InnerNet Weekly: Inspirations From CharityFocus.org

InnerNet Weekly: Inspirations From CharityFocus.org http://www.ijourney.org/ iJourney passages are a weekly email service that delivers a little bit of wisdom to 72,613 people. It all started with couple folks getting together on 'Wednesdays' in the Silicon Valley. eng inspiration, wisdom, spiritual, service eng clubs@charityfocus.org 2013-05-24 06:14:34 Seven People Cutting Stones, Roger Walsh For several weeks strange sounds had drifted over the mountains from the neighboring valley. There was much talk in the village about what these noises could be, but no one could make sense of them. Even the village elders had never heard anything like them. Finally one of the young men of the village was chosen to cross the mountains and see what was going on.   After two days of hiking he reached the mountaintop and saw in the valley far below a hive of activity with dozens of people working. As he drew closer, he saw a line of people, each with a huge stone in front of them that they were hammering and chiseling.    When he finally reached the valley floor he approached a young man at one end of the line and asked, “What are you doing?”   “Huh!” grunted the young man. “I’m killing time until I get off work.”   Puzzled, the hiker turned to the second person in the line, a young woman, and asked, “Excuse me, but what are you doing?”   “I’m earning a living to support my family,” she responded.   Scratching his head, the hiker moved on to the third person and asked again, “What are you doing?”   “I’m creating a beautiful statue,” came the reply. Turning to the next person, the hiker repeated his question.   “I’m helping to build a cathedral,” came the answer.   “Ah!” said the hiker. “I think I’m beginning to understand.” Approaching the woman who was next in line he asked, “And what are you doing?   “I am helping the people in this town and generations that follow them, by helping to build this cathedral.”   “Wonderful,” exclaimed the hiker. “And you, sir? He called to the man beside her.   “I am helping to build this cathedral in order to serve all those who use it and to awaken myself in the process. I am seeking my salvation through service to others.”   Finally the hiker turned to the last stone worker, an old, lively person whose eyes twinkled and whose mouth formed a perpetual smile. “And what are you doing?” he inquired.   “Me?” smiled the elder. “Doing?” The elder roared with laughter. “This ego dissolved into God many years ago. There is no ‘I’ left to ‘do’ anything. God works through this body to help and awaken all people and draw them to Him.” --Roger Walsh, in Essential Spirituality... http://www.ijourney.org/?tid=962 Mon, 20 May 2013 00:00:00 -0700 The Gentlest Thing in the World, Byron Katie The gentlest thing in the world is an open mind. Since it doesn't believe what it thinks, it is flexible, porous, without opposition, without defense. Nothing has power over it. Nothing can resist it. Even the hardest thing in the world — a closed mind — can't resist the power of openness. Ultimately the truth flows into it and through it, like water through rock. "When the mind first becomes a student of itself, it learns that nothing in the world can possibly oppose it: everything is for it, everything adds to it, enlightens it, nourishes it, reveals it. It continues to open, because it's in a fearless, undefended state, and it's hungry for knowledge. And when it realizes that it's nothing, it can penetrate everywhere, even when there's no room for it, no place to receive it. People are afraid to be nothing. But being nothing is only one aspect of it. Not only is it nothing to be afraid of, it's a cause for celebration. Without your stressful story, there is no stress — obviously! When you don't believe your thoughts, there's only laughter and peace. There are names for a place like that. I call it heaven. And how can people know what nothingness is while they still believe what they think? 'Something is better than nothing' — can you absolutely know that that's true? The truly open mind doesn't have a goal or a purpose other than to be what it is. It's not attached to concepts of self or other. It realizes that ultimately there are no humans, there is no mind. When the mind opens, you lose everything, gratefully. I'm sitting here as a woman, and in the next realization I'm a galaxy or an ant. It doesn't matter. You lose everything, and then there's the reentry. On a good-hair day, don't you love to look in the mirror? That's what it's like. You're looking in the mirror at nothing, delighted. When you're nothing, it's always a good-hair day. […] Mind appears, if it appears, only to end itself. The projected world goes first, then the mind that projected it. No trace of it remains. Silence is all that's possible — the openness of never having existed in the first place. That's where I live. When it's over, it's over. You can't create or uncreate it. You wouldn't want to. -- Byron Katie, in "A Thousand Names for Joy" ... http://www.ijourney.org/?tid=956 Mon, 13 May 2013 00:00:00 -0700 Selfless Climbing versus Ego Climbing, Robert Pirsig Phaedrus wrote a letter from India about a pilgrimage to holy Mount Kailas, the source of the Ganges and the abode of Shiva, high in the Himalayas, in the company of a holy man and his adherents. He never reached the mountain. After the third day he gave up exhausted, and the pilgrimage went on without him. He said he had the physical strength but that physical strength wasn't enough. He had the intellectual motivation but that wasn't enough either. He didn't think he had been arrogant but thought that he was undertaking the pilgrimage to broaden his experience, to gain understanding of himself. He was trying to use the mountain for his own purposes and the pilgrimage too. He regarded himself as the fixed entity, not the pilgrimage or the mountain, and thus wasn't ready for it. He speculated that the other pilgrims, the ones who reached the mountain, probably sensed the holiness of the mountain so intensely that each footstep was an act of devotion, an act of submission to this holiness. The holiness of the mountain infused into their own spirits enabled them to endure far more than anything he, with his greater physical strength, could take. To the untrained eye ego-climbing and selfless climbing may appear identical. Both kinds of climbers place one foot in front of the other. Both breathe in and out at the same rate. Both stop when tired. Both go forward when rested. But what a difference! The ego-climber is like an instrument that's out of adjustment. He puts his foot down an instant too soon or too late. He's likely to miss a beautiful passage of sunlight through the trees. He goes on when the sloppiness of his step shows he's tired. He rests at odd times. He looks up the trail trying to see what's ahead even when he knows what's ahead because he just looked a second before. He goes too fast or too slow for the conditions and when he talks his talk is forever about somewhere else, something else. He's here but he's not here. He rejects the here, is unhappy with it, wants to be farther up the trail but when he gets there will be just as unhappy because then it will be "here." What he's looking for, what he wants, is all around him, but he doesn't want that because it is â€‹all around him. Every step's an effort, both physically and spiritually, because he imagines his goal to be external and distant. Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance... http://www.ijourney.org/?tid=959 Mon, 06 May 2013 00:00:00 -0700 The Endless Fertility of Walking, Rebecca Solnit Walking, ideally, is a state in which the mind, the body, and the world are aligned, as though they were three characters finally in conversation together, three notes suddenly making a chord. Walking allows us to be in our bodies and in the world without being made busy by them. It leaves us free to think without being wholly lost in our thoughts. I wasn't sure whether I was too soon or too late for the purple lupine that can be so spectacular in these headlands, but milkmaids were growing on the shady side of the road on the way to the trail, and they recalled the hillsides of my childhood that first bloomed every year with an extravagance of these white flowers. Black butterflies fluttered around me, tossed along by wind and wings, and they called up another era of my past. Moving on foot seems to make it easier to move in time; the mind wanders from plans to recollections to observations. The rhythm of walking generates a kind of rhythm of thinking, and the passage through a landscape echoes or stimulates the passage through a series of thoughts. This creates an odd consonance between internal and external passage, one that suggests that the mind is also a landscape of sorts and that walking is one way to traverse it. A new thought often seems like a feature of the landscape that was there all along, as though thinking were traveling rather than making. And so one aspect of the history of walking is the history of thinking made concrete—for the motions of the mind cannot be traced, but those of the feet can. Walking can also be imagined as a visual activity, every walk a tour leisurely enough both to see and to think over the sights, to assimilate the new into the known. Perhaps this is where walking's peculiar utility for thinkers comes from. The surprises, liberations, and clarifications of travel can sometimes be garnered by going around the block as well as going around the world, and walking travels both near and far. Or perhaps walking should be called movement, not travel, for one can walk in circles or travel around the world immobilized in a seat, and a certain kind of wanderlust can only be assuaged by the acts of the body itself in motion, not the motion of the car, boat, or plane. It is the movement as well as the sights going by that seems to make things happen in the mind, and this is what makes walking ambiguous and endlessly fertile: it is both means and end, travel and destination. -- Rebecca Solnit, from <a href="http://www.worldcat.org/wcpa/servlet/DCARead?standardNo=0140286012&standardNoType=1&excerpt=true">"Wanderlust: A History of Walking"</a>... http://www.ijourney.org/?tid=950 Mon, 29 Apr 2013 00:00:00 -0700 The Great Tragedy of Speed, David Whyte Speed in work has compensations. Speed gets noticed. Speed is praised by others. Speed is self-important. Speed absolves us. Speed means we don't really belong to any particular thing or person we are visiting and thus appears to elevate us above the ground of our labors. When it becomes all-consuming, speed is the ultimate defense, the antidote to stopping and really looking. If we really saw what we were doing and who we had become, we feel we might not survive the stopping and the accompanying self-appraisal. So we don't stop, and the faster we go, the harder it becomes to stop. We keep moving on whenever any form of true commitment seems to surface. Speed is also warning, a throbbing, insistent indicator that some cliff edge or other is very near, a sure diagnostic sign that we are living someone else's life and doing someone else's work. But speed saves us the pain of all that stopping; speed can be such a balm, a saving grace, a way we tell ourselves, in unconscious ways, that we are really not participating. "The great tragedy of speed as an answer to the complexities and responsibilities of existence is that very soon we cannot recognize anything or anyone who is not traveling at the same velocity as we are. We see only those moving in the same whirling orbit and only those moving with the same urgency. Soon we begin to suffer a form of amnesia, caused by the blurred vision of velocity itself, where those germane to our humanity are dropped from our minds one by one. We start to lose sight of any colleagues who are moving at a slower pace, and we start to lose sight of the bigger, slower cycles that underlie our work. We especially lose sight of the big, unfolding wave form passing through our lives that is indicative of our central character. On the personal side, as slaves to speed, we start to lose sight of family members, especially children, or those who are ill or infirm, who are not flying through the world as quickly and determinedly as we are. Just as seriously, we begin to leave behind the parts of our own selves that limp a little, the vulnerabilities that actually give us color and character. We forget that our sanity is dependent on a relationship with longer, more patient cycles extending beyond the urgencies and madness of the office." --David Whyte ... http://www.ijourney.org/?tid=938 Mon, 22 Apr 2013 00:00:00 -0700 Why Not Be Ready?, Tenzin Palmo Our everyday life is our spiritual life. If we have awareness to be able to use our everyday life as practice, then our lives have meaning. Otherwise, the days go by—impermanence, as we know—moment to moment to moment, day after day, year after year, and suddenly, there we are, faced with death, and what have we done? We don’t know when we are going to die. Every breath we take could be our last breath: we don’t know. When we wake up in the morning, we should say, “How amazing that I lasted this whole day and I haven’t died yet.” Who knows when we’ll die? We honestly don’t know. All these people killed in accidents on the road—did they think they were going to die? Death comes without respect for age or success or beauty or health. When we go, we go. So we have to live each day as if it were our last. If we really thought, “Tomorrow, I’m going to die,” what would we do with today? Surely we would really start to re-evaluate our whole situation. Once when I was in my cave, there was a raging blizzard and I was snowed in. The blizzard blew seven days and seven nights non-stop and the cave was completely covered. When I opened the window, there was just a sheet of ice; when I opened the door, there was a sheet of ice. I thought, “This is it,” because the cave was very small and I would surely run out of oxygen and die. So I got myself all ready [...] and I went through my life. I regretted the things I had done wrong, and I rejoiced in the things I had done right. It was very salutary because I really believed that I only had a day or two left at most. It really put things into perspective—what was important and what was not important; what was important for me to think and what was totally irrelevant for me to think. Normally our minds are filled with non-stop chatter, the running commentary of totally useless soap-opera dialogue that we present to ourselves. But when we believe we’ve only got a limited amount of time to keep thinking, we become very discriminating in our thoughts, and much more conscious of how we’re using our time and of what we’re doing with our mind. If we live thinking that each day is our last, it helps us appreciate each moment. This is not being fatalistic or gloomy. If this was our last day on earth, we would be careful of our time. We wouldn’t create more problems; we would try to solve the problems we already have. We’d be nice to people. If we’re not going to see them again, why not be nice to them? Wouldn’t we be kind to our family, our children, our partners, and the people that we’re leaving, if we thought we were never going to see them again? Because, who knows? We might not. One day, we won’t. Why not be ready? -- Tenzin Palmo, excerpted from<a href="http://tenzinpalmo.com/shop/"> "Into the Heart of Life"</a>... http://www.ijourney.org/?tid=936 Mon, 15 Apr 2013 00:00:00 -0700 The Only Power of the Mystic, Hazrat Inayat Khan The only power for the mystic is the power of love. Every kind of power lies in this one thing which we call by the simple name: love. Charity, generosity, kindness, affection, endurance, tolerance, and patience--all these words are different aspects of one; they are different names of only one thing: love. Whether it is said, 'God is love,' or whatever name is given to it, all the names are the names of God; and yet every form of love, every name for love, has its own peculiar scope, has a peculiarity of its own. Love as kindness is one thing, love as tolerance is another, love as generosity is another, love as patience another; and yet, from beginning to end, it is just love. Remember therefore that for higher attainment on the spiritual path, study is secondary; all knowledge of occult and psychic law, all magical powers, are secondary. The first and most important principle is the cultivation of the heart quality. One may ask: How to cultivate the heart quality? There is only one way: to become selfless at each step one takes forward on this path, for what prevents one from cultivating the loving quality is the thought of self. The more we think of our self the less we think of others, and as we go further the self grows to become worse and worse. In the end the self meets us as a giant which we had always fought; and now at the end of the journey the giant is the stronger. But if from the first step we take on the path of perfection we struggled and fought and conquered this giant which is the self, it could be done only by the increasing power of love. What do I mean by love? It is such a word that one cannot give one meaning. All attributes like kindness, gentleness, goodness, humbleness, mildness, fineness, are names of one and the same thing. Love therefore is that stream which when it rises, (it also) falls in the form of a fountain, and each stream coming down is a virtue. All virtues taught by books or by a religious person have no strength or life because they have been learned; a virtue that is learned has no power, no life. The virtue that naturally springs from the depth of the heart, the virtue that rises from the love-spring and then falls as many different attributes, that virtue is real. There is a Hindustani saying, 'No matter how much wealth you have, if you do not have the treasure of virtue, it is of no use'. The true riches is the ever increasing spring of love from which all virtues come. --Hazrat Inayat Khan from <a href="http://wahiduddin.net/saki/saki_date.php">"The Bowl of Saki"</a>... http://www.ijourney.org/?tid=933 Mon, 08 Apr 2013 00:00:00 -0700