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#2404 - Sunday, February 26, 2006 - Editor: Gloria Lee

"Spiritual truth is not something elaborate and esoteric,
it is in fact profound common sense. When you realize
the nature of mind, layers of confusion peel away. You
don't actually "become" a buddha, you simply cease,
slowly, to be deluded. And being a buddha is not being
some omnipotent spiritual superman, but becoming at last
a true human being."

~Sogyal Rinpoche
  posted by Gill Eardley to Allspirit    

           Take someone who doesn't keep score,
        who's not looking to be richer, or afraid of losing,
        who has not the slightest interest even
        in his own personality: He's free.

                   - Rumi
                   
      

Version by Coleman Barks
"Open Secret"     posted to Along the Way    

  In case you thought you understood "Examine the nature of unborn awareness," let go even of that understanding, that poise, that security, that sense of ground. Let go even of the idea of emptiness, of openness, of space...so whenever you come up with a solid conclusion, let the rug be pulled out. You can pull out your own rug, and you can also let life pull it out for you.

So if you think that everything is solid, that's one trap, and if you change that for a different belief system, that's another trap. We have to pull out the rug from under our belief systems altogether. We can do that by letting go of our beliefs, and also our sense of what is right and wrong, by just going back to the simplicity and the immediacy of our present experience, resting in the nature of alaya.

From Start Where You Are : A Guide to Compassionate Living by Pema Chodron, Copyright 1994, Shambhala Publications.

    Egos clash. That's the nature of egos.
Treat these outbursts as sneezing fits.

~Hugh Prather in "Spiritual Notes to Myself"

--gill

here's another from him:

"Letting people in is largely a matter of
not expending the energy to keep them out."

--ts

posted to Allspirit

"It's as if you had vast, unlimited space
-complete openness, total freedom, complete
liberation -and the habit of the human race is to
always, out of fear, grasp onto little parts of
it.

And that is called ego and ego is grasping on
to the content of our thoughts.
That is also the root of suffering, because there is something in
narrowing it down which inherently causes us a lot of pain because
it is then that we are always in a relationship of wanting or not
wanting.

We are always in a struggle with other people, with
situations, even with our own being.
That's what we call stress.

That's what we experience as continual, on-going stress. Even in the
most healthy, unneurotic of us, there's some kind of slight or very
profound anxiety of some kind,some kind of uneasiness or
dissatisfaction.

When Trungpa Rinpoche came to the West and was teaching in the early
days in Vermont at what used to be called Tail of the Tiger (now
Karme Choling), he used to tell the students: 'Just sit and let your
mind open and rest- let yourself be completely open with an open
mind, and whenever you get distracted and find yourself thinking- in
other words when you are no longer fully in the present and are
carried away- simply just come back again to resting your mind in an
open state.'"

                            ~Pema Chodron


From the web site:
http://www.shambhala.org/teachers/pema/meditation1.php


posted to Daily Dharma

  I remember a short conversation between the Buddha and a philosopher of his time. I have heard that Buddhism is a doctrine of enlightenment. What is your method? What do you practice every day? We walk, we eat, we wash ourselves, we sit down. What is so special about that? Everyone walks, eats, washes and sits down... Sir, when we walk, we are aware that we are walking; when we eat we are aware that we are eating.... When others walk, eat, wash, or sit down, they are generally not aware of what they are doing. -- Thich Nhat Hanh, Zen Keys

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