“We live in illusion and the appearance of things. There is a reality. We are
that reality. When you understand this, you see that you are nothing, and being
nothing, you are everything. That is all." Kalu Rinpoche
"Now something in us
knows this. We know our connection with every other being, with life, with the
breath of the atmosphere, with the spirit that moves through beings. We know
it, but we don’t really trust it.
Part of what makes
meditation so extraordinary and so different from almost everything else we do,
is that to simply sit is to step outside of our identity, step outside of the
busyness, and the roles, because our culture is so caught up in different ways
in greed, ambition, fear, judgment, racism, or struggle between people all
around us. And as we begin to sit, certainly there’s peace, and a kind of
healing, and an opening, but more than that, there just comes space.
Henry David Thoreau said that ‘the
soul grows by subtraction, and not by addition.’ It’s not that you sit to
meditate to get something else, but actually it is an opening, a letting go.
And as we do open, we see all the possibilities – sinner and sage, flow or
struggle, and all the stories that we might tell ourselves about being the
victim or the warrior, or the workaholic, or the nurturer, or the great mother,
or the lost soul, or the eternal youth – all the kind of archetypes that we
play out at different times in our life.
What the invitation of meditation
and of the Buddha (the word Buddha means to be awake) offers is a remembering
of this space of awareness, of the space of the heart. To listen to all these
different stories and tales and fears and desires. Who am I really in all of
this?” Jack Kornfield
Jack Kornfield's dharma talk: "Who are you really?"
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| Photo: anolphart www.dpreview.com |
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