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.
Humans are optimised for survival, not truth.
Find your own mind…
The meaning of being alive is just being alive.
Alan Watts
The problem is not suffering itself but thinking suffering is a problem and trying to avoid it.
Recognising the infinite, ever-changing variations of the complete, indivisible whole…
So-called spiritual teachings and discourse are no less prone to language games, semantic confusion and seemingly pointless hairsplitting than philosophy, science or any other locus of academia.
It appears to me that ordinary, everyday life is where the rubber really hits the road otherwise we’re just playing the ‘how many angels can dance on the head of a pin?’ game over and over.