“How do we know if our practice is a real practice? Only by one thing: more and more, we just see the wonder. What is the wonder? I don’t know. We can’t know such things through thinking. But we always know it when it’s there.”
—Charlotte Joko Beck; “Nothing Special”, p. 241
Thank you, dhammanovice.
(Source: stillcuriosity)
Awareness is our true self; it’s what we are. So we don’t have to try to develop awareness; we simply need to know how we block awareness, with our thoughts, our fantasies, our opinions, and our judgements. We’re either in awareness, which is our natural state, or we’re doing something else. The mark of mature students is that most of the time, they don’t do something else. They’re just here, living their life. Nothing special.
(Source: stillcuriosity)
When we become open awareness, our ability to do necessary thinking gets sharper, and our whole sensory input gets brighter, clearer. After a certain amount of sitting, the world looks brighter, sounds are sharper, and there’s a richness of sensory input, which is just our natural state if we are not blocking out experience with our tense worrying minds
(Source: stillcuriosity)
Practice is not about having experiences, not about having giant realisations, not about getting somewhere or becoming something. We are perfect as we are. By “perfect” I mean simply that this is it. Practice is simply maintaining awareness - of our activities but also of the thoughts that separate us from our activities. As we hammer nails or sit, we simply hammer nails or sit. Since our senses are open, we hear and feel other things as well : sounds, smells and so on. When thoughts arise, we notice them, and return to our direct experience.
(Source: stillcuriosity)
When there is no object, no person, no event, no thing in the world with which I identify, by which I’m caught – when there is no object and no observing self – then there is a flip into what, if you wish to give it a name, is the enlightened state.
(via stillcuriosity)
To have a ‘self’ means we are self-centered. Being self-centered—and therefore opposing ourselves to external things—we are anxious and worried about ourselves. We bristle quickly when the external environment opposes us; we are easily upset. And being self-centered, we are often confused. This is how most of us experience our lives.
Enlightenment is not something you achieve. It is the absence of something. All your life you have been going forward after something, pursing some goal. Enlightenment is dropping all that. But to talk about it is of little use. The practice has to be done by each individual. There is no substitute. We can read about it until we are a thousand years old and it won’t do a thing for us. We all have to practice, and we have to practice with all of our might for the rest of our lives.
(Source: stillcuriosity)
We have to be willing to be anything.
“When we see ourselves as we are, then out of that death of the ego, out of that withering, the flower blooms. ‘On a withered tree, the flower blooms’ - a wonderful line from Shōyō Rōku. A flower blooms, not on a decorated tree, but on a withered tree. When we back away from our ideals and investigate them by being the witness, then we back into what we are, which is the intelligence of life itself.”
- Charlotte Joko Beck (27 March, 1917 to 15 June, 2011)
Thank you, sharanam & paynehollow.
“Life always gives us
exactly the teacher we need
at every moment.
This includes every mosquito,
every misfortune,
every red light,
every traffic jam,
every obnoxious supervisor (or employee),
every illness, every loss,
every moment of joy or depression,
every addiction,
every piece of garbage,
every breath.
Every moment is the guru.”
