The Dalai Lama and Barack Obama

(long live z0tl):

"though attachment, aversion, dullness, pride, and envy may arise, fully understand their inner energy; recognize them in the very first moment, before karma has been accumulated.

in the second moment look nakedly at this state and relax in its present. then whichever of the five passions [lust, anger, stupidity, arrogance, and jealousy] arise becomes a pure presence, freed in its own place, without being eliminated.

it emerges as the pristine awareness that is pure, pleasurable, and not conditioned by thought."


Longchenpa

"There seems to be two kinds of searchers: those who seek to
make their ego something other than it is, i.e. holy, happy,
unselfish (as though you could make a fish unfish), and those
who understand that all such attempts are just gesticulation
and play-acting, and there is only one thing that can be done,
which is to disidentify themselves with ego, by realising
its unreality, and by becoming aware of their eternal identity
with pure being."

Wei Wu Wei

Borrowed this back from Don:

"When you perceive the truth, you will become totally free from desire or hope. One who is endowed with supreme dispassion drives away the goblin of illusion. He is not pleased by pleasure, he is not troubled by troubles. The twin-forces of attraction and aversion do not even touch him. He looks upon all with equal vision.
“Free from the least attachment he enjoys whatever comes to him unsought, even as the eyes perceive their objects without desire or hate. Such experiences do not therefore produce either joy or sorrow in him. Even though he appears to be engaged in the performance of appropriate actions in this world, his consciousness is not disturbed in the least. Whatever may befall him in accordance with the laws of time, space and causation, whether it is pleasant or unpleasant, he remains inwardly undisturbed.”

Yogavasistha

The comment box for the previous post is getting kinda full. So here's something new to chew on:

IT'S MIND OVER MATTER:

If you don't mind,
it doesn't matter.

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"Of the many earnest, and how earnest, people we may observe reading, attending lectures, studying and practicing disciplines, devoting their energies to the attainment of a liberation which is by definition unattainable, how many are not striving via the ego-concept which is itself the only barrier between what they think they are and that which they wish to become but always have been and always will be?"

Wei Wu Wei
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"Having many sorts of knowledge cannot compare with giving up SEEKING for anything, which is the best of all things."

Huang Po
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I certainly can't top Kathleen's choice of words.

And yep, my Beloved's moving down from Boulder to share my home in Santa Fe.




: Here's an alternate picture of us :
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"The arising and the elimination of illusion are both illusory. Illusion is not something rooted in Reality; it exists because of your dualistic thinking. If you will only cease to indulge in opposed concepts such as 'ordinary' and 'Enlightened', illusion will cease of itself."

Huang Po
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*
"[Siddartha Gotama, the future Buddha] had already mastered the meditation systems of two contemporary teachers and found that although they led to extremely refined states of consciousness, those states didn't last. Having ascended to higher planes, so to speak, a descent to the normal plane of consciousness is inevitable, with no resolution to the fundamental problem of being: that we experience ourselves as semi-, but not completely, separate from experiences. Therefore we can neither ultimately unite with what is pleasant, nor can we be totally divorced from what is unpleasant, nor can we give up the search for happiness in one of these untenable positions:

Association with the disliked is dukkha, separation from the liked

is dukkha, not attaining one's wishes is dukkha.

In an attempt to snuff out the whole pleasure-pain mechanism, Gotama resorted to ferocious austerities in the company of five ascetics at Uruvela. Nearly killing himself in the process, he eventually had to admit that asceticism was not the answer either. In that moment of recognition, he remembered the ease and peacefulness of a time when he had been sitting in the shade of a tree watching his father at a ploughing festival. Shaded from the blazing sun, with no particular inclination toward this or that, his mind had by itself settled into a state of calm. Might that gratuitous, unforced calm be the basis for enlightenment?
The world was benevolent on that day in another valuable respect. A local woman called Sujata made him an offering of milk-rice, which he ate. Although the other ascetics walked off in disgust, he now had the physical strength and well-being and the mental ease and detachment to collect his highly trained attention and direct it to the roots of the problem of life: the creation of a self that is both alienated from life and besieged by it. Resolving to remain in that very spot until he had discovered an answer, he took up a seated position...

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On that night of Awakening, Siddhartha [saw] through the picture show of identity. In profound meditation, he had witnessed the long passage of his many births: now being this, now being that... and the road all those beings had travelled on... the self-perpetuating road of karma. What you do defines you; what you become determines how you see the world and yourself; how that world and self appears determines how you act. To reject the process, to think of getting off the road, is just another road, another becoming, another birth. Knowing there's no person on the road, that is Awakening.

***

The Buddha described his night of Awakening in different ways. One striking account was his recognition of all the forms of doubt and greed and worry as members of a demon host led by the personification of delusion, Mara. ... A meditator is quickly introduced to this host, and generally gets panicked or defensive, or gets into battle with them --all of which activities to defend the self merely affirm its existence. Therefore one is something --a sight, a sound, an idea, an opinion, a future, a belief: an identity. There is the source of all the longing and the quarrelling, which sustains the tenacity of the habitual reactions of the mind."

Ajahn Sucitto
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If you don't become the ocean, you'll be seasick every day.

Leonard Cohen
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(

Realization consists of getting rid of the
false idea that one is not already realized.

Ramana

(Thanks, Beloved)