Dear Lou, I cannot be entirely unhappy
You have shown me that I am still somehow the same,
even the same in a more strengthened way,
that actually none of my old possibilities are .. lost,
perhaps they are really all there,
only that for a while I don’t know how to use them
Rilke, Letter to Lou Andreas-Salomé
When we are alone on a starlit night, when by chance we see the migrating birds in autumn; when we see children in a moment when they are really children, when we know love in our own hearts;
or when, like the Japanese poet, Basho, we hear an old frog land in a quiet pond with a solitary splash
– at such times the awakening, the turning inside out of all values, the ‘newness,’ the emptiness and the purity of vision that make themselves evident,
all these provide a glimpse of the cosmic dance.
Thomas Merton
One of the first things you learn when you travel is that
nowhere is magical unless you can bring the right eyes to it.
You take an angry man to the Himalayas, he just starts complaining about the food.
Pico Iyer, The Art of Stillness
Our present lives are dominated by the goddess Reason,
who is our greatest and most tragic illusion.
By the aid of reason, so we assure ourselves, we have “conquered nature”.
Jung
The self is a verb, not a noun.
It’s a process of grasping and clinging = a habitual tendency to solidify what is inherently fluid.
When you see this, the ‘self’ unravels.
Guo Gu, Silent Illumination: A Chan Buddhist Path to Natural Awakening
Whatever arises, whether it’s pleasing or not, try to remember that all we can do is experience and work with whatever our life is right now.
No matter what life is and no matter how we feel about it, all that matters in practice is whether we can honestly acknowledge what is going on,
and then stay present with the physical experience of that moment.
Ezra Bayda, Zen Heart
