Our existence is our statement. Our being is our saying. Everything is said in our living.
Tag: life
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.
All life is luck.
Life can break us but in doing so it makes us.
You can’t get into it, you can’t get out of it. You are it.
— John Astin
It’s dark because you are trying too hard.
Lightly child, lightly. Learn to do everything lightly.
Yes, feel lightly even though you’re feeling deeply.
Just lightly let things happen and lightly cope with them…
Somewhere along the way, you realize that no one will teach you how to live your own life — not your parents or your idols, not the philosophers or the poets, not your liberal arts education or your twelve-step program, not church or therapy or Tolstoy. No matter how valuable any of that guidance, how pertinent any of that wisdom, in the end you discover that you make the path of life only by walking it with your own two feet under the overstory of your own consciousness — that singular miracle never repeated in all the history and future of the universe, never fully articulable to another.
It is inarguably true that I exist. That I am. The mind’s response to this fundamental fact is to miniaturize it, to make it absurd, to say ‘I am a body.’ The belief that I am a body is the First Mistake. From the chalice of this mistake are poured a thousand others. That life begins and ends, for example, just as the time-bound body begins and ends. Obviously, life is timeless. It has no beginning and no end, and despite what Oprah says, no one lives a life. We are life.
The Trojan Horse of mistakes
My world/ life may be small yet it is infinite…
Let what comes, come. Let what goes, go.
These days it seems to me that practice is nothing without all the vicissitudes of life and vice versa.
Practice in the midst of life.
What’s here now? 