The origin of suffering

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Be attentive and notice that whatever arises passes away; that whatever condition of your mind or body – whether it is a sensation of pleasure or pain, feeling or memory, sight, sound, smell, taste or touch, inside or outside – is just a condition. It’s important to reflect on what ‘ignorance’ really means when .. called … the origin of all suffering. ‘Being ignorant’ means that we identify with these conditions, by regarding them as ‘me’ or ‘mine’, or as something that we don’t want to be ‘me’ or ‘mine’. We’ve got the idea that we’ve got to find some permanent pleasant condition, we have to achieve something, get something we don’t have. But you can notice that desire in your mind is a moving thing, looking for something, so it’s a changing condition that arises and passes away – it’s not-self.

Ajahn Sumedho, Everything that arises passes away

photo sean p bender

 

Sunday Quote: True self, false self

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Discernment is a process of letting go what we are not

Father Thomas Keating, Cistercian monk, author of Open Mind, Open Heart

photo mschlindwein

No Maps

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It’s so tempting to want the answers before we begin the journey. We like to know our way.  We like to have maps.  We like to have guides.  But we are more like a breathing puzzle, a living bag of pieces, and each day shows us what a piece or two is for, where it might go, how it might fit.  Over time, a picture starts to emerge by which we begin to understand our place in the world. Unfortunately we waste a lot of time seeking someone to tell us what life will be like once we live it. We drain ourselves of vital inner fortitude by asking others to map our way. The instructions are in the living.

Mark Nepo, The Book of Awakening

Map of Ireland 1592 by Abraham Ortelius

Unique

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If you don’t look at things through your concepts, you’ll never be bored. 

Every single thing is unique. 

Every sparrow is unlike every other sparrow despite the similarities. 

It’s a great help to have similarities, so we can abstract, so that we can have a concept. 

It’s a great help, from the point of view of communication, education, science. 

But it’s also very misleading and a great hindrance  to seeing this concrete individual. 

If all you experience is your concept,  you’re not experiencing reality,  because reality is concrete. 

The concept is a help, to lead you to reality, but when you get there, 

you’ve got to intuit or experience it directly.

.
Anthony de Mello. sj.

photo david friel

 

Starting over, again and again

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That we go numb along the way is to be expected. Even the bravest among us, who give their lives to care for others, go numb with fatigue, when the heart can take in no more, when we need time to digest all we meet. Overloaded and overwhelmed, we start to pull back from the world, so we can internalize what the world keeps giving us. Perhaps the noblest private act is the unheralded effort to return: to open our hearts once they’ve closed, to open our souls once they’ve shied away, to soften our minds once they’ve been hardened by the storms of our day.

Mark Nepo, Hearing the Cries of the World

photo Daniel Francisco madrigal Moller

Sunday Quote: Magic things

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The world is full of magic things,

patiently waiting for our senses to grow sharper.

W.B. Yeats

wild flower photo by Ellen van Kalmthout