locked inside our brains

Karl Duffy1 Comment

All Eastern traditions agree that constant striving for a future state is the root of our unhappiness. No surprise then that the West, with its focus on achievement, has such high levels of anxiety and depression.

.Our society is very result-oriented, that’s why we are so competitive. That’s why we are always stressed, because we are always looking at something in the distance.

If you are always looking at the top of the mountain you are climbing, you cannot be aware of the grass and flowers growing at your feet.

We are always looking ahead, aren’t we? And then the actual thing, the actual living, passes us by. We are locked inside our brains, cut off from the present moment, always centered on something beyond our reach. 

Tenzin Palmo, Reflections on a Mountain Lake

The change of outside circumstances

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Pleasure depends very much on circumstances, what triggers it. Then it’s a sensation, in a way. So sensations change from pleasurable to neutral and to unpleasurable. I mean even the most pleasurable thing – you eat something very delicious. Once, it’s delicious. Two, three times, OK. And then ten times, you get nauseous…. The most beautiful music, you hear it five times, 24 hours, it’s a nightmare. And also, it’s something that basically doesn’t radiate to others. You can experience pleasure at the cost of others’ suffering. So it’s very vulnerable to the change of outer circumstances. It doesn’t help you to face the outer circumstances better.

Now if we think of happiness as a way of being, a way of being that gives you the resources to deal with the ups and downs of life, that pervades all the emotional states, including sadness.

So we have to distinguish mental factors which contribute to that way of being, the cluster of qualities like altruistic love, inner freedom, and so forth from those who undermine that, which is like jealousy, obsessive desire, hatred, arrogance. We call that “mental toxins,” because they poison our happiness and also make us relate to others in a poisonous way. So happiness is something that you can cultivate, unlike pleasure. You don’t cultivate pleasure, but happiness in that sense is a skill. 

Matthieu RIcard, On Being interview

Sunday Quote: Whole

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There’s a place in your soul

where you’ve never been wounded.

Meister Eckhart

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enduring strength

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Springtime. We trust the grass to rise again; Trust your own returning.

Let us not forget to be quietly powerful,

growing like a blade of grass.

Omid Safi

The stories we tell ourselves

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What holds us back is rarely life itself, but the narrative which we cling to. When the story falls silent, movement returns.

One cannot individuate as long as one is playing a role to oneself;

the convictions one has about oneself are the most subtle form of persona and the most subtle obstacle against any true individuation.

One can admit practically anything, yet somewhere one retains the idea that one is nevertheless so and so and this is always a sort of final argument which counts apparently as a plus ; yet it functions as an influence against true individuation.

Jung

Watch the add-ons

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In life, a first wound is often unavoidable – hurt, grief, disappointment, or physical suffering. But then the mind often fires a second arrow: “This shouldn’t be happening.” “My life is ruined.” The second arrow is the suffering created by resistance, over-thinking and making the pain a story about your life

Suppose they shot a person with an arrow, and then struck him immediately afterward with a second arrow – that person would feel the pain of two arrows.

So too, when someone without inner training is touched by a painful feeling, they feel two pains, the physical feeling and the mental.

But when someone is more aware, and is touched by a painful feeling, they feel the one pain, physical but not mental.

The Buddha, Samyutta Nikaya, Sallatha Sutta (The Arrow), SN 36.6,