the joy of elevated thoughts
1. Love Is The Law Of Life
All love is expansion, all selfishness is contraction. Love is therefore the only law of life. He who loves lives, he who is selfish is dying. Therefore, love for love's sake, because it is the law of life, just as you breathe to live.
2. It's Your Outlook That Matters
It is our own mental attitude, which makes the world what it is for us. Our thoughts make things beautiful, our thoughts make things ugly. The whole world is in our own minds. Learn to see things in the proper light.
3. Life is Beautiful
First, believe in this world - that there is meaning behind everything. Everything in the world is good, is holy and beautiful. If you see something evil, think that you do not understand it in the right light. Throw the burden on yourselves.
4. It's The Way You Feel
Feel like Christ and you will be a Christ; feel like Buddha and you will be a Buddha. It is feeling that is the life, the strength, the vitality, without which no amount of intellectual activity can reach God.
5. Set Yourself Free
The moment I have realized God sitting in the temple of every human body, the moment I stand in reverence before every human being and see God in him - that moment I am free from bondage, everything that binds vanishes, and I am free.
6. Don't Play The Blame Game
Condemn none: if you can stretch out a helping hand, do so. If you cannot, fold your hands, bless your brothers, and let them go their own way.
7. Help Others
If money helps a man to do good to others, it is of some value; but if not, it is simply a mass of evil, and the sooner it is got rid of, the better.
8. Uphold Your Ideals
Our duty is to encourage every one in his struggle to live up to his own highest idea, and strive at the same time to make the ideal as near as possible to the Truth.
9. Listen To Your Soul
You have to grow from the inside out. No one can teach you, no one can make you spiritual. There is no other teacher but your own soul.
10. Be Yourself
The greatest religion is to be true to your own nature. Have faith in yourselves.
11. Nothing Is Impossible
Never think there is anything impossible for the soul. It is the greatest heresy to think so. If there is sin, this is the only sin - to say that you are weak, or others are weak.
12. You Have The Power
All the powers in the universe are already ours. It is we who have put our hands before our eyes and cry that it is dark.
13. Learn Everyday
The goal of mankind is knowledge ... now this knowledge is inherent in man. No knowledge comes from outside: it is all inside. What we say a man knows, should, in strict psychological language, be what he discovers or unveils; what man learns is really what he discovers by taking the cover off his own soul, which is a mine of infinite knowledge.
14. Be Truthful
Everything can be sacrificed for truth, but truth cannot be sacrificed for anything.
15. Think Different
All differences in this world are of degree, and not of kind, because oneness is the secret of everything.
- Swami Vivekananda
"We move through the world in a narrow groove, preoccupied with the petty things we see and hear, brooding over our prejudices, passing by the joys of life without even knowing that we have missed anything. Never, for a moment do we taste the heady wine of freedom. We are as truly imprisoned as if we lay at the bottom of a dungeon, heaped with chains."
- Yang Chu
2. Two fears keep us from claiming this power: fear that we have no internal guidance or standards, and fear that we have them but they will mislead us.
3. Noticing the impact of acting authentically can help lessen these fears.
4. At the point you realize that you use your internal guides more often than external ones, you have swallowed your wolf.
5. Ignore these rules and discover your own.
- Julia Mossbridge
we lose all track of their passage
every heart is its own Buddha
ease off; become immortal
wake up: the world's a mote of dust
behold heaven's round mirror
turn loose: slip past shape and shadow
sit side by side with nothing - save Tao
- Shih-shu
Stones and Trees
the first three
one
What has kept you from Nirvana?
Is it because you are not a monk?
Is it because you are not in India, Thailand, Japan, or Tibet?
Is it because you do not meditate enough?
Is it because you are a bad person?
Is it because you developed negative Karma in a past life?
Nirvana is.
You are.
Be enlightenment.
two
Is Nirvana something you get,
or is Nirvana something you are?
If you can get it, you can lose it.
If you are it, it is never gone.
three
People do all kinds of things to find Nirvana:
they meditate,
they pray,
they give up material possessions,
they refrain from sex,
they live in caves.
They do strange things to their bodies.
Why? Because they believe that by performing physical actions they will find Nirvana.
Actions do not equal Nirvana.
Performing an action to obtain Nirvana is no different than the person who believes that once they obtain a desired goal they will never desire anything else. But as soon as they get it, they become bored and move on to their next desire.
Physical action will not lead you to Nirvana.
Be Nirvana, and no external action or technique is necessary.
- Scott Shaw
Nirvana in a nutshell
157 zen reflections
"For everything that is understood and sensed is nothing other than the apparition of the non-apparent, the manifestation of the hidden, the affirmation of the negated, the comprehension of the incomprehensible, the utterance of the unutterable, the access to the inaccessible, the intellection of the unintelligible, the body of the bodiless, the essence of the beyond-essence, the form of the formless, the measure of the immeasurable, the number of the unnumbered, the weight of the weightless, the materialization of the spiritual, the visibility of the invisible, the place of the placeless, the time of the timeless, the definition of the infinite, the circumscription of the uncircumscribed, and the other things which are both conceived and perceived by the intellect alone and cannot be retained within the recesses of memory and which escape the blade of the mind."
- John Scotus Eriugena
"As you look deeply into your own awareness, and relax the self-contraction, and dissolve into the empty ground of your own primordial experience, the simple feeling of Being - right now, right here - is it not obvious all at once? Were you not present from the start? Did you not have a hand to play in all that was to follow? Did not the dream itself begin when you got bored with being God? Was it not fun to get lost in the productions of your own wondrous imagination, and pretend it all was other? Did you not write this book, and countless others like it, simply to remind you who you are?"
- Ken Wilber
The Simple Feeling of Being
"What I know in my bones is that I forgot to take time to remember what I know. The world is holy. We are holy. All life is holy. Daily prayers are delivered on the lips of breaking waves, the whisperings of grasses, the shimmering of leaves."
- Terry Tempest Williams
And every gale of wind a curious song.
The Heavens were an oracle, and spoke
Divinity: the Earth did undertake
The office of a priest; and I being dumb
(Nothing besides was dumb) all things did come
With voices and instructions . . . "
- Thomas Traherne
"These blessed mountains are so compactly filled with God's beauty, no petty personal hope or experience has room to be . . . . the whole body seems to feel beauty when exposed to it as it feels the campfire or sunshine, entering not by the eyes alone, but equally through all one's flesh like radiant heat, making a passionate ecstatic pleasure glow not explainable. One's body then seems homogeneous throughout, sound as a crystal."
- John Muir
A presence that disturbs me with the joy of elevated thoughts;
a sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused,
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean, and the living air,
And the blue sky, and in the Mind of man;
A motion and a spirit, that impels
All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
And rolls through all things."
- William Wordsworth
"The Now is as it is because it cannot be otherwise. What Buddhists have always known, physicists now confirm: there are no isolated things or events. Underneath the surface appearance, all things are interconnected, are part of the totality of the cosmos that has brought about the form that this moment takes."
- Eckhart Tolle
"Your unhappiness ultimately arises not from the circumstances of your life but from the conditioning of your mind.
Do you carry feelings of guilt about something you did - or failed to do - in the past? This much is certain: you acted according to your level of consciousness or rather unconsciousness at that time. If you had been more aware, more conscious, you would have acted differently.
Guilt is another attempt by the ego to create an identity, a sense of self. To the ego, it doesn't matter whether that self is positive or negative. What you did or failed to do was a manifestation of unconsciousness - human unconsciousness. The ego, however, personalizes it and says, "I did that," and so you carry a mental image of yourself as "bad."
"Do you know of someone whose main function in life seems to be to make themselves and others miserable, to spread unhappiness? Forgive them, for they too are part of the awakening of humanity. The role they play represents an intensification of the nightmare of egoic consciousness, the state of non-surrender. There is nothing personal in all this. It is not who they are."
- Eckhart Tolle
Stillness Speaks
lonely rock worlds
ever-so-turning
in time-raked, sand wings.
shadows
across rough earths
after a rain,
with surrounding currents
of space and nothingness
around each grain
imitation of a river
swept into a stillness
of change.
nothing
but sand and rock
nothing at all
- Alan Altany
"The terms mountains and rivers, combined, in Chinese, mean 'landscapes,' and that's exactly what the Chinese mean when they refer to landscapes. But in Buddhism, there is also a traditional metaphoric association that goes way back, with mountains symbolizing a kind of stubborn, fierce, persistent energy - which, indeed, they do. Rocks are hard; they resist erosion. And there is an old tradition of the forces and nature of water as being fluid, flexible, all-permeating, all-embracing, and necessary to life. So, in Buddhist thought those are shorthand symbolic terms for wisdom as willed spiritual energy, and compassion as the wise fruit of that energy.
In the Buddhist tradition, for the bird of enlightenment to fly, it must have two wings: the wing of wisdom and the wing of compassion. Wisdom without compassion is cold and arrogant, and compassion without wisdom is often foolish. So, there's the sense that the two are essential to each other.
Mountains bring the precipitation down, and precipitation brings the mountains down, so there's this sharing here and this giving there - an interaction that is persistent throughout all of geological time."
- Gary Snyder
"Your experience of physical reality is based on limitation. What seems most solid, most unbudgeable, seems most real. You define and direct your life within the constraints you observe and choose to believe in. Because the range of your experience and action is determined by what you think is possible, impossibility actually shapes your reality. It is impossibility that tells you what the limits to physical life are and where you can expect to find them.
Thus, having forgotten your unity, you see yourself as completely separate from others rather than deeply connected to them; having forgotten that all things are truly possible, you experience life as a struggle against difficult odds."
- Pandit Rajmani Tigunait
have been thought already thousands of times;
but to make them truly ours,
we must think them over again honestly,
until they take root in our personal experience."
- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
"See yourself in others,
Then whom can you hurt?
What harm can you do?"
- Buddha
"According to Buddhism, there are six different realms in samsára arising from the six negative emotions. If your anger or hatred is very strong, then you will be born in the hell realms of fire or ice. If your greed, or your avarice is very strong, then you will be born into the hungry ghost realm where no matter how much you get you will never be satisfied. If your ignorance is very great, if you refuse to learn, or if you are confused or dull, you will be re-born as an animal or fish. In the wild, your life will be a constant search for food and avoiding being eaten; if you are a farm animal or pet you will be at the mercy of your owner.
If jealousy is your strongest emotion, then you will be born in the demi-gods' realm spending your time fighting, feuding, always looking over your shoulder. If you are very proud, then you will be born into the gods-realm, you will be rich but you will be selfish. If your desire is great, then you will be born into the human realm.
When you talk about being born in one of these "samsaric realms" they are not physical places, but states of mind as the result of your conditioning. In the hell realm for example, all your misery, all your burning hatred will become more real so you see everything through a fog of anger and paranoia. That is the hell realm.
It is often said that in the same day or even the same hour, we can experience the hell realm, the heavenly realm, and the human realm according to our state of mind."
- Ringu Tulku Rinpoche
"When you realize that your life is important, valuable, precious, hard to get and easy to lose you will not idle it away. You will appreciate it more and use it to better purpose. You will not waste it by making yourself uselessly miserable or worrying too much about small things. If something goes wrong, then all right, it goes wrong, but you still have your life, which is very precious. If you understand this deeply, then even if you have nothing else, absolutely nothing except your life, you still have your most important possession."
- Ringu Tulku Rinpoche
"It is because the world is not capricious that true freedom exists. Our life direction is a product of renewed and recurrent momentum. Freedom is the presence, not the absence, of constraints that give ongoing impact and importance to our choices. Even skidding on the ice, we are behind the wheel. If we don't panic, and if we break intermittently and steer into the skid, we can regain control of our direction."
- Paul R. Fleischman
"In the oldest religion, everything was alive, not supernaturally but naturally alive . . . For the whole life-effort of man was to get his life into contact with the elemental life of the cosmos, mountain-life, cloud-life, thunder-life, air-life, earth-life, sun-life. To come into immediate felt contact, and so to derive energy, power, and a dark sort of joy. This effort into sheer naked contact, without an intermediary or mediator, is the root meaning of religion."
- D. H. Lawrence
Many seekers are confused and not able to comprehend the apparent paradox of transcending the ego without actually annihilating it. In Buddhist psychology, there is a concept that ego is not real, for it is only a play of the so called five skandhas. This concept is missing the elemental understanding that our body-mind operates as an alive and coherent organism of intelligence in a purposeful and meaningful way. The ego cannot be found anywhere as such, for the one looking for it - is the ego. It is too close to be found, but certainly it is always there.
It is difficult to define what the ego is, for it is not anything substantial. We would define ego as a self-conscious function of individualized consciousness capable of relating to its surroundings and itself in a centralized and intelligent manner. The ego is not an entity, but rather a unified field of identity - it is not fixated on a point, but operates within a spatial consciousness. It has many layers and many aspects.
The goal and purpose of Enlightenment is not to eliminate the ego, but to enlighten it. How could we possibly enlighten it if we deny its very existence?"
- Aziz Kristof
"Satori is not a morbid state of mind, a fit subject for the study of abnormal psychology. If anything, it is a perfectly normal state of mind. When I speak of mental upheaval, one may be led to consider Zen as something to be shunned by ordinary people. This is a most mistaken view of Zen, but one unfortunately often held by prejudiced critics. As Joshu declared, "Zen is your everyday thought"; it all depends on the adjustment of the hinge whether the door opens in or opens out. Even in the twinkling of an eye the whole affair is changed and you have Zen, and you are as perfect and as normal as ever. More than that, you have acquired in the meantime something altogether new. All your mental activities will now be working to a different key, which will be more satisfying, more peaceful, and fuller of joy than anything you ever experienced before. The tone of life will be altered. There is something rejuvenating in the possession of Zen. The spring flowers look prettier, and the mountain stream runs cooler and more transparent. The subjective revolution that brings about this state of things cannot be called abnormal. When life becomes more enjoyable and its expanse broadens to include the universe itself, there must be something in Satori that is quite precious and well worth one's striving after."
- D.T. Suzuki
"Within the Buddhist tradition, one generally distinguishes between two types of meditation. One type is a resting meditation or settling the mind, and the other is an analytical or investigating meditation. Some practitioners think that these two forms of meditation are in opposition to each other, like water and fire. That view implies that if you have one, you cannot have the other. One might think that if you practice analytical meditation, you will not be able to place the mind evenly in absorption meditation, and if you practice absorption meditation, it will exclude the possibility of analytical meditation.
It seems that most people actually prefer absorption meditation because they think of analytical meditation as a lot of work. They think, "Oh, analytic meditation is not good because you have to use a lot of effort, you have to read many books, and generally you have to think a lot." It seems that most students would prefer simply to practice a form of resting meditation. Thus, we should ask why there seems to be this preference for resting meditation and so little enthusiasm for engaging in analytical meditation.
One reason that meditators may not be so enthusiastic about analytical meditation is that they think thoughts and concepts will increase through engaging in the process of analysis. From books they have read, they have understood that the meaning of meditation is to "be without thoughts." As a result, many people have developed the preconception that meditation should be without any mental activity, whatsoever. They think that the ability to rest or meditate as if one were a stone is a sign of good meditation. When it appears that analytical meditation increases conceptions and thoughts, then their preconception that "good meditation is without thoughts" prevents these meditators from considering analytical meditation to be true meditation. When practicing this type of meditation, one does have the feeling that thoughts are increasing. This is how it apparently is; thoughts do increase, apparently."
- Acharya Lama Tenpa Gyaltsen
But my desire to commune with the spirit of the universe,
to be intoxicated even with the fumes, call it, of that divine nectar,
to bear my head through atmospheres and over heights unknown to my feet,
is perennial and constant."
- Thoreau
"As for the world of phenomena, we are inclined to believe that it is illusory, separate from reality. And we think that only by ridding ourselves of it will we be able to reach the world of true mind. That is also an error. This world of birth and death, this world of lemon trees and maple trees, is the world of reality in itself. There is no reality that exists outside of the lemon and maple trees. The sea is either calm or stormy. If you want a calm sea, you cannot get it by suppressing the stormy sea. You must wait for the same sea to become calm. The world of reality is that of lemon and maple trees, of mountains and rivers. If you see it, it is present in its complete reality. If you do not, it is a world of ghosts and concepts, of birth and death."
- Thich Nhat Hanh
"That is at bottom the only courage that is demanded of us: to have courage for the most strange, the most singular and the most inexplicable that we may encounter. That mankind has in this sense been cowardly has done life endless harm; the experiences that are called visions, the whole so-called spirit-world, death, all those things that are so closely akin to us, have by daily parrying been so crowded out of life that the senses with which we could have grasped them are atrophied. To say nothing of God."
- Rainer Maria Rilke
The palm at the end of the mind,
Beyond the last thought, rises
In the bronze decor.
A gold-feathered bird
Sings in the palm, without human meaning,
Without human feeling, a foreign song.
You know then that it is not the reason
That makes us happy or unhappy.
The bird sings. Its feathers shine.
The palm stands on the edge of space.
The wind moves slowly in the branches.
The bird's fire-fangled feathers dangle down.
- Wallace Stevens
The Tao Sequence
one
The Tao is a low whisper coming from a shiny
button over a child's heart
The whisper has many names and no name
beginning with the first letter
and ending with the same letter
The name is the sleep of every breath and
the moon, and all light that flashes
from its surface to its center
Seeking no place, you find a path where
the grooves are still clean
Wandering with all eyes, moist floors of music
swallow you whole
It's the old law & new law, where waters
flow from ancient glistering night
and your own
- Dave Brinks
The Secret Brain
"The great thing, if one can, is to stop regarding all the unpleasant things as interruptions of one's own, or real life. The truth is of course that what one calls the interruptions are precisely one's real life - the life God is sending one day by day; what one calls one's real life is a phantom of one's own imagination. This at least is what I see at moments of insight: but it's hard to remember it all the time."
- C. S. Lewis
Makes a beautiful naked woman
Materialize from
Words,
Who then says,
With a sword precariously waving
In her hands,
"If you look at my loins
I will cut off your head,
And reach down and grab your spirit
By its private parts,
And carry you off to heaven
Squealing in joy."
Hafiz says,
"That sounds wonderful, just
Wonderful.
Someone please - start writing
Some great
Lines."
- Hafiz
translated by Daniel Ladinsky
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