We just happen and our conscious awareness is a helpless passenger along for the ride.
Tag: mind
Self-continuity is a sparkling chain of mirages, of emptiness.
— Khenchen Palden Sherab Rinpoche
The peace you’re looking for isn’t something to acquire. It’s what’s revealed when you stop searching.
I’ve lived through some terrible things in my life, some of which actually happened.
— Mark Twain
Perhaps you have noticed that the mind misinterprets everything.
Nothing is everything. Or, in the mirror, everything is nothing.
What I’ve learned
One day I looked for my self and found nothing. Turning attention back on itself there was only wide open space – not a thing, but space for everything. If I am anything I am simply everything that is happening.
Words can never capture what we are – language always fails beautifully in this regard – but this chap has a lovely turn of phrase and a simple brevity which always makes me smile and feel a gentle ‘yes’ every time I read him.
Imagine waking up one morning to the realization that you have no opinions. And that, moreover, you have no likes or dislikes. What would the world look like in that event? How would you feel?
A room with no furniture
No matter how compelling or beautiful they may be, words appeal in the main to the linear, thinking mind that thinks in words.
— Dōgen
The Buddha knew that because both happiness and unhappiness are unsatisfactory, they have the same value.
— Ajahn Chah
Morning meditation
Our consciousness doesn’t choose or do a goddamned thing. All that important stuff is left to our great, unknowable unconscious. Our consciousness takes credit but shouldn’t, when it should be taking responsibility but doesn’t.
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.
Everything is always it and it is always different.
Whenever I hear the phrases like ‘original mind’, ‘ground of being’ and other such terms, they seem to imply a final foundational condition that simply doesn’t ring true for me.
Even in complete, pristine, calm silence and stillness we remain the nexus of the ever-changing flow of phenomena of what we are.
I prefer something like ‘flux of being’ because, for me, there is nowhere to land, no ground, no resting place, no fundamental basis, no beginning or end – only ever shifting sands, the perpetual free fall through ever changing experience.
There’s no escape yet we’re completely free.
You can’t get into it, you can’t get out of it. You are it.
— John Astin
The whole social structure—which is to be competitive, aggressive, comparing oneself with another, accepting an ideology, a belief, and so on—is based on conflict, not only within oneself but also outwardly…
The bold emphasis above is mine. Reading the original article this phrase leapt out at me.
I find it difficult to articulate just how profound and transformative the shift from inner and outer conflict to inner and outer wholeness can be.
I’m no expert in these matters but, as a lay reader, I have long sensed a commonality between spiritual non-duality and Jung’s individuation.
I have a meditative/ contemplative practice and also had periods of psychotherapy. In spite of coming from different directions, for me at least, they converge on the same point – the recognition of and freedom from one’s own mind.
As my therapist once said as I was trying in vain for something to say to him: ‘If there’s no problem, there’s no problem.’
When the duality of subject and object dissolves conflict of any kind is impossible. As has been articulated for thousands of years in myriad different ways – whatever this is, is impossible to say, but it isn’t two.
We no more consciously know what we’re going to say or do next than we beat our heart, digest our food or grow our hair.
Patterns, symbols, archetypes, myths, stories – maps of unknowable territories. What is created when the universe attempts to apprehend itself.
No one chooses what to like or dislike. All that arises preconceptually, and then we call the conscious coming to awareness of those preconceptual brain states ‘me’.
— Robert Saltzman
What’s here now? 