Murphy, Upside Down Zen: Finding the Marvelous in the ordinary

Always leaning forward

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Are you so busy in getting to the future that the present moment is reduced to a means of getting there? Stress is caused by being ‘here’ but wanting to be ‘there,’ or being in the present but wanting to be in the future. It is a split that tears you apart inside

Eckhart Tolle, The Power of Now

As it is

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Meditation is a form of training the mind, so that it does  not get hooked by all our inner storms, but rather relates to the world, or other people, in a fresh way, just as they are:

Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche used the phrase “first thought, best thought” to refer to that first moment of fresh perception, before the colorful and coloring clouds of judgment and personal interpretation take over. “First thought” is “best thought” because it has not yet got covered over by all our opinions and interpretations, our hopes and fears, our likes and dislikes. It is direct perception of the world as it is.

Dr Jeremy Hayward, First Thought