Brief commentaries about this life we’re living, as it is thought about and as it is.
GRACE NOTES
• Like the good ship Plastiki made of recycled plastic bottles and currently circling the globe, this little blog venture floats on recycled and reusable truths. It makes no claim to possess this truth, nor to seek it, nor to know it, but to recognize that all of life floats on it, is supported and fed by it, and is nothing other than this indescribable, unknowable truth, however it is formed and cobbled together. Like a glass bottomed boat, perhaps some of this collection will help us both look and see through to the reality that lies beneath the surface. And to see we are that which is looking.
• ( More commentaries will be added , with the most recent appearing here at the top. If you have one or two, please use the blog or Contact Me to share your Grace notes.)
• NEW: There is nobody that dances – just dancing – the acceptance of our being one with the flow of all life.
• “Wisdom is knowing I am nothing. Love is knowing I am everything, and between the two my life moves.” Nisargadatta
• “All of your problems are body-mind problems.” Nisargadatta Maharaj
• The unknown life is the only one we’re living.
• “ Enlightenment is absolute co-operation with the inevitable.” Anthony de Mello
• Ultimately, we recognize our self to be pure potential. Nothing else.
• “Anyone you think you know, you don’t know them now.” Nirmala
• You are not a concept about you.
• In asking ourselves the question of “die before you die,” it is useful to address: “what is it that lives before, during
and after death?”
• Opinions are invested in the most when we are afraid they may not be true.
• Time is a useful invention.
• “Ego is only a problem for ego.” Adyashanti
• The search for awareness is always awareness seeking its own recognition.
• “ So they say” is the story of our life, but not the truth of it.
• Life is source constantly re-sourcing from itself.
• “ The point is not to get rid of thought and feelings, but just not to feel located inside of them.” Adyashanti
• “ This is as much God as you’re ever gonna get.”
Adyashanti, after dropping a stick several times.
• “Thought is the bar behind the door.” Rumi
• If you’re looking for something you can believe in, you’re not seeing the truth.
• “He chose to be rich by making his wants few and supplying them himself.” Emerson, about his friend Thoreau.
• With knowing comes seeing; with seeing comes knowing. There’s only knowing/seeing – being. That is joy.
• There’s no leaving of awareness; we’re born in it, we live, die and dance always in awareness.
• Our desire not to suffer is why we suffer.
• There’s nothing missing, although the mind tells us otherwise.
• A thought may or may not tickle our interest, but it always moves on.
• “Love itself, is a kind of knowing.”
Gregory the Great ( 14th. century )
• “ My wish would be to tell not how things ought to be, but how they are, and how and why we ignore them as they
are.”
Alan Watts
• Reality is this illusion, perceived.
• Cultivating sanity is simple, direct relationship to the truth of this moment.
• “Devotion to truth becomes a movement of compassion not only for ourselves but for others; we start to see that
what we do for ourselves, we automatically do for others.” Adyashanti
• The fiction of self involves the curious exploration of all our beliefs with a gentle wielding of any blunt or sharp
instrument that comes to hand in the moment.
• “ Even the poorest thing shines”
Layman P’ang (740-808)
• Identity takes the shape of the messages received and believed.
• Love is all this, constantly thising!
• Our home is in this great unknown, no matter where we think we’re laying our head.
• “ Birthdays are good for you; the more you have the longer you live!”
• Life doesn’t get better than this. Or worse.
• “Do not improve yourself past that which is already whole.” Adyashanti
• Joy is abundant when we let this moment be exactly as it is.
• Life is like a river that flows while remaining.
• “ Be like the breeze that is attached neither to the garbage nor the garden it blows over.” Papaji
• “ This consciousness I am is beating a drum; everyone is carried away by the noise of the drum. Who looks for the
drummer? “
Nisargadatta
• “ The souls dark cottage, battered and decayed, lets in new light thro the chinks that time has made. “
Virgil
• “ And is Dan coming with? “
overheard cell talk
* Writing happens to give voice to this silence.
* Ultimately, all words lead away from understanding.
* Concepts add a certain method to our madness.
* “ This question of existence never gets straightened out except through existence itself.”
Martin Heidegger
• My friend Brian lives on the street at the corner of 63rd and College. Google that corner in Berkeley and you’ll see him sitting there on a plastic box, reading.
• Life gives you the experience you think you’ll get.
• “ He came with the sofa.”
( overheard )
*Truth is like the big old family dog I saw today; he was clutched by a three year old toddler finding his feet while hanging on to the scruff of his neck with complete trust. I am the toddler, and the dog.
*What sanity looks like is always and only this.
* Grace lends us a hand that sometimes is shaped like a fist.
* When “I” disappears, it’s all awareness.
* “ When you assist somebody who is so called “dying”, you must die with him. You must free him from all kinds of qualification. That means you must be free yourself.”
Jean Klein
• “ Without this effort, all that’s left is the wonderful play of pure consciousness called life; no one to experience it and no one to suffer from it, and yet it dances beautifully.”
Nirmala
* What on earth would it be like to live without our belief in ideas? Reality.
• The rest is silence.
• “All happiness comes from pleasing the Self.”
• “ Awareness is always on holiday because it doesn’t do anything.”
Florian
*In death, your life as your idea of it, dies. This Life that you are, lives on, of course.
* “Let go by knowing the pain of holding.”
Papaji
• When thoughts land, simply wave them away; don’t feed them, let them fly off before shit happens!
• Whatever is arising is not a mistake. Let it be.
• Awareness is drawn to experience everything as it is.
• “ To the old people with grey hair the little children give instruction.”
Manichaean Psalm
• Mind produces beautiful thoughts about beauty.
• “ Even though truth can manifest as illusion, that doesn’t mean it’s still not illusion.” Adyashanti
• Imaginary self is an egoically crafted critter.
• There is no place for effort in reality – just natural expression. Effort is selfish; it is a sign of conflict between fears and desires.
• Self surrender can’t be done. It’s the surrender of all self concern.
• “ All becoming has needed me. My looking ripens things and they come toward me, to meet and be met.” Rilke
• Bypass the mind and totally lean into the whole of what’s going on here and now.
• Sincere looking naturally leads to seeing.
• There’s no such thing as a true thought. There is truth, and there are our thoughts about it.
• Patience is found in silence.
• Awareness holds all our stories, but is itself not a story.
• It’s not that we lose our identity in our death; in truth, we find it: what we always have been, are and will be.
• Life is allowed, gets easier and easier, without a “me” being attached to it.
• Grace is found in the simple exploration of this; it flows from a seeing in the round, a natural curiosity and receptivity toward reality.
• You are not present – you are pre-sense – presence itself.
• Shift happens!
• “ So they say” is the story of our unexamined life.
• “ To be without anxiety about imperfection” is a Zen phrase for being.
• A “me” has to take a side, have an opinion.
• This is always a world without “me”.
• “ Being selfless isn’t a good, holy or noble activity. It’s simply that when there is no self, selflessness happens.” Adyashanti
• I saw three crazy people today who didn’t know what they were doing, and all of them were me… know what I mean?
• We’re all born with a sweet tooth for truth.
• “There is nothing in the universe as much like God as silence.” Meister Eckhart
• Nothing needs to change for you to be happy.
• “The most important book to read is yourself; if you read that, you will have read all the others.” Toni Packer
• “If you argue correctly, you’re never wrong.” Movie “Thank you for Smoking”
• Suffering in any form is caused by a missed perception.
• Do you want to feel good, or know what’s really true?
• We do not chose our suffering; it comes from our habits and preferences and the resistance they produce.
• Problems are created by resistance to what is.
• “You can only know God through an open mind, just as you can only see the sky through a clear window.” Alan Watts
• The mind is naturally born open; in our early quest for identity, we begin to close it with the question “who am I?” and to open it again with the same question, slightly but significantly modified to “ what am I?”
• Waking up is realizing that what appears uniquely different is actually all the same One dressed in costumes.
• Our addiction to concepts precludes what is otherwise and obviously true in our actual experience.
• “Humans live as though to breathe were life, and to not breathe were death” Who lives and who dies?
• “This is the time for you to compute the possibility that there is anything but Grace.” Hafiz
• “Memory is the corpse of experience, from which life has vanished.” Alan Watts
• We may be well served if we add “ …I think.” to the end of any statements we make about things we think are “true and real.”
• Opposition is minds way of claiming territory on which to construct an identity.
• Freedom is a resting between contradiction.
• Inscribed on Pete Seegers’ banjo: “This machine surrounds hate and forces it to surrender.”
• In truth there are no goals, no “finish” lines.
• “ When you live this emptiness, you are completely vacant. There is no person who is vacant, there is only vacancy.” Jean Klein
• In the harmony of wholeness, thought takes its place as an aspect , a facet of the jewel, a useful tool from time to time.
• “Something must be said about the healed vision of life which comes from full awareness, for it involves a deep transformation of our view of the world.” Alan Watts
• Life gives us our deepest intentions.
• Real, whole and happy living is not an accomplishment; it simply embraces all that happens in this fragile and fleeting now, now.
• Generally, there is no such thing as a “personal decision.” We react according to our programming; to act, there must be awareness.
• With spiritual ego, “someone” pretends to know something.
• Talking to my Self is talking to you. It’s a confession that all the stories I told my Self were lies.
• No one can tell you what this is; to know it as your Self does not require knowledge, but being.
• One is spirit and – Oh yes, human!
• “ Now I know I wanna go to heaven!”
( A ninety year old woman after making her first skydive.)
• Looking for something that you can believe in? What is it that’s looking?
• “ Get a grip!” is the minds way to stay in the forefront of being.
• “ Not knowing what we want “ is usually seen as a “problem”.
• Life lives on, so relax – you don’t need to help the absolute.
• Please do not think that what is said in words is actual and real. Words are expressing the underlying real nature of what is.
• What “happens” is called life, and then there’s the story about it.
• All stories are about themselves.
• I sing not about love; love sings about love.
• “ When did we start pretending?
• “ The problems we face will not be solved by the minds that made them.” car sticker
• Real love is seen as a threat by ego-love.
• “There is no better service then to fully experience your life and find out the truth of it.” Nirmala
• In this life which we could call: “ the shooting of the bull!” what’s the fuss all about? A vanished thought?
• Death gives us a glimpse of the duration of the finite with all its endings, and the endless beginnings of the infinite. The two are one.