24 October 2009 @ 03:45 pm
Predicting the Future
We don't need a psychic to tell us what our future experience will be—we need only look at our own minds. If we have a good heart and helpful intentions toward others, we will continually find happiness. If instead, the mind is filled with ordinary self-centered thoughts, with anger and harmful intentions toward others, we will find only difficult experiences.
- Chagdud Tulku Rinpoche
24 October 2009 @ 03:43 pm
Self is a Verb
The practice of mediation invites us to investigate the flux of rising and passing events. When we get the hang of it, we can begin to see how each artifact of the mind is raised and lowered to view, like so many flash cards. But we can also glimpse, once in a while, the sleight of hand shuffling the cards and pulling them off the deck. Behind the objects lies a process. Self is a process. Self is a verb.
~ Andrew Olendzki
21 August 2009 @ 10:45 am
Watermelons and Zen Students
Watermelons and Zen students
grow pretty much the same way.
Long periods of sitting
till they ripen and grow
all juicy inside, but
when you knock them on the head·
to see if they're ready—
sounds like nothing's going on.
-Peter Levitt, from Essential Zen
18 August 2009 @ 10:45 pm
Rest in Natural Great Peace
When I meditate, I am always inspired by this poem by Nyoshul Khenpo:
Rest in natural great peace
This exhausted mind
Beaten helpless by karma and neurotic thought,
Like the relentless fury of the pounding waves
In the infinite ocean of samsara.
Rest in natural great peace.
Above all, be at ease, be as natural and spacious as possible. Slip quietly out of the noose of your habitual anxious self, release all grasping, and relax into your true nature. Think of your ordinary emotional, thought-ridden self as a block of ice or a slab of butter left out in the sun. If you are feeling hard and cold, let this aggression melt away in the sunlight of your meditation. Let peace work on you and enable you to gather your scattered mind into the mindfulness of Calm Abiding, and awaken in you the awareness and insight of Clear Seeing. And you will find all your negativity disarmed, your aggression dissolved, and your confusion evaporating slowly like mist into the vast and stainless sky of your absolute nature.
–Sogyal Rinpoche, The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying