Thisness…

Coming back to where you started is not the same as never leaving.

— Terry Pratchett

This is the return to ordinary, uncomplicated living. Emails, menopause, coffee, internet trolls. It’s the same body-mind moving as before. It still looks and feels like a self. Only now, it’s no longer believed to be about anyone. It’s no longer the identity.

— Freedom from and freedom as

As you walk the Spiritual path It widens Not narrows Until one day It broadens To a point Where There is no Path left at all.

— Wayne Liquorman

Good morning.

Suffering doesn’t disappear from life, it disappears into life.

— Barry Magid, Ordinary Mind Zendo.

…then perhaps Zen is the name of the rug that we pull out from under ourselves to collapse any mysterious shapes. Including Zen itself.

— Zen is a rug, Shojiwax

Let everything happen to you Beauty and terror Just keep going No feeling is final.

— Rainer Maria Rilke

There can be no transforming of darkness into light and of apathy into movement without emotion.

— Carl Jung

Reality is not outside of you for you to grasp. Reality is You. You can’t get closer to it by naming it. You can only be it. It can’t be spoken. It doesn’t need to be.

— What’s in a name?

Madness is a special form of the spirit and clings to all teachings and philosophies, but even more to daily life, since life itself is full of craziness and at bottom utterly illogical. Man strives toward reason only so that he can make rules for himself. Life itself has no rules.

— Carl Jung

Recognising and accepting impermanence is easier as you get older since you have a daily front row seat to live physical decay.

I bear in my hands the disguise by which I conceal my life. A web of meaningless events, I dye it with the magic of my point of view.

— David Shields, Reality Hunger

The degree of control we think we have over our life is grossly over estimated. Indeed the degree to which we think have any control or agency at all is perhaps one of our greatest delusions.

Patterns, symbols, archetypes, myths, stories – maps of unknowable territories. What is created when the universe attempts to apprehend itself.

Freedom is not an achievement at some future point in time, but the absence of the need for any achievement, now.

— Start here

Awakening is truly nothing more or less than being right here in this moment, just as it is, and just as we are.

— Joan Tollifson

As you make more and more powerful microscopic instruments, the universe has to get smaller and smaller in order to escape the investigation. Just as when the telescopes become more and more powerful, the galaxies have to recede in order to get away from the telescopes. Because what is happening in all these investigations is this: Through us and through our eyes and senses, the universe is looking at itself. And when you try to turn around to see your own head, what happens? It runs away. You can’t get at it. This is the principle.

— Alan Watts

The knower cannot be known.

Good morning.

Guillermo del Toro on wealth: “a wealthy man is a man who has enough, not a man that needs more. If you have enough to invite someone for a beer? You’re rich. If you have a yacht, planes, islands, and you still need more? You’re not rich.”

— Abigail Larson via Dave Winer