Who Would You Be?
"Isn't it funny how no baby is born racist, yet every baby cries when they hear the cries of another. No matter the gender, culture, or color — proving that, deep down, we were meant to connect and care for each other."
~ Prince Ea
To Tell the Modes Apart
Mindfulness practice doesn’t eliminate my personal narrative. It gradually changes my relationship to it.
Tired of Yourself
"A lot of the poetic discipline boils down to getting tired of yourself, and I really believe that. When you get tired of yourself, then you change."
~ David Whyte
Freedom
"I think hard times are coming when we will be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now and can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies to other ways of being, and even imagine some real grounds for hope. We will need writers who can remember freedom. Poets, visionaries—the realists of a larger reality."
~ Ursula Le Guin
Liberation through Intimacy
Transcendence isn't an escape plan, but an engagement strategy: liberation through intimacy. Transcending the self and the world begins with deeply accepting the self and the world. It grows naturally out of countless direct experiences of life as it is being lived and an intimate familiarity with how its composition constantly fluctuates.
The Myth of Permanence
"Contemplating impermanence can be a liberating experience, one that brings both sobriety and joy."
~ Sakyong Mipham
If We Didn't Try to Hold the Flux
“What both science and at least some philosophical and even religious traditions tell us is that the world is impermanent. Nothing in it stays the same. We don't stay the same. Our bodies don't stay the same. The people that we love and the things that we love don't stay the same. That's just the truth of the matter, that there's this constant impermanence, this constant flux. And some philosophers have argued over the years that we should just embrace that. We would be freer if we didn't try to hold that flux for a moment.”
Alison Gopnik
Changing the Plane of Focus
"Many longtime meditators seem completely unaware that these two planes of focus exist, and they spend their lives looking out the window, as it were."
~ Sam Harris
The Ego Will Be Asked to Open to Something Larger
"The ego wishes comfort, security, satiety; the soul demands meaning, struggle, becoming. The contention of these two voices sometimes tears us apart. Ordinary ego consciousness is crucified by these polarities. Again, the paradox emerges that in our suffering, in our symptoms, are profound clues as to the meaning of the struggle, yet the path of healing is very difficult for the apprehensive ego to accept, for the ego will be asked to be open to something larger than itself."
~ James Hollis, from Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life: How to Finally, Really Grow Up
Come and Go Freely
"The sense of self becomes a home rather than a prison. You can come and go freely."
~ Shinzen Young