So I Believed Inspirational
“The night before brain surgery, I thought about death. I searched out my larger values, and I asked myself, if I was going to die, did I want to do it fighting and clawing or in peaceful surrender? What sort of character did I hope to show? Was I content with myself and what I had done with my life so far? I decided that I was essentially a good person, although I could have been better - but at the same time I understood that the cancer didn’t care.”
“I asked myself what I believed. Quite simply, I believed I had the responsibility to be a good person, and that meant fair, honest, hardworking and honorable. If I did that, if I was good to my family, true to my friends, if I gave back to …
live a life as free as a bird on the wing inspirational
It is an old association, and a misunderstanding, that to be a nonconformist is to be a rebel. The nonconformist is a reactionary; he acts out of anger, rage, violence and ego. His action is not based in consciousness. Although he goes against the society, just to be against the society is not necessarily to be right. In fact most of the time to move from one extreme to another is always to move from one wrong to another wrong.
The rebel acts with a tremendous balance, and that is not possible without awareness, alertness, and immense compassion. It is not a reaction, it is an action — not against the old, but for the new.
The rebel is creating the new world …
Root of happiness inspirational
Root of happiness is knowing that everything changes. That’s all there is to happiness. It’s nothing you pursue. It’s living in the constant continual paradox of life.
The Vedas say that the yes and the no uttered together produce the silence. We spend so much of our time trying to take the yes and the no and resolve it. Instead of being pushed into wonder and not knowing, we have whole explorations of how do we deal with paradox, how do we live in paradox, how do we resolve paradox? The yes and the no, the complete contrariness of life, is actually only meant to move us into silence.
How many of us have been in search of our purpose? How do we reconcile looking for purpose and being…
The Werner Heisenberg Quantum Matrix
Although doctors might disagree on this or that cure, they all agreed on one thing: the patient’s own consciousness was irrelevant. What mattered was the doctor’s ability to manipulate drugs and body parts, much as a mechanic manipulates the parts of a car. It would be a foolish mechanic, indeed, who believed that his or her feelings — let alone the car’s feelings! — had anything to do with getting the vehicle back on the road. We doctors were considered equally foolish to believe that either our own or the patient’s consciousness played any role in the healing process.
But this vision of the body as machine was based on a long-outdated model of the physical world, grounded in t…
hard places in my heart inspirational
Once in a while, we are given moments of real grace.
Sometimes, during my early-morning meditation, a place within me opens and parts of myself let go that I did not even know were holding on. In these moments I feel all the hard places in my heart and body yield to a great softness carried on my breath, and I am filled with compassion for the part of me that is always trying, always organizing, problem solving, anticipating. And my mind stops and simply follows my breath. A great faith washes through me, a knowing that everything that needs to get done will get done.
My shoulders drop an inch, the small but familiar ache in my chest eases, and the moment stretches. There is en…
Order of the Star inspirational
Truth is a pathless land.
Truth, being limitless, unconditioned, unapproachable by any path whatsoever, cannot be organized; nor should any organization be formed to lead or to coerce people along any particular path. If you first understand that, then you will see how impossible it is to organize a belief. A belief is purely an individual matter, and you cannot and must not organize it. If you do, it becomes dead, crystallized; it becomes a creed, a sect, a religion, to be imposed on others. Truth cannot be brought down, rather the individual must make the effort to ascend to it. You cannot bring the mountain-top to the valley. If you would attain to the mountain-top you must pass thro…
mostly the opportunity to enjoy inspirational
The end — in all of the monastic traditions, of both East and West — consists in cultivating mindfulness, being mindful. And “mindful” may be a little misleading, because it sounds a bit much like mind-over-body, but it has nothing to do with mind over or against body. I think “wholeheartedness” is the English word that expresses better what mindfulness as a technical term means; that you respond to every situation from your center, from your heart — that you listen with your heart to every situation, and your heart elicits the response.
If you’re really mind-full, and if you underline that aspect of fullness, wholeness, or wholeheartedness, it reveals the gift characte…
self-sufficient things inspirational
To understand what social action is, we must realise that it is not a case of ‘me with society around me’ as if the two were self-sufficient things; the two are interrelated. What we bring to the society around us is our quality of mind, our quality of heart, our quality of being; so inner spiritual training and social action cannot be separated. They are interrelated and interdependent. The training that we apply to ourselves is as important as anything we do outside, because inner training is the core. The ability we have to help others or affect others depends on our inner clarity, good intentions and the integrity with which we have looked after ourselves. The two are inseparable….
meditation breaks the addiction to thinking inspirational
The issue is not so much the presence or absence of thought activity during meditation. Rather, the issue is the degree to which ones thought activity is driven, unconscious and fixated.
The great majority of human beings are literally addicted to thinking. Even the most wretched substance abuser can go a few hours between “fixes,” but most human beings cannot abide even for a few seconds without some sort of “thought fix.” If there’s nothing significant to think about, we fill the void with fantasy and trivia.
Simply stated, meditation breaks the addiction to thinking. One is then in a highly desirable situation. When you want to have a complete experience …
conscious of the coincidences in our lives
“This is hard to explain,” she said. “But the priest put it this way. He said the First Insight occurs when we become conscious of the coincidences in our lives.”
She leaned toward me. “Have you ever had a hunch or intuition concerning something you wanted to do? Some course you wanted to take in your life? And wondered how it might happen? And then, after you had half forgotten about it and focused on other things, you suddenly met someone or read something or went somewhere that led to the very opportunity you envisioned?
“Well,” she continued, “according to the priest, these coincidences are happening more and more frequently and that, when they do, they strike us as be…
