Contemplations

The joy which is
in Revelation
is nowhere else.
No amount of
perception
thinking
projecting
planning
doing
efforts
achieving
every will give you
that joy
that radiance
which Revelation does.

- Swami Amar Jyoti

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Close to Home

Jane Dobisc, who later became a Zen teacher under Korean Master Seung Sahn, went on a pilgrimage to the East as a young woman, searching for a Buddhist teacher. At one point she spent weeks trekking through the Himalayas to get to a particularly remote monastery. Reaching it at last she knocked upon the door and asked if she could see the lama.

"Oh, no," replied the nun who'd opened the door. "He's in New York."

When Dobisc returned home she discovered that Master Seung Sahn had been operating a practice center in Rhode Island all along, no more than a ten-minute drive from her family's home.

- from Sean Murphy's One Bird, One Stone (Renaissance Books)

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The Path

All of us are apprenticed to the same teacher
that the religious institutions originally worked
with: reality. Reality-insight says ... master
the twenty-four hours. Do it well, without self-
pity. It is as hard to get the children herded
into the car pool and down the road to the bus
as it is to chant sutras in the Buddha-hall on
a cold morning. One move is not better than the
other, each can be quite boring, and they both
have the virtuous quality of repetition.

Repetition and ritual and their good results
come in many forms. Changing the filter, wiping
noses, going to meetings, picking up around the
house, washing dishes, checking the dipstick-don' t
let yourself think these are distracting you from
your more serious pursuits. Such a round of chores
is not a set of difficulties we hope to escape
from so that we may do our "practice" which will
put us on a "path"-it is our path.

- GARY SNYDER, 'The Practice of the Wild'

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What Is The Point?

So what is the point of waiting? What exactly are you waiting for? Is somebody going to give you what you always wanted? Will a train come from Heaven bringing you goodies? But nothing that could ever happen could be as good, as precious, as who you are. What stops you from being, from being present, is nothing but your hope for the future. Hoping for something to be different keeps you looking for some future fantasy. But it is a mirage; you'll never get there. The mirage stops you from seeing the obvious, the preciousness of Being. It is a great distortion, a great misunderstanding of what will fulfill you. When you follow the mirage, you are rejecting yourself.

-- A.H. Almaas, from 365 Nirvana, Here and Now by Josh Baran

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All wisdom and holiness are but streaks of lightening - Huang Po

I love the mystery of it all. I love the ancient Chinese Zen Master Huang Po's declaration that all our spiritual insights are at best momentary lightening flashes in the vast mystery beyond all understanding. I am delighted that thought can never grasp its source and there is no way to explain it.

There are times of identification, of emptiness and fullness, of expansion and contraction. The awakening is reborn and refreshed each day as quiet releases, small epiphanies, gratitude and wonder. At each time it is the same awakening - the realization of being the silent presence, the enduring ground of wholeness and peace that is always here beneath the surface activity. All the variations in experience - including identification and sense of separation - are seen to be the expressions of this ever present reality underlying and sourcing it all.

Dasarath
Freedom Dreams

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That we know this awareness exists means only that we have an idea of awareness. We do not see that awareness as itself an object, nor can we ever do so. If we are to know the awareness by itself, first we would have to drop knowing its objects, its reflections in thought, including the ego-thought, and then be it, not see it.

- Notebooks of Paul Brunton

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"All disciplines are fixations: discipline excludes everything, except
the one thing that one wishes to concentrate upon. Thus one
establishes a dictatorship over oneself and all understanding is
jeopardized. What is absolutely necessary is attention without
strain. When I observe myself, I am really forced to admit that
every day I am the prisoner of a thousand unsatisfied desires, or
desires whose satisfaction brings me no permanent bliss. So it
seems to me that instead of endless running from one desire to
another, it would be better to stop and examine the true nature of
desire. If this investigation is successful you will penetrate the
nature of the true aim of all desire. What any desire really aims at, is
a state of non desire. This non desire is a state in which we demand
absolutely nothing. Thus it is a state of extreme abundance, of fullness.
This fullness is revealed as being bliss and peace. You now
know that you are really seeking nothing else but fullness and
absolute peace.

Now that you have understood the inner nature of your ultimate
goal, you perceive that the ultimate goal is, in fact, not a goal, that is
to say an end towards which you strive, but that the ultimate state
can only be the consequence of relaxing and letting go. Liberation is
not to be obtained by collecting and accumulating, but by being
rooted in a state of being which is truly ours and in which we live
constantly without knowing it. Even if we wished to, we could not
live for a single moment outside of this state."

- Jean Klein