Seeds for the soul

Thomas Merton, Seeds of Contemplation, New Direction Books, 1949

Every moment and every event of every man's life on earth plants something in his soul. For just as the wind carries thousands of invisible and visible winged seeds, so the stream of time brings with it germs of spiritual vitality that come to rest imperceptibly in the minds and wills of men. Most of these unnumbered seeds perish and are lost, because men are not prepared to receive them: for such seeds as these can not spring up anywhere except in the good soil of liberty and desire. p 17

Listen to the Song

Thomas Merton, Faith and Violence, University of Notre Dame Press, 1968


We must learn to respond not to this or that syllable, but to the whole song. p. 118

Fruition of the Journey

Traleg Kyabgon Rinpoche, Letting Go of Spiritual Experience, Tricycle Magazine Fall 2004

"The ultimate goal of the spiritual journey is to realize the union of your mind and ultimate reality. You discover eventually that not only are you in reality, but that you also embody that reality. Your ordinary body becomes the body of a buddha, your ordinary speech becomes the speech of a buddha, and your ordinary mind becomes the mind of a buddha. This is the great transition that you have to make, relinquishing your fixation on the separation of samsaric beings and buddhas. When we can talk about them as ultimately the same, when this actual transformation occurs within an individual, it is a truly great occurrence. It is remarkable because an ordinary, confused being still retains that preexisting continuity between an ordinary being and an enlightened being, in the sense that what you become is what you have always been. At the end of the journey, you are simply returning home."

The Shower of Truth

Chögyam Trungpa, The Truth of Suffering and the Path of Liberation, Edited by Judith Lief, Shambhala Publications 2010

When you put relative and absolute truth together and they become one unit, it becomes possible to make things workable. You are not too much on the side of absolute truth, or you would become too theoretical. You are not too much on the side of relative truth, or you would become too precise. When you put them together, you realize that there is no problem. The combination works because it is simple and dynamic. You have hot and cold water together, so you can take a really good shower. pg. 103

Empty Hand

Lin Jensen, An Ear to the Ground, Tricycle Magazine, Summer 2006

What’s most needed in the moment of choice is an empty hand.

Otherness

Stephen Batchelor, Tricycle Magazine, Reincarnation: A Debate, Summer 1997

For me one of the most striking passages in Shantideva is the verse in which Shantideva says that the person who dies, and the person who is reborn, are other. And, therefore, the only valid motive that one can have for acting has to be compassion. There is no "you" who continues into a future life. "You" finish at death, and something else, another being is then born, like a parent giving birth to a child. That position takes the subject—me, the ego—out of the equation. The process of evolutionary change is not about me, Stephen Batchelor, but about what I can now do to improve the spiritual evolutionary advantage of those who come after my death. If you take the idea of otherness in this way, you no longer need to posit some personal consciousness that goes from one life to the next.

A Mind Without Dependencies

Thanissaro Bhikkhu, The Dignity of Restraint, Tricycle Magazine Spring 2004

"As the Buddha said, if you see a greater pleasure that comes from forsaking a lesser pleasure, be willing to forsake that lesser pleasure for the greater one. Sounds like a no-brainer, but if you look at the way most people live, they don’t think in those terms. They want everything that comes their way. They want to have their cake and enlightenment, too; to win at chess without sacrificing a single pawn. Even when they meditate, their purpose in developing mindfulness is to gain an even more intense appreciation of the experience of every moment in life. That’s something you never see in the Buddha’s teachings. His theme is always that you have to let go of this in order to gain that, give this up in order to arrive at that. There’s always a trade-off.

So we’re not practicing for a more intense appreciation of sights, scents, sounds, tastes, smells, tactile sensations. We’re practicing to realize that the mind doesn’t need to depend on those things, and that it’s healthier without such dependencies."

Shoot & Play

Chögyam Trungpa, Unpublished poem, composed March 1980, Chateau Lake Louise, Alberta, Canada. From Carolyn Gimian's July 11, 2011 post to Ocean of Dharma, Quote of the Week

Never straining your mind
And never relaxing your mind
Mind becomes decent.
As we shoot an arrow or play music
The string is reasonable.
As musicians and archers, we are always heartbroken—
How can we actually sow and propagate dharma in the world?
Thanks to you, father guru,
We can perform according to your vision.
With no lute, no arrow,
Still we shoot and play.

Removing the Clouds

Chögyam Trungpa, Edited by Judith Lief - Nobody's World, Shambhala Publications 2008

There’s a sharp precision that exists in our life, which generally arises from some form of training or discipline, the sitting practice of meditation in particular. It’s not that meditation sharpens our perceptions, but that sitting practice makes it possible to perceive. It’s a question of removing the clouds, rather than recreating the sun. pg 107

Inner Journey

Thomas Merton The Wisdom of the Desert, New York, New Directions, 1960

What good will it do us to know merely that such things were once said? The important thing is that they were lived. That they flow from an experience of the deeper levels of life. That they represent a discovery of man, at the term of an inner and spiritual journey that is far more crucial and infinitely more important than any journey to the moon. pg 11