Sunday Quote: Thin Spaces

I’d rather be in the mountains thinking of God than in church thinking about the mountains.

John Muir

A little willingness to see

Pentecost weekend.

It has seemed to me sometimes as though the Lord breathes on this poor gray ember of Creation and it turns to radiance – for a moment, or a year, or the span of a life – and then it sinks back into itself again, and to look at it no one would know it had anything to do with fire, or light.

That is what I said in the Pentecost sermon. I have reflected on that sermon, and there is some truth in it. But the Lord is more constant and far more extravagant than it seems to imply. Wherever you turn your eyes the world can shine like transfiguration. You don’t have to bring a thing to it except a little willingness to see.

The words of the narrator, a dying minister, to his son in Marilynne Robinson, Gilead

What Kondanna realised

Thus spoke the Blessed One, and the Group of Five bhikkhus were gladdened. Now while this discourse was being delivered, the untarnished and clear insight arose in Venerable Kondanna thus: “Whatever has the nature to arise, has the nature to cease.”

During this talk, there arose in Kondanna the clear seeing of the Dhamma “that whatever has the nature to arise, has the nature to cease.” He insightfully saw the holding onto the world wherein dukkha [suffering] is conditioned and is let go of. In order to recognize that everything – even the very thoughts and emotions that one has – just comes and goes means that there is dispassion and detachment, a clear seeing of how things work.

Attachment means that we give thoughts or feelings a significance that they would not have if they were seen as passing phenomena. With attachment there is no independence from the immediate circumstances, no space to see things objectively. So we go up with the ups and down with the downs, falling into despair about being depressed, and we then languish in that mood.

Ajahn Sucitto, The Dawn of the Dhamma: Illuminations from the Buddha’s First Discourse

A natural process

The intelligent way of working with emotions is to try to relate to their basic substance. The basic “isness” quality of the emotions, the fundamental nature of the emotions, is just energy. And if one is able to relate with the energy, then the energies have no conflict with you. They become a natural process.

Chögyam Trungpa, The Myth of Freedom and the Way of Meditation

Healthy energies

The more you can free yourself from

your internalization of the gaze of others,

the more liberated you feel…[and]…the more you will unleash the healthy energies of the mind.

Thanissaro Bhikkhu, Under your Skin

Wasting time

If you say that getting money is the most important thing, you’ll spend your life completely wasting your time.

You’ll be doing things you don’t like in order to go on living, that is, to go on doing things you don’t like doing, which is stupid.

Alan Watts