Via Daily Dharma: Where’s Your Sense of Adventure?

As spiritual practitioners we need to have some curiosity about the unknown. When unexplored territory frightens us, we need to ask ourselves, “Where’s our sense of adventure?”

—Elizabeth Mattis Namgyel, “Open Stillness”

Via Daily Dharma: You Are Already Complete

Why is it that we yearn to be more or other than we are? It so rarely occurs to us that what we are looking for maybe—indeed, always is—already within us, simply undiscovered.

—Toinette Lippe, “Between Eternities”

Via Daily Dharma: How to Cultivate Equanimity

If a mind state or emotion or mood becomes strong—feelings such as sadness or happiness or anger or desire, restlessness or excitement, interest or rapture, joy or calm—make the mental note of that mind state, feeling it and observing how that too is part of the passing show. It arises, it is there for some time, it passes away.

—Joseph Goldstein, “Breathing”

Via Ram Dass / Words of Wisdom - April 25, 2018

There is great delight in tuning through a variety of different methods, and really looking to each method to move you in its own unique way while continuing to open you up. So be very generous in your opening to methods, because if you bring to them a pure heart and a yearning to be free, they will serve you in that way.

The way you get your karmuppance with methods, if you use them for power, you get power - but then you are stuck with the power. If you use them to reinforce your separateness, you get left in your separateness...

 - Ram Dass -

Via Daily Dharma: Dismantling Delusion

To experience the everyday sublime one needs to dismantle piece by piece the perceptual conditioning that insists on seeing oneself and the world as essentially comfortable, permanent, solid, and mine.

—Stephen Batchelor, “The Everyday Sublime”

Via Daily Dharma: Active Refuge

Committing to this path is not an act that we can carry out once and for all, like a “conversion” or a baptism, but an act that must be renewed each day.

—Fabrice Midal, “Brief Teachings”

Happy Earth Day!

Happy Earth Day!

The environment is not merely the place where we live and act, for the biosphere is the ground from which and within which we arise. The earth is not only our home, it is our mother.

—David Loy, “Healing Ecology”

Via Ram Dass / Words of Wisdom - April 22, 2018

Surrender who you think you are and what you think you are doing into what is. It is mind boggling to think that spirituality is dying into yourself.

- Ram Dass -

Via Daily Dharma: Mother of All Beings

The environment is not merely the place where we live and act, for the biosphere is the ground from which and within which we arise. The earth is not only our home, it is our mother.

—David Loy, “Healing Ecology”

Via Daily Dharma: We Are Temporary Too

Know that your precious, infinitely beloved, and irreplaceable self will dissolve like a sand castle, grain by grain—and what a relief it is to know. You exist in a great space of knowing, filled with the shared ephemerality of all things.

—Sallie Tisdale, “Self-Care for Future Corpses”

Via Daily Dharma: How to Truly Relax

When we understand that nothing exists independently, everything that does arise seems more dreamlike and less threatening. This brings a deep sense of relaxation, and we feel less need to control our mind and circumstances.

—Dzigar Kongtrul Rinpoche, “The Theater of Reflection”

Via Daily Dharma: How to Speak with Care

When we speak with greater skill, our true self—our compassionate, loving self—emerges with gentle ease. So before you speak, stop, breathe, and consider if what you are about to say will improve upon the silence.

—Allan Lokos, “Skillful Speech”

Via Ram Dass / Words of Wisdom - April 18, 2018

Ramana Maharshi said that God, guru, and the Self are the same. The guru, the true guide, awakens our own deeper being, or ātman, which is God itself. Ramana Maharshi realized that Self directly. His view from the Arunachala mountain, his darshan, his teaching, pointed directly at the ātman, at Self-realization. That unity of God, guru, and Self is the higher truth, and if your veil of attachment is very thin, you may be able, like Ramana, to penetrate directly to that essence in the heart.

But most of us, to get through our busy human incarnation and the profusion of forms we find in our lives, need guidance and help. Seeing the guru as separate from oneself is a way to approach it in steps of lesser truths. It’s a first step toward becoming the One. The reality of the guru or guide as separate from oneself is a method or vehicle for coming to God. It’s using a relationship with a separate entity, dualism, to get to the One, to the reality that the guru is identical with your inmost being.

- Ram Dass -

Via Daily Dharma: The Joy of Giving

At its most basic level, dana [generosity] in the Buddhist tradition means giving freely without expecting anything in return.

—Gil Fronsdal, “The Joy of Giving”

Via Daily Dharma: The Self Will Surprise You

The realization of no self is not at all nihilistic. It simply means that the self is something different from what we habitually assume it to be.

—Guo Jun, “The Calligrapher’s Apprentice”

Via Daily Dharma: Let the World Be Your Teacher

When you forget all your dualistic ideas, everything becomes your teacher, and everything can be the object of worship.

—Shunryu Suzuki Roshi, “Bowing”

Via Ram Dass / Words of Wisdom - April 15, 2018

How would I like to enter my own death? With a feeling of, I don't know, but wow! It's going to be interesting.

- Ram Dass -

Via Daily Dharma: Be a Lamp Unto Yourself

A teacher, out of compassion and love, seeing that somebody is suffering, gives a path. But each individual has to walk on the path.

—Interview with S. N. Goenka by Helen Tworkov, “Superscience”

Via Daily Dharma: Are You Truly Alive?

To acknowledge that you are dying is to recognize that you are alive.

—Dean Rolston, “Memento Mori”