Way back in the ’80s, my guru asked me, “What is stress?” He had never heard of stress because he came from the Himalayas. I told him stress is the perception of threat: physical, emotional and psychological. After a while, he said, “You mean resistance to existence.” And he said, “If you don’t resist existence, you will have flow.” That’s the best advice.
Deepak Chopra in Wall Street Journal, November 2024, Deepak Chopra Doesn’t Believe You’re Too Busy to Meditate
The goal, if we can speak of a goal on the spiritual path, is not to be attained in the future.
It is the place we start from. It is within us. It is us, our essential self.
We cannot go towards it; we relax back into it
We are revealed as that
Rupert Spira
Seeing all things as equally present
is to cease seeing things
through the lens of their meaning and usefulness to myself
Noelle Oxehandler, Buddhist author
The precious tree of nondual mind
spreads throughout the universe
it bears compassion in flower and fruit,
though there is no other,
and nobody “doing good“
Tilopa, 988 – 1069, Indian tantric master and scholar, influential in the Buddhist Mahāmudrā/ Tibetian tradition
All the possibilities of your human destiny are asleep in your soul.
You are here to realize and honour these possibilities. When love comes in to your life, unrecognized dimensions of your destiny awaken and blossom and grow. Possibility is the secret heart of time.
John O’Donohue, Anam Chara
The mental and emotional ‘pause’, the open state, allows the topic of one’s expectation to go down like the sun – and arise again in a fresh light. One can then pick up the thread of what one was doing or talking about with a fresh mind and a shift in perspective – or one can decide to drop it. There’s an opportunity for a transformative choice.
Because unless you’ve deliberately paused and released it, a thread of grievance or passion has just gone into storage – and will arise later. Threads don’t drop by themselves when the mind that is holding them moves into the background.
But the possibility that the pause offers is to place a topic under an open timeless light; having reviewed it, its basis can be seen and relinquished. And at other times, having let an idea rest in that aware space, new angles and insights into it arise as the mind re-engages.
Ajahn Sucitto
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