I’ve struggled with worry and anxiety my entire life. Tried a little counseling. A mild anti-anxiety drug for a while. Lots of reading on the subject. And, in recent years, meditation. I suspect a professional would put me on the low end of the anxiety spectrum, if there is such a thing. At this point in my life, I don’t expect to ever be completely worry-free. I’ve learned to live with it. Continue reading
This Q&A with James Altucher might be the best thing I’ve come across about “minimalism” although he quickly disavows that label. I couldn’t live as he does but he’s not suggesting I should. A few snippets:
I have one bag of clothes, one backpack with a computer, iPad, and phone. I have zero other possessions.
For me, having little means I don’t have to think about things that I own.
I have 238,795 unread emails in my inbox. Emails are a suggestion but not an obligation.
I understand real books are beautiful. So I go to bookstores for hours and read them. But I won’t own them because they won’t fit in my one bag.
I never read random articles on the Internet unless they are by people I know.
I like this guy’s style. No idea what others should do… just some thoughts on what he should do. Today. Tomorrow? Who knows?
Excerpts from Alan Watts’ Become What You Are:
Though your thoughts may run into the past or the future they cannot escape the present moment.
A man does not really begin to be alive until he has lost himself, until he has released the anxious grasp which he normally holds upon his life, his property, his reputation and position.
The one important result of any serious attempt at self-renunciation or self-acceptance is the humiliating discovery that it is impossible. […] The people who have quite genuinely died to themselves make no claims of any kind to their own part in the process.
Our attempts to stand above (our) emotions and control them are the emotions themselves at play.
Your everyday mind is the Tao. Continue reading
Excerpts from Alan Watts’ Still the Mind (An Introduction to Meditation)
We fail to distinguish between the way things are and the way they are described.
One’s actual organic being is inseparable from the universe.
I found out that unless one has something to give people, there is nothing one can do to help them. Just because I thought I ought to help, it didn’t mean that I had anything to give.
The whole energy of the universe is coming at you and through you, and you are that energy.
You can only know what you can compare with something else.
What we call the past is simply the traces, the fade-outs trailing away from the present. Continue reading
Just finished Waking Up – A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion by Sam Harris. Amazon reviews here; more about Mr. Harris here. Ideas I found highlighter-worthy below.
Our minds are all we have. They are all we have ever had. And they are all we can offer others. Every experience you have ever had has been shaped by your mind.
It is your mind, rather than circumstances themselves, that determine the quality of your life.
Everything we want to accomplish is something that promises, if done, it would allow us to finally relax and enjoy our lives in the present. […] Each of us is looking for a path back to the present: We are trying to find good enough reasons to be satisfied now.
Twenty percent of Americans describe themselves as “spiritual but not religious.”
Is it possible to be happy before anything happens, before one’s desires are gratified, in spite of life’s difficulties, in the very midst of physical pain, old age, disease, and death?
On one level, wisdom is nothing more profound than an ability to follow one’s own advice.
A true spiritual practitioner is someone who has discovered that it is possible to be at ease in the world for no reason, if only for a few moments at a time.
It is impossible for any faith, no matter how elastic, to fully honor the truth claims of another.
We manage to avoid being happy while struggling to become happy.
(Mindfulness is ) a state of clear, nonjudgmental, and undistracted attention to the contents of consciousness. […] Being mindful is not a matter of thinking more clearly about experience; it is the act of experiencing more clearly, including the arising of thoughts themselves.
The problem is not thoughts themselves but the state of thinking without knowing we are thinking.
Most people who believe they are meditating are merely thinking with their eyes closed.
Most of us spend every waking moment lost in the movie of our lives.
Meditation is a technique for waking up.
Investigating the nature of consciousness is the basis of spiritual life.
Consciousness is the one thing in this universe that cannot be an illusion.
If you shut your eyes at this moment, the contents of your consciousness change quite drastically, but your consciousness (arguably) does not.
Are we unconsciousness during sleep or merely unable to remember what sleep is like?
We are not aware of all the information that influences our thoughts, feelings, and actions.
I’ve forgotten most of what has happened to me over the course of my life.
Subjectively speaking, the only thing that actually exists is consciousness and its contents. […] Reality vastly exceeds our awareness of it.
(I am) a continuum of experience.
The feeling of “I” is a product of thought. […] Having an ego is what it feels like to be thinking without knowing that you are thinking.
(Thoughts are) transient appearances in consciousness.
We tell ourselves the story of the present, as though some blind person were inside our heads who required continuous narration to know what is happening.
Even if your life depended on it, you could not spend a full minute free of thought. […] We spend our lives lost in thought. […] Taking oneself to be the thinking of one’s thoughts is a delusion.
One must be able to pay attention closely enough to glimpse what consciousness is like between thoughts — that is, prior to the arising of the next one.
We imagine that we are conscious of our selves within our bodies. We seem to be riding around inside our bodies.
(The self) is the feeling that there is an inner subject, behind our eyes, thinking our thoughts and experiencing our experience.
It may be that an awareness of other minds is a necessary condition for an awareness of one’s own.
Consciousness is the prior condition of every experience; the self or ego is an illusory appearance within it; look closely for what you are calling “I,” and the feeling of being a separate self will disappear; what remains, as a matter of experience, is a field of consciousness — uncontaminated by its ever-changing contents.
Consciousness is intrinsically free of self.
That which is aware of sadness is not sad. That which is aware of fear is not fearful. Notice thoughts as they emerge and recognize them to be transitory appearances in consciousness. In subjective terms, you are consciousness itself — you are not the next, evanescent image or string of words that appears in your mind.
Consciousness is intrinsically undivided.
Nothing is intrinsically boring — boredom is simply a lack of attention.
We need not come to the end of the path to experience the benefits of walking it.
We read for the pleasure of thinking another person’s thoughts.
It is by ceasing to cling to the contents of consciousness — to our thought, moods, and desires — that we make progress.
There is experience, and then there are the stories we tell about it.
Consciousness is never improved or harmed by what it knows.
Excerpts from This Is It: and Other Essays on Zen and Spiritual Experience by Alan Watts.
This — the immediate, everyday, and present experience— is IT, the entire and ultimate point for the existence of a universe. […] We use this simplest of words because we have no word for it.
The high ideals for which we are killing and regimenting each other are empty and abstract substitutes for the unheeded miracles that surround us— not only in the obvious wonders of nature but also in the overwhelmingly uncanny fact of mere existence.
Everything is as right as it can be. […] The universe, precisely as it is at this moment, as a whole and in every one of its parts, is so completely right as to need no explanation or justification beyond what it simply is.
It is usual for the individual to feel that the whole world has become his own body, and that whatever he is has not only become, but always has been, what everything else is.
The immediate now, whatever its nature, is the goal and fulfillment of all living.
The enlightenment or awakening is not the creation of a new state of affairs but the recognition of what always is.
Each thing, each event, each experience in its inescapable nowness and in all its own particular individuality was precisely what it should be, and so much so that it acquired a divine authority and originality.
Solving problems and coping with situations is by no means the only or even the chief business of life.
Nature is much more playful than purposeful, and the probability that it has no special goals for the future need not strike one as a defect.
The point of music is discovered in every moment of playing and listening to it. It is the same, I feel, with the greater part of our lives, and if we are unduly absorbed in improving them we may forget altogether to live them.
“Law of nonidentity” — “whatever you say a thing is, it isn’t.” […] (There is a world other than words) Words represent it, but if we want to know it directly we must do so by immediate sensory contact.
However much I may be impressed by the difference between a star and the dark space around it , I must not forget that I can see the two only in relation to each other, and that this relation is inseparable.
There are no such things as truths by themselves: a truth is always in relation to a point of view.
The price of intelligence as we now know it is chronic anxiety,
Imagine, a point of view, or perhaps a state of mind, which is experiential rather than intellectual— a kind of sensation rather than a set of ideas.
Let your mind alone ; let it think whatever it likes.
Thinker and thoughts are the same. […] When the dualism of thinker and thought disappears so does that of subject and object.
Man is not so much an organism in an environment as an organism-environment relationship.
Strictly speaking, there are no Zen masters because Zen has nothing to teach. […] the experience of awakening (satori) is not to be found by seeking,
One (can) not be right without also being wrong, because the two were as inseparable as back and front.
I believe that Zen appeals to many in the post-Christian West because it does not preach, moralize, and scold in the style of Hebrew-Christian prophetism.
Looking out into it at night, we make no comparisons between right and wrong stars, nor between well and badly arranged constellations. Stars are by nature big and little, bright and dim. Yet the whole thing is a splendor and a marvel which sometimes makes our flesh creep with awe.
In Zen one does not feel guilty about dying, or being afraid, or disliking the heat.
The Hebrew-Christian universe is one in which moral urgency, the anxiety to be right, embraces and penetrates everything.
The appeal of Zen, as of other forms of Eastern philosophy, is that it unveils behind the urgent realm of good and evil a vast region of oneself about which there need be no guilt or recrimination, where at last the self is indistinguishable from God.
Zen is above all the liberation of the mind from conventional thought.
“Fundamentally not one thing exists.” Things are terms, not entities. They exist in the abstract world of thought, but not in the concrete world of nature .
Ego is (a) persona or social role, a somewhat arbitrary selection of experiences with which he has been taught to identify himself.
Excerpts from The Way of Zen
I have no other self than the totality of things of which I am aware.
I have somehow become the empty space in which everything is happening.
TAO
The vague, void-seeming, and indefinable Tao is the intelligence which shapes the world with a skill beyond our understanding. … Whereas God produces the world by making, the Tao produces it by “not-making” (growing).
The Tao’s principle is spontaneity. But spontaneity is not by any means a blind, disorderly urge, a mere power of caprice. … A philosophy restricted to the alternatives of conventional language has no way of conceiving an intelligence which does not work according to plan, according to a (one-at-a-time) order of thought.
Hsuan – A metaphorical darkness; the sheer inconceivability which confronts the mind when it tries to remember a time before birth, or to penetrate its own depths.
If the ordinary man is one who has to walk by lifting his legs with his hands, the Taoist is one who has learned to let the legs walk by themselves.
The eye’s sensitivity to color is impaired by the fixed idea that there are just five true colors.
BUDDHISM
Reasonable men will always be capable of compromise, but men who have dehumanized themselves by becoming the blind worshipers of an idea or an ideal are fanatics whose devotion to abstractions make them enemies of life.
The value of emptiness lies in the the movements it permits or in the substance which it mediates and contains. But the emptiness must come first. This is why Indian philosophy concentrates on negation, on liberating the mind from concepts of Truth.
The basic reality of my life is not any conceivable object.
Maya: Things, facts, and events are delineated, not by nature, but by human description, and the way in which we describe (or divide) them is relative to our varying points of view.
–
The formal world becomes the real world in the moment when it is no longer clutched, in the moment when its changed fluidity is no longer resisted.
It is precisely (the) realization of the total elusiveness of the world which lies at the root of Buddhism.
SELF
Any attempt to conceive the Self, believe in the Self, or seek for the Self immediately thrusts it away.
It is fundamental to every school of Buddhism that there is no ego, no enduring entity which is the constant subject of our changing experiences. For the ego exists in an abstract sense alone, being an abstraction from memory. The past from which our ego is abstracted has entirely disappeared.
To one who has self-knowledge, there is no duality between himself and the external world.
(Zen on the Round of birth-and-death) The process of rebirth is from moment to moment, so that one is being reborn so long as one identifies himself with a continuing ego which reincarnates itself at each moment in time.
Nirvana can only arise unintentionally, spontaneously, when the impossibility of self-grasping has been thoroughly perceived.
Buddhism does not share the Western view that there is a moral law, enjoined by God or nature, which is man’s duty to obey.
Smriti (recollectedness) is a constant awareness or watching of one’s sensations, feelings, and thoughts – without purpose or comment. It is a total clarity and presence of mind, actively passive, wherein events come and go like reflections in a mirror: nothing is reflected except what is.
Through such awareness it is seen that the separation of the thinker from the thought, the knower from the known, the subject from the object, is purely abstract. There is not the mind on the one hand and its experiences on the other: there is just a process of experiencing in which there is nothing to be grasped, as an object, and no one, as a subject, to grasp it.
The object itself is just thought. A thought cannot see itself.
Dharmadhatu – The proper harmony of the universe is realized when each “thing-event” is allowed to be freely and spontaneously itself, without interference.
Logic and meaning, with its inherent duality, is a property of thought and language but not of the actual world.
As the sound “water” is not actually water, the classified world is not the real world.
Instead of trying to purify or empty the mind, one must simply let go of the mind – because the mind is nothing to be grasped. Letting go of the mind is also equivalent to letting go of the series of thoughts and impressions which come and go “in” the mind, neither repressing them, holding them, nor interfering with them.
PRINCIPLES AND PRACTICE
The fondest illusion of the human mind: in the course of time everything may be made better and better.
The power of thought enables us to construct symbols of things apart from the things themselves. This includes the ability to make a symbol, an idea of ourselves apart from ourselves. We learn to identify ourselves with our idea of ourselves.
All ideas of self-improvement and of becoming or getting something in the future relate solely to our abstract image of ourselves.
In Taoist and Buddhist thought there is no conception of a God who deliberately and consciously governs the universe. [The Tao, without doing anything leaves nothing undone]
It is part of the very genius of the human mind that it can, as it were, stand aside from life and reflect upon it, that it can be aware of its own existence, and that it can criticize its own processes.
When human beings think too carefully and minutely about an action to be taken, they cannot make up their minds in time to act.
From (such) memories, reflections, and symbols the mind constructs its idea of itself. … The identification of the mind with its own image is paralyzing because the image is fixed — it is past and finished.
The attempt to act and think about (an) action simultaneously is precisely the identification of the mind with its idea of itself.
Whatever we do, and whatever “happens” to us, is ultimately “right.”
To act “without second thought,” without double-mindedness, is by no means a mere precept of our imitation. For we cannot realize this kind of action until it is clear beyond any shadow of doubt that it is actually impossible to do anything else.
There is no necessity for the mind to try to let go of itself, or to try not to try.
“Brushing off thoughts which arise is just like washing off blood with blood.” – Japanese master Bankei
Social conditioning fosters the identification of the mind with a fixed idea of itself as the means of self-control, and as a result man thinks of himself as “I” – the ego. Thereupon the mental center of gravity shifts from the spontaneous or original mind to the ego image. Once this has happened, the very center of our psychic life is identified with the self-controlling mechanism.
As soon as I recognize that my voluntary and purposeful action happens spontaneously “by itself,” just like breathing, hearing, and feeling, I am no longer caught in the contradiction of trying to be spontaneous. There is no real contradiction, since “trying” is “spontaneity.”
One stops trying to be spontaneous by seeing that it is unnecessary to try, and then and there it can happen. … One does not realize the spontaneous life by depending on the repetition of thoughts or affirmation. One realizes it by seeing that no such devices are necessary.
Zen lies beyond the ethical standpoint, whose sanctions must be found, not in reality itself, but in the mutual agreement of human beings.
Zen does not confuse spirituality with thinking about God while one is peeling potatoes. Zen spirituality is just to peel the potatoes.
Zen is neither self nor Buddha to which one can cling, no good to gain and no evil to be avoided, no thoughts to be eradicated and no mind to be purified, nobody to perish and no soul to be saved.
The practice of Zen is not the true practice so long as it has an end in view, and when it has no end in view it is awakening — the aimless, self-sufficient life of the “eternal now.”
As muddy water is best cleared by leaving it alone, it could be argued that those who sit quietly and do nothing are making one of the best possible contributions to a world in turmoil.
To see the world as it is concretely, undivided by categories and abstractions, one must certainly look at it with a mind which is not thinking — which is to say, forming symbols about it. … A quiet awareness, without comment, of whatever happens to be here and now. This awareness is attended by the most vivid sensation of “nondifference” between oneself and the external world, between the mind and its contents — the various sounds, sights, and other impressions of the surrounding environment. … It just comes by itself when one is sitting and watching without any purpose in mind — even the purpose of getting rid of purpose.
The basic position of Zen is that it has nothing to say, nothing to teach. The truth of Buddhism is so self-evident, so obvious that it is, if anything, concealed by explaining it.
Awakening almost necessarily involves a sense of relief because it brings to an end the habitual psychological cramp of trying to grasp the mind with the mind, which in turn generates the ego with all its conflicts and defenses.
What we are, most substantially and fundamentally, will never be a distinct object of knowledge. Whatever we can know — life and death, light and darkness, solid and empty — will be the relative aspects of something as inconceivable as the color of space.
Awakening is to know what reality is not.
So long as one thinks about listening, one cannot hear clearly, and so long as one thinks about trying or not trying to let go of oneself, one cannot let go. Yet whether one thinks about listening or not, the ears are hearing just the same, and nothing can stop the sound from reaching them.
Because the world is not going anywhere there is no hurry. Hurry, and all that it involves, is fatal. For there is no goal to be attained.
The purposeful life has no content, no point. It hurries on and on, and misses everything. It is only when there is no goal and no rush that the human senses are fully open to receive the world. People in a hurry cannot feel.
Making an effort to concentrate on the instantaneous moment implies at once that there are other moments.
I’m not really sure what Stephen Batchelor is trying to say in Buddhism Without Beliefs. I think his main idea is there in the title. Excerpts below got some highlighter… real reviews at Amazon. This wasn’t one of my favorite books on the topic.
Awakening is no longer seen as something to attain in the distant future, for it is not a thing but a process — and this process is the path itself. […] It is an authentic way of being in the world.
The dharma is not something to believe in but something to do. [ Wikipedia: In Buddhism dharma means “cosmic law and order”, but is also applied to the teachings of the Buddha.]
An agnostic Buddhist is not a “believer” with claims to revealed information about supernatural or paranormal phenomena, and in this sense is not “religious.” […] The dharma is not a belief by which you will be miraculously saved. It is a method to be investigated and tried out. […] An agnostic Buddhist eschews atheism as much as theism, and is as reluctant to regard the universe as devoid of meaning as endowed with meaning.
Buddhism could be described as “the culture of awakening.”
Religions are united not be belief in God but by belief in life after death.
Regardless of what we believe, our actions will reverberate beyond our deaths. Irrespective of our personal survival, the legacy of our thoughts, words, and deeds will continue through the impressions we leave behind in the lives of those we have influenced or touched in any way.
Life is neither meaningful nor meaningless. Meaning and its absence are given to life by language and imagination.
Anguish emerges from craving for life to be other than it is.
Dharma practice is founded on resolve. […] An ongoing, heartfelt reflection on priorities, values and purpose. […] Dharma practice is the process of awakening itself: the thoughts, words, and deeds that weave the unfolding fabric of experience into a coherent whole.
The process of awakening is like walking on a footpath. When we find such a path after hours of struggling through undergrowth, we know at last that we are heading somewhere. Moreover, we suddenly find that we can move freely without obstruction. We settle into a rhythmic and easy pace. […] What counts is not so much the destination but the resolve to take the next step.
Focused awareness is difficult not because we are inept at some spiritual technology but because it threatens our sense of who we are.
The stiller the mind, the more palpable the dazzling torrent of life becomes.
The world is so saturated with the meanings given to it that those meanings seem to reside in the things themselves.
At every moment we are either inclining toward or engaged in an act: a physical movement, an utterance, a thought. Even when you decide not to act, you are still doing something: refraining.
As you sit in meditation, notice how what you are doing is the enactment of an earlier resolve. By attending to the details of this present moment, by choosing not to recollect the past or plan for the future, you are engaged in a process of creating yourself in a specific and deliberate way.
What are we but the story we keep repeating, editing, censoring, and embellishing in our heads? [I am] an unfolding narrative.
We cannot attain awakening for ourselves: we can only participate in the awakening of life.
When belief and opinion are suspended, the mind has nowhere to rest.
Susan Blackmore describes her fascinating book as “my own attempt to combine science and personal practice in the investigation of consciousness.”
“Learning to meditate means nothing more than learning to sit still and pay attention, staying relaxed and alert, without getting tangled up in trains of thoughts, emotions or inner conversations.”
“Now I understood the need for a calm mind. We were told that calming the mind is the starting point of all meditation, but that it can also take you all the way. We were told even scarier things; that what you are searching for is here right now, that there is really nothing to strive for and that once you arrive you will realise there was nowhere to go in the first płace; that however hard you work, and you must work hard, in the end you will know that there is nothing to be done.”
“Being in the present moment […] meant that I was not to think about the next moment, not to dwell on what I had just done, not to think about what I might have said instead, not to imagine a conversaton that I might have later, not to look forward to lunch, not to look forward to weekends, or holidays or… anything.”
“The present moment is always all right. All my troubles lay in the thoughts I was letting go of. […] The body seemed to keep on doing relevant and sensible things, apparently without all the agonising I had assumed was essential.”
“Idealism: The idea that there is no separate physical world, and everything in the universe is made up of thoughts, or ideas or consciousness.”
“Materialism: The idea that there is no separate mental world, and everything in the universe is mad of matter.”
“Actions exist, and also their consequences, but the person that acts does not. — Buddhist saying
“Am I conscious now? It troubles me that I seem so often to be unconscious. I wonder what this unconsciousness is. I cannot believe I spend most of my life in a kind of darkness. Surely that cannot be so. Yet every time I ask the question it feels as though I am waking up, or that a light is switching on.”
“How can I look into the darkness, when looking makes it light?”
“The words aren’t really necessary anymore. Rather, there just seems to be a questioning attitude, an openness of mind. Am I conscious now? Yes, I am, keep on that way, and now, and now, and gently now. […] Awareness does become more continuous with practice — it can just take a very long time.”
“I can grab a now. I can grasp out with my attention. This and this. They happened at once, didn’t they. It was a now, I am sure, even though it was gone by the time I can have that certanty. […] I cannot work out what it would mean for there to be no now. And yet there does not seem to be a now. […] When I sit quietly, doing nothing, there is no obvious choice of what is now. Stuff just happens.”
“I was looking for the me that was looking and I found only the world. I am, it seems, the world I see.”
“There is not a separate me as well as the experience. It is hard to accept that I am all those people walking down the street.”
“I see and hear and feel but name nothing. […] It is something like paying attention equally to everything.”
“How can I tell the clouds have moved? Because from one moment to the next I can remember what came before.”
“There are multiple brain processes going on, some of which take up more of the brain’s capacity than others, but there is no me who experiences them, and no time at which they become conscious.”
“The world we think we see or hear — is always a memory. and what is a memory?”
“Do past and future look different? […] They’re all just the same stuff — memory stuff; imagination stuff. Past and future can be held in mind as equivalent.”
“Mindfullness is being fully here in the present moment. But now I know that there is no such moment. So what is mindfullness?” [What I understand as ‘now’ is really just a memory of just-past moment]
“What was I conscious of a moment ago? I found whole streams of experience that seemed to have already been going on, for someone, before I noticed them.”
“There is no thinker other than the thoughts. […] I’ve always treated thoughts as a problem, or something to be dealt with. Now, instead of either fighting them or watching them, I am simply to be them.”
“The universe seems to be causlly closed. That is, everything that happens is caused by something else. Nothing happens by magical forces intervening from outside the web of causes and effects, for everything is interconnected with everything else. […] Yet I feel as though I can act freely. Indeed this magical view is probably how most people in most cultures have always thought about themselves, imagining a non-physical mental entity that has wishes and desires, can think and plan, and carry out those plans by acting on the world.”
“Decision are made because of countless interacting events, and afterwards a little voice inside says, ‘I did that’, ‘I decided to do that.’ […] I am not separate from the perceptions, thoughts and actions that make up my world. And if I am what seems to be the world, the we are in this together. Me and the world, world/me are doing all these actions that now just seem to act of their own accord.”
“The world had summed up the options, chose one, carried it out, and moved on. This action was a result of everything I had learned and done before. […] Could I just trust the world and this body to woirk all by itself without me doing anything?”
“I am not a continuous conscious being at all. What seems to be me just arises along with whatever is being experienced. […] Every time some experience comes along, the me is allowed to go, along with the ending of the experience, as though experience and experiencer arise and then snuff out together. […] There never was a continuous I. […] The ‘same me’ was never recreated. […] Will I be snuffed out like a candle? Yes, just as I have been a thousand, million times before.” #
“Consciousness is an illusion; an enticing and convincing illusion that lures us into believing that our minds are separate from our bodies.”
“(My selves) arise along with the sensations, perceptions and thoughts that they seem to be having, and die along with them. With every new ‘this’ there is a new ‘me’ who was looking into it.”
There is nothing it is like to be me.
I am not a persisting conscious entity.
I do not consciously cause sthe actions of my body.
Consciousness is not a stream of experiences.
Seeing entails no vivid mental pictures or movie in the brain.
There is no unity of consciousness either in a given moment or through time.
Brain activity is neither conscious no unconscious.
There are no contents of consciousness.
There is no now.
“At any time in a human brain there are multiple parallel processes going on, conjuring up perceptions, thoughts, opinions, sensations and volitions. None of these is either in or out of consciousness for there is no such place. Most of the time there is no observer: if consciousness is involved at all it is an attribudon made later, on the basis of remembering events and assuming that someone must have been experiencing them in the past, when in fact no one was.”
Mindfulness Meditation in Everyday Life by Jon Kabat-Zinn (Amazon)
What happens now, in this moment, influences what happens next.
We tend to be particularly unaware that we are thinking virtually all the time. […] Meditation means learning how to get out of this current.
Meditation is the only intentional, systematic human activity which at the bottom is about not trying to improve yourself or get anywhere else, but simply to realize where you already are.
Let go of wanting something else to happen in this moment.
Is it possible for you to contemplate that this may actually be the best season, the best moment of your life?
Look at other people and ask yourself if you are really seeing them or just your thoughts about them. Sometimes our thoughts act like “dream glasses.”
If you do decide to start meditation, there’s no need to tell other people about it, or talk about why you are doing it or what it’s doing for you. […] Just look at (this) as more thinking.
Meditation is neither shutting things out nor off. It is seeing things clear4ly, and deliberately positioning yourself differently in relationship to them.
Meditation is not about feeling a certain way. It’s about feeling the way you feel. It’s not about making the mind empty or still. […] Meditation is about letting the mind be as it is.
Even our leisure tends to be busy and mindless. The joy of non-doing is that nothing else needs to happen for this moment to be complete.
“To affect the quality of the day, that is the highest of arts.” — Thoreau
(We meditate to realize) “…that things are already perfect.”
We tend to see things through tinted glasses: through the lens of whether something is good for me or bad for me, or whether or not it conforms to my beliefs or philosophy.
At the deepest level, there is no giver, no gift, and no recipient… only the universe rearranging itself.
Voluntary Simplicity: “…intentionally doing only one thing at a time and making sure I am here for it.
If mindfulness is deeply important to you, then every moment is an opporunity to practice.
Meditation is more rightly thought of as “Way” than as a technique.
Awareness is not the same as thought. It lies beyond thinking. […] Awareness is more like a vessel which can hold and contain our thinking.
Meditation involves watching thought itself.
The posture itself is the meditation. The posture speaks of not looking for anything more, but simply digesting what is.
Mindfullness: Allowing one moment to unfold intot he next without analyzing, discoursing, judging, condemning, or doubting; simply observing, embracing, opening, letting be, accepting. Right now. Only this step. Only this moment.
We often see our thoughts, or someone else’s, instead of seeing what is right in front of us or inside of us.
When we perceive our intrinsic wholeness, there is truly no place to go and nothing to do.
What we call “the self” is really a construct of our own mind.
Stop trying so hard to be “somebody” and instead just experience being. […] You are only you in relationship to all other forces and events in the world.
You are who you already are. But who you are is not your name, your age, your childhood, your beliefes, your fears. They are part of it, but not the whole.
The self is impermanent. […] It is constantly changing, decaying, and being reconstructed again, always slightly differently, depending on the circumstances of the moment. […] It never repeats itself. Whenever you look, it is slightly different.