A personal blog by a graying (mostly Anglo with light African-American roots) gay left leaning married college-educated Buddhist Baha'i BBC/NPR-listening Professor Emeritus now following the Dharma in Minas Gerais, Brasil.
"Let me explore with you another way of defining who you are. Look at the cloud again, and become aware of the sky that surrounds the cloud. I invite you to identify your awareness with the sky. In your awareness there is your life that is cloud. In other words, your whole concept of who you think you are, all your sense experiences of your body, all of the stuff of ‘me,’ is all the cloud. And the cloud is being appreciated or embraced or carried by the sky.
The sky is just awareness. It’s much easier to describe the cloud than to describe the sky. The sky doesn’t have a beginning or an end, and it really doesn’t have qualities, it’s just sky. That’s the quality of awareness. It doesn’t have a trip. The sky doesn’t have a trip, it’s just hanging out."
Just as watching one’s breath becomes something deeper over time, the practice of compassionate communication can lead to subtle but profound inner shifts.
