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I’m not interested in remedial projects of improvement but just curious about the nature of what is.
It seems we have made pain some kind of mistake, like having it is somehow wrong.
Don't let them fool you—pain is a part of things.
But remember, dear Ellie, the compost down in the field: if the rank and dank and dark
are handled well, not merely discarded, but turned and known and honored, they one day come to beds of rich earth home even to the most delicate rose.
Teddy Macker from Poem for my Daughter
People meditating on the fundamental carry out their ordinary tasks and activities in the midst of meditation and carry out meditation in the midst of ordinary tasks and activities. There is no disparity between meditation and activity.
Muso Soseki
The curious paradox is that when I accept myself just as l am, then I can change.
Carl Rogers
And yet change cannot be brought about or contrived. Change is what results when everything is left alone and you do what you are moved to do, not what you think you should or ought to do.
Then there is no going back. You are not who you were but something else which simply is.
Distracted? From what?
We are constant flux. No ground, no resting place. Nowhere to land. Perpetual process. Cessation of one thing reveals the movement of another. Whatever is here is included. Everything that occurs is allowed and a natural , indivisible part of the flowing whole.
It is human nature to see ourselves as things (called selves) instead of processes, and as such see everything else as things instead of impermanent processes. Things to believe in, things to make, things to fear, things to want, things to control, things to have and posses, things to deny, things to attain, things to destroy, things, things, things.
Immutable objects to define us, to live for, to lie for and to die for.
By believing passionately in something that still does not exist, we create it. The nonexistent is whatever we have not sufficiently desired.
Franz Kafka
…trying to become better than who you already are is what keeps you from realizing that you are awake right now.
Robert Saltzman
Being is the only answer.
All that needs to be done is whatever happens, which is the next most necessary thing, that which we are instinctively, spontaneously moved to do.
We sense what we sense, we feel what we feel – the raw qualia of being. Then we express in language and all that rawness is transformed and changed and becomes something else, something different yet inseparable.
We think in the language of the world.
Barry Magid
Even language, in all its myriad forms and perspectives, is it. We are language and language is us, a mutual interdependence and inseparability. Let’s not demonise thought.
As soon as the words form, language employed, the story told… That’s it. Over. Done. Everything has changed, moved on, fresh, anew… and so around we go… Words form…
At a certain point effort becomes effortless.
The thing to see is that it’s not necessary to get ourselves into any particular state because every apparent state is it. Reality remains reality, regardless of how it may be appearing. If we likened life to a motion picture, it's not like some parts of the picture are more the picture than other parts, right? It's all made of the same indescribable “light,” projecting everything that is seen, everything that is heard, everything that is felt and perceived.
But what I'm inviting you to consider is the possibility that you don't have to reshape the moment into anything for the moment is already perfectly reality, just as it is. Each momentary perception is perfectly free, perfectly at ease, perfectly open, without it having to be transformed or modified in any way whatsoever.
That has a very different feel, doesn’t it? It’s the feeling of already being home because there is only home. We’ve never actually been cast out of the garden. Ever.
John Astin
If you are at war with the world it is just a proxy battle for a war with yourself.