|
We are not held back by the love we didn't receive in the past, but by the love we're not extending in the present.
The sound of peaceful music, the sound of terrible noise, are both clearly revealed as they are and nothing else. Nonetheless, we prefer the peacefulness and dislike the irritation of the noise. We try to control, to change things to how we want them. This can be done with a certain degree but cannot be done completely and eternally. If, on the other hand, we accept things as they are and see things as clearly revealed as they are, that acceptance itself is the first step toward unbreakable peacefulness.
I want to unfold.
We are so anxious to achieve some particular end that we never pay attention to the psycho-physical means whereby that end is to be gained. So far as we are concerned, any old means is good enough. But the nature of the universe is such that ends can never justify the means. On the contrary, the means always determine the end.
There is a tension in living fully; what often fells like an opposition between our longing for the solitude where we can find our own company & the desire to be fully & intimately with the world. When we learn to live with both the desire for separation & the longing for union, we find that they are simply two ways of knowing the same ache: we all just want to go home.
An elder Cherokee Native American was teaching his grandchildren about life. He said to them, "A fight is going on inside me. It is a terrible fight, and it is between two wolves. One wolf represents fear, anger, envy, sorrow, regret, greed, arrogance, self-pity, guilt, resentment, inferiority, lies, pride, and superiority. The other wolf stands for joy, peace, love, hope, sharing, serenity, humility, kindness, benevolence, friendship, empathy, generosity, truth, compassion, and faith. This same fight is going on inside of you and every other person too." The children thought about it for a minute and then one child asked his grandfather, "Which wolf will win?" The old Cherokee simply replied: "The one I feed."
Your body needs to be held and to hold, to be touched and to touch. None of these needs is to be despised, denied, or repressed. But you have to keep searching for your body's deeper need, the need for genuine love. Every time you are able to go beyond the body's superficial desires for love, you are bringing your body home and moving toward integration and unity.
The snow goose does not need to bathe to make itself White. Neither need you do anything but be yourself.
And then the day came
As human beings, our greatness lies not so much in being able to remake the world...as in being able to remake ourselves. BE the change you want to see in the world.
As you are doing the work of observing yourself, you will notice a conditioned habit of focusing on what is seen rather than noticing who is doing the seeing. If you hear judgments, stop & ask youself "Who is judging?" rather than leaping to a reaction of feeling bad. Always remember that the awareness you are practicing is more important than the content of your answer.
A human being is a part of the whole, called by us Universe, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest-a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole nature
in its beauty.
I saw the angel in the marble and I carved until I set him free.
We are what we think. With our thoughts we make the world.
Our whole business in this life is to restore to health the eye of the heart whereby God may be seen.
When it comes to illuminating the inner structure of consciousness & highlighting its weaknesses & flaws, nothing, not even love, casts as bright a beam as money. The things we're willing to do to obtain it, to protect it, to express our guilt over having it, are incomparably revealing... If you want to know how insecure you are, how swollen & stiff your ego is, what your chances are of staying on the path, just examine your attitudes toward the juice. Money's a terrible servant but a wonderful master.
hari om tat sat
Everyone is overridden by thoughts;
For one human being to love another
I have learned this, at least, by my experiment; that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours.
Certain things catch you eye,
For a man, as for a flower and beast and bird, the triumph is to be most vividly, most perfectly alive.
Your grief for what you’ve lost lifts a mirror Expecting the worst, you look, and instead Your hand opens and closes and opens and closes Your deepest presence is in every small contracting and expanding,
Lokah Samasta Sukhino Bhavantu
A butterfly counts not months but moments and has time enough.
The dreamer who dreams our dreams knows far more of us than we know of it.
Thou must love God as not-God, not-Spirit, not-person, not-image, but as He is, a sheer, pure absolute One, sundered from all duality, and in whom we must eternally sink from nothingness to nothingness.
If my heart could do my thinking, and my head began to feel, I would look upon the world anew, and know what’s truly real.
Then I was standing on the highest mountain of them all, and round about beneath me was the whole hoop of the world. And while I stood there I saw more than I can tell and I understood more than I saw; for I was seeing in a sacred manner the shapes of all things in the spirit, and the shape of all shapes as they must live together like one being.
Realize that the journey to the center takes place within your own mind.
All children are artists. The problem is how to remain an artist once he grows up.
I have come to the frightening conclusion that I am the decisive element. It is my personal approach that creates the climate. It is my daily mood that makes the weather. I possess tremendous power to make life miserable or joyous. I can be a tool of torture or an instrument of inspiration, I can humiliate or humor, hurt or heal. In all situations, it is my response that decides whether a crisis is escalated or de-escalated,
and a person is humanized or de-humanized. If we treat people as they are, we make them worse. If we treat people as they ought to be, we help them become what they are capable of becoming.
Happiness cannot be traveled to, owned, earned, worn or consumed. Happiness is the spiritual experience of living every minute with love, grace & gratitude.
Western laziness consists of cramming our lives with compulsive activity, so that there is no time at all to confront the real issues.
May the tree of our life
I believe that the very purpose of life is to be happy. From the very core of our being, we desire contentment. In my own limited experience I have found that the more we care for the happiness of others, the greater is our own sense of well-being. Cultivating a close, warmhearted feeling for others automatically puts the mind at ease. It helps remove whatever fears or insecurities we may have and gives us the strength to cope with any obstacles we encounter. It is the principal source of success in life. Since we are not solely material creatures, it is a mistake to place all our hopes for happiness on external development alone. The key is to develop inner peace.
Traditional people of Indian nations have interpreted the two roads that face the light-skinned race as the road to technology and the road to spirituality. We feel that the road to technology.... has led modern society to a damaged and seared earth. Could it be that the road to technology represents a rush to destruction, and that the road to spirituality represents the slower path that the traditional native people have traveled and are now seeking again? The earth is not scorched on this trail. The grass is still growing there.
Two people have been living in you all your life. One is the ego, garrulous, demanding, hysterical, calculating; the other is the hidden spiritual being, whose still voice of wisdom you have only rarely heard or attended to. . . . you have uncovered in yourself your own wise guide. Because he or she knows you through and through, since he or she is you, your guide can help you, with increasing clarity and humor, negotiate all the difficulties of your thoughts and emotions. . . . The more often you listen to this wise guide, the more easily you will be able to change your negative moods yourself, see through them, and even laugh at them for the absurd dramas and ridiculous illusions that they are. . . . The more you listen, the more guidance you will receive. If you follow the voice of your wise guide . . . and let the ego fall silent, you come to experience that presence of wisdom and joy and bliss that you really are.
The finest emotion of which we are capable is the mystic emotion. Herein lies the germ of all art and all true science. Anyone to whom this feeling is alien, who is no longer capable of wonderment and lives in a state of fear is a dead man. To know that what is impenetrable for us really exists and manifests itself as the highest wisdom and the most radiant beauty, whose gross forms alone are intelligible to our poor faculties - this knowledge, this feeling ... that is the core of the true religious sentiment. In this sense, and in this sense alone, I rank myself among profoundly religious men.
There is a vitality, a life-force, an energy, a quickening that is translated through you into action and because there is only one of you in all of time, this expression is unique. And if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium and be lost. The world will not have it. It is not your business to determine how good it is nor how valuable nor how it compares with other expressions. It is your business to keep it yours clearly and directly, to keep the channel open. You do not even have to believe in yourself or your work. You have to keep open and aware directly to the urges that motivate you. Keep the channel open.
The future is not a result of choices among alternative paths offered by the present, but a place that is created --- created first in the mind and will, created next in activity. The future is not some place we are going to, but one we are creating. The paths are not to be found, but made, and the activity of making them changes both the maker and the destination.
To become what we are capable of becoming is the only end in life.
When you begin to touch your heart or let your heart be touched, you begin to discover that it's bottomless, that it doesn't have any resolution, that this heart is huge, vast, and limitless. You begin to discover how much warmth and gentleness is there, as well as how much space.
|
So many of our problems arise because we always feel cut off from something we need. We do not feel whole and therefore turn expectantly toward other people for the qualities we imagine missing in ourselves. All of the problems of the world, from one person’s anxiety to warfare between nations, can be traced to this feeling of not being whole.
You don't get to choose how you're going to die, or when. You can only decide how you're going to live. Now! 
So ego, then, is the absence of true knowledge of who we really are, together with its result: a doomed clutching on, at all costs, to a cobbled together and makeshift image of ourselves, an inevitably chameleon charlatan self that keeps changing and has to, to keep alive the fiction of its existence. . . . Ego is then defined as incessant movements of grasping at a delusory notion of "I" and "mine," self and other, and all the concepts, ideas, desires, and activity that will sustain that false construction. . . . The fact that we need to grasp at all and go on and on grasping shows that in the depths of our being we know that the self does not inherently exist. . . . {The ego's greatest triumph} is to inveigle us into believing its best interests are our best interests, and even into identifying our very survival with its own. This is a savage irony, considering that ego and its grasping are at the root of all our suffering. Yet ego is so convincing, and we have been its dupe for so long, that the thought that we might ever become egoless terrifies us.
