Words to live by.
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Even after all this time
The Sun never says to the Earth
"You owe me"
Look what happens
With a love like that
It lights
The Whole Sky --Hafiz
The Importance of Bedtime Stories:
A good story doesn't cost a penny, but it can be more memorable than a pricey toy. A ritual of sharing stories between a parent and child can create a bond that lingers for a lifetime, said Jay O'Callahan of Massachusetts, a nationally known storyteller who got his start telling made-up tales to his kids. "It's a real gift," he said. "The simplest, loveliest gift of time, attention and imagination." Children yearn for that kind of intimate connection with a parent, said O'Callahan, adding that a friend once told him of a night when her young son interrupted her while she was reading a storybook to him. "No," the boy told his mom insistently. "Read the one that's inside of you."
The Sun never says to the Earth
"You owe me"
Look what happens
With a love like that
It lights
The Whole Sky --Hafiz
The Importance of Bedtime Stories:
A good story doesn't cost a penny, but it can be more memorable than a pricey toy. A ritual of sharing stories between a parent and child can create a bond that lingers for a lifetime, said Jay O'Callahan of Massachusetts, a nationally known storyteller who got his start telling made-up tales to his kids. "It's a real gift," he said. "The simplest, loveliest gift of time, attention and imagination." Children yearn for that kind of intimate connection with a parent, said O'Callahan, adding that a friend once told him of a night when her young son interrupted her while she was reading a storybook to him. "No," the boy told his mom insistently. "Read the one that's inside of you."
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Words are not as satisfactory as we should like them to be, but, like our neighbours, we have got to live with them and must make the best and not the worst of them. --Samuel Butler
The Power of Naming Your Emotions:
If you name your emotions, you can tame them, according to new research that suggests why meditation works. Brain scans show that putting negative emotions into words calms the brain's emotion center. That could explain meditation's purported emotional benefits, because people who meditate often label their negative emotions in an effort to "let them go." Psychologists have long believed that people who talk about their feelings have more control over them, but they don't know why it works. "In the same way you hit the brake when you're driving when you see a yellow light, when you put feelings into words, you seem to be hitting the brakes on your emotional responses," says UCLA psychologist Matthew Lieberman.
The Power of Naming Your Emotions:
If you name your emotions, you can tame them, according to new research that suggests why meditation works. Brain scans show that putting negative emotions into words calms the brain's emotion center. That could explain meditation's purported emotional benefits, because people who meditate often label their negative emotions in an effort to "let them go." Psychologists have long believed that people who talk about their feelings have more control over them, but they don't know why it works. "In the same way you hit the brake when you're driving when you see a yellow light, when you put feelings into words, you seem to be hitting the brakes on your emotional responses," says UCLA psychologist Matthew Lieberman.
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Carl G. Jung: Believers and Thinkers
My education offered me nothing but arguments against religion on the one hand, and on the other the charisma of faith was denied me. I was thrown back on experience alone.
Belief is a charisma, which God giveth or taketh away. It would be presumptuous to imagine that we can command it at will.
Faith is a charisma not granted to all; instead, man has the gift of thought, which can strive after the highest things. ... People who merely believe and don't think always forget that they continually expose themselves to their own worse enemy: doubt. Wherever belief reigns, doubt lurks in the background. But thinking people welcome doubt: it serves them as a valuable stepping-stone to better knowledge. People who can believe should be a little more tolerant with those of their fellows who are only capable of thinking. Belief has already conquered the summit which thinking tries to win by toilsome climbing. The believer ought not to project his habitual enemy, doubt, upon the thinker, thereby suspecting him of destructive designs. If the an the ancients had not done a bit of thinking we would not possess any dogma about the Trinity at all. The fact that a dogma is on the one hand believed and on the other hand is an object of thought is proof of its vitality. Therefore let the believer rejoice that others, too, seek to climb the mountain on whose peak he sits.
- C.G. Jung in Psychology and Western Religion
My education offered me nothing but arguments against religion on the one hand, and on the other the charisma of faith was denied me. I was thrown back on experience alone.
Belief is a charisma, which God giveth or taketh away. It would be presumptuous to imagine that we can command it at will.
Faith is a charisma not granted to all; instead, man has the gift of thought, which can strive after the highest things. ... People who merely believe and don't think always forget that they continually expose themselves to their own worse enemy: doubt. Wherever belief reigns, doubt lurks in the background. But thinking people welcome doubt: it serves them as a valuable stepping-stone to better knowledge. People who can believe should be a little more tolerant with those of their fellows who are only capable of thinking. Belief has already conquered the summit which thinking tries to win by toilsome climbing. The believer ought not to project his habitual enemy, doubt, upon the thinker, thereby suspecting him of destructive designs. If the an the ancients had not done a bit of thinking we would not possess any dogma about the Trinity at all. The fact that a dogma is on the one hand believed and on the other hand is an object of thought is proof of its vitality. Therefore let the believer rejoice that others, too, seek to climb the mountain on whose peak he sits.
- C.G. Jung in Psychology and Western Religion
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Immortality
I feel in all my limbs His boundless Grace;
Within my heart the Truth of life shines white.
The secret heights of God my soul now climbs;
No dole, no sombre pang, no death in my sight.
No mortal days and nights can shake my calm;
A Light above sustains my secret soul.
All doubts with grief are banished from my deeps,
My eyes of light perceive my cherished Goal.
Though in the world, I am above its woe;
I dwell in an ocean of supreme release.
My mind, a core of the One's unmeasured thoughts;
The star vast welkin hugs my Spirit's peace.
My eternal days are found in speeding time;
I play upon His Flute of rhapsody.
Impossible deeds no more impossible seem;
In birth chains now shines Immortality.
Sri Chinmoy
I feel in all my limbs His boundless Grace;
Within my heart the Truth of life shines white.
The secret heights of God my soul now climbs;
No dole, no sombre pang, no death in my sight.
No mortal days and nights can shake my calm;
A Light above sustains my secret soul.
All doubts with grief are banished from my deeps,
My eyes of light perceive my cherished Goal.
Though in the world, I am above its woe;
I dwell in an ocean of supreme release.
My mind, a core of the One's unmeasured thoughts;
The star vast welkin hugs my Spirit's peace.
My eternal days are found in speeding time;
I play upon His Flute of rhapsody.
Impossible deeds no more impossible seem;
In birth chains now shines Immortality.
Sri Chinmoy
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Counting On Our Ultimate Concern
--Sharon Salzberg
The offering of one's heart happens in stages, with shadings of hesitation and bursts of freedom. Faith evolves from the first intoxicating blush of bright faith to a faith that is verified through our doubting, questioning, and sincere effort to see the truth for ourselves. Bright faith steeps us in a sense of possibility; verified faith confirms our ability to make that possibility real. Then, as we come to deeply know the underlying truths of who we are and what our lives are about, abiding faith, or unwavering faith as it is traditionally called, arises.
Abiding faith does not depend on borrowed concepts. Rather, it is the magnetic force of a bone-deep, lived understanding, one that draws us to realize our ideals, walk our talk, and act in accord with what we know to be true. Theologian Paul Tillich defines faith as alignment with our "ultimate concern," those values that we are most devoted to, that form the core of what we care passionately about. An ultimate concern is not an interest that is merely a fashion or a whim, but one that is a centering point for our lives.
When we wake up in the morning and picture the dealings of our day as consequential, we tell ourselves a story that is based on our ultimate concern. We remind ourselves of loving our neighbor or remembering God. When at the end of our day we recall its events and arrange them in a pattern that reveals something significant, our ultimate concern is what we reference in the arranging. Because of abiding faith in an ultimate concern, the day wasn't just a series of flashing moments, lost to us now and amounting to nothing. We count on our ultimate concern not just for ballast when things get rocky, or for a sense of easy comfort on a bad day; we go there for light.
Our ultimate concern is the touchstone we turn to over and over again, the thread that we reach for to convey a sense of meaning in our lives. It is the glue that connects the disparate pieces, the frame that gives shape to the picture of our experiences. We turn to our ultimate concern when afraid, or bewildered, or when we don't quite know who we are anymore.
--Sharon Salzberg,
--Sharon Salzberg
The offering of one's heart happens in stages, with shadings of hesitation and bursts of freedom. Faith evolves from the first intoxicating blush of bright faith to a faith that is verified through our doubting, questioning, and sincere effort to see the truth for ourselves. Bright faith steeps us in a sense of possibility; verified faith confirms our ability to make that possibility real. Then, as we come to deeply know the underlying truths of who we are and what our lives are about, abiding faith, or unwavering faith as it is traditionally called, arises.
Abiding faith does not depend on borrowed concepts. Rather, it is the magnetic force of a bone-deep, lived understanding, one that draws us to realize our ideals, walk our talk, and act in accord with what we know to be true. Theologian Paul Tillich defines faith as alignment with our "ultimate concern," those values that we are most devoted to, that form the core of what we care passionately about. An ultimate concern is not an interest that is merely a fashion or a whim, but one that is a centering point for our lives.
When we wake up in the morning and picture the dealings of our day as consequential, we tell ourselves a story that is based on our ultimate concern. We remind ourselves of loving our neighbor or remembering God. When at the end of our day we recall its events and arrange them in a pattern that reveals something significant, our ultimate concern is what we reference in the arranging. Because of abiding faith in an ultimate concern, the day wasn't just a series of flashing moments, lost to us now and amounting to nothing. We count on our ultimate concern not just for ballast when things get rocky, or for a sense of easy comfort on a bad day; we go there for light.
Our ultimate concern is the touchstone we turn to over and over again, the thread that we reach for to convey a sense of meaning in our lives. It is the glue that connects the disparate pieces, the frame that gives shape to the picture of our experiences. We turn to our ultimate concern when afraid, or bewildered, or when we don't quite know who we are anymore.
--Sharon Salzberg,
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Let Everything End
--Adyashanti
There is a great momentum of suffering and confusion that every spiritual seeker encounters. It is the momentum of ignorance which manifests as the experience of conflict and confusion and which causes suffering. In order to discover the perspective of liberation, which alone transcends this entire movement of ignorance and suffering, one needs to let everything end.
"Letting everything end" means to stand in the moment completely naked of attachment to any and all ideas, concepts, hopes, preferences, and experiences. Simply put, it means to stop strategizing, controlling, manipulating, and running away from yourself -- and to simply be. Finally you must let everything end and be still. In letting everything end, all seeking and striving stops. All effort to be someone or to find some extraordinary state of being ceases. This ceasing is essential. It is true spiritual maturity.
By ceasing to follow the mind's tendency to always want 'more', 'different', or 'better', one encounters the opportunity to be still. In being still, a perspective is revealed which is free from all ignorance and bondage to suffering. From that perspective, eternal self is realized. The eternal self, the seer, is recognized to be one's true nature, one's very own Self. This is an invitation to let all seeking end, all striving end, all efforting end, all past identity end, all hopes end, and to discover that which has no beginning or end.
--Adyashanti
--Adyashanti
There is a great momentum of suffering and confusion that every spiritual seeker encounters. It is the momentum of ignorance which manifests as the experience of conflict and confusion and which causes suffering. In order to discover the perspective of liberation, which alone transcends this entire movement of ignorance and suffering, one needs to let everything end.
"Letting everything end" means to stand in the moment completely naked of attachment to any and all ideas, concepts, hopes, preferences, and experiences. Simply put, it means to stop strategizing, controlling, manipulating, and running away from yourself -- and to simply be. Finally you must let everything end and be still. In letting everything end, all seeking and striving stops. All effort to be someone or to find some extraordinary state of being ceases. This ceasing is essential. It is true spiritual maturity.
By ceasing to follow the mind's tendency to always want 'more', 'different', or 'better', one encounters the opportunity to be still. In being still, a perspective is revealed which is free from all ignorance and bondage to suffering. From that perspective, eternal self is realized. The eternal self, the seer, is recognized to be one's true nature, one's very own Self. This is an invitation to let all seeking end, all striving end, all efforting end, all past identity end, all hopes end, and to discover that which has no beginning or end.
--Adyashanti
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One Robe One Bowl
--Sylvia Boorstein
In the early years of my practice, a group of Burmese monks were guest teachers for a week at a retreat at which I was a student in southern California. They were housed in one of the cottages at the edge of the retreat center. One morning after breakfast, the retreat manager announced, "The monks are leaving this morning. If you want to, you can stand outside their cottage as a gesture of respect as they leave."
I stood silently with the other retreatants and watched the monks walk out single file from their cottage, each one carrying his begging bowl in a string bag. I realized that whatever they were wearing, whatever they were carrying, and whatever was in the two suitcases on top of the minibus they were traveling in constituted all of their worldly goods. Watching the monks seemed to me a visual representation of the truth that not-needing--not needing more, not needing other--is the end of suffering. I thought, "They have everything they need."
At home these days, I keep a copy of a small book of poetry by the Zen monk Ryokan, 'One Robe, One Bowl', not on the bookshelf but someplace where I see it often--on the kitchen counter, or propped up on the piano next to the music. The title reminds me of the image of the monks. When my mind becomes cluttered, and therefore tense, with desires--with things I think I need or ways in which I think things need to be in order for me to be happy--I remember that the clutter itself is the cause of my suffering, and I think, "What is it that I really need?" When I see clearly enough, I can be generous toward myself. I can give away the clutter.
--Sylvia Boorstein
--Sylvia Boorstein
In the early years of my practice, a group of Burmese monks were guest teachers for a week at a retreat at which I was a student in southern California. They were housed in one of the cottages at the edge of the retreat center. One morning after breakfast, the retreat manager announced, "The monks are leaving this morning. If you want to, you can stand outside their cottage as a gesture of respect as they leave."
I stood silently with the other retreatants and watched the monks walk out single file from their cottage, each one carrying his begging bowl in a string bag. I realized that whatever they were wearing, whatever they were carrying, and whatever was in the two suitcases on top of the minibus they were traveling in constituted all of their worldly goods. Watching the monks seemed to me a visual representation of the truth that not-needing--not needing more, not needing other--is the end of suffering. I thought, "They have everything they need."
At home these days, I keep a copy of a small book of poetry by the Zen monk Ryokan, 'One Robe, One Bowl', not on the bookshelf but someplace where I see it often--on the kitchen counter, or propped up on the piano next to the music. The title reminds me of the image of the monks. When my mind becomes cluttered, and therefore tense, with desires--with things I think I need or ways in which I think things need to be in order for me to be happy--I remember that the clutter itself is the cause of my suffering, and I think, "What is it that I really need?" When I see clearly enough, I can be generous toward myself. I can give away the clutter.
--Sylvia Boorstein
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"Let go of regret and let go of self reproach. Say sometimes in your prayer: "Yes, great Father of All, I have failed in this. I should have done better. Help me next time to fulfill this with a greater understanding." Do not weep over your failure and reproach yourself endlessly, for you only build a barrier which holds you back from Light and comfort."
For me all the regrets were excess baggage i carried for a long time...I am traveling a lot lighter today.
For me all the regrets were excess baggage i carried for a long time...I am traveling a lot lighter today.
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Ignorant before the heavens of my Life
Ignorant before the heavens of my life,
I stand and gaze in wonder. Oh the vastness
of the stars. Their rising and descent. How still.
As if I didn't exist. Do I have any
share in this? Have I somehow dispensed with
their pure effect? Does my blood's ebb and flow
change with their changes? Let me put aside
every desire, every relationship
except this one, so that my heart grows used to
its farthest spaces. Better that it live
fully aware, in the terror of its stars, than
as if protected, soothed by what is near.
- Rilke Maria Rainer
Ignorant before the heavens of my life,
I stand and gaze in wonder. Oh the vastness
of the stars. Their rising and descent. How still.
As if I didn't exist. Do I have any
share in this? Have I somehow dispensed with
their pure effect? Does my blood's ebb and flow
change with their changes? Let me put aside
every desire, every relationship
except this one, so that my heart grows used to
its farthest spaces. Better that it live
fully aware, in the terror of its stars, than
as if protected, soothed by what is near.
- Rilke Maria Rainer
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