Stone Men

That is all ...

"We live in illusion and the appearance of things.  

There is a Reality.  

You are that Reality.  

Seeing this, you know that you are everything.  

And being everything, you are no-thing.  

That is all."  - 

Kalu Rinpoche

"Emptiness is two things at once:  

the absence of self and the presence of the Divine.  

Thus as self decreases, the Divine increases." 

- Sister Bernadette Roberts

"Wisdom tells me I am no-thing.  

Love tells me I am everything.  

And between the two my life flows."  

-Nisargadatta Maharaj

Going out is going in

"Learn how to see.  Realize that everything connects to everything else."

Leonardo da Vinci 

 

"When we try to pick anything out by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe."

John Muir

No Where To Go

Stepping stones

Changing Things

Enlightenment

  

"Bodhi means enlightenment, the state devoid of all defects and endowed with all good qualities. Sattva refers to someone who has courage and confidence and who strives to attain enlightenment for the sake of all beings. Those who have this spontaneous, sincere wish to attain enlightenment for the ultimate benefit of all beings are called bodhisattvas. Through wisdom, they direct their minds to enlightenment, and through their compassion, they have concern for beings. This wish for perfect enlightenment for the sake of others is what we call bodhichitta, and it is the starting point on the path."

Dalai Lama

Different eyes

Tom Paine

Attention

Let Me Be A Free Man

Do It Now

African Proverb

What Love Really Is

"How few 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 you see someone as he or she really is here and how and not as they are in your memory or your desire or in your imagination or projection that you can truly love them, otherwise it is not the person that you love but the idea that you have formed of this person, or this person as the object of your desire 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 your desires, your prejudices, your memories, your projections, your 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 you set out to serve someone whom you have not taken the trouble to see, are you meeting that person's need or your own?"

-- Father Anthony de Mello

Morality vs. Obedience

Mindfulness Western style

"In Western traditions, mindfulness is associated with devotional practices in which the Divine is a constant companion within us. In Christianity, the practice is having Jesus by our side at all times. In Judaism, the Kabalistic idea that creation is taking place in each and every moment brings an acute sensitivity to everything. All of these ideas can be practiced to raise our level of awareness and induce an entirely new perspective, seeing things 'as they really are.'"

-Rabbi David Cooper

Question?

Fools Crow

Self is everwhere

"Self is everywhere, shining forth from all beings, vaster than the vast, subtler than the most subtle, unreachable, yet nearer than breath, than heartbeat.  Eye cannot see it, ear cannot hear it nor tongue utter it; only in deep absorption can the mind, grown pure and silent merge with the formless truth. As soon as you find it, you are free; you have found yourself; you have solved the great riddle; your heart forever is at peace.  Whole, you enter the Whole.  Your personal self returns to its radiant, intimate, deathless source."

(Mundaka: Upanishad into Sacred Poets)

Teachers

Before we judge

The illusion

"A mystic sees beyond the illusion of separateness into the intricate web of life in which all things are expressions of a single Whole. You can call this web "God, the Tao, the Great Spirit, the Infinite Mystery, Mother or Father," but it can be known only as love."
 Joan Borysenko

Wage Peace

Wage Peace  Wage peace with your breath.  Breathe in firemen and rubble, breathe out whole buildings and flocks of red wing blackbirds.  Breathe in terrorists and breathe out sleeping children and freshly mown fields.  Breathe in confusion and breathe out maple trees.  Breathe in the fallen and breathe out lifelong friendships intact.  Wage peace with your listening: hearing sirens, pray loud.  Remember your tools: flower seeds, clothes pins, clean rivers.  Make soup.  Play music, memorize the words for thank you in three languages.  Learn to knit, and make a hat.  Think of chaos as dancing raspberries, imagine grief as the out-breath of beauty or the gesture of fish.  Swim for the other side.  Wage peace.  Never has the world seemed so fresh and precious:  Have a cup of tea and rejoice.  Act as if armistice has already arrived.  Celebrate today.

(Judyth Hill)

Self

Small everyday

Love is about appreciation

Invincible

"In the midst of winter, I finally learned that there was in me an invincible summer."
~Albert Camus

Cloud free

"Thus, the teachings on Buddha Nature do not mean that there is some nucleus of Buddhhood enclosed in sentient beings behind the temporary obscuring stains. Rather, our whole existence as sentient beings is in itself the sum of temporary stains that float like clouds in the infinite, bright sky of Buddha Nature, the luminous, open expanse of our mind that has no limits or boundaries. Once these clouds dissolve from the warm rays of the sun of wisdom shining in this space, nothing within sentient beings has been freed or developed, but there is just this radiant expanse without any reference points of cloud-like sentient beings or cloud-free Buddhas."

(Sthiramati, 6th century Indian Buddhist scholar-monk)

Love comes more naturally

One Common Mind

 

There is one mind common to all individual men. Every man is an inlet to the same and to all of the same. He that is once admitted to the right of reason is made a freeman of the whole estate. What Plato has thought, he may think; what a saint has felt, he may feel; what at any time has befallen any man, he can understand. Who hath access to this universal mind is a party to all that is or can be done, for this is the only and sovereign agent.

-Ralph Waldo Emerson, Essays: First Series1

What is wisdom?

"So what is wisdom? Wisdom is that knowledge that nurtures relationships.  Wisdom is that knowledge that looks at us ourselves in ecological terms,  that we are as part of an ecosystem, a chain of being,  a web of existence."

Deepak Chopra

Words have power

Feels free

Intelligent life

Ubuntu

Old Picture

“Your expectation of something unique and dramatic, of some wonderful explosion, is merely hindering and delaying your Self Realization. You are not to expect an explosion, for the explosion has already happened - at the moment when you were born, when you realized yourself as Being-Knowing-Feeling. There is only one mistake you are making: you take the inner for the outer and the outer for the in...See More

— with Sonali Das and Didi Poblador Mendoza.

Pursued by awkward qualities

If you try to avoid or remove the awkward quality, it will pursue you. The only effective way to still its unease is to transfigure it, to let it become something creative and positive that contributes to who you are. Nietzche said that one of the best days in his life was the day when he re-baptized all his negative qualities as his best qualities. Rather than banishing what is at first glimpse unwelcome, you bring it home to unity with your life.....One of your sacred duties is to exercise kindness toward them. In a sense, you are called to be a loving parent to your delinquent qualities. ♥

 ~ Anam Cara: A Book of Celtic Wisdom

Sam I Am

Ram Dass

Present