If
your mind isn’t
clouded by unnecessary things,
this is the best season
of your life.
Posts Tagged → beauty
this world is open sky and dustbin
This world
is an open sky and also a dustbin,
giving life to some and death to others;
the outcomes are not controlled
by this world.
Press
your finger into the world
and put it to your nose. You may smell
sweetness, or you may smell dung.
Discernment is possible in
these matters.
True hearts
stay awake if love is possible. The
others have no need for beauty, nor hope of
it. If you are holding gold in your hand,
don’t imagine ways to turn it
into mud.
☯️
The Old Fool wears
second-hand clothes and fills his belly
with tasteless food, mends holes to make a
cover against the cold, and thus the myriad affairs
of life, according to what comes, are done. Scolded, the
Old Fool merely says, “Fine.” Struck, the Old Fool falls
down to sleep. “Spit on my face, I just let it dry;
I save strength and energy and give you no
affliction.” Paramita is his style; he
gains the jewel within.
Platform Sutra of the Sixth Patriarch
🪷
Forget the body.
Let go of sensations
and obsessions and objects.
Do non-doing to the point that thoughts
cease to arise. Releasing mental constructs and
emotional entanglements, you’ll begin
to flow as a sage. Then let go
of that notion on top
of everything
else.
put aside the false and crazy mind
Put aside the
crazy and false mind that
has been concocting your knowledge
and understanding, and make it so that
nothing whatsoever is weighing
on your mind.
🪷
love, faithfulness, and correctness
joan radcliffe walker embodied all these
as did her partner in all bud walker
A healthy family,
a healthy country, a healthy
world — all grow outward from
a single superior
person.
The hexagram Chia Jen concerns the proper foundation of human communities. The I Ching teaches that all clans must have a superior person at their center if they are to prosper and succeed. Therefore, in order to improve our family, company, nation, or world community, we must begin by improving ourselves.
If you will observe healthy families you will always see present in them three qualities: love, faithfulness, and correctness. When we truly love others, we are naturally kind, gentle, and patient with them. When we are faithful to others, we place proper principles and conduct above temporary influences like anger, desire, or greed. And when we practice correctness, we spiritually nourish ourselves and all those around us. When all three qualities are cultivated, a healthy clan springs naturally into being.
The difference between paying lip service to these ideals and practicing them is profound. If you advocate high ideals and actions to others but do not embody them yourself, your influence will disintegrate for lack of a proper foundation. Therefore, in order to inspire superior qualities in others, you must first instill them in yourself.
Concentrate not upon influencing others or external events but upon strengthening your inner devotion to proper principles. When modesty, acceptance, equanimity, and gentleness become deeply ingrained in your character, they will flow steadily out from from you.
Soon you will find yourself enmeshed in a web of healthy relationships, and in this there is great good fortune.
from The I Ching, or Book of Changes
Hexagram 37, Chia Jén / The Family (The Clan)
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the work now is to become pure light
Darkness
has been given as
a nightshirt to sleep in.
Remember how human beings
were composed from water and dust
for blood and flesh with oily resins heated
in fire to make a skeleton. Then the soul, the divine
light, was breathed into human shapes. The work now is
to help our bodies become pure light. It may look like
this is not happening. But in a cocoon every bit
of worm-dissolving slime becomes silk.
As we take in light, each part
of us turns to
silk.
We
made the night
a darkness, but we bring
shining dawnlight out of that.
In the same way the mound of your
grave will bloom with resurrection. Sufis
and those on the path of the heart use darkness
to go within. During the night vigil the universe
is theirs. With all the kings and sultans and
their learned counselors asleep, everyone
is unemployed, except those wakeful
few and the divine
presence.