Spirituality

Eating the Blame

Gill Washington Awakening, Buddhist Writings, Jack Kornfield, Spirituality, Suffering, Zen , , , 0 Comment

From: After the Ecstasy, the Laundry

By Jack Kornfield

When we are confused or in pain, we often judge ourselves as
“not spiritual enough.” But the awakened heart does not judge
anything-not our family or our love, nor our pain and confusion,
our passion or anger. “Terrible harm has been done by this
misunderstanding,” said one Catholic monk.

In mature spirituality we are willing to have a dialogue
with pain, with evil, to hold them in our prayers. In
situations Of great pain, someone has to consciously
suffer the impact, to become the ground where the
sorrows can be held and reworked. These things can be
carried with grace. But it can’t be faked. If you go to
someone with 99 percent of goodwill and are still caught
in 1 percent anger, all they feel is the anger, and it pushes
them from reconciliation. The heart has to willingly hold the
whole of suffering for it to be transformed.

In Zen, holding the suffering sometimes takes the form of
“eating the blame.” It is illustrated by the story of a
cook who made soup for the monks from a turtle offered by
fishermen that morning. When the soup was ladled into the
monks’ bowls, the roshi bellowed for the cook to come out.
The turtle’s head, which should have been removed before
serving, was floating in the master’s bowl. The cook bowed
to the master, looked into the bowl, saw the problem, and
with a deft movement of chopsticks plucked the turtle head
out and ate it. Then he bowed to the master, the master
back, and the cook returned to the kitchen.

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Essence of Life

Gill Washington Awakening, Buddhist Writings, Life, Pema Chödrön, Spirituality , , , 0 Comment

From: When Things Fall Apart: Heart Advice for Difficult Times

by Pema Chodron

“We think that if we just meditated enough or jogged enough
or ate perfect food, everything would be perfect. But from
the point of view of someone who is awake, that’s death.
Seeking security or perfection, rejoicing in feeling confirmed
and whole, self-contained and comfortable, is some kind of
death. It doesn’t have any fresh air. There’s no room for something
to come in and interrupt all that. We are killing the moment by
controlling our experience. Doing this is setting ourselves up for
failure, because sooner or later, we’re going to have an experience
we can’t control: our house is going to burn down, someone we love
is going to die, we’re going to find out we have cancer, a brick is
going to fall out of the sky and hit us on the head, somebody’s going
to spill tomato juice all over our white suit, or we’re going to arrive
at our favorite restaurant and discover that no one ordered produce
and seven hundred people are coming for lunch.

“The essence of life is that it’s challenging. Sometimes it is sweet,
and sometimes it is bitter. Sometimes your body tenses, and sometimes
it relaxes or opens. Sometimes you have a headache, and sometimes you
feel 100 percent healthy. From an awakened perspective, trying to tie
up all the loose ends and finally get it together is death, because it
involves rejecting a lot of your basic experience. There is something
aggressive about that approach to life, trying to flatten out all the
rough spots and imperfections into a nice smooth ride.

“To be fully alive, fully human, and completely awake is to be
continually thrown out of the nest. To live fully is to be always in
no-man’s-land, to experience each moment as completely new and
fresh. To live is to be willing to die over and over again. From the
awakened point of view, that’s life.”

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Knowledge and Wisdom

Gill Washington Enlightenment, Gill Washington, Practice, Spirituality , , , 0 Comment

There is a difference between knowledge and wisdom.
Accumulating facts and ideas and so on is knowledge.
Understanding this knowledge is wisdom, and is totally
unrelated to whether someone has a lot of book learned
knowledge or a little. It is as mistaken to assume a scholar
could not have realized as it is to believe a ‘dullard’
as in the Joseph Goldstein story, or someone like Hastamalaka
could not have realized. Each have their own
advantages and disadvantages along the way, their own
salvation to diligently work out.

The ‘unlearning’ that people like Idries Shah talk about
does not mean to become an intellectual jelly, with mush
for brains. He was rather intelligent himself, and very
learned. As was Rumi, and Hafiz and many others. The
challenge for those blessed with intelligence is to utilize
it in a way which helps and not hinders spiritual realization,
to let go of the idea that intelligence will necessarily help
them, or makes them superior. But nor is it wise to look down
on the learned and intelligent and judge them as having only
accumulated useless knowledge. Hafiz himself could recite
the entire Qur’an, and we really are way off when we find
ourselves judging the spiritual state of others.

Something else to ponder on this topic: if there were not
people who devoted their lives to learning, to accumulating
knowledge, we would not have the Bible, the Qu’ran,
the Buddhist scriptures and may other spiritual works. We
would know nothing of the life of Jesus or the Prophet or
Buddha, as these were all memorized by scholars and
written down at a much later time, often hundreds of years
later.
I leave you with the idea that if we are feeling superior
about something, such as judging for ourselves that if
someone is knowledgeable they are per se unrealized, we may
like to open our minds a little, and allow for another
possibility. We could at least suspend judgement, as
judging others is usually a much less fruitful use of
our time than our own practice can be in helping us to
see we are off. And when we do this we are no different
to the intelligent brothers who dismiss the dullard in the
Goldstein story – just doing the same thing in reverse.

With much metta to those who are intelligent, those who
are not, those who are learned, those who are not, and
those who see no difference between the two and those
who do!

Gill Washington

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Each and All

Gill Washington Life, Poems, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Spirituality , , , , 0 Comment

By Ralph Waldo Emerson

Little thinks, in the field, yon red-cloaked clown,
Of thee from the hill-top looking down;
The heifer that lows in the upland farm,
Far-heard, lows not thine ear to charm;
The sexton, tolling his bell at noon,
Deems not that great Napoleon
Stops his horse, and lists with delight,
Whilst his files sweep round yon Alpine height;
Nor knowest thou what argument
Thy life to thy neighbor’s creed has lent.
All are needed by each one;
Nothing is fair or good alone.
I thought the sparrow’s note from heaven,
Singing at dawn on the alder bough;
I brought him home, in his nest, at even;
He sings the song, but it pleases not now,
For I did not bring home the river and sky; —
He sang to my ear, — they sang to my eye.
The delicate shells lay on the shore;
The bubbles of the latest wave
Fresh pearls to their enamel gave;
And the bellowing of the savage sea
Greeted their safe escape to me.
I wiped away the weeds and foam,
I fetched my sea-born treasures home;
But the poor, unsightly, noisome things
Had left their beauty on the shore,
With the sun, and the sand, and the wild uproar.
The lover watched his graceful maid,
As ‘mid the virgin train she stayed,
Nor knew her beauty’s best attire
Was woven still by the snow-white choir.
At last she came to his hermitage,
Like the bird from the woodlands to the cage; —
The gay enchantment was undone,
A gentle wife, but fairy none.
Then I said, “I covet truth;
Beauty is unripe childhood’s cheat;
I leave it behind with the games of youth:” —
As I spoke, beneath my feet
The ground-pine curled its pretty wreath,
Running over the club-moss burrs;
I inhaled the violet’s breath;
Around me stood the oaks and firs;
Pine-cones and acorns lay on the ground;
Over me soared the eternal sky,
Full of light and of deity;
Again I saw, again I heard,
The rolling river, the morning bird; —
Beauty through my senses stole;
I yielded myself to the perfect whole.

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Everything Depends on Your Steps

Gill Washington Buddhist Writings, Joy, Life, Mindfulness, Peace, Spiritual Writers, Spirituality, Thich Nhat Hanh Quotes , , , 0 Comment

From: The Long Road Turns to Joy

By Thich Nhat Hanh

The seed of mindfulness is in us, but we usually forget to water it.
We think that happiness is possible only in the future-when we get
a house, a car, a Ph.D. We struggle in our mind and body, and we
don’t touch the peace and joy that are available right now-the blue
sky, the green leaves, the eyes of our beloved. What is most
important? Many people have passed exams and bought houses and
cars, and yet they are still unhappy. What is most important in life is
to find peace and to share it with others. To have peace, you can
begin by walking peacefully. Everything depends on your steps.

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I Have Come

Gill Washington Poems, Prayer, Rumi, Spirituality , , , , , , 0 Comment

From Hush – Don’t Say Anything to God – Passionate Poems of Rumi

by Shahram Shiva

I have come
to pull you by your ear,
and bring you to myself.
I will make you selfless,
I will make you fearless,
then I will place you in the
heart and the soul of the king of Souls.
I have come like a breeze of Spring
to you, oh, field of flowers,
so I can keep you by my side,
and hold you tight.
I have come to shine on you,
as you walk this path.
Like the prayer of lovers,
I will help you reach the
roof of the heavens.

I have come to take back that kiss
that you stole from me.
You are my catch, my game,
my prey, my hunt.
You have escaped my trap so far,
Run, run, or I will chase you there.
Remember what the lion said to the deer.
“You are so beautiful,
you are so lovely
run in front of me,
so I can catch you
and tear you to pieces.”
Be like the deer, accept the wounds
like a shield of a warrior.
Don’t listen to anything
but the whooshing of the arrows heading
toward you.
From the dust of the Earth to a human being
there are a thousand steps
I have been with you through these steps,
I have held your hand and walked by your side.
You may think that I have left you
on the side of the road.
Don’t complain,
don’t become mad,
and don’t open the lid of the pot.
Boil happily and be patient.
Remember what you are being prepared for.
You are a lion’s cub,
hidden inside a deer’s body,
with one strike I will wipe that illusion
and rid you of it.
You are my ball, and you roll because
of the strike of my polo mallet.
Just remember,
it is me who is chasing you
even though it is me who is helping you run.

http://www.rumi.net/

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The Choiceless Choice

Gill Washington Freedom, Spirituality, Tony Parsons , , 0 Comment

From:  The Open Secret

by Tony Parsons

In presence I see that I have never chosen or done
anything, but have only been lived through.
And so I have never stopped the sea or moved
the sun or taken one step nearer or further away
from my birthright.

In accepting my divine helplessness I enjoy the
freedom of never having a past or future I could
call my own.

Some people ask, “Who chooses, who directs this
wonderful chaos?” But once in the arms of the beloved
nothing matters, and I can live as though I choose and
rejoice in the letting go.

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