meditation

He had forgotten how to soar upon the wings of his soul...

Making good use of our limited time - the limited time from birth to death, as well as our limited time each day - is the key to developing inner steadiness and calm.

Preach the gospel to yourself, because as you consider who you are in light of God's perfect goodness, holiness and peace, you must soften toward others.

The path of meditation and the path of our lives altogether ha to do with curiosity, inquisitiveness.

Today, find a point of stillness: brief, but precious slight, but full small, but luminously real. Find a point stillness in the balance of all things between the breathing out and breathing in.

I grow into these mountains like a moss. I am bewitched. The blinding snow peaks and the clarion air, the sound of earth and heaven in the silence, the requiem birds, the mythic beasts, the flags, great horns, and old carved stones, the silver ice in the black river, the Kang, the Crystal Mountain. Also, I love the common miracles-the murmur of my friends at evening, the clay fires of smudgy juniper, the coarse dull food, the hardship and simplicity, the contentment of doing one thing at a time_ gradually my mind has cleared itself, and wind and sun pour through my head, as through a bell. Though we talk little here, I am never lonely; I am returned into myself. In another life-this isn__ what I know, but how I feel- these mountains were my home; there is a rising of forgotten knowledge, like a spring from hidden aquifers under the earth. To glimpse one__ own true nature is a kind of homegoing, to a place East of the Sun, West of the Moon- the homegoing that needs no home, like that waterfall on the supper Suli Gad that turns to mist before touching the earth and rises once again to the sky.

Set a daily solitude time for reflection and rethinking.

Only those who have the great capacity of genuine trust can enter this realm [the realm of the buddhas]. Those who have no trust are unable to accept it, however much they hear it.

When we sit in meditation, we are closer than usual to the world as it is. By simply bringing body, breath, and mind together in the present moment, we touch Buddha; we touch reality, and we are in the world as it is. Most people__ experience in this state is peaceful and rejuvenating.

Like silence after noise, or cool, clear water on a hot, stuffy day, Emptiness cleans out the messy mind and charges up the batteries of spiritual energy. Many people are afraid of Emptiness, however, because it reminds them of Loneliness.

Through meditation, difficult thoughts and emotions may well rise up. And through practice, you can meet such emotions with kindness, listen to them, explore them and then really let them go.

When we are, love is not.When we are not, love is.

Yesterday I talked about cultivating precision, gentleness, and openess, and described how the meditation technique helps us to remember the qualities that we already possess.

Zen has been called the "religion before religion," which is to say that anyone can practice, including those committed to another faith. And that phrase evokes that natural religion of our early childhood, when heaven and a splendorous earth were one. But soon the child's clear eye is clouded over by ideas and opinions, preconceptions and abstractions. Not until years later does an instinct come that a vital sense of mystery has been withdrawn. The sun glints through the pines, and the heart is pierced in a moment of beauty and strange pain, like a memory of paradise. After that day, at the bottom of each breath, there is a hollow place filled with longing. We become seekers without knowing that we seek, and at first, we long for something "greater" than ourselves, something apart and far away. It is not a return to childhood, for childhood is not a truly enlightened state. Yet to seek one's own true nature is "a way to lead you to your long lost home." To practice Zen means to realize one's existence moment after moment, rather than letting life unravel in regret of the past and daydreaming of the future. To "rest in the present" is a state of magical simplicity...out of the emptiness can come a true insight into our natural harmony all creation. To travel this path, one need not be a 'Zen Buddhist', which is only another idea to be discarded like 'enlightenment,' and like 'the Buddha' and like 'God.

Meditation is for many a foreign concept, somehow distant and foreboding, seemingly impossible to participate in. But another word for meditation is simply awareness. Meditation is awareness.

Only when the seeker is lost, the truth is there. Seek, and you will miss. Seek not, and you will find. The very seeking becomes a barrier to truth, to the ultimate experience.

Every time we forget to breathe or our minds wander or we__e hijacked by feelings or sensations, we gently bring ourselves back to the breath, again and again.

The central feature of the practice of meditation and hard work known as Zen is that, as Matthiessen says, it __as no patience with mysticism, far less the occult._ Nor does it have any time with moralism, the prescriptions or distortions we would impose on the world, obscuring it from our view. It asks, it insists rather, that we take this moment for what it is, undistracted, and not cloud it with needless worries of what might have been or fantasies of what might come to be. It is, essentially, a training in the real__he Universe itself is the scripture of Zen." Pico Iyer from introduction.