Posted Friday, May 8 on Facebook by Sharon Salzberg
Of the Empire - Mary Oliver
Greed, Anger and Ignorance at the center of the Wheel of Life.
"We will be known as a culture that feared death
and adored power, that tried to vanquish insecurity
for the few and cared little for the penury of the
many. We will be known as a culture that taught
and rewarded the amassing of things, that spoke
little if at all about the quality of life for
people (other people), for dogs, for rivers. All
the world, in our eyes, they will say, was a
commodity. And they will say that this structure
was held together politically, which it was, and
they will say also that our politics was no more
than an apparatus to accommodate the feelings of
the heart, and that the heart, in those days,
was small, and hard, and full of meanness."
Rilke on Sadness
“How should we be able to forget those ancient myths that are at the beginning of all peoples, the myths about dragons that at the last moment turn into princesses; perhaps all the dragons of our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us once beautiful and brave. Perhaps everything terrible is in its deepest being something helpless that wants help from us.
So you must not be frightened if a sadness rises up before you larger than any you have ever seen; if a restiveness, like light and cloudshadows, passes over your hands and over all you do. You must think that something is happening with you, that life has not forgotten you, that it holds you in its hand; it will not let you fall. Why do you want to shut out of your life any uneasiness, any miseries, or any depressions? For after all, you do not know what work these conditions are doing inside you.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet
"Lead with the Heart" - Jack Kornfield
In the article linked below Jack Kornfield gives a beautifully concise rendering of the thinking mind and its divisive nature to which we often over-identify. He points to knowing a kinder relationship through with our direct experience where we can "direct our loving awareness to see the whole stream of thoughts, we can release ourselves from their divisive grip and come to rest in the body and heart. . ."
The Renewing Expressions of Nature's Being
I am always awed by the vibrant and renewing expressions of Nature's Being in Spring. They are made even more radiant when I remember that I, too, am none other than that always changing Being. Ms. Limón’s words speak to the power of renewal.
Instructions on Not Giving Up
Ada Limón, 1976
More than the fuchsia funnels breaking out
of the crabapple tree, more than the neighbor’s
almost obscene display of cherry limbs shoving
their cotton candy-colored blossoms to the slate
sky of Spring rains, it’s the greening of the trees
that really gets to me. When all the shock of white
and taffy, the world’s baubles and trinkets, leave
the pavement strewn with the confetti of aftermath,
the leaves come. Patient, plodding, a green skin
growing over whatever winter did to us, a return
to the strange idea of continuous living despite
the mess of us, the hurt, the empty. Fine then,
I’ll take it, the tree seems to say, a new slick leaf
unfurling like a fist to an open palm, I’ll take it all.
Mindfulness Applied - The Four Foundations
“Sit down wherever you are
And listen to the wind singing in your veins
.Feel the love, the longing, the fear in your bones.
Open your heart to who you are, right now,
Not who you would like to be,
Not the saint you are striving to become,
But the being right here before you, inside you, around you.
All of you is holy.
You are already more and less
Than whatever you can know.
Breathe out,
Touch in,
Let go.”
The invitation of this poem speaks to how simple and profound mindfulness meditation practice can be. And, it's made even more special, when we remember that everything can be an object of meditation and nothing is excluded from the practice. This lets us continually broaden our perspectives through our direct experience.
The four areas of mindfulness guide us to pay attention to what appears in our experience and clearly see what it is like.
Mindfulness of the Body is where we are aware of sensations arising in the body. Many of us have experience of at least part of this as we pay attention to the breath during meditation.
Mindfulness of Feeling Tone is where we are aware of knowing whether an experience is pleasant, unpleasant or neutral. It is very helpful to notice these feeling tones as they arise because we can remember to refrain from adding commentary and stories on top of what's simply happening.
Mindfulness of qualities of Mind is where we know when the mind is being greedy or not, angry or not, deluded or not, and clear or not.
Mindfulness of Categories of Experience (Dhammas) is the awareness of all things that appear and run around in our minds. This is where mindfulness helps us to pay particular attention to clinging and letting go as we face the impermanent realty of all experience.
Mindfulness Applied Now
““What day is it?” asked Pooh.
“It’s today,” squeaked Piglet.
“My favorite day,” said Pooh.”
As Pooh remembers, that today is his favorite day, we can remember that being with what is "right now" can be our favorite realization too. It is only in the ever-present now where we know the true being-ness of life as arises and disappears. It is only now where we can see and investigate how the conditioned nature of our mind distorts and obscures what is real. And, it is only now that we can see that the lens of our conditioned mind allows us only to see what we already believe and expect to see.
The clarifying gift of mindfulness practice is that it allows us to be curious about all of the unknown possibilities of reality that lie beyond our conditioned view. We can practice and open to knowing ourselves as the awareness of possibility where we can find insight and wisdom and freedom.
Mindfulness Applied
““Mindful and creative, a child who has neither a past, nor examples to follow, nor value judgments, simply lives, speaks and plays in freedom.””
There are many Buddhist teachings and practices that highlight the subtleties and nuances of mindfulness. Beyond focusing attention solely on objects of meditation, we can also turn our attention toward the actual process of being mindful. What depth and broadening perspectives can be found as we awaken to being the reality of experience and not separate from it?
As the quote above suggests, the importance of our practice is being free with whatever arises in experience. We were this way once before our conditioning led us to add all the opinions, judgments and stories on top of experience. Joseph Goldstein tells us that if we give responsibility over to our conditioned mind, we probably find that we are looking for something special. That can mean that we are missing what is simple and overlooking what is always right in front of us.
Bare Knowing and Simple Mind
“It is only the simple mind that can understand the real, not the mind that is full of words, knowledge, information. The mind that analyzes, calculates, is not a simple mind.”
This is sometimes referred to as "bare knowledge" where we open our awareness to experience WHAT IS without any personal or cultural filters. Experiment with this as you try to be in any regular old experience, like walking in nature, by NOT naming and labeling everything that you see, feel hear or taste. Without the conditioning of our mind jumping in to provide play-by-play commentary and analysis, we can get a glimpse of the simple mind that is the only mind that can actually allow us to be in and with experience clearly as it is.
Martin Luther King, Jr. 1967 - "Where Do We Go From Here?"
“... Power properly understood is nothing but the ability to achieve purpose. It is the strength required to bring about social, political, and economic change.
... Now a lot of us are preachers, and all of us have our moral convictions and concerns, and so often we have problems with power. But there is nothing wrong with power if power is used correctly.
You see, what happened is that some of our philosophers got off base. And one of the great problems of history is that the concepts of love and power have usually been contrasted as opposites, polar opposites, so that love is identified with a resignation of power, and power with a denial of love. It was this misinterpretation that caused the philosopher Nietzsche, who was a philosopher of the will to power, to reject the Christian concept of love. It was this same misinterpretation which induced Christian theologians to reject Nietzsche’s philosophy of the will to power in the name of the Christian idea of love.
Now, we got to get this thing right. What is needed is a realization that power without love is reckless and abusive, and that love without power is sentimental and anemic. Power at its best is love implementing the demands of justice, and justice at its best is love correcting everything that stands against love. And this is what we must see as we move on.”