"The Meaning of Life is to see"

[openyouri]

I would be strange and ragged and like the Prophet who has walked across the land to bring the dark Word, and the only Word I had was “Wow!”

Jack Kerouac

[openyouri]

“…there is no being other than God…Everything that exists in the world, spiritual and physical, is God Himself….Because of this, every person can become attached to God wherever he is, through the holiness that exists in every single thing, even corporeal things.” — Rabbi Yehudah Aryeh Leib Alter

[mindful-and-motivated-deactivat]

Mindfulness helps us get better at seeing the difference between what’s happening and the stories we tell ourselves about what’s happening, stories that get in the way of direct experience. Often such stories treat a fleeting state of mind as if it were our entire and permanent self.

Sharon Salzberg (via withlovingkindness)

[openyouri]

Nothing we do is inevitable, but everything we do is irreversible. How do you propose to remember that in time?

Joy Williams

[openyouri]

I hear the wind blow and I feel that it was worth being born just to hear the wind blow.

Fernando Pessoa

[openyouri]

Life is like stepping into a boat that is about to set sail out to sea and sink.

Shunryu Suzuki

[openyouri]

Find meaning. Distinguish melancholy from sadness. Go out for a walk. It doesn't have to be a romantic walk in the park, spring at its most spectacular moment, flowers and smells and outstanding poetical imagery smoothly transferring you into another world. It doesn't have to be a walk during which you'll have multiple life epiphanies and discover meanings no other brain ever managed to encounter. Do not be afraid of spending quality time by yourself. Find meaning or don't find meaning but “steal” some time and give it freely and exclusively to your own self. Opt for privacy and solitude. That doesn't make you antisocial or cause you to reject the rest of the world. But you need to breathe. And you need to be.

Albert Camus

[watchoutforintellect]

And now let us believe in a long year that is given to us, new, untouched, full of things that have never been…

Rainer Maria Rilke, from a letter to his wife featured in The Letters of Rainer Maria Rilke: 1892-1910 (via watchoutforintellect)

[abiding-in-peace]

You may wonder if the most wonderful moments of your life are already behind you. Or you may think the happiest moment of your life is still to come. But this is the moment we have been waiting for.

Thich Nhat Hanh, in “At Home in the World”. (via abiding-in-peace)

[thecalminside]

Let go of the battle. Breathe quietly and let it be. Let your body relax and your heart soften. Open to whatever you experience without fighting

Jack Kornfield (via thecalminside)

[rainbowtwo]

The Zen of Seeing

‘Never has it been more urgent to speak of seeing. Ever more gadgets, from cameras to computers, from art books to videotapes, conspire to take over our thinking, our feeling, our experiencing, our seeing. Onlookers we are spectators… ‘Subjects’ we are, that look at 'objects.’ Quickly we stick labels on all that is, labels that stick once and for all. By these labels we recognise everything but no longer see anything. We know the labels on the bottles, but never taste the wine. Millions of people, unseeing, joyless, bluster through life in their halfsleep, hitting, kicking, and killing what they have barely perceived. They have never learned to see, or they have forgotten that man has eyes to see, to experience.’

- Frederick Franck, The Zen of Seeing.

[openyouri]

It is not our job to remain whole. We came to lose our leaves Like the trees, and be born again, Drawing up from the great roots. --Robert Bly

[luthienne]

Always, over and over, these days and nights will come, the anxiety, the aversion, the doubt. And I will still live, and I will still love life.

Hermann Hesse, from Wandering; “Rainy Weather” (via luthienne)

[openyouri]

Vipassana is a word that means, “to see things as they really are” and it is this beautiful yet difficult practice that carries one to the end of unhappiness. Michael Kewley

[the-red-lotus-blog-deactivated2]

When we let go of our battles and open our hearts to things as they are, then we come to rest in the present moment. This is the beginning and the end of spiritual practice.

Jack Kornfield (via the-red-lotus-blog)

[journalofanobody]

…of all things this was the saddest, that life goes on: if one leaves one’s lover, life should stop for him, and if one disappears from the world, then the world should stop, too: and it never did. And that was the real reason for most people getting up in the morning: not because it would matter but because it wouldn’t.”

 Truman Capote (via journalofanobody)

[purplebuddhaproject]

“Much of spiritual life is self-acceptance, maybe all of it.” ― Jack Kornfield

(via purplebuddhaproject)