Wednesday, April 20, 2016

Via Ram Dass:

April 20, 2016

How do you know that what you are doing is from a level of evolving consciousness and not just an ego trip? Until the final moment before enlightenment, I can guarantee that everything is an ego trip. Even spiritual practices are all ego trips. They’re all ego trips because it’s you being somebody thinking you’re doing something. That’s an ego trip.

Via Daily Dharma / April 20, 2016: Innocent Consciousness

The work of Zen is to reach the ground of being, to perceive the true nature of the self, which, as it turns our, is a phantom. This is also the work of poetry, at least for me: to erode the membrane between self and the world, so that a newly innocent consciousness can emerge, one that sees what it sees without commentary, analysis, or judgment.

—Chase Twichell, "Second Innocence: With Basho at Sesshin"