+ Buy adequate security, not super abundance.
+ Choose your dealer and buy outright (i.e., don't buy on margin.)
~
-Continuous improvement is better than delayed perfection.
- -- Mark Twain
+Continuous improvement is better than delayed perfection. -- Mark Twain
+~
+All of us cherish helpful and loving friends, and wise, compassionate
+spiritual mentors are especially important to us to progress on the path.
+Being separated from the people we value or having an important relationship
+not work out the way we had hoped is painful, yet it is a common occurrence in
+cyclic existence. Because we ourselves, others, and all the conditioned
+things around us are impermanent by nature, whatever comes together must also
+separate.
+ -- Thubten Chodron, "Good Karma: How to Create the Causes of Happiness and
+ Avoid the Causes of Suffering", published by Shambhala Publications
+~
+There are no limits to our imagination,
+or if there are,
+we can only imagine them.
+ -- Fred T. Hamster
+~
+When I was a boy and I would see scary things in the news, my mother would say
+to me, "Look for the helpers. You will always find people who are helping."
+ -- Fred Rogers
+~
+Some people are born on third base and go through life thinking they hit a
+triple.
+ -- Barry Switzer
+~
+ First, let’s take a look at how physical and emotional health supports
+our spiritual health. What is spiritual health? One way that the Buddhist
+teachings define spiritual health is having a sense of interconnection with
+other living beings on the planet, as well as respect for the natural
+environment. Recognition of this interconnection with others is developed as
+we call to mind the things that all beings have in common: the wish to attain
+happiness and avoid suffering. We can reflect on this by thinking that all of
+the wonderful things we want for ourselves, others want them too. Just so,
+all of the painful things we would like to avoid, others wish to avoid those
+things too.
+ However, spiritual health is far more than a mere sense of connection.
+True spiritual health arises from discovering love and compassion for all
+sentient beings. In doing so, we cut through our own painful feelings of
+anger, resentment, and strong desire, which cause us so much personal
+unhappiness and sorrow. By bringing ourselves back into harmonious
+relationship with friends, family, and the larger community, even those we may
+dislike, we ourselves become spiritually rich.
+ -- Anyen Rinpoche & Allison Choying Zangmo, "The Tibetan Yoga of Breath:
+ Breathing Practices for Healing the Body and Cultivating Wisdom",
+ published by Shambhala Publications
+~
+Our worries may zoom around the state of the world. “What happens if the
+economy plummets? If the ozone layer keeps decreasing? If we have more
+anthrax attacks? If terrorists take over the country? If we lose our civil
+liberties fighting terrorism?” Here, our creative writing ability leads to
+fantastic scenarios that may or may not happen, but regardless, we manage to
+work ourselves into a state of unprecedented despair. This, in turn, often
+leads to raging anger at the powers that be or alternatively, to apathy,
+simply thinking that since everything is rotten, there’s no use doing
+anything. In either case, we’re so gloomy that we neglect to act
+constructively in ways that remedy difficulties and create goodness.
+ -- Thubten Chodron, in "Taming the Mind", published by Shambhala Publications
+~
+It really seemed like every band built on the one just prior to it, so that as
+each day moved on, the acts just generated more and more energy and awesome
+music, storing it up in a celestial battery. the peak of it all for me was
+the phish show on the last night, which was so high energy and saturated with
+fun and healthy vibes that I felt like "i never need to feel fear again".
+that feeling lasted for days after the concert was over. hopefully memory of
+that thought never fades.
+ -- fred t. hamster, after lockn 2016
+~
+The dawn of the Great Eastern Sun is based on actual experience. It is not a
+concept. You realize that you can uplift yourself, that you can appreciate
+your existence as a human being. Whether you are a gas station attendant or
+the president of your country doesn’t really matter. When you experience
+the goodness of being alive, you can respect who and what you are. You need
+not be intimidated by lots of bills to pay, diapers to change, food to cook,
+or papers to be filed. Fundamentally, in spite of all those responsibilities,
+you begin to feel that it is a worthwhile situation to be a human being, to be
+alive, not afraid of death.
+ -- Chögyam Trungpa, "Shambhala: The Sacred Path of the Warrior", published
+ by Shambhala Publications
+~
+ These deities share a freedom from passion and experience more and more
+subtle states of mind in each higher level. In the first level, the freedom
+from passion is experienced; in the second, freedom from discursive thought;
+in the third, the elimination of gross joy in meditation, leaving only sublime
+delight; in the fourth, freedom even from delight. Above these are the four
+levels of the realm of formlessness, whose inhabitants have transcended form
+altogether and have no bodies or forms at all. Here deities experience
+successively even more subtle states of mind: the infinity of space, the
+infinity of consciousness, “nothing at all,” and neither perception nor
+nonperception.
+ These states can certainly appear enormously attractive from our human
+point of view. In fact, they correspond to what many think religious practice
+is all about—attaining some kind of heaven or some sort of tranquillity or
+bliss. But from the Buddhist viewpoint, the sublimity even of these states is
+not a worthy ultimate goal. One may ask, “What can possibly be wrong with
+such attainments?”
+ It is important to remember that the divine states of the desire realm,
+the form realm, and the formless realm, like all the other states known in the
+other five realms, are still part of samsara and subject to karma,
+impermanence, and suffering. In spite of the relative exaltation of their way
+of being, there comes a day for every god when he or she begins to feel the
+signs of impending death. The intoxication of the godly state gives way to
+sadness, pain, fear, and finally terror, and this is followed by death and
+rebirth in a lower realm.
+ In addition, the gods have one enormous liability: precisely because of
+their power, longevity, and intoxication, they are unable to hear the dharma
+with its teachings about duhkha, the first noble truth. They, like the
+inhabitants of all the other nonhuman realms, are victims of their karma and
+are unable to practice a spiritual path to gain liberation.
+ -- Reginald A. Ray, in "Indestructible Truth", published by Shambhala Publications
+~
+The Zen monk Thich Nhat Hanh writes, "I like to walk alone on country paths,
+rice plants and wild grasses on both sides, putting each foot down on the
+earth in mindfulness, knowing that I walk on the wondrous earth. In such
+moments, existence is a miraculous and mysterious reality. People usually
+consider walking on water or in thin air a miracle. But I think the real
+miracle is to walk on earth... a miracle we don’t even recognize."
+ -- from Jan Chozen Bays, MD, "How to Train a Wild Elephant & Other Adventures
+ in Mindfulness", published by Shambhala Publications
+~
+Begin the sequence of sending and taking with yourself
+
+Whatever pain you feel, take it in, wishing for all beings to be free of it.
+Whatever pleasure you feel, send it out to others. In this way, our personal
+problems and delights become a stepping-stone for understanding the suffering
+and happiness of all beings.
+ -- Pema Chodron's "Compassion Cards", published by Shambhala Publications
+~
+Tuvaṭaka Sutta: The Discourse on Being Quick
+
+(The Buddha said,)
+"Let them completely destroy the root
+Of conceptual differentiation,
+That is, [the idea] ‘I am the thinker.’
+Ever mindful, they train to subdue their cravings.
+
+"They shouldn’t get entrenched in any teachings they know
+Whether their own or that of others.
+Good people say that
+Being entrenched is not release.
+
+"They would not, because of this, think themselves
+Better, worse, or equal [to others].
+Experiencing many things,
+They don’t take a stand in thoughts of themselves."
+
+ The Buddha’s first teachings in this poem are particularly important.
+Here he emphasizes the destruction of the root source for conceptual
+proliferation which he describes as being either the idea "I am the
+thinker" or the thought "I am." While the grammar of the Pali phrase
+allows for both translations into English, the two options both identify some
+form of conceit as the basis from which a problematic differentiation of
+concepts with which the world is categorized arises. When this conceit is
+uprooted, the conceptual proliferation stops. A sage does not categorize or
+conceptualize the world with any fixed reference point of existing as "I."
+ While training to become such a sage, a monastic should avoid swelling up
+with conceit, which is described as thinking they are better, worse, or equal
+to others. The alternative to such comparative thinking is to have a mind
+that is still and unmoving like a calm sea. Many of the training instructions
+the Buddha mentions can be understood as support for having a still, peaceful
+mind.
+ -- Gil Fronsdal, "The Buddha before Buddhism: Wisdom from the Early
+ Teachings", published by Shambhala Publications
projects / feisty_meow.git / blobdiff