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Interesting. Back leg out this time as she considers her options.
Anyway
The Paradoxical Commandments By Kent M. Keith
People are illogical, unreasonable, and self-centered.
Love them anyway.
❧
If you do good, people will accuse you of selfish ulterior motives.
Do good anyway.
❧
If you are successful, you will win false friends and true enemies.
Succeed anyway.
❧
The good you do today will be forgotten tomorrow.
Do good anyway.
❧
Honesty and frankness make you vulnerable.
Be honest and frank anyway.
❧
The biggest men and women with the biggest ideas can be shot down by the smallest men and women with the smallest minds.
Think big anyway.
❧
People favor underdogs but follow only top dogs.
Fight for a few underdogs anyway.
❧
What you spend years building may be destroyed overnight.
Build anyway.
❧
People really need help but may attack you if you do help them.
Help people anyway.
❧
Give the world the best you have and you’ll get kicked in the teeth.
Give the world the best you have anyway.
The Buddha knew that because both happiness and unhappiness are unsatisfactory, they have the same value.
— Ajahn Chah
Morning meditation
Our consciousness doesn’t choose or do a goddamned thing. All that important stuff is left to our great, unknowable unconscious. Our consciousness takes credit but shouldn’t, when it should be taking responsibility but doesn’t.
Hope is fear in disguise.
Putting wings on a caterpillar does not make it a butterfly…
Shiv is a lone but wise voice in the so-called spiritual industry. I always enjoy the way he punctures what Ordinary Mind Zendo’s Barry Magid calls our ‘curative fantasies’.
He reminds us, above all, of the full breadth and depth of our humanity – everything included, nothing left out.
I’m suspicious of claims of ‘our true nature’ good or bad, but particularly when it is stated as fact that fundamentally ‘we are love.’
Unless you’re in the depths of delusion or simply not being honest with yourself, this is just a delightful (curative) fantasy.
Everything is always it and it is always different.
Whenever I hear the phrases like ‘original mind’, ‘ground of being’ and other such terms, they seem to imply a final foundational condition that simply doesn’t ring true for me.
Even in complete, pristine, calm silence and stillness we remain the nexus of the ever-changing flow of phenomena of what we are.
I prefer something like ‘flux of being’ because, for me, there is nowhere to land, no ground, no resting place, no fundamental basis, no beginning or end – only ever shifting sands, the perpetual free fall through ever changing experience.
All life is luck.
Life can break us but in doing so it makes us.
Be knowingly silent as often as you can and you will no longer be a prey to the desire to be this or that. You will discover in the everyday events of life the deep meaning behind the fulfilment of the whole, for the ego is totally absent.
— Jean Klein
To help others, first realize that there are no others. That we are one, not two, three or a thousand…
The power of one
There’s no escape yet we’re completely free.
You can’t get into it, you can’t get out of it. You are it.
— John Astin
Imagine a tree thinking it was separate from the rest of the universe. The ensuing confusion would be absurdly funny. Sound familiar? Trees are trees and humans are humans. It is our nature to think absurd things. It is also our nature to laugh. We would do well to laugh more at the predicament we create for ourselves.
They do the best coffee and cakes.
The whole social structure—which is to be competitive, aggressive, comparing oneself with another, accepting an ideology, a belief, and so on—is based on conflict, not only within oneself but also outwardly…
The bold emphasis above is mine. Reading the original article this phrase leapt out at me.
I find it difficult to articulate just how profound and transformative the shift from inner and outer conflict to inner and outer wholeness can be.
I’m no expert in these matters but, as a lay reader, I have long sensed a commonality between spiritual non-duality and Jung’s individuation.
I have a meditative/ contemplative practice and also had periods of psychotherapy. In spite of coming from different directions, for me at least, they converge on the same point – the recognition of and freedom from one’s own mind.
As my therapist once said as I was trying in vain for something to say to him: ‘If there’s no problem, there’s no problem.’
When the duality of subject and object dissolves conflict of any kind is impossible. As has been articulated for thousands of years in myriad different ways – whatever this is, is impossible to say, but it isn’t two.
A nice 5k run this morning in beautiful autumn sunshine. More than a hint of warmth in the sun and an invigorating freshness to the air. Coffee beckons…
