You Are IT

Love your enemies not as a moral imperative, but simply because your separateness from them is an illusion. So, you love them as yourself.

~ DSK

I once lived in an apartment so small I had to step outside into the adjacent hallway to open my oven door. There was room only for a bed, a radio, and a cardboard carton of books. I kept my clothes in a closet down the hall. Even in this confined space, there was housework to be done. Indeed, the demands of maintenance follow us wherever we find ourselves, from palaces to prison cells.

The Italian poet Cesare Pavese wrote in his journal that we never remember days, we remember only moments. And Zen teachers tell us that this moment is the only one we’ll ever have. Perhaps this is a better way of looking at enlightenment. It’s not achieving or gathering something. Nor is it losing or overcoming something else. It’s simply stepping outside of the room you’re in and allowing the oven door to open. It’s checking the ceiling overhead and cleaning up the spills beneath your feet.

– Gary Thorp, "The Dust Beyond the Cushion"

I understand Nirvana is a Sanskrit word which means literally “breathing out”.  Whewww.  Letting go of your breath = a particular concept of heaven?   So, if you cling to your breath, you will lose it.  Interesting.  It reminds me of the bible verse, Luke 9:24 – “For whoever wants to save his life will lose it…”

The concepts of clinging and letting go, transience and impermanence, living and dying, all fit together like a puzzle and transcend cultures and theologies.

Recognize the power of mind, respect the power of mind. And also recognize the power behind the power, the ocean holding the wave. Recognize yourself as the ocean, with your stories, your feelings, as waves.

Waves can be beautiful or terrifying, but always… they return to the ocean. Every wave always is made up of the ocean. No wave can ever be separate from the ocean. Waves of thoughts, waves of emotions, waves of sensations, waves of events, are all made up of consciousness.

And all return to consciousness, while never being separate from consciousness. And if this becomes another story, let this go, and see what is true.

– Gangaji

And in stillness and silence, non-duality manifests. The Silence, the great Silence, the space between infinitesimal particles, the space between stars, the emptiness that exists alone, undivided, the only thing that is real is where non-duality exists.

– Won Bup Ahn-Letty Brelsford, Non-Dualism

One reason I had always been interested in Zen was my sense that for people like myself, trained in abstraction, Zen could serve as the ideal tonic.

For Zen, as I understood it, was about slicing with a clean sword through all the Gordian knots invented by the mind, plunging through all specious dualities—East and West, here and there, coming and going—to get to some core so urgent that its truth could not be doubted.

– Pico Iyer

Ideas and trends might originate from the urban maw, but peace and tranquility are the hamlet’s domain.

– Scott Kinnaird

Desire becomes addiction after you have that first little taste of something—alcohol, great sex, getting stoned—that comes so close to complete satisfaction…then you start chasing it.

The same thing happens in meditation: having that first bit of bliss, then it’s gone. You want the perfection back.

But you’re chasing something you’ve already lost. If you stay with that widening dissatisfaction and think, “Oh, yeah, of course,” then insight can begin to happen. In that gap.

– Mark Epstein, “The Merry-Go-Round of Desire”

Meditation is simply a method to go beyond your normal mind. And anyone who meditates cannot fall below the normal mind. That is an impossibility.

And anyone who meditates is sooner or later going to reach his real home — which is not only his, which is our home.

– Osho

The wind has settled, the blossoms have fallen;

Birds sing, the mountains grow dark —

This is the wondrous power of Buddhism.

– Ryokan, (1758-1831)