“The miracle is not to walk on water. The miracle is to walk on the green Earth in the present moment, to appreciate the peace and beauty that are available now.”
—-Thich Nhat Hahn
being
Morning Trip (307)
“‘I want these people to experience beauty and prosperity. I want them to have it now. Not tomorrow, not in the future, but now, because their lives are short.’
‘If you remove adversity, you remove ingenuity and creativity with it. There is no need to strive to make something beautiful or better if it already is.'”
–Ilona Andrews, Magic Binds
Morning Trip (290)
“At first, the idea of ‘being in the moment’ scared me. I imagined that I would spend my life thinking, Right now, the wind is blowing and I see a butterfly. Now the butterfly is gone, but the wind is still blowing. A mosquito bit me despite the blowing wind. Oh my God–make it stop! I can’t do a play-by-play of every moment. I’ve got things to think about–work to get done. I basically was afraid mindfulness would disrupt my flow–what the scholar Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi describes as that sacred intersection of deep enjoyment and disciplined concentration.”
–Brene Brown, Rising Strong
Morning Trip (283)
“I decided to start anew–to strip away what I had been taught, to accept as true my own thinking. This was one of the best times of my life. There was no one around to look at what I was doing, no one interested, no one to say anything about it one way or another. I was alone and singularly free, working into my own, unknown–no one to satisfy but myself. I began with coal and paper and decided not to use any color until it was impossible to do what I wanted to do in black and white. I believe it was June before I needed blue.”
–Georgia O’Keeffe
Morning Trip (278)
“Feeling anger, it is easy to conclude that you are angry. The problem with this conclusion is that it can go beyond a mere descriptive statement. It can become a policy statement, or a basic plank in the platform of your sense of who you are. This, in turn, means that you come to see the moods as ‘all in your head,’ a function of your own nature, thus devaluing them. From an esoteric point of view, moods are the manifestation of energies, and can transcend the merely personal in the same way that the abstract structures of mathematics transcend the minds that perceive them.”
–John Michael Greer, Clare Vaughn, and Earl King Jr., Learning Ritual Magic [taken from Esoteric Empathy]
Morning Trip (255)
“The problem is that the self that you became convinced was the real you is a phantom that exists only as an abstraction in your mind – animated by the conflicted emotional energy of separation. It’s about as real as last night’s dream. And when you stop thinking it into existence, it has no existence at all. That’s why it is false – which begs the question, who or what is the real you?
At the core of the false self is a void of deficiency derived from an essential turning away from one’s own divinity, either out of natural development, despair, or simply by succumbing to the trance of the world with all its masks of deception and harsh obligation to conform to its insanity. The false self orbits around this vacuous abyss at its core, in silent terror of its nameless, faceless threat of oblivion.
The false self is both an obstacle and a doorway through which you must pass on your way to awakening to the dimension of being. As you pass through the void of self, the identification with self dies, either temporarily or permanently, and you are revealed (reborn) to be a presence. Presence is not a self in any conventional sense. It has no shape or form, no age or gender. It is an expression of universal being, the formless substance of existence. Presence is not subject to birth or death; it is not of the world of “things.” It is the light and radiance of consciousness in which entire worlds arise and pass away.”
–Adyashanti, wait – what?
Morning Trip (254)
“Sensations, from the beginning, involve a sort of doing. This means that, in an important sense, it is your doing self that brings your core self into being. You are responsible at the very deepest level for what it feels like to be you. But then, for your next trick, well, how about spreading some of that soul dust onto the things around you? Remember, too, that it is your mind that projects phenomenal qualities onto external objects. If you only knew it, you yourself are responsible for the feel of the world.”
–Nicholas Humphrey, Soul Dust: The Magic of Consciousness
Morning Trip (135)
“Do not let your fire go out, spark by irreplaceable spark….Do not let the hero in your soul perish, in lonely frustration for the life you deserved, but have never been able to reach. Check your road and the nature of your battle. The world you desired can be won. It exists, it is real, it is possible, it is yours.”
–Ayn Rand
Elisa's Spot 