Kilsand.se

I have seen many spiritual people become obsessed with how unspiritual others are and assume an arrogant and superior attitude while completely missing the fact that they themselves are not nearly as spiritually enlightened as they would like to think they are.

Enlightenment can be measured by how compassionately and wisely you interact with others—with all others, not just those who support you in the way that you want. How you interact with those who do not support you shows how enlightened you really are.

-Adyashanti

We depend on nature

not only for our physical survival.

We also need nature

to show us the way home,

the way out of the prison of our own minds.

We got lost

in doing,

thinking,

remembering,

anticipating —

lost in a maze of complexity

and a world of problems.

We have forgotten

what rocks,

plants,

and animals

still know.

We have forgotten how to be —

to be still,

to be ourselves,

to be where life is:

Here and Now.

– Eckhart Tolle

(Stillness Speaks pg77)

Maharajji: Does your teacher have desires?

Ram Dass: Yes, but he told me NOT to have desires.

Maharajji: Do you have desires?

R.D.: Yes.

Maharajji: Then he didn’t teach you. How can he teach what he isn’t?

– Neem Karoli Baba

Mrs. and Mr. Kelly, an elderly couple from America, and others of their company desired to know what they should do to gain concentration in the face of discomfort of sitting and the sting of mosquitoes, etc.

M.: The discomforts will not worry you if your concentration is right. Do not mind the discomforts. Keep your mind steady in meditation.

If you do not have the strength and endurance to bear mosquito stings, how do you hope to gain realization of the Self? Realization must be amidst all the turmoil of life. If you make yourself comfortable and go to bed, you fall asleep. Face the troubles, but keep yourself steady in meditation.

Think of the Self despite the mosquitoes or toothache. It needs strength, but one must be a hero to gain realization.

Sri Ramana Maharshi

– Talk 150

In our delusion, we see things as being permanent and truly self-existing. But in reality phenomena are impermanent, and devoid of any true substantial existence. We want to believe that our friends, partner, wealth and influence will all endure, but by nature they are bound to change. It is therefore senseless to be so preoccupied with them.

– Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche

from the book ”The Heart of Compassion: The Thirty-seven Verses on the Practice of a Bodhisattva”

We are naturally attached to comfort and pleasure and bothered by physical and mental suffering. These innate tendencies lead us to seek out, maintain and try to increase whatever gives us pleasure comfortable clothing, delicious food, agreeable places, sensual pleasure – and to avoid or destroy whatever we find unpleasant or painful. Constantly changing and devoid of any true essence, these sensations rest on the ephemeral association of the mind with the body, and it is useless to be attached to them. Rather than being dragged along and trapped by your perceptions, just let them dissolve as soon as they form, like letters traced on the surface of water with your finger disappearing as you draw them.

– Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche

from the book ”The Hundred Verses of Advice: Tibetan Buddhist Teachings on What Matters Most”

Q: What makes me limited and superficial?

M: The total is open and available, but you will not take it. You are attached to the little person you think yourself to be. Your desires are narrow, your ambitions — petty. After all, without a center of perception where would be the manifested? Unperceived, the manifested is as good as the unmanifested. And you are the perceiving point, the non-dimensional source of all dimensions. Know yourself as the total.

Q: How can a point contain a universe?

M: There is enough space in a point for an infinity of universes. There is no lack of capacity. Self-limitation is the only problem. But you cannot run away from yourself. However far you go, you come back to yourself and to the need of understanding this point, which is as nothing and yet the source of everything.

– Nisargadatta, I AM THAT ch 70

What is the ego?
Enquire.
The body is insentient and cannot say ’I’.
The Self is pure consciousness and non-dual. It cannot say ’I’.
No one says ’I’ in sleep.
What is the ego then?
It is something intermediate between the inert body and the Self.
It has no locus standi.
If sought for it vanishes like a ghost.
At night a man may imagine that there is a ghost by his side because of the play of shadows.
If he looks closely he discovers that the ghost is not really there, and what he imagined to be a ghost was merely a tree or a post.
If he does not look closely the ghost may terrify him.
All that is required is to look closely and the ghost vanishes.
The ghost was never there.
So also with the ego.

Bhagavan

This body is not me.
I am not limited by this body.
I am life without boundaries.
I have never been born,
and I have never died.

Look at the ocean and the sky filled with stars,
manifestations from my wondrous true mind.

Since before time, I have been free.
Birth and death are only doors through which we pass,
sacred thresholds on our journey.
Birth and death are a game of hide-and-seek.

So laugh with me,
hold my hand,
let us say good-bye,
say good-bye, to meet again soon.

We meet today.
We will meet again tomorrow.
We will meet at the source every moment.
We meet each other in all forms of life.

~ Thích Nhất Hạnh

In April 1950 Bhagavan was very ill; yet even in this state of utter prostration when unable to sit up, he insisted that all who had come for his ”darshan” must be allowed to have their desire fulfilled. So they were allowed to pass in a queue in front of the room where he was lying.

There were always, many people in the queue and it was so long that a person had not more than a second or two for his darshan.

Even these silent marches past were not without some incident or other, to show how compassionate and alert Bhagavan was.

One timid devotee who was never known to have talked to Bhagavan or to sit in the half anywhere except in the back rows, summoned up courage to throw a slip of paper at the feet of Bhagavan, as he passed along. Bhagavan took the slip, read it and asked for the person to be brought. The attendants fetched him before Bhagavan as though he were a culprit to be reprimanded for breaking discipline. Sri Bhagavan looked him full in the face with a broad and benign smile and nodded assent.

The slip contained the words ”Bhagavan! Save me.”