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When we are in touch with being whole, we feel at one with everything.
When we perceive our intrinsic wholeness, there is truly no place to go and nothing to do.
We find it lying within ourselves at all times, and as we touch it, taste it, listen to it, the body cannot but touch it, taste it, listen as well, and in so doing, let go.
Siddhartha listened. He was now listening intently, completely absorbed, quite empty, taking in everything. He felt that he had now completely learned the art of listening.
And all the voices, all the goals, all the pleasures all the good and evil, all of them together was the world. All of them together was the stream of events, the music of life.
When Siddhartha listened attentively to this river, to this song of a thousand voices, when he did not listen to the sorrow or the laughter, when he did not bind his soul to any one particular voice and absorb it in his Self, but heard them all, the whole, the unity, then the great song of a thousand voices consisted of one word.
The atmosphere is whole, but its currents have unique signatures, even though they are just wind. Life on earth is a whole, yet it expresses itself in unique time-bound bodies, microscopic or visible, plant or animal, extinct or living. So there can be no one place to be. There can be no one way to be, no one way to practice, no one way to learn, no one way to love, no one way to grow or to heal, no one way to live, no one way to feel, no one thing to know or be known. The particulars count.
The spirit of inquiry is fundamental to living mindfully.
Inquiry and mindfulness can occur simultaneously in the unfolding of your daily life.
Problems of all shapes and sizes come up all the time in life. They range from the trivial to the profound to the overwhelming. The challenge here is to meet them with inquiry, in the spirit of mindfulness.
Do we have the courage to look at something, whatever it is, and to inquire, what is this? What is going on? It involves looking deeply for a sustained period, questioning, questioning, what is this? What is wrong? What is at the root of the problem? What is the evidence? What are the connections? What
would a happy solution look like? Questioning, questioning, continually questioning.
Inquiry is not so much thinking about answers, although the questioning will produce a lot of thoughts that look like answers. It really involves just listening to the thinking that your questioning evokes, as if you were sitting by the side of the stream of your own thoughts, listening to the water flow over and around the rocks...
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The true value of a human being is determined primarily by the measure and sense in which he has attained liberation from the self.
If you observe this process of selfing with sustained attention and inquiry, you will see that what we call “the self” is really a construct of our own mind,
“Who is the I who is asking who am I?”,
Here perhaps lies a major explanation for diminished self-esteem in many people. We aren’t really familiar with this constructed aspect of our identity process.
We are likely to continually seek interior stability through outside rewards, through material possessions, and from others who love us.
Buddhists might say that this is because there is no absolute separate “self” in the first place, just the process of continual self-construction or “selfing.” If we could only recognize the process of selfing as an ingrained habit and then give ourselves permission to take the day off, to stop trying so hard to be “somebody” and instead just experience being, perhaps we would be a lot happier and more relaxed.
So, when we speak about not trying so hard to be “somebody” and instead just experience being, directly, what it means is that you start from where you find yourself and work here.
Meditation is not about trying to become a nobody, or a contemplative zombie, incapable of living in the real world and facing real problems. It’s about seeing things as they are, without the distortions of our own thought processes.
Awareness itself can help balance out the selfing and reduce its impact.
By recognizing and letting go of selfing impulses, we accord the universe a little more room to make things happen.
Without care and awareness, small-minded feeling states can dominate the moment. It happens all the time. The collective pain we cause others and ourselves bleeds our souls.
For one, when it happens now—and it still does with annoying frequency—I find that I am aware of my reaction the moment it happens and I look at it. “This is it,” I remind myself!
I observe the anger as it starts rising in me. It turns out that it is preceded by a mild feeling of revulsion. Then I notice the stirrings of a feeling of betrayal which is not so mild. Someone didn’t respect my request, and I am taking it very personally. After all, my feelings count in the family, don’t they?
Watching your reactions in situations that annoy you or make you angry. Notice how even speaking of something “making” you angry surrenders your power to others. Such occasions are good opportunities to experiment with mindfulness
Observe the ways in which your feelings are creations of your mind’s view of things,
Can you be patient enough and courageous enough to explore putting stronger and stronger emotions into the pot and just holding them and letting them cook, rather than projecting them outward and forcing the world to be as you want it to be now?
there was a way to look at having children as a meditation retreat in its own right—one that would have most of the important features of those I was giving up, except for the quiet and the simplicity.
The retreat schedule would be relentless
and demand continual acts of selflessness and loving kindness.
The deep and constantly changing needs of children are all perfect opportunities for parents to be fully present rather than to operate in the automatic pilot mode,
I felt that parenting was
nothing short of a perfect opportunity to deepen mindfulness,
while I followed not my breathing but our breathing.
The older children get, the harder it is to remember that they are still live-in Zen masters.
The challenges to be mindful and non-reactive, and to look clearly at my reactions and overreactions and to own when I am off seem to get greater as I gradually have less and less direct say in their lives.
Parenting is a mirror that forces you to look at yourself.
Just being centered yourself, fully present and open and available, is a great gift for them. And mindful hugging doesn’t hurt, either.
To my mind, the best way to impart wisdom, meditation, or anything else to your children, especially when they are young, is to live it yourself, embody what you most want to impart, and keep your mouth shut.
Without being over-bearing or insistent, you can suggest that they tune in to their breathing, slow it down, float on the waves in a little boat, watch the fear or the pain, look for images and colors, use their imagination to “play” with the situation, and then remind themselves that these are just pictures in the mind, like movies; that they can change the movie, the thought, the image, the color, and sometimes feel better quicker and feel more in control.
They will know from direct experience that they are more than just their thoughts and feelings, and can relate to them in ways that give them more choices to participate in and influence the outcomes of various situations;
So you have to remind yourself that all colorations of “I,” “me,” and “mine” are just currents of thinking that are liable to carry you away from your own heart and the purity of direct experience. This reminder keeps the practice alive for us at the very moments we may need it the most and are the most ready to betray it. It keeps us looking deeply, in the spirit of inquiry and genuine curiosity, and asking constantly, “What is this?”, “What is this?”
Perhaps you forgot or didn’t quite grasp that meditation really is the one human activity in which you are not trying to get anywhere else but simply allowing yourself to be where and as you already are.
Meditation can be a profound path for developing oneself,
for refining one’s perceptions, one’s views, one’s consciousness. But, to my mind, the vocabulary of spirituality creates more practical problems than it solves.
the practice is not about getting anywhere else at all, not even to pleasant or profound spiritual experiences. Hopefully they will come to understand that mindfulness is beyond all thinking, wishful and otherwise, that the here and now is the stage on which this work unfolds continuously.
The concept of spirituality can narrow our thinking rather than extend it. All too commonly, some things are thought of as spiritual while others are excluded. Is science spiritual? Is being a mother or father spiritual? Are dogs spiritual? Is the body spiritual? Is the mind spiritual? Is childbirth? Is eating? Is painting, or playing music, or taking a walk, or looking at a flower? Is breathing spiritual, or climbing a mountain? Obviously, it all depends on how you encounter it, how you hold it in awareness.
Doing science is spiritual. So is washing the dishes. It is the inner experience which counts. And you have to be there for it. All else is mere thinking.
