Thoughts arise and fall as flowers live and wilt. Stars fade over eons in the night sky and clouds pass and change.

Everything is changing all the time. Thoughts come and go. But who is thinking them?

— Who is aware?

Listening to Zen teacher and psychoanalyst Barry Magid’s Ordinary Mind.

Excellent so far. Within minutes I belatedly learned the difference between psychotherapy and psychoanalysis.

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.

Nothing happens next, this is always it.

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

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

We truly become ourselves when we forget ourselves.

On this, World Meditation Day, a few random thoughts on practice:

You can’t do meditation wrong. There’s no success or failure.
In practicing meditation, we’re not trying to live up to some kind of ideal— quite the opposite. We’re just being with our experience, whatever it is…
Ordinary everyday life is meditation enough if we attend to it in the moment with simplicity, an open curious mind and without taking ownership of any of it.
The only way one really gets any of the most important benefits of meditation practice is by giving up on the notion that there are any benefits to meditation practice.
The heart of meditation is simply being interested in what is here now – being more interested in what is… rather than in what was, what will be, or what should be.

And finally…

What we’re really in the business of doing is helping people stay with the thoughts and feelings they are coming to meditation to escape.

— Ordinary Mind Zen teacher Barry Magid

The most profound recognition finds its complete realisation without articulation.

What we are does not exist in language.

Zen koans paradoxically use language to demonstrate the absurdity and futility of language in recognising the nature of mind.

Initially we can see there is the territory and the map. Then we see through the map and recognise it is just more territory. And then, at a certain point, we see through the territory itself and realise there is nothing fixed or stable, just perpetual flux, of which we are an indivisible aspect.

Dzogchen according to James Low

Dzogchen is a particular flavour of Tibetan Buddhism. Its essential insights into the nature of mind can appear somewhat arcane. But not in the hands of Scottish translator and teacher James Low.

In his newly released podcast James Low – Dzogchen and Buddhist Teachings he manages to communicate the most esoteric of teachings in a most ordinary and down to earth fashion.

Just as a man still is what he always was, so he already is what he will become. The conscious mind does not embrace the totality of a man, for this totality consists only partly of his conscious contents, and for the other and far greater part, of his unconscious, which is of indefinite extent with no assignable limits. In this totality the conscious mind is contained like a smaller circle within a larger one. Hence it is quite possible for the ego to be made into an object, that is to say, for a more compendious personality to emerge in the course of development and take the ego into its service.

— Carl Jung

Everything is precisely, exactly as it is, but doesn’t arrive anywhere. There’s no conclusion. It’s pattern after pattern after pattern.

— James Low

I’ve heard so many people who are living with a cancer that is going to take them away say that there is a vernacular around battle terminology: You’re a winner or you’re a loser. It’s all about fighting. It’s such a red herring, that attitude, because it brings with it the concept that we might win…

— Tilda Swinton (from the New York Times)

A way of liberation can have no positive definition.

It has to be suggested by saying what it is not.

— Alan Watts, The Way of Zen