How
amazing it is
that all people have this but
cannot polish it into bright clarity.
In darkness unawakened, they
make foolishness cover
their wisdom.
Posts Tagged → death
welcoming flies at the picnic
I don’t call
any song finished if I don’t
think that it somehow is vibrating with
the awareness of how we live in spite of the inevitable.
Which is what all spirituality is, is how do we come into being,
how do we live fully in the constant, conscious knowledge
that we won’t always? How do you invest in the idea
of any real commitment in the face of
everything being finite?
…We’re sort of
seduced into thinking that here’s life,
and there’s these bad things that can happen,
obstacles that just fall into your road, as if the obstacle
is not the road. You know? We want to think that all things
being equal, we should be content all the time, and would
be, except for these pesky flies that want to ruin
every picnic. As if that isn’t what
the picnic is.
❤️
have a listen to
Welcoming Flies at the Picnic,
it will gladden your
💜
beginner’s mind, beginner’s heart
To achieve
what the zen buddhists
call “beginner’s mind,” you dispense
with all preconceptions and enter
each situation as if seeing it
for the first time.
“In the
beginner’s mind there
are many possibilities,” wrote
Shunryu Suzuki in his book Zen Mind,
Beginner’s Mind, “but in the
expert’s there are few.”
As much
as I love beginner’s
mind, though, I advocate an
additional discipline: cultivating a
beginner’s heart. That means approaching
every encounter imbued with a freshly
invoked wave of love that is as pure
as if you’re feeling it for
the first time.
rises and falls serve a sacred purpose
Consider the Mahatma, the great soul. One Mahatma is busy struggling with himself and struggling with conditions before him and around him. This struggle is not for naught, for it is a conflict with the self, it is a conflict with others, it is a conflict with conditions – conflicts that come from all around, till every bit of that Mahatma is tested and tried, till every bit of his patience is exhausted and his ego is ground. A hard rock is turned into a soft paste – then appears the personality of a Mahatma. This process of effacement, the real meaning of crucifixion is to crucify the false self, that the true self may rise. As long as the false self is not crucified, the true self is not realized.
The path of attainment means embracing this struggle. The man who fails in the world will fail to attain spiritual bliss. Yet, difficulties rise over the head of him who looks at them with awe. But the same difficulties fall at the feet of him who takes no notice of them. Ultimately, verily, independence and indifference are the two wings which enable the soul to fly. This indifference is not a lack of feeling but a mastery, for man without feeling is without life. It is the strength to pour out floods of love, yet keeping your garment of detachment from being wet.
Thus, the rises and falls, the joys and sorrows, the struggles and surrenders, all serve a sacred purpose. Joy and sorrow are the light and shade of life; without light and shade no picture is clear. In the end, love develops into harmony, and of harmony is born beauty. For love is living and therefore growing, love is growing and therefore expanding, there is no limit to the expansion of love, for its source is divine and thus its expansion is perfect. This is the ultimate rise.
quietude whatever you are doing
Return the mind
to quietude whatever you are doing,
not imagining what is yet to come and not thinking
about what has already passed. After a long time at this, spirit and
energy merge, feelings and objects are forgotten; spirit solidifies,
energy congeals, and there is just one breath in the belly,
revolving without going out or in.
This is called womb
breathing.