Thisness

I’ve always found this time of year rather strange. I find myself surrounded by people both off and online looking back over the previous year and/ or looking ahead to the next.

I find myself doing neither. What’s done is done. Lessons will be learned or they won’t and what’s to come will come and the degree to which we have any conscious agency over any of it is (as I always boringly say) greatly overstated.

The only time that matters is now, the present moment – forever on the cusp of what’s gone and what’s unfolding. Neither memory nor imagination. An ever fluid liminal zone, ungraspable yet vitally and vividly apparent. Reality in the raw.

Nothings comes next, this is always it.

There are two conditions for growth: quietude and stillness. To avoid growth, have a goal. Create an agenda. Make a plan. Draw up a list of resolutions.

All growth is outgrowth. The germinant seed explodes.
Growth

Living by principles is not living your own life.
It is easier to try to be better than you are than to be who you are.

— Marion Woodman

Nothing happens next, this is always it.

It is inevitably true that life is suffering. But the reverse is also true: suffering is life. It is in the midst of suffering that we get to exercise so many of the virtues that make us human. Our sense of courage, justice, compassion, wisdom; all these things manifest and operate in and because of the reality of suffering.

— Barry Magid, Ending The Pursuit Of Happiness

…reality is that which does not go away even if you don’t believe in it.

— Robert Saltzman

From radical nonduality, you get nothing. Or put differently, you get everything, just as it is. Radical nonduality is not about improvement or progress. It offers a description of reality, never a prescription for how to fix it. It suggests no path, no methodology, nowhere to go, nothing to do other than what is already happening effortlessly by itself.

— Joan Tollifson, Death The End Of Self Improvement

Belief is the problem not what is believed.

Not knowing, intimacy, mystery—all are words that convey a simple, yet profound, openness to the moment without any attempt to master, control, or understand it.

— Barry Magid, Ending The Pursuit Of Happiness

There is no stillness or silence, there is always movement and sound.

There is nowhere to go. We take ourselves everywhere and find ourselves everywhere.

There is no one to whom we are not related. Yes, the idea of me and mine is a cultural cornerstone, but like all ideas, it’s false.

— Relatives

Filling the conscious mind with ideal conceptions is a characteristic of Western theosophy, but not the confrontation with the shadow and the world of darkness. One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious.

— Carl Jung

This is what Zen means by being detached – not being without emotion or feeling, but being one in whom feeling is not sticky or blocked, and through whom the experiences of the world pass like the reflections of birds flying over water.

— Alan Watts

What is the ‘silence’ that you are after? Do you hear those trucks passing by on the road and the flushing of the toilet? Do you want to escape from all this and go and sit in the caves? There is noise inside you wherever you go.

— What is the ‘silence’ you are after? U.G Krishnamurti