Via Daily Dharma / Forget Yourself

When you focus attention on someone or something that inspires awe in you, you forget yourself. You also forget yourself, and you may even forget your Self.

—Ken McLeod, "Where the Thinking Stops"

Via Daily Dharma / Accomplishing Now

[The] drive for future accomplishment just builds up the habit of always striving for something other than what we have right here and now. The result is that even when we reach our goal, we’re still being driven by those habits to look for the next thing.

—Brad Warner, "How to Not Waste Time"

Via Ram Dass

 

When the faith is strong enough, it is sufficient just to be. It’s a journey towards simplicity, towards quietness, towards a kind of joy that is not in time. It’s a journey that has taken us from primary identification with our body and our psyche, on to an identification with God, and ultimately beyond identification.

TED 2017: His Holiness Pope Francis: Why the only future worth building includes everyone

Via Daily Dharma / Acknowledging Destructive Emotions

If an emotion, such as hatred or envy, is judged to be destructive, then it is simply recognized as such. It is neither expressed through violent thoughts, words or deeds, nor is it suppressed or denied as incompatible with a “spiritual” life.

—Stephen Batchelor, "Foundations of Mindfulness"

Via Daily Dharma / The Benefits of Heightened Awareness

If you’re sensitive to what’s going on around you—sensitive to the weather, to your immediate environment—then you’re going to be sensitive to current events and everything else that enters your life.

—David Budbill, "A Voice from the Outside"

Via Daily Dharma / Rejecting Consumer Consciousness

A world that truly understands the nature of consciousness could shift away from the hedonic treadmill of consumerism and toward the infinitely renewable resource of genuine happiness that is cultivated by training the mind.

—B. Alan Wallace, "Within You Without You"

Via Daily Dharma / How to Meditate Anywhere

Anytime you can go out and keep all of your visual and auditory senses alive—looking above eye level, hearing behind you as well as in front of you—you’re performing meditation in the natural world. You’re poised for any stimulus coming from anywhere. It’s as down-to-earth as you can get and still be up in the sky.

—James H. Austin, quoted in Zenshin Michael Haederle’s, "This Is Your Brain on Zen"

Carpool | Google Home now supports multiple users

Unconditional love really exists in each of us. It is part of our deep inner being. It is not so much an active emotion as a state of being. It’s not ‘I love you’ for this or that reason, not ‘I love you if you love me.’ It’s love for no reason, love without an object.

Via Daily Dharma / Changing Your Way of Being

Meditation is not merely a useful technique or mental gymnastic, but part of a balanced system designed to change the way we go about things at the most fundamental level.

—Judy Lief, "Meditation Is Not Enough Alone"

Via Daily Dharma / Breaking Habits

Habituation devours work, clothes, furniture, one’s wife, and the fear of war. . . . And art exists that one may recover the sensation of life; it exists to make one feel things, to make the stone stony.

—Viktor Shklovsky in Henry Shukman’s, "The Unfamiliar Familiar"

Via Daily Dharma / Are You Ready to Meet Reality?

In order to open—in meditation and in life in general—we must let go of our familiar thoughts and emotions, we must step out from behind the safe curtain of our inner rehearsals and onto the stage of reality, even if it’s for just a brief moment.

—Michael Carroll, "Bringing Spiritual Confidence in the Workplace"

Via Ram Dass

My path is the path of Guru Kripa, which means ‘grace of the guru’. It seems like a sort of strange path in the West, but my path involves my relationship to Maharajji, Neem Karoli Baba. The way I do that is that I just hang out with him all the time. I have an imaginary playmate in a way, I mean, he’s dead. He dropped his body, yet he seems so alive to me, because I have invested that form in my mind as an emotional connection to that deeper truth.

Because for me, Maharajji is the cosmic giggle. He is the wisdom that transcends time and space. He is the unconditional lover. He is the total immediate presence.

Via Daily Dharma / What Makes a Good Sit?

Great ecstatic meditation periods have never been celebrated by teachers; we’re always told to go back to the cushion, to let go of all that arises.

—Trudy Walter, "Leaning into Rawness"

Fight Back!

Via Daily Dharma / What the World Needs Now

The overcoming of clinging through the wisdom of selflessness, the development of empathic love, and the expression of both in conscientious compassion have today become imperatives.

—Venerable Bhikku Bodhi, "The Need of the Hour"

Via Daily Dharma / Working with Your Mistakes

In human life, if you feel that you have made a mistake, you don’t try to undo the past or the present, but you just accept where you are and work from there. Tremendous openness as to where you are is necessary.

—Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche, "Your Life is Your Practice"

Via Daily Dharma / Don’t Compare Yourself to Others

Comparing yourself is an almost instantaneous way to connect with suffering.

—Denise Di Novi, "This Buddhist Life"