Suffering

"What is the key to untie the knot of your mind's suffering?  Act great.  My dear, always act great."  Hafiz

Enlightenment

"Make no mistake about it - enlightenment is a destructive process.   It has nothing to do with becoming better or being happier.  Enlightenment is the crumbling away of untruth.  It's seeing through the facade of pretense.  It's the complete eradication of everything we imagined to be true."  Adyashanti

"Often, confusion is the tension of trying to make sense of things too soon, before enough of the inner players have learned their parts.  Often, experience is the way that the heart and mind and spirit practice what they need to play."  Mark Nepo

At the end of the talk someone from the audience
asked the Dalai Lama, "Why didn't you fight back against
the Chinese?" The Dalai Lama looked down, swung his feet
just a bit, then looked back up at us and said with a gentle smile, "Well, war is obsolete, you know " Then, after a few moments,
his face grave, he said, "Of course the mind can rationalize
fighting back...but the heart, the heart would never understand.
Then you would be divided in yourself, the heart and the mind,
and the war would be inside you."

When I Die

I know how it will be when I die,
My beauty will be so extraordinary that God will worship me.
He will not worship me from a distance, for our minds will have wed.
Our souls will have flowed into each other.
How to say this: God and I will forever cherish
Myself.

Art of Living

"The master in the art of living makes little distinction between his work and his play, his labor and his leisure, his mind and his body, his education and his recreation, his love and his religion. He hardly knows which is which. He simply pursues his vision of excellence in whatever he does, leaving others to decide whether he is working or playing. To him he is always doing both."     Zen Buddhist text

Peacemaking

“We often think of peace as the absence of war, that if powerful countries would reduce their weapon arsenals, we could have peace. But if we look deeply into the weapons, we see our own minds--our own prejudices, fears and ignorance...To work for peace is to uproot war from ourselves and from the hearts of men and women.” --Thich Nhat Hanh

Taught So Much

I

Learned

So much from God

That I can no longer

Call

Myself

A Christian, a Hindu, a Muslim

A Buddhist, a Jew.

The truth has shared so much of Itself 

With me.

That I can no longer call myself

A man, a woman, an angel

Ore even pure

Soul

Love has

Befriended Hafiz so completely

It has turned to ash

And freed

Me

Of every concept and image

My mind has ever known.

I am Not My Body

This body is not me.

I am not limited by this body.

I am life without boundaries.

I have never been born,

and I have never died.

Look at the ocean and the sky filled with stars, manifestations from my wondrous true mind.

Since before time, I have been free.

Birth and death are only doors through which we pass, sacred thresholds on our journey.

Birth and death are a game of hide- and seek.

So laugh with me,

hold my hand,

let us say good-bye,

say good-bye, to meet again soon.

We meet today.

We will meet again tomorrow.

We will meet at the source every moment.

We meet each other in all forms of life.

~By Thich Nhat Hanh

Inner Work

"Real and abiding consciousness change doesn't just happen.  We have to work for it, in our own hearts and in the world.  I am just as impressed by the inner work that each one of us does as I am by the work we do in the world.   By inner work, by spiritual work, I mean living the examined life; watering the seeds of wisdom, confronting our shadowy parts, because I'm telling you, inside each one of us is our own little mean mini-Maciavilli.   It takes work to tame our mini-Maciavilli.  It takes spiritual work that quiets the reactivity of the mind and expands the heart in wider cirlces.  It takes psychological inquiry to heal our family wounds and uncoil our unconscious ego urges to dominate and punish.  Without this kind of inner work our primal, tribal reactivity waits in the wings and it takes over when crisis' loom.  I'm not saying the point is to become some egoless saint.  I'm just asking you to consider trying to change yourself even as you try to change the world because how we do what we do is as important as what we do."  Elizabeth Lesser

Mind

"The mind is not our thoughts, just as the sky is not the weather."  Elizabeth Lesser

Discovery

"A discovery is said to be an accident meeting a prepared mind."  Albert Szint-Gycrgyi

Junk Food for the Mind

"The sound of one another's voices is so often background noise, as though life were a never-ending cell phone call.  Mirroring a junk food diet for the body, we have developed a junk-talk diet for the mind.   The cure for junk food is not to stop eating but to eat consciously.   The cure for junk talk is not to stop talking, but to speak and listen and write and read consciously, carefully determining our communication."   Christina Baldwin

Growth

"This place of feeling sqeezed is a very important part in our lives where we can really learn something. The point where we are not able to take it or leave it, where we are caught between a rock or a hard place, caught with both the upliftedness of our ideas and the rawness of what is happening in front of our eyes-that is indeed a very fruitful place.

When we feel squeezed there's a tendency for the mind to become small. We feel like a victim, like a pathetic, hopeless case. At that moment of hassle or bewilderment or embarrassment, our minds become bigger.

Instead of taking what's actually occurred as a statement of personal weakness or someone else's power, instead of feeling stupid we could be there, feeling off guard, not knowing what to do, just hanging out there with the raw and tender energy of the moment. This is the place where we begin to learn.

We're so used to running from discomfort, and we're so predictable. If we don't like it, we strike out at someone or beat up on ourselves. We want to have security and certainty of some kind when we actually have no ground to stand on at all.

The next time there is no ground to stand on, don't consider it an obstacle. Consider it a remarkable stroke of luck. We have no ground to stand on, and at the same time it could soften us and inspire us. Finally, after all these years, we could finally grow up."

Pema Chondron

Buddhist Mind

The Tibetan Buddhists speak of 3 kinds of mind:
1.  Dull Mind: no spiritual interest
2.  Average Mind: Content with Dogma and blind faith
3.  Inquiring Mind: curious and filled with doubt

Change

"People say they are dying to change.  They say they want to change.  So they end up changing their partner, where they work or where they live, and often all they end up doing is becoming more the same than they were before.  I think the primary, radical, subversive way to change is to change the way you think.  John O' Donahue

Meaning

"Most of us lead far more meaningful lives than we know.  Often finding meaning is not so much about doing things differently; it is about seeing familiar things in a new way.   When we find new eyes, the unsuspected blessing in work we have done for many years may take us completely by surprise.   We can see life in many ways, with the eye, with the mind, with the intuition.   But perhaps it is only by those who speak the language of meaning, who have remembered how to see with the heart, that life is ever deeply known or served."  Rachel Naomi Remen

Forgiveness

"How I know that I have forgiven someone is that he or she has harmless passage in my mind."  ~Rev. Karyl Huntley

Forgiveness

"If I don’t forgive you, you’ll go right on with your life, but I’ll have backaches, nervous tension, or disease from the festering sore of this unforgiveness of you in me. [So] I won’t give you [that kind of] free rent in my mind." ~Della Reese

Celtic Spirituality

"Celtic Spirituality and the ancient Irish faith never forced anyone.  Never drove people through the tracks of programs with the intention of reaching the cold destination of perfection.   It never tried to unriddle the mind of it's gracious contradictions.   And it never tried to make the world safe or certain for people.   It constantly called people back to the source of their own originality."     John O' Donahue