natural compassion through meditation

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Sitting practice makes you more aware; it sensitizes you to the little nicks and bruises

 that the heart is subject to. Hurtful things you used to say and do, 

painful things said and done to you that you formerly brushed off or hardly noticed, 

you now see as painful. It pains you to say, even to think, hurtful things,

 and you notice even more—though you probably noticed before—

when such things are said or done to you. The more you are familiar with all this

 in your own mind, the twists and turns of which increasingly come into view 

as you go on practicing, the more it dawns on you that others are like this too. 

 

You see you are not unique—there’s a human pattern here.

The human mind is a swirl of activity mostly centered around self-preservation 

and self-justification (which can, oddly, sometimes take the form of self-recrimination)

 and all sorts of scheming to get one’s own way. After some initial dismay, 

you realize this is normal. You are a mess, and so is everyone else. And when you don’t

 take the mess into account, when you insist on pretending that it doesn’t exist, 

that it is reasonable to take all the hurts and slights and confusion seriously

 and thrash around in them—you make things much worse. But appreciate the mess,

 know that it is a shared mess, and even have a sense of humor about it, 

and you can be much more forgiving and generous with yourself and others.

 So naturally, your thoughts, words, and deeds in relation to others 

will be more relaxed, generous, and kind.

Morality is more about others than it is about you. 

Mostly, the sphere of ethical conduct has to do with how you interact with others. 

Some people think that meditation makes an already self-concerned person hyper self-aware,

 thereby increasing causes for worry and upset. There might be some truth to this.

 But, mostly, meditation practice has the opposite effect: it makes much more vivid

 the feeling that you are living in a world with other people whose lives, hearts, needs, 

and pains matter as much as yours do. Meditation increases empathy.

 It makes you quite loath to hurt anyone—you see that hurting someone is the same

 as hurting yourself. In fact it is worse. You would rather hurt yourself than hurt someone else.

 If you hurt yourself, you can deal with it, somehow. But if you hurt someone else,

 you can’t necessarily help them deal with it. They are stuck with the effects of what

 you have done to them. And so are you. You have to live with it. 

Morality comes out of this sensitivity and empathy. Kindness toward others

and one’s self is what morality is fundamentally about. Not a set of rules.

 

The Buddhist precepts offer a different approach to conduct that creates suffering

for ourselves and others.  More of a helpful guide to happiness, they are offered

as behaviors that stated as negatives create problems and as positives lead to happiness.

There is no sense of sinfulness or any thing like divine retribution, only actions that are

very practical to avoid or helpful to develop.

 

 

I vow to cherish life, not to kill.
I vow to accept gifts, not to steal.
I vow to respect others, not to misuse sexuality.
I vow to practice truthfulness, not to lie.
I vow to practice clarity, not to intoxicate mind or body
of self or others.
I vow to speak with kindness, not to slander.
I vow to practice modesty, not to praise self at the expense of others.
I vow to practice generosity, not to be possessive of anything.
I vow to practice love, not to harbor ill will.

~ Norman Fischer

excerpts from Compassion without Calculation

with thanks to Lions Roar

I had learned to reduce myself to zero

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

"It was only when I had learned to reduce myself to zero," Gandhi

says, "that I was able to evolve the power of satyagraha in South Africa." 

 

Satyagraha - Literally "holding on to truth" - is the name he coined for

this method of fighting without violence or retaliation.

 

 Gandhi had a genius for making abstruse ideas practical,

and one of the best examples comes when he explains the basis

 of satyagraha. In Sanskrit the word satya,  "truth," is derived from sat,

 "that which is." Truth is; untruth merely appears to be.

 

 Gandhi brought this out of the realm of doctoral

 dissertations and into the middle of politics.  It means, he said, that evil

is real only insofar as we support it. The essence of holding on to truth

is to withdraw support of what is wrong. If enough people do this - if,

he maintained, even one person does it from a great enough depth -evil

has to collapse from lack of support.

 

Gandhi was never theoretical. He learned by doing. Satyagraha 

continued to be refined in action all his life; he was experimenting up to the

 day he was assassinated. But the essentials are present from the very

 beginning in South Africa.

First is the heartfelt conviction that a wrong situation wrongs both sides. 

 

Europeans and Indians alike were degraded by race prejudice; a

lasting solution, therefore, had to relieve this burden for all involved. In

spiritual terms this follows from the unity of life, which is what Gandhi's

"truth" means in practice. But it is also profoundly practical, because only

a solution for everyone can actually resolve the problem and move the

situation forward. 

 

More than just both sides "winning," everyone is a

 little nobler, a little more human, for the outcome.

~ Eknath Easwaran

from Gandhi The Man  

 

 

how one man changed himself to change the world

 

 

 

 

 

 

 In these verses from the Bhagavad Gita, which is set on a battlefield 

representing the human heart, a warrior prince named Arjuna,

who represents you and me, asks Sri Krishna, the Lord within, how

one can recognize a person who is aware or God in each moment

or his life. 

The reply is:

 

They live in wisdom who see themselves in all and all in them,

whose love for the Lord of Love has consumed every selfish desire

and sense craving tormenting the heart. Not agitated by grief or

hankering after pleasure, they live free from lust and fear and anger.

Fettered no more by selfish attachments, they are not elated by good

fortune nor depressed by bad.  

 

Key words in the life of Mahatma Gandhi. 

~ from Gandhi the Man:

How one man changed himself to change the world

by Eknath Easwaran

 

 

 

 

pain - healing - integration

 

 

 

 

 ~ Joseph Goldstein

grateful

 

 

 

They arrive inside
They object at evening.
There’s no one to meet them.

The lamps they carry
Cast their shadows
Back into themselves.

They make notations:
The sky and the earth
Are of the same impenetrable color.
There’s no wind. If there are rivers,
They must be beneath the ground.
Of the marvels we sought, no trace.
Of the native girls, nothing.

There’s not even dust, so we must conclude
That someone passed recently
With a broom...

As they write, the tiny universe
Stitches its black thread into them.

Eventually nothing is left
Except a faint voice
Which might belong
Either to one of them
Or to someone who came before.

It says: I’m grateful
That you’ve finally come.
It was beginning to get lonely.
I recognize you. You are all
That has eluded me.

May this be my country.

 

 

 

 

~ Charles Simic

Explorers

 

 

 

 

inside

 

 

 

 

 

Go inside a stone
That would be my way.
Let somebody else become a dove
Or gnash with a tiger’s tooth.
I am happy to be a stone.

From the outside the stone is a riddle:
No one knows how to answer it.
Yet within, it must be cool and quiet
Even though a cow steps on it full weight,
Even though a child throws it in a river;
The stone sinks, slow, unperturbed
To the river bottom
Where the fishes come to knock on it
And listen.

I have seen sparks fly out
When two stones are rubbed,
So perhaps it is not dark inside after all;
Perhaps there is a moon shining
From somewhere, as though behind a hill—
Just enough light to make out
The strange writings, the star-charts
On the inner walls. 

~ Charles Simic

 

 

 

 

the clear deep source

 

 

 

 

 

 

To allow oneself to be carried away by a multitude of conflicting concerns,

 to surrender to too many demands, to commit oneself to too many projects,

 to want to help everyone with everything is to succumb to violence.

 

 The frenzy of the activist neutralizes his work for peace.

 It destroys the fruitfulness of his own work, 

because it kills the root of inner wisdom

 which makes work fruitful.

 

 

The time for contemplation is the spring that feeds our action, 
and our action will be as deep as the spring. 
We need time to allow the spirit to clear the obstacles 
– the clinging debris and mud – 
that keeps the spring from flowing freely from its clear, 
deep source. And we need time for the spring to 
overflow into insightful and compassionate action.

 

 

 

 
- Thomas Merton

from The Violence Of Modern Life

with thanks to Heron Dance Art Journal

everyone is so stressed

We wonder why everyone is so stressed. But many of us would
not know who we are without conflict...


Democrat against Republican, socialist against capitalist,
woman vs man, black vs white, vegan vs omnivore,
the enlightened vs the ignorant...


Maybe the answer is never one side vs the other. Maybe we could
rest the [conflicted] mind in the Heart. Maybe we could all go meet
in Rumi's field, under the stars, beyond the ideas of right and wrong.
How can we get there?
Listen to the Silence. 

~ Fred LaMotte

 

 

 

wonder and unity

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Wonder is where it starts, and though wonder is also where it ends,

 this is no futile path. Whether admiring a patch of moss, a crystal,

 flower, or golden beetle, a sky full of clouds, a sea with the serene,

 vast sigh of its swells, or a butterfly wing with its arrangement of crystalline ribs,

 contours, and the vibrant bezel of its edges, the diverse scripts and ornamentations 

of its markings, and the infinite, sweet, delightfully inspired transitions

 and shadings of its colors — whenever I experience part of nature,

 whether with my eyes or another of the five senses, whenever I feel drawn in,

 enchanted, opening myself momentarily to its existence and epiphanies,

 that very moment allows me to forget the avaricious, blind world of human need,

 and rather than thinking or issuing orders, rather than acquiring or exploiting,

 fighting or organizing, all I do in that moment is “wonder,” like Goethe, 

and not only does this wonderment establish my brotherhood with him,

 other poets, and sages, it also makes me a brother to those wondrous things

 I behold and experience as the living world: butterflies and moths, beetles,

 clouds, rivers and mountains, because while wandering down the path of wonder,

 I briefly escape the world of separation and enter the world of unity.

Our universities fail to guide us down the easiest paths to wisdom… 

Rather than teaching a sense of awe, they teach the very opposite: 

counting and measuring over delight, sobriety over enchantment, 

a rigid hold on scattered individual parts over an affinity for the unified and whole. 

These are not schools of wisdom, after all, but schools of knowledge,

 though they take for granted that which they cannot teach — 

the capacity for experience, the capacity for being moved,

 the Goethean sense of wonderment.

 

 

 

 

 

~ Hermann Hesse

from  Butterflies: Reflections, Tales, and Verse

with thanks to the marginalian

 

a few words on the soul

 

 

 

 

 

 

We have a soul at times.

No one's got it nonstop,

for keeps.

 

Day after day,

year after year

may pass without it.

 

Sometimes 

it will settle for a while

only in childhood's fears and raptures.

Sometimes only in astonishment

that we are old.

 

It rarely lends a hand

in uphill tasks,

like moving furniture,

or lifting luggage,

or going miles in shoes that pinch.

 

It usually steps out

 whenever meat needs chopping

or forms have to be filled.

 

For every thousand conversations

it participates in one,

if even that,

since it prefers silence. 

 

Just when our body goes from ache to pain

it slips off duty.

 

It's picky:

it doesn't like seeing us in crowds,

our hustling for a dubious advantage

and creaky machinations make it sick.

 

Joy and sorrow

aren't two different feelings for it.

It attends us

only when the two are joined.

 

We can count on it

when we're sure of nothing

and curious about everything.

 

Among the material objects

it favors clocks with pendulums

and mirrors, which keep on working

even when no one is looking.

 

It won't say where it comes from

or when it's taking off again,

though it's clearly expecting such questions.

 

We need it

but apparently 

it needs us

for some reason too.

 

 

 

 

~ Wislawa Szymborska

from Monologue of a Dog 

 

 

 

 

the power of speech

 

 

 

 

 

Speech is such a powerful influence in our lives because we speak a lot.

Speech conditions our relationships, conditions our minds and hearts, and

to a great degree conditions consequences in the future.  

 

 The Buddha outlined a practice for staying mindful

 of how another person is addressing us, without getting caught up in our own reactivity, 

remaining compassionate for their welfare, with a mind of lovingkindness.

... there are five courses of speech that others may

use when they address you: their speech may be timely or

untimely, true or untrue, gentle or harsh, connected with

good or with harm, spoken with a mind of lovingkindness

or with inner hate....

 

you should train yourselves thus:

Our minds will remain unaffected, and we shall utter no

evil words; we shall abide compassionate for their welfare,

with a mind of lovingkindness...

 

One speaks at the right time, in accordance with facts,

speaks what is useful,,,

 

 

 

 

 

 ~ Buddha

 from Mindfulness: A Practical Guide to Awakening

by Joseph Goldstein

to catch a look at yourself

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I

I flinch from something that shuffles slantwise through sleet,
A fragment of what is to come.
A wall broken loose. Something without eyes. Hard.
A face of teeth!
A lone wall. Or is the house there
although I do not see it?
The Future: an army of empty houses
that grope their way ahead through sleet.

II

Two truths approach each other. One comes from within,
one comes from without--and where they meet you have the chance
to catch a look at yourself.
Noticing what is about to happen, you shout desperately: "Stop!
Anything, anything, as long as I don't have to know myself."
And there is a boat that wants to put in--tries to, right here--
it will try again thousands of times.
Out of the forest's dark comes a long boat hook
that's pushed through the open window
among the party guests who have danced themselves warm.

III

The apartment I've lived in most of my life is to be evacuated. It's already
emptied of everything. The anchor has let go--but despite the mournful
air it's still the lightest apartment in the city. Truth needs no furniture.
I've gone one round on life's circle and come back to the starting point: a
bare room. Scenes from my early life take shape on the walls like Egyptian
paintings inside a burial chamber. But they are fading. The light is too
strong. The windows have enlarged. The empty apartment is a big tele-
scope pointed at the sky. It's as quiet here as a Quaker meeting. Nothing
heard b ut the pigeons of the backyards, their cooings.

 

 

 

 

 

~ Tomas Transtromer

   Preludes

 art by Picasso

 

 

unlock the fullness of life

 

 

 

 

 

 

 Gratitude unlocks the fullness of life.

 It turns what we have into enough, and more. 

It turns denial into acceptance,

 chaos to order, confusion to clarity.

 

 It can turn a meal into a feast, 

a house into a home, 

a stranger into a friend. 

 

Gratitude makes sense of our past,

 brings peace for today and creates a vision for tomorrow.

 

 

 

 

 ~ Melody Beattie

with thanks to Heron Dance Art Journal

shoreline of the magnificent

 

 

 

 

 

The visible world is only the shoreline of the magnificent
ocean of the invisible. The invisible is not empty, but is
textured and tense with presences [energies]. These
presences cannot be named; they can only be sensed, not seen.

When you name a dimension of your experience, one of your
qualities or difficulties...you give it an identity. It then responds
to you according to the tone of its name...

The wildness of the invisible world is nameless. It has no name.
A first step towards reawakening respect for your inner life
may be to become aware of the private collage of dead names
you have for your inner life. 

 

Often the experiences of
wilderness can return us to the nameless wildness within.
Sometimes, go away to a wild place of your own. Leave
your name and the grid of intentions and projects and images
which mark you out as citizen Z. Leave it all and let yourself
just slip back into the rhythms of your intimate wildness.[rhythm]

 
You will be surprised at the lost terrains, wells, and mountains
that you will rediscover, territories which have been buried
under well-meant but dead names. To go beyond confinement
is to rediscover yourself.

 

 

 

 

John O'Donohue
from Eternal Echoes

with thanks to Mystic Meandering

 

 

 

 

an unexpected visitor, a joy, a depression, a meanness

.

This being human is a guest house.
Every morning a new arrival,
A joy, a depression, a meanness,
Some momentary awareness come 

As an unexpected visitor,
Welcome and entertain them all,
Even if they're a crowd of sorrows
Who violently sweep your house
Empty of its furniture,
Still, treat each guest honorably 

They may be clearing you out
For some new delight.

The dark thought, the shame, the shame, the malice,
Meet them at the door laughing
And invite them in.
Be grateful for whoever comes,
Because each has been sent
As a guide from above.


.
~ Rumi

.