"When You Become Aware Of Silence, Immediately There Is That State Of Inner Still Alertness." - Eckhart

"Imagine the idea that the moment you were born you were kicked off the edge of a precipice, and you are falling. As you fell, a great lump of rock came with you, and it’s traveling alongside you. And you’re clinging to it for dear life! And thinking, ‘Gee, I’ve gotta hold onto this.’ You see? Well, it doesn’t do a thing for you. And it’s only making you anxious, and as soon as you understand that it doesn’t do a thing for you that you let go and relax. So, everybody’s in this situation. We’re all completely insecure! We’re all headed straight for death, as if we had been condemned by a judge. And yet here we are all clinging onto things. And we have all sorts of alibis for doing this. We say, ‘Well, I have responsibilities for my dependents, and I’ve got to cling on.’ But all you’re doing is you’re teaching your dependents to cling the same way as you are and making them miserable by learning to go on surviving compulsively.

So the thing is, the same way you’re caught in a torrent, and you try to get out of it by swimming against it, you’ll just wear yourself out, and you’re still carried along with it. So the sensible thing to do is to turn around and swim with it! And if you want to get out of it, swim towards the edge. But go with it! Same way when you’re sailing. Always keep the wind in your sails. If you want to go against the wind: tack! But use the wind. So it’s this way, you know, we’re all in this great stream of change which we call life, we ARE the stream! If you imagine you're separate from it, and you're being carried along by IT as if you were a cork, that's a delusion. You're a wave of the stream itself, so get with IT!”

~Alan Watts

Today, I found myself heading to a Buddhist temple for an addiction recovery meeting and meditation session. Initially, I was overwhelmed with anxiety, my mind racing with all the ways things could go wrong. Why? Because the mind, though a powerful tool, is just that—a tool. It should be used only when needed; otherwise, it will create problems simply to justify its own activity, becoming an addiction in itself.

As I made my way there, I became aware of the vibrations of the music resonating in my ears, the wind brushing against my face, the comfort of my seat—each moment was rich with joy. Yet, we so rarely tap into the immediate joy available to us in the present.

“The aesthetic principles of Zen include wabi-sabi (侘寂), the aesthetic of “imperfect, impermanent, and incomplete" beauty, yugen (幽玄): profound grace and deep awareness of the Universe; datsuzoku (脱俗): free and unbounded by convention and seijaku (静寂): tranquility, stillness…”

—

Ecological Consciousness

art by Tsuchiya-Koitsu

You are going to laugh until your stomach hurts again. You're going to be in awe of a sunset. Watch your favorite show while you eat your favorite food. Find money on the street. Discover a great band you haven't heard of before. You will find your way back.

“Listening is loving”

—

The hardest paths often lead to the strongest versions of yourself. Keep walking, and you'll discover just how powerful you truly are.

“When you go out into the woods, and you look at trees, you see all these different trees. And some of them are bent, and some of them are straight, and some of them are evergreens, and some of them are whatever. And you look at the tree and you allow it. You see why it is the way it is. You sort of understand that it didn’t get enough light, and so it turned that way. And you don’t get all emotional about it. You just allow it. You appreciate the tree. The minute you get near humans, you lose all that. And you are constantly saying ‘You are too this, or I’m too this.’ That judgment mind comes in. And so I practice turning people into trees. Which means appreciating them just the way they are.”

— Ram Dass

No thought has any power. You have power. And when you identify and believe in the thought you give power to the thought.

Mooji

The basic problem is that one believes that everything is real, and thus everything is treated as such.

- Kalu Rinpoche