Beyond the Realms of the Bringer of Death ...

In Buddhism the word translated as 'demon' is the Sanskrit , which means 'bringer of death'. There are Four Kinds of Demons: 1) demons which are afflictions, 2) demons which are illnesses, 3) the demon of death, and 4) heavenly demons. The first three can be said to be internal demons and the fourth, external demons. The head of the heavenly demons is Mara the Evil One, who rules over the Sixth Desire Heaven. The demons of that heaven derive their bliss from preying on the energies of other beings. They are particularly threatened by those who practice on the spiritual pathways that reach beyond their realms and finally lead to genuine enlightenment.

When one's inner fire departs ...

When one's inner fire departs, a demon takes possession. Demons come to polish the Way. Those on the True Way have to endure demons. The more you get polished, the brighter you get; you'll be polished until you're like the autumn moon, which illumines all the demon hordes in empty space. When the demon hordes are scattered, then the original Buddha manifests. (Chinese sayings)

Meeting Need

How few of us understand what love really is, and how it arises in the human heart. It is so frequently equated with good feelings toward others, with benevolence or nonviolence or service. But these things in themselves are not love. Love springs from awareness. It is only inasmuch as we see someone as he or she really is, here and now, and not as they are in our memory or our desire or in our imagination or projection that we can truly love them, otherwise it is not the person that we love but the idea that we have formed of this person, or this person as the object of our desire, and not as he or she is in themselves. The first act of love is to see this person or this object, this reality as it truly is. And this involves the enormous discipline of dropping our desires, prejudices, memories, projections, selective way of looking ... a discipline so great that most people would rather plunge headlong into good actions and service than submit to the burning fire of this asceticism. When we set out to serve someone whom we have not taken the trouble to see, are we meeting that person's need or our own need?"
--- Father Anthony de Mello

Not an Occidental view

The idea of living creatures is that trees, buffalo and man are temporary energy swirls, turbulent patterns. You find that perception registered so many ways in archaic and primitive lore. I say that it is probably the most basic insight into the nature of things, and that our more common, recent Occidental view of the universe as consisting of fixed things is out of the main stream, a deviation from basic human perception."
Gary Snyder

Wood to the Fire ...

So, to deal with anger, we avoid letting our mind jump again and again to the trigger for our anger. Then we look at anger itself and keep our attention upon it. If we stop adding wood to a fire and just watch, the fire will die out. Likewise, anger will vanish away, without being forcibly repressed or allowed to explode.
Mathieu Ricard - Yes magazine

... the more I realize ...

The more I think about it, the more I realize there is nothing more artistic than to love others.
Vincent Van Gogh

Quarrel not ...

"Quarrel not at all. No man resolved to make the most of himself can spare time for personal contention. Still less can he afford to take all the consequences, including the vitiating of hs temper and loss of self-control."
Abraham Lincoln

SOMEDAY

Someday, after mastering the winds, the waves, the tides and gravity, we shall harness for God the energies of Love, and then, for a second time in the history of the world, humans will have discovered Fire.
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

Nature's Best Beings

Giving Birth.
Nourishing Life.
Shaping Things without them possessing them.
Serving Life without expectation of reward,
Leading without dominating:
These are the profound virtues of nature,
And of Nature's Best Beings.
(Lao Tse)

Consider the philosopher ...

David Foster Wallace was especially concerned that certain theoretical paradigms - the cerebral asceticism of modernism, the clever trickery of post modernism - too casually dispensed what he called the "very old traditional human truths that have to do with spirituality and and emotion and community." He called for a more forthright, engaged treatment of these basic truths, yet he himself attended to them with his own fractured and esoteric methods. For instance ... "Let a physical possibility structure be a set of distinct but intersecting paths, each of which is a set of functions on ordered pairs of time world situations, such that for any set of functions in some intersecting paths there is a primary accessibility relationship corresponding to physical possibility understood in terms of diachronic physical compatibility."

... without your permission

Nobody can make you feel inferior without your permission.
Eleanor Roosevelt

The Paradoxical Lesson ...

The paradoxical lesson is that we can change the world only by changing ourselves. This is not just a cute abstraction; it is an elusive key to effective performance in all aspects of life." -- Robert Quinn in Deep Change