Beholding

In rare moments of deep play, we can lay aside our sense of self, shed time's continuum, ignore pain, and sit quietly in the absolute moment, watching the world's ordinary miracles. No mind or heart hobbles. No analyzing or explaining. No questing for logic. No promises. No goals. No relationships. One is completely open to whatever drama may unfold. With innocent surprise, one regards life's spectacles and underpinnings... When it happens, we experience a sense of revelation and gratitude. Nothing need be thought or said. There is a way of beholding that is a form of prayer.



Diane Ackerman
Deep Play

Like Love...

Diane Ackerman wrote this in her journal during her trip to the Antarctic:

"Tonight the moon is invisible, darkness itself has nearly vanished, and the known world which we map with families, routines and newspapers, floats somewhere beyond the horizon. Travelling to a strange, new landscape is a kind of romance. You become intensely aware of the world where you are, but also oblivious to the rest of the world at the same time. Like love, travel makes you innocent again."


Diane Ackerman

Best

The best scholar is one who has realized the meaning of the absence of any true existence.
The best monk is one who has tamed his own mind.
The best quality is a great desire to benefit others.
The best instruction is always to watch the mind.
The best remedy is to know that nothing has any inherent reality.
The best way of life is one that does not fit with wordly ways.
The best accomplishment is a steady lessening of negative emotions.
The best sign of practice is a steady decrease of desires.
The best generosity is non-attachment.


Atisha

Mind

The mind is its own place, and in itself
Can make a Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven.


John Milton
Paradise Lost

The Buddha is like...

The Buddha is like Hume in wanting to set man free from his own irrational attempts to build metaphysical scaffolding as a vantage point for perceiving the nature and destiny of almost everything about which man has ever had a persisting question. He is like Nietzsche in seeing the sad plight of human power shackled by the guilt-ridden resentment of the weak. He is like Marx and Engels in wanting to liberate man from the chimeras and myths under whose mystification he is pining away. The Buddha is like John Stuart Mill in seeing that the most powerful bonds that enslave man are not tyrants sitting astride great thrones but those subtle persuasions that rule the inner man and strip him of his integrity and independence. The Buddha is like Freud, too, in wanting to free the creative processes deep in human personality from the compulsive authoritarian controls of an ego or super-ego in which every urge to happiness is distorted, suppressed and denied. He is like Wittgenstein in wishing to alert man to the "mystification" of the human intellect by language.


N.P. Jacobson
Buddhism: The Religion of Analysis

Foreigner - I Want To Know What Love Is

Gotta take a little time
A little time to think things over
I better read between the lines
In case I need it when I'm older

This mountain I must climb
Feels like a world upon my shoulders
Through the clouds I see love shine
It keeps me warm as life grows colder

In my life there's been heartache and pain
I don't know if I can face it again
Can't stop now, I've traveled too far
To change this lonely life
I want to know what love is
I want you to show me
I want to feel what love is
I know you can show me

I'm gonna take a little time
A little time to look around me
I've got nowhere left to hide
It looks like love has finally found me


By Foreigner

Holding true

What we say about love between persons applies even more to God. If love is true, it will last, we tell our children when they fear a separation from their beloved. If it is the real thing, it will come through. Surely this holds for God as well. If God's gift of self-revelation reveals truth, then it will see us through. Its forms of expression may alter; our ways into its truths may find different expression; but its truth about the center goes on shining. And the center still addresses us, pushes toward us and into us. We must discover new ways to receive it and explore new ways to correspond with it.


Ann Belford Ulanov
finding space - Winnicott, God and Psychic Reality