“Whoever Is Happy Will Make Others Happy, Too.”

“The aesthetic principles of Zen include wabi-sabi (侘寂), the aesthetic of “imperfect, impermanent, and incomplete" beauty, yugen (幽玄): profound grace and deep awareness of the Universe; datsuzoku (脱俗): free and unbounded by convention and seijaku (静寂): tranquility, stillness…”

—

Ecological Consciousness

art by Tsuchiya-Koitsu

“A Brief History of Us”

We are the universe trying to understand itself.

Remember feelings pass. Even the most intense and disturbing emotions pass.

I for one am grateful that our brains can forget.

Recently I've really had strong urges to drink and smoke. By telling you I guess I'm hoping you have a little advice or something insightful to say, and hopefully it will help anyone else who might have similar urges. Btw I don't have any addictions to either one, just new and strange urges to indulge.

“Where attention goes, energy flows.”

I’m not sure who said that, but it’s a poeticparaphrasing of what many sages have been saying for years; and it can help toexplain how any thought or urge, indeed any movement of the mind, gets itspower. At the point a thought or urge arises it’s powerless and, bereft ofattention, it will quickly dissipate;however, when given attention, energy pours into it and then it’s going to be hard to get rid of.

What usually happens is this: an urge arises for analcoholic drink and we react to it, and think, ‘that would be nice, it’s a warmday and a cold beer would be good, I’ve not had one for a while, and on andon…’ or, we might think, ‘where’s this coming from, I don’t want alcohol, it’snot good for me, where is this urge coming from..?’ Either way, we’ve engagedwith it, we’ve given it attention and our energy is pouring into it, as eachthought gives rise to another, and then to another, and so on…

Instead, what we can do is acknowledge the urge as it arises,without engaging with it: an analogy we can use for this, is to imagine theurge comes in the form of a text message to your phone; so, a notification popsup, which allows you to see a part of the message, and you can see it says,‘lets have a drink’ but you can’t see all the whys-or-why-nots. Now, the moment you open that message you are engaging with it, the sendercan see you opened it and so a response is needed; however, if you don’t openit, you’re not engaging with it and so no response is needed and it can beignored and eventually be forgotten about. And if the urge to open it comes in,we again just see the notification, but don’t open the message…

If we engage with the urge, it will quickly bring thoughtafter thought, which are the whys-and-why-nots, which are mostly unconscious thought;by not engaging with it, we take away it’s power and create a space in which wecan consciously think about whether we really do want to drink and smoke. Andin that space, we’re less likely to be influenced by outside factors, such aspeer-pressure, and so make a conscious decision.

I hope that helps. Namaste, Dave

A philosopher and a scientist come to the same, beautiful conclusion.

So therefore, if you understand perfectly clearly that you can’t do anything to find that very, very important thing—God, Enlightenment, Nirvāṇa, whatever—then what? Well, I find—you know—it’s so stupid, because even if I tell myself, “Well, there’s nothing I can do about it.” Why did I say that? You see? why did I say that? Why did I go out of my way to tell myself there’s nothing I can do about it? Because in the back of my mind there’s a funny little feeling that if I did tell myself that, something different would happen. See?

Alright, so even that doesn’t work. Nothing works. Now, when absolutely nothing works, where are you? Well, here we are—I mean, there’s a feeling of something going on. The world doesn’t stop dead when there’s nothing you can do. There’s something happening. Now, just there: that’s what I’m talking about. There’s the happening. When you are not doing anything about it, you’re not not doing anything about it; you just can’t help it, it goes on despite anything you think or worry about, or whatever. Now there is the point. Right there.

~Alan Watts

Art: @plumvillagefrance

We search for everything we believe we don't have, not knowing that everything we are looking for is already inside us. We are born with it. Miguel Angel Ruiz