small things

When you don’t punish or condemn yourself, when you relax more and appreciate your body and mind, you begin to contact the fundamental notion of basic goodness in yourself. So it is extremely important to be willing to open yourself to yourself. Developing tenderness toward yourself allows you to see both your problems and your potential accurately. You don’t feel that you have to ignore your problems or exaggerate your potential. That kind of gentleness toward yourself and appreciation of yourself is very necessary. It provides the ground for helping yourself and others.

When I meditate, I am always inspired by this poem by Nyoshul Khenpo:

Rest in natural great peace
This exhausted mind
Beaten helpless by karma and neurotic thought,
Like the relentless fury of the pounding waves
In the infinite ocean of samsara.

Rest in natural great peace.

Above all, be at ease, be as natural and spacious as possible. Slip quietly out of the noose of your habitual anxious self, release all grasping, and relax into your true nature. Think of your ordinary emotional, thought-ridden self as a block of ice or a slab of butter left out in the sun. If you are feeling hard and cold, let this aggression melt away in the sunlight of your meditation. Let peace work on you and enable you to gather your scattered mind into the mindfulness of Calm Abiding, and awaken in you the awareness and insight of Clear Seeing. And you will find all your negativity disarmed, your aggression dissolved, and your confusion evaporating slowly like mist into the vast and stainless sky of your absolute nature.

All life is the play of universal forces. The individual gives a personal form to these universal forces. But he can choose whether he shall respond or not to the action of a particular force. Only most people do not really choose - they indulge the play of the forces. Your illness, depressions etc. are the repeated play of such forces. It is only when you can make oneself free of them that one can be the true person and have a true life - but one can be free only by living in the Divine.

Just as iron rusts from disuse & stagnant water putrefies… so our intellect wastes unless it is kept in use.

We know that our dreams are just ways we have of telling ourselves about ourselves when we are asleep, and yet we have learned to keep from ourselves so much of who we fully, truly are that our dreams seem strange. Amazing, isn’t it? What we tell ourselves about ourselves must be told with so much secrecy and arcane symbolism that we can’t remember it, and if we can, we can’t understand it. At such moments our inner world seems shrouded, muted, alienated, as the natural world seems when it is covered with snow.

Isn’t it sad to realize that we have learned not to accept who we fully are? And isn’t it wonderful to remember that gradually, with courage, we can come to accept and include even what at first had appeared so strange, so horrible, so not-me in our dreams?

As the powerful energy and intelligence that initiated the creative process gradually awakens to itself in the light of humanity’s highly evolved, self-reflective awareness—especially in those who are at the most advanced stage of our own culture’s development—something very important begins to happen. As the self becomes more highly individuated, simultaneously its powers of autonomy, volition, free agency, consciousness, and cognition increase exponentially. And the growing complexity of the self-structure is the prism through which the light of that evolutionary impulse shines into this world. This prism is alive and conscious, and it possesses the powers of both self-reflectivity and choice. That is why, when the evolutionary impulse awakens and surges through a highly evolved vehicle, it is the development of that individual that enables the very essence of the evolutionary impulse itself to actually evolve and to refine itself as it moves through them. It is none other than our uniquely human capacities for autonomy, volition, free agency, consciousness, and cognition that enable this impulse—which is the manifest God—to effect change in the world and in the universe.

The most enlightened people in the world embrace their full potential of light and dark. When you’re with people who recognize and own their negative qualities, you never feel judged by them. It’s only when people see good and bad, right and wrong, as qualities outside themselves that judgments occur.

If you are with a man you don’t trust, it is only because you prefer unsurrendered love to surrendering wide open in total trust. It feels safe. You are afraid to let go of control - part of you doesn’t trust love’s command - so you have chosen a man who doesn’t demand your surrender with his depth of integrity. If you did trust the command of love, you would only settle for a deep man capable of opening you more deeply than you could instruct him.

relationship tip: be compassionate when expressing a complaint - you are talking to the person you love, not the thing you find annoying

Put bluntly, the ego is not an obstruction to Spirit, but a radiant manifestation of Spirit.