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.
🪷
Posts Tagged → beauty
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.
our own heart must teach us
The greater your love,
the greater your moral. If we are forced
to be virtuous according to a certain principle,
a certain regulation, certain laws or rules, then that
is not real virtue. It must come from the depths
of our heart; our own heart must
teach us the true moral.
there is freedom at the end
There is freedom
from desire and sorrow
at the end of the way. The awakened
one is free from all fetters and goes beyond
life and death. Like a swan that rises
from the water she moves onward,
never looking back.
The one who understands
the unreality of all things, and who
has laid up no store, that one’s track is
as of birds in the air. Like a bird in the air,
she takes an invisible course, wanting
nothing, storing nothing, knowing
the emptiness of all things.