Via Ram Dass / Words of Wisdom - October 21, 2018 🍁

I am still a person with an ego, and there is a little bit of stuff in which I’m somebody. So I’m in training to become nobody. And this is my training field, right here. I have to sit day after day with hundreds and thousands of people looking up at me, like this, saying ‘yes, oh yes, oh Ram Dass yes, oh yes, ah thank you, ah Ram Dass.’ That is my fire. It’s all those mind nets saying, ‘This is who you are, this is who you are, this is who you are, this is who you are.’ And if I get stuck in being the actor of being somebody who’s doing good, watch it!

Then my mind creates a reality in which everybody that comes into my mind field is somebody for whom good needs to be done…We can play the roles, but let’s not get stuck in them. …it’s so seductive to get caught in roles.

- Ram Dass -

Via Daily Dharma: Everyday Bodhisattva

The bodhisattva aspiration is an everyday matter—everyday both in the sense of needing to be renewed as each day passes, and in the sense of applying to simple tasks, to ordinary actions motivated by a longing to reduce the difficulty and increase the happiness of those with whom we share our lives.

—Manjusura, “An Everyday Aspiration”

Via Daily Dharma: Passionate Non-Attachment

In non-attachment the river-life of emotion continues, only our relationship to it alters. The response to the passions isn’t driven by the small self’s benefit, but turns instead toward all beings’ well-being.

—Jane Hirshfield, “Six Small Meditations on Desire”

Via Daily Dharma: Finding the Mind

What is mindfulness, if not the practice of bringing the mind to those places where it goes missing? Again and again, we wake ourselves up at the point where drowsiness, distractions, and daydreams arise.

—Noelle Oxenhandler, “Awake and Demented”

Via Daily Dharma: An Unexpected Teacher

We all know anger from experience, but when we are asked to pause and consider, “What is this anger?” it’s not always so easy to see what it is. Yet when we approach our feelings of anger with awareness, with mindfulness, it becomes a productive part of our practice. We find, after all, that anger has something to teach us.

—Jules Shuzen Harris, “Uprooting the Seeds of Anger”

Coco Peru - SHow me your Pride!

Via Daily Dharma: Cultivate Joy

When we are not attached to who we think we are, life can move through us, playing us like an instrument. Understanding how everything is in continual transformation, we release our futile attempts to control circumstances. When we live in this easy connection with life, we live in joy.

—James Baraz, “Lighten Up!”

Via Ram Dass / Words of Wisdom - October 17, 2018 🍁

One of the big traps we have in the West is our intelligence, because we want to know that we know. Freedom allows you to be wise, but you cannot know wisdom. You must be wisdom. When my guru wanted to put me down, he called me ‘clever.’ When he wanted to reward me, he would call me ‘simple.’ The intellect is a beautiful servant, but a terrible master. Intellect is the power tool of our separateness. The intuitive, compassionate heart is the doorway to our unity.

- Ram Dass -

Never give up! Never surrender!

Via Daily Dharma: Learning Through Loss

Loss is a fact of life. Impermanence is everywhere we look. We are all going to suffer our losses. How we deal with these losses is what makes all the difference. For it is not what happens to us that determines our character, our experience, our karma, and our destiny, but how we relate to what happens.

—Lama Surya Das, “Practicing With Loss”

The Decemberists - Once In My Life

Via Daily Dharma: The Circle of Generosity

What can we really possess, after all? Our realization that there is actually nothing that can be held on to can become a powerful factor in cultivating our inner wealth of generosity, which is a wealth that can never be depleted, a gift that can forever be given, a seamless circle that feeds itself.

—Marcia Rose, “The Gift That Cannot Be Given”

Via Daily Dharma: Breaking the Cycle

Meditation interrupts the endless feedback loops between consciousness and language, between consciousness and being . . . opening a space, a pause, a higher order function of attentive compassion. In practice, one learns to accept finitude, mortality, and the great ending, and in practice, one learns to cultivate the patience, compassion, and peace that lead to freedom.

—Roy Scranton, “Learning to Die in the Anthropocene”

Via Ram Dass / Words of Wisdom - October 14, 2018

The interesting question is, "How do you put yourself in a position so that you can allow ‘what is’ to be?" The enemy turns out to be the creation of mind, because when you are just in the moment, doing what you are doing, there is no fear. The fear is when you stand back to think about it. The fear is not in the actions. The fear is in the thought about the actions.

- Ram Dass -

Via Daily Dharma: Thoughts Aren’t the Enemy

Most people think that thoughts and emotions are the enemy of present-moment awareness, and that negative emotions in particular are the enemy of interconnectedness. But we can use thoughts and emotions, even the bad ones, to actually bring us into the present moment.

—Phakchok Rinpoche and Erric Solomon, “Creating a Confident Mind”

Via Daily Dharma: Savor Your Life

As you grow in mindfulness, you reclaim your life.

—Thich Nhat Hanh, “Thich Nhat Hanh’s Little Peugeot”

Via Daily Dharma: Wisdom Within the World

Sages, too, endure the same mundane circumstances as we—they fall sick, suffer injuries, meet with unwelcome changes—but their wisdom sees past the incidental to the universal, to the certainty of change that is best coped with by equanimity. Wisdom does not alter the world; it lets the sage transcend the world.

—Bhikkhu Nyanasobhano, “The Phone Rings”

Via Ram Dass / Words of Wisdom - October 10, 2018

A lot of people try to counteract the ‘I am not good enough’ with ‘I am good enough.’ In other words, they take the opposite and they try to invest it. That still keeps the world at the level of polarities. The art is to go behind the polarities. So the act is to go not to the world of ‘I am good’ to counteract ‘I am bad,’ or ‘I am lovable’ as opposed to ‘I am unlovable.’ But go behind it to ‘I am.’ I am. I am. And I am includes the fact that I do crappy things and I do beautiful things and I am. That includes everything and I am.

- Ram Dass -

The four immeasurables

Os quatro incomensuráveis - bondade amorosa, compaixão, alegria pela fortuna dos outros e equanimidade (The four immeasurables—loving kindness, compassion, rejoicing for others’ fortune, and equanimity) 

—Interview with Edward Simon by Gabriel Lefferts, “This Buddhist Life: Edward Simon”