A student once asked the spiritual teacher Jiddu Krishnamurti what his secret to peace and contentment was. He leaned over and whispered to the student “I don’t mind what happens”
Toni Bernhard, Self-Care in an Uncertain World
We all feel that health is the natural state of the body.
Why do we not feel that happiness is the natural state of he mind?
Rupert Spira, You are the Happiness you Seek
From the beginning all beings are Buddha.
It’s like water and ice – there is no ice without water – outside of us there is no Buddha.
It is sad that people ignore what’s near
And search for truth far away.
We are like someone surrounded by water
Crying out “I thirst!”
Like the son of a rich person going around poor on this earth we endlessly circle the Six Worlds.
The cause of our circling is ignorance.
From dark path to dark path we walk.
How can we be freed from the wheel of birth-and-death?
Hakuin’s Song of Zazen
Lovely days don’t come to you
You should walk to them
Rumi
Just like a bead of water sits lightly on a lotus leaf,
or water on a red lily,
a wise person does not cling to
what is seen, heard or felt,
as they do not add on to the seen, the heard, or the felt.
The Buddha, Jara Sutta, 4.6
From what I gather in reading ancient texts, right up to the present, human beings have always been confronted by the same kinds of problems. I think that this world is not a realm that admits to a solution. That isn’t what this world is about. It’s a different kind of activity that we have here. We have to deal with good and evil continually. With joy and despair, with all the antinomies, all the opposites and contraries. That’s what our life is about. We can’t abdicate that.
Leonard Cohen, Leonard Cohen on Leonard Cohen: Interviews and Encounters
Mindfulbalance 