separation..........................

 

    . . . Separation between God or reality and yourself is brought about by you, by the mind that clings to the known, to certainty, to security.  This separation cannot be bridged over, there is no ritual, no discipline, no sacrifice that can carry you across it; there is no savior, no Master, no guru who can lead you to the real or destroy the separation.  The division is not between the real and yourself; it is in yourself.

-J. Krishnamurti, The Book of Life

Surrender.................................

 

He who surrenders himself without reservation to the temporal claims of a nation, or a party, or a class is rendering to Caesar that which, of all things, most emphatically belongs to God: himself.

C. S. Lewis, from his 1939 sermon, Learning In War-time

About freedom.......................

 . . . Freedom includes an act of choice, but its root is in the realization that the self is no sovereign, in the discontent with the tyranny of the ego. Freedom comes about in the moment of transcending the self, . . .

-as cut-and-pasted from this post

The old rights and responsibilities problem....

Human rights' are a fine thing, but how can we make ourselves sure that our rights do not expand at the expense of the rights of others. A society with unlimited rights is incapable of standing to adversity. If we do not wish to be ruled by a coercive authority, then each of us must rein himself in. . . . A stable society is achieved not by balancing opposing forces but by conscious self-limitation: by the principle that we are always duty-bound to defer to the sense of moral justice.

-attributed to Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, from Rebuilding Russia: Reflections and Tentative Proposals

thanks Kurt

A guru-level reminder..........

.....................................................from Bill Murray:

Step seven: Remember that you are you and no one else is.
The night’s final question was “What’s it like being you?” Murray responded with a guru-level reminder about the importance of being present, which we’ll reprint in full and embed in audio form below.

I think if I’m gonna answer that question, because it is a hard question, I’d like to suggest that we all answer that question right now, while I’m talking. I’ll continue. Believe me, I won’t shut up. I have a microphone. But let’s all ask ourselves that question right now. What does it feel like to be you? What does it feel like to be you? Yeah. It feels good to be you, doesn’t it? It feels good, because there’s one thing that you are—you’re the only one that’s you, right? So you’re the only one that’s you, and we get confused sometimes—or I do, I think everyone does—you try to compete. You think, Dammit, someone else is trying to be me. Someone else is trying to be me. But I don’t have to armor myself against those people; I don’t have to armor myself against that idea if I can really just relax and feel content in this way and this regard. If I can just feel, just think now: How much do you weigh? This is a thing I like to do with myself when I get lost and I get feeling funny. How much do you weigh? Think about how much each person here weighs and try to feel that weight in your seat right now, in your bottom right now. Parts in your feet and parts in your bum. Just try to feel your own weight, in your own seat, in your own feet. OK? So if you can feel that weight in your body, if you can come back into the most personal identification, a very personal identification, which is: I am. This is me now. Here I am, right now. This is me now. Then you don’t feel like you have to leave, and be over there, or look over there. You don’t feel like you have to rush off and be somewhere. There’s just a wonderful sense of well-being that begins to circulate up and down, from your top to your bottom. Up and down from your top to your spine. And you feel something that makes you almost want to smile, that makes you want to feel good, that makes you want to feel like you could embrace yourself.

So what’s it like to be me? You can ask yourself, What’s it like to be me? You know, the only way we’ll ever know what it’s like to be you is if you work your best at being you as often as you can, and keep reminding yourself: That’s where home is.

Thanks Chris

The private world.................

Our work for peace must begin within the private world of each one of us. To build for man a world without fear, we must be without fear. To build a world of justice, we must be just. And how can we fight for liberty if we are not free in our own minds? How can we ask others to sacrifice if we are not ready to do so?

-Dag Hammarskjold

Russell on standard of values adjustments......

     Be very wary of opinions that flatter your self-esteem.  Both men and women, nine times out of ten, are firmly convinced of the superior excellence of their own sex.  There is abundant evidence on both sides.  If you are a man, you can point out that most poets and men of science are male; if you are a woman, you can retort that so are most criminals.  The question is inherently insoluble;  but self-esteem conceals this most people.  We are all, whatever part of the world we come from, persuaded that our own nation is superior to all others.  Seeing that each nation has characteristic merits and demerits, we adjust our standard of values so as to make out that the merits possessed by our nation are the really important ones, while its demerits are comparatively trivial.  Here, again the rational man will admit that the question is one to which there is no demonstrably right answer.  It is more difficult to deal with the self-esteem of man as man, because we cannot argue out the matter with some nonhuman mind.  The only way I know of dealing with this general human conceit is to remind ourselves that man is a brief episode in the life of a small planet in a little corner of the universe, and that, for aught we know, other parts of the cosmos may contain things as superior to ourselves as we are to jelly-fish.

-Bertrand Russell

Careful............................

     Preoccupation with self is always a major component of unhealthy guilt and recrimination.  It stirs our emotions, churning in self-destructive ways, closes us in upon the mighty citadel of self, leads to depression and despair, and preempts the presence of a compassionate God.

-Brennan Manning, The Ragamuffin Gospel

On blaming the wrong person........

"And then I started to cry, too, because I was thinking of Michael and what was lost, and Kevin and what I hope won’t be lost. And because, more and more, it seems that Donald Trump’s genius for hate and division has driven us all into a canyon that we won’t easily be able to climb out of."

"I worry that it will be a long time before we can talk across our jangly, angry chasms. "


 Don't indulge in the off-loading of your estrangement onto Donald Trump. There will always be political figures out there, setting us off, stirring up hostility and anxiety. Find the estrangement that originates in you, and take care of that.  "Just remember, when you really need somebody, the only one that’s going to be compelled to run toward you is your family...."


-Ann Althouse, from this post in which she quotes Maureen Dowd

Time......................................

“As time goes on, you’ll understand. What lasts, lasts; what doesn’t, doesn’t. Time solves most things. And what time can’t solve, you have to solve yourself.”


-Haruki Murakami

via

Anxious.............................

"Men are anxious to improve their circumstances, but they are unwilling to improve themselves;  they therefore remain bound."

-James Allen

The Fountain of Goodness...............

"Dig deep within yourself, for there is a fountain of goodness ever ready to flow if you will keep digging."
-Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, 7,59

Today, we could hope that goodness comes our way - good news, good weather, good luck.  Or we could find it ourselves, in ourselves.  Goodness isn't something that's going to be delivered by mail.  You have to dig it up inside your own soul.  You find it within your own thoughts, and you make it with your own actions.

-Ryan Holiday, yesterday's reading from The Daily Stoic

Within......................................

In a justly ordered universe, where loss of equipoise would mean total destruction, individual responsibility must be absolute.  A man's weakness and strength, purity and impurity, are his own, and not another man's;  they are brought about by himself, and not by another;  and they can only be altered by himself, never by another.  His condition is also his own, and not another man's.  His suffering and his happiness are evolved from within.  As he thinks, so he is;  as he continues to think, so he remains.

-James Allen,   As A Man Thinketh

Damn..............................

"I am not a product of my circumstances.  I am a product of my decisions."

-Stephen R. Covey

It's Entertainment.....................

The world is actually entertainment.  Like amusement, it is meant to be worn lightly.  Heaven is within and is revealed by awareness.  The world is merely an appearance.  Its melodrama is an artifice of the distorted sense of perception.  It leads one to think that the world is large, powerful, and permanent and that the Self is small, weak, and transitory;  exactly the opposite is true.

-David R. Hawkins

Self-knowledge............................

“Self-control is the chief element in self-respect, and self-respect is the chief element in courage.” 

-Thucydides

Flow...............................

He sticks to this traditional custom because he knows from experience that the preparations for working put him simultaneously in the right frame of mind for creating.  The meditative repose in which he performs them gives him that vital loosening and equability of all his powers, that collectedness and presence of mind, without which no right work can be done.  Sunk without purpose in what he is doing, he is brought face to face with that moment when the work, hovering before him in ideal lines, realizes itself ass if of its own accord.  As the steps and postures in archery, so here in modified form other preparations have the same meaning.  And only where this does not apply, as for instance with religious dancers and actors, are the self-recollection and self-immersion practiced before they reach the stage.
     As in the case of archery, there can be no question but that these arts are ceremonies.  More clearly that the teacher could express in words, they tell the pupil that the right frame of mind for the artist is only reached when the preparing and the creating, the technical and the artistic, the material and the spiritual, the project and the object, flow together without a break.

-Eugen Herrigel,  Zen in the Art of Archery

archer via

Our power..............................

     No dark fate determines the future.  We do.  Each day and each moment, we are able to create and re-create our lives and the very quality of human life on our planet.  This is the power we wield.
     Lasting happiness cannot be found in pursuit of any goal or achievement.  It does not reside in fortune or fame.  It resides only in the human mind and heart, and it is here that we hope you will find it.

-Tenzin Gyatso and Desmond Tutu, from their Introduction to The Book of Joy:  Lasting Happiness In A Changing World

Nonself................................

     The first time I tasted peanut butter cookies, I was at Tassajera Zen Mountain Center in California, and I loved them!  I learned that to make peanut butter cookies, you mix the ingredients to prepare the batter, and then you put each cookie onto a cookie sheet using a spoon.  I imagined that the moment each cookie leaves the bowl of dough and is place onto the tray, it begins to think of itself as separate.  You, the creator of the cookies, know better, and you have a lot of compassion for them.  You know that they are originally all one, and that even now, the happiness of each cookie is still the happiness of all the other cookies.  But they have developed "discriminative perception," and suddenly they set up barriers between themselves.  When you put them in the oven, they begin to talk to each other"  "Get out of my way.  I want to be in the middle."  "I am brown and beautiful and you are ugly!"  "Can't you please spread a little in that direction?"  We have the tendency to behave this way also, and it causes a lot of suffering.  If we know how to touch our nondiscriminating mind, our happiness and the happiness of others will increase manifold.

     We all have the capacity of living with nondiscriminating wisdom, but we have to train ourselves to see in that way, to see that the flower is us, the mountain is us, our parents and our children are all us.  When we see that everyone and everything belongs to the same stream of life, our suffering will vanish.  Nonself is not a doctrine or a philosophy.  It is an insight that can help us live life more deeply, suffer less, and enjoy life more.  We need to live the insight of nonself.

-Thich Nhat Hanh,  The Heart of the Buddha's Teaching:  Transforming Suffering into Peace, Joy, and Liberation

Making experiences.........Part 3

To some degree we will rely on the filters to tell us what we want.  Not as slave masters, but as a mirror.  We'll listen to the suggestions and recommendations that are generated by our own behavior in order to hear, to see who we are.  The hundred million lines of code running on the million servers of the intercloud are filtering, filtering, filtering, helping us to distill ourselves to a unique point, to optimize our personality.  The fears that technology will make us more uniform, more commoditized are incorrect.  The more we are personalized, the easier it is for the filters because we become distinct, and acutalized distinction they can reckon with.  At its heart, the modern economy runs on distinction and the power of differences - which can be accentuated by filters and technology.  We can use the mass filtering that is coming to sharpen who we are, for the personalization of our own person.
     More filtering is inevitable because we can't stop making new things.  Chief among the new things we will make are new ways to filter and personalize, to make us  more like ourselves.

-Kevin Kelly,  The Inevitable