Living as a River Quotes

“There was also no longer any sense of my moving along a time line. Time was no longer a path with the past behind me and the future before me, as we commonly conceive of it. Instead there was a sense of an eternally unfolding present moment. Rather than time being a journey along a linear path, change appeared to be mandala-like. It seemed to be like a flower seen from above, endlessly unfolding from within, or like a kaleidoscope’s image forever rearranging itself. It struck me as highly misleading to think in terms of there being a past behind us and a future ahead of us. Instead there was only this one present moment, eternally unfolding according to its nature. I found myself in an eternal, timeless present.”
― Bodhipaksa, Living as a River: Finding Fearlessness in the Face of Change

“the best kind of life is a joyful and fearless life—one in which we have looked impermanence in the face and seen it not as an enemy or even simply as how things are, but as an opportunity for growth.”
― Bodhipaksa, Living as a River: Finding Fearlessness in the Face of Change

“Consciousness is not an entity that sits within us, awaiting contact with the outside world; rather it’s a series of activities that arise in dependence upon contact with the world. The ultimate act of letting go is to abandon the delusion that consciousness and the world are separate things.”
― Bodhipaksa, Living as a River: Finding Fearlessness in the Face of Change

“We are not separate from the world around us; we instead exist as the sum total of our relationships with a vast web of interconnected processes. We are not physically separate, and we are not mentally separate, and realizing these facts is infinitely enriching.”
― Bodhipaksa, Living as a River: Finding Fearlessness in the Face of Change

“Fundamentally, we all just want to be happy, secure, and at peace. The problem is that as strategies for finding happiness, clinging and aversion just don’t work very well.”
― Bodhipaksa, Living as a River: Finding Fearlessness in the Face of Change

“Studies have shown that we frequently try to find something unchanging and reliable with which to identify, something that acts like a secure island amidst a river of change. Often what we cling to is an ideology, or a religious identity, or a sense of belonging to a group or nation. This response is one of fear and clinging. We see change around us and we’re afraid. And so we try to find something to cling to—something more permanent and stable than ourselves.”
― Bodhipaksa, Living as a River: Finding Fearlessness in the Face of Change

“when we do happen to experience the fragility of existence, we often find our appreciation of life enhanced rather than diminished.”
― Bodhipaksa, Living as a River: Finding Fearlessness in the Face of Change

“To Hesiod in Greece in the late seventh century BCE, water was under the special care of the gods and was a purifying gift from them, to be treated with veneration. “Never cross the sweet-flowing water of ever-rolling rivers afoot,” he entreated us, “until you have prayed, gazing into the soft flood, and washed your hands in the clear, lovely water.”[2]”
― Bodhipaksa, Living as a River: Finding Fearlessness in the Face of Change

“It seems that the parietal lobes of the brain have the function of creating a sense of time and space, and when that part of the brain goes offline, we lose our sense of there being an inside and an outside to our experience.”
― Bodhipaksa, Living as a River: Finding Fearlessness in the Face of Change

“As part of the Six Element Practice, for example, we may repeat the phrase, “This is not me; this is not mine; I am not this.” A verse such as this is, as it were, dropped into the mind.”
― Bodhipaksa, Living as a River: Finding Fearlessness in the Face of Change