Tag: Present moment

Trying to find happiness in the wrong way

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I think it’s odd for people to say, “I meditate,” or “I don’t meditate.” It’s like saying either you work with your mind or you don’t. The reality is that whether or not we are working with our mind in formal meditation, one way or another we are always working with our mind. Most of the time we’re using it to meditate on “me.” We’re using it to become familiar with our immediate reactions to the world around us. Somebody has something we want, so we “meditate” on jealousy. We don’t get something we want, or we do get something we don’t want, so we “meditate” on anger. Our root meditation is, “What about me? Will I get what I want today?” Our mind is continuously chasing itself around, trying to secure happiness in all the wrong ways. Its speed and reactivity keep us under siege. There’s so little space that by the end of the day we feel physically exhausted. We are drained by our continual meditation on the mental fabrication known as “me.”

Meditation is about taming our mind by engaging our mind, with enthusiasm and inspiration. With practice we become grounded in the experience of basic goodness. This leads us toward a healthy sense of self.

Sakyong Mipham Rinpoche

If we stopped moving…

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If we were not so single-minded
about keeping our lives moving,
and for once could do nothing,
perhaps a huge silence
might interrupt this sadness
of never understanding ourselves
and of threatening ourselves with death.

Perhaps the earth can teach us
as when everything seems dead
and later proves to be alive.

Paolo Neruda, Keeping Quiet


Having room for everything and everyone

Karl Duffy1 Comment

The silence of the mind is like the space in a room. The spacious mind has room for everything. It is like the space in a room, which is never harmed by what goes in and out of it. In fact, we say “the space in this room,” but actually, the room is in the space, the whole building is in the space. We can apply this perspective to the mind, using the “I” consciousness to see space as an object. In the mind, we can see that there are thoughts and emotions —  the mental conditions that arise and cease. Usually, we are dazzled, repelled, or bound by these thoughts and emotions. We go from one thing to another, reacting, controlling, manipulating, or trying to get rid of them. So we never have any perspective in our lives. We become obsessed with either repressing or indulging in these mental conditions; we are caught in these two extremes. With meditation, we have the opportunity to contemplate the mind and the spacious mind has room for everything.

Noticing the space around people and things provides a different way of looking at them, and developing this spacious view is a way of opening oneself. When one has a spacious mind, there is room for everything. When one has a narrow mind, there is room for only a few things. Everything has to be manipulated and controlled, so that you have only what you think is right  – what you want there – and everything else has to be pushed out.  Life with a narrow view is suppressed and constricted; it is always struggle. There is always tension involved in it, because it takes an enormous amount of energy to keep everything in order all the time. If you have a narrow view of life, the disorder of life has to be ordered for you; so you are always busy, manipulating the mind and rejecting things or holding on to them. 

Ajahn Sumedho

Noticing the space around

Karl DuffyLeave a comment

Most of our suffering comes from habitual thinking. If we try to stop it out of aversion to thinking, we can’t; we just go on and on and on. So the important thing is not to get rid of thought, but to understand it. And we do this by concentrating on the space in the mind, rather than on the thought.

Our minds tend to get caught up with thoughts of attraction or aversion to objects, but the space around those thoughts is not attractive or repulsive. The space around an attractive thought and a repulsive thought is not different, is it? Concentrating on the space between thoughts, we become less caught up in our preferences concerning the thoughts. So if you find that an obsessive thought of guilt, self-pity, or passion keeps coming up, then work with it in this way — deliberately think it, really bring it up as a conscious state, and notice the space around it. This way, we begin to have a perspective on the impermanent nature of thinking.

Ajahn Sumedho

How the world reveals its beauty

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If we look at the world with a love of life,

the world will reveal its beauty to us.

Daisaku Ikeda

The beams of love

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A huge change in the weather yesterday and today, and objectively it is much grayer here. However, had a number of meetings with people who reveal an inner light and a courage in the face of difficulties. It is love which brightens each day and the capacity to appreciate what we have, not wishing things be different.

We are put on earth a little space,
That we may learn to bear the beams of love.

William Blake