Kindle Notes & Highlights
They didn't mind anything.
JK I dont mind what happens
The failure to believe in the fact of choice is the deepest tyranny of all—and it is the very key to the prison door. A door (it turns out) that wants badly to be opened.
Choice
It is like I am waiting to see what will come next. Not what I will do, but what will happen. I have a curious sensation of unfoldment. That is the sentence I have been working up to putting down. Every day is a show, and I'm the audience and I'm the one on the stage. It's like I have nothing to do. It is doing itself. Something has been set in motion, and all I need do is notice it.
No more the doer
I understood, then—years after ceasing to call myself any sort of Christian—what Jesus must have been about. Oh, I said, all of it dawning—Oh . . . This is what the people felt like, the ones walking with Jesus, sitting with him and listening to his stories. Looking into his eyes.
You come into the presence of a saint, and you are brought face to face with this truth: that beneath all suffering, beneath all the apparent gravity of our lives, flows something forever fresh.
So enlightenment seems to transmute the human condition by cleansing away the things that don't serve us, at the same time shining a light into our fullest human potential, infusing it with energy: to be wise, to be kind, to enjoy our lives, to make right decisions, to take effective action.
My constant experience is that I am not doing anything, in the sense I always used to understand doing. Things are simply happening.
Most people go to their graves believing suffering is unavoidable. How sad that is. If you turn from the possibility that it could be otherwise, you will suffer needlessly until the day you die.
If you tell yourself there is a path you need to travel, that it will take time to get where you want to go—that there is a distance between you and the fully realized state—then the path can become a way of holding liberation at arm's length.
Just remember that what you are experiencing is not “contained” in the teacher, or the book, or the meditation retreat. It is there, in you, all the time.
In the end, ordinary life will be the only indispensable teacher—the one whose lessons you cannot bypass.
You cannot be free and have those ways you've always identified yourself, those cherished stories you've always told yourself about who you are, how your history has molded you, stymied you, blessed you.
