"Imagine The Idea That The Moment You Were Born You Were Kicked Off The Edge Of A Precipice, And You
"Imagine the idea that the moment you were born you were kicked off the edge of a precipice, and you are falling. As you fell, a great lump of rock came with you, and it’s traveling alongside you. And you’re clinging to it for dear life! And thinking, ‘Gee, I’ve gotta hold onto this.’ You see? Well, it doesn’t do a thing for you. And it’s only making you anxious, and as soon as you understand that it doesn’t do a thing for you that you let go and relax. So, everybody’s in this situation. We’re all completely insecure! We’re all headed straight for death, as if we had been condemned by a judge. And yet here we are all clinging onto things. And we have all sorts of alibis for doing this. We say, ‘Well, I have responsibilities for my dependents, and I’ve got to cling on.’ But all you’re doing is you’re teaching your dependents to cling the same way as you are and making them miserable by learning to go on surviving compulsively.
So the thing is, the same way you’re caught in a torrent, and you try to get out of it by swimming against it, you’ll just wear yourself out, and you’re still carried along with it. So the sensible thing to do is to turn around and swim with it! And if you want to get out of it, swim towards the edge. But go with it! Same way when you’re sailing. Always keep the wind in your sails. If you want to go against the wind: tack! But use the wind. So it’s this way, you know, we’re all in this great stream of change which we call life, we ARE the stream! If you imagine you're separate from it, and you're being carried along by IT as if you were a cork, that's a delusion. You're a wave of the stream itself, so get with IT!”
~Alan Watts
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If we are completely present to whatever is arising, we can stretch beyond our self-imposed limits; we can endure what may seem unendurable.
- Shinge Roko Cherry Shayat Roshi
Identification with your mind creates an opaque screen of concepts, labels, images, words, judgments, and definitions that blocks all true relationship. It comes between you and yourself, between you and your fellow man and woman, between you and nature, between you and God. It is this screen of thought that creates the illusion of separateness, the illusion that there is you and a totally separate “other.” You then forget the essential fact that, underneath the level of physical appearances and separate forms, you are one with all that is. By “forget,” I mean that you can no longer feel this oneness as self-evident reality. You may believe it to be true, but you no longer know it to be true. A belief may be comforting. Only through your own experience, however, does it become liberating.
Eckhart Tolle
- A message from 23 nights temple -
“In times of hardship, there is actually hope and joy. When things are easy, actually trouble and suffering increase.”
-二十三夜堂からのメッセージ-
“苦労しているときには、却って希望や喜びがある。楽をしていると、却って悩みや苦しみが増える。”
Today, I found myself heading to a Buddhist temple for an addiction recovery meeting and meditation session. Initially, I was overwhelmed with anxiety, my mind racing with all the ways things could go wrong. Why? Because the mind, though a powerful tool, is just that—a tool. It should be used only when needed; otherwise, it will create problems simply to justify its own activity, becoming an addiction in itself. As I made my way there, I became aware of the vibrations of the music resonating in my ears, the wind brushing against my face, the comfort of my seat—each moment was rich with joy. Yet, we so rarely tap into the immediate joy available to us in the present.
-Griff
“When you have Yin you must have Yang, when you have Yang you must have Yin, they mutually kind of compliment each other. For instance you cannot succeed without failure. If you always succeed you can’t succeed any more. You’ve got to have some failure in order to succeed, it’s all relative. So then perhaps a good way to relieve anxiety. Today for instance, we are so much troubled with anxiety. Perhaps this is the way.”
~ Gia-fu Feng
Forget about your life situation and pay attention to your life. Your life situation exists in time.
Your life is now. Your life situation is mind-stuff.
Your life is real.
— Eckhart Tolle
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zengriff-v2 reblogged this · 9 months ago
