Courtesy James Steinberg

"What we are looking for is what is looking."

St. Francis of Assisi

“Without the present
there can’t be past or future.
Knowing the present,
Which is eternal,
is knowing the truth.”

Baba Hari Dass
from The Path to Enlightenment is not a Highway

 


If you expect your life to be up and down, your mind will be much more peaceful.
Lama Thubten Yeshe


When we truly hate what’s happening, our instinct is to flee from it like a house on fire.  But if we can learn to turn around and enter that fire, to let it burn all our resistance away, then we find ourselves arising from the ashes with a new sense of power and freedom.
Raphael Cushnir


After all, what is so scary about things just as they are?  If we see things as they are, at least we know the truth.  What should frighten us is denying things as they are.
Shyalpa Rinpoche, a contemporary Nyingma lama


“I am the light that is above them all,
I am the All,
The All came forth from Me
And the All attained to Me.
Cleave a piece of wood and I am there;
Lift up a stone and you will find me there.”

The Gospel According to Thomas

 

“There was a young man who said:
Though it seems that I know that I know,
What I would like to see, is the I that knows me,
When I know, that I know, that I know.”

Alan Watts

 

    “The intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational mind is a faithful servant.
We have created a society that honors the servant and has forgotten the gift.”

Albert Einstein

 

“This is it, and that’s the end of it.  Give up the search for something to happen and fall in love, fall intimately in love with the gift of presence in What Is.  Here, right now, is the seat of all you will ever long for.  It is simple, and ordinary and magnificent.  You see, you are already home.”

Tony Parsons


 

“Make no effort to work or to renounce, your very effort is bondage.”

Ramana Maharshi

 


“When I heard the temple bell ring,
suddenly there was no bell and no I,
just sound.”

A Zen master on awakening to his true nature

 

“Dance, when you’re broken open.
Dance, if you’ve torn the bandage off.
Dance, in the middle of the fighting.
Dance in your blood.
Dance, when you’re perfectly free.”

Rumi




“The older we get, the more likely we are to experience these moments of ‘cognitive dissonance,’ when self-image and reality contradict each other.  Though this conflict is uncomfortable, it is a clear window into the place where we are clinging, and where we need to pay attention.  Just as physical pain alerts us to trouble in the body, mental pain alerts us to where we need to be more conscious.  In other words, our frustrations, anger, delusions, and so on become our greatest helpers in freeing ourselves from suffering.  They point to where the Ego is trapped, and remind us to begin to shift our identity to the Soul level.  They show where we are resisting change, where we are time-bound, and where we need to grow beyond past conditioning.”

Ram Dass  from Still Here:  Embracing Aging, Changing and Dying

"Let go of excessive thinking and see how everything changes. Your relationships change because you don’t demand that the other person should do something for you to enhance your sense of self. You don’t compare yourself to others or try to be more than someone else to strengthen your sense of identity.

You allow everyone to be as they are. You don’t need to change them; you don’t need them to behave differently so that you can be happy.
 
There’s nothing wrong with doing new things, pursuing activities, exploring new countries, meeting new people, acquiring knowledge and expertise, developing your physical or mental abilities, and creating whatever you’re called upon to create in this world.

It is beautiful to create in this world, and there is always more that you can do.

Now the question is, Are you looking for yourself in what you do?  Are you attempting to add more to who you think you are? Are you compulsively striving toward the next moment and the next and the next, hoping to find some sense of completion and fulfillment?

The preciousness of Being is your true specialness. What the egoic self had been looking for on the level of the story - I want to be special - obscured the fact that you could not be more special than you already are now. Not special because you are better or more wretched than someone else, but because you can sense a beauty, a preciousness, an aliveness deep within.