#essential writings

[eyeamthat]

When icy winter comes, it is unforgiving to all things young, tender and insecure. One must grow beyond youthful uncertainty to survive. Maturity and determination are necessary. Seeing the courageous, solid way that trees prepare for winter helps me appreciate the lessons I've learned.

Thich Nhat Hanh, Fragrant Palm Leaves

[persephones-fruit]

The psyche is not of today; its ancestry goes back many millions of years. Individual consciousness is only the flower and the fruit of a season, sprung from the perennial rhizome beneath the earth; and it would find itself in better accord with the truth if it took the existence of the rhizome into its calculations. For the root matter is the mother of all things.

Carl Jung, Symbols of Transformation

[eyeamthat]

Mountains and rivers, Earth and sun, all lie within the heart of consciousness. When that realization arises, time and space dissolve. Cause and effect, birth and death, all vanish. Though I dwell a hundred thousand light-years from a star, I can cross that distance in a flash.

Thich Nhat Hanh, Fragrant Palm Leaves

[persephones-fruit]

What is the myth you are living?

Carl Jung, Symbols of Transformation

[bobonbooks]

Review: A Sure Way

A Sure Way A Sure Way (Plough Spiritual Guides), Edith Stein, edited by Carolyn Brand, Introduction by Zena Hitz. Plough Publishing (ISBN: 9781636081762) 2026. Summary: Essential writings on knowing God, the cross, the resurrection, women’s spirituality, and the way of the cross. Edith Stein was born to an upper-middle-class Jewish family in Breslau, Prussia (now Wroclaw, Poland). An early…

Review: A Sure Way

[persephones-fruit]

I have been accused of 'deifying the soul.' Not I, but God himself deified it! I did not attribute a religious function to the soul, I merely produced the facts which prove that the soul is naturally religious...For it is obvious that far too many people are incapable of establishing a connection between the sacred figures and their own psyche: that is to say, they cannot see to what extent the equivalent images lie dormant in their own unconscious.

Carl Jung

[samnamiko-blog]

Present Moment Wonderful Moment

“To dwell happily in the present moment,” was a common phrase of the Buddha. Often he advised his disciples, “Do not lose yourselves in the past, do not run after the future. The past no longer is, the future has not yet come.”

There are so many wonderful things in our world to enjoy, and yet we concentrate on what is not going well.

... our mind is like a television set with many channels. In the present moment we can choose the channel that we want to watch. Buddha has taught that there are fifty-one mental formations including love, joy, hate, jealousy, feelings, and perceptions, and it is up to us to choose which program we want to watch. For many of us, however, a program will appear on the screen of our mental television which is not of our choosing. This is because we have not yet rained in the art of mindfulness, which is the art of recognizing which mental formation is arising and of taking good care of that mental formation as it arises and for as long as it is present. The more mindful we are the more we can choose which mental formations appear on the screen of our mind.

[Thich Nhat Hanh] does not mean to tell us that we should not suffer or that suffering is wrong. [He] has suffered much and would not advise us not to suffer. It is our suffering that makes us compassionate. It is our suffering that acts as a compost to bring about the flowers and fruit of understanding and compassion. [He] tells his disciples, “You have every right to suffer, but you do not have the right not to practice when you suffer.” If we do not practice mindful breathing and walking when we suffer, we shall drown in our suffering and it will not be converted into that compost on which the flowers of understanding can grow.