Wisdom for Personal Reflection

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It is easy to eat without tasting, miss the fragrance of the moist earth after a rain, even touch others without knowing the feelings we are transmitting. In fact, we refer to all these ever-so-common instances of missing what is here to be sensed, whether they involve our eyes, our ears, or our other senses, as examples of “being out of touch.”
We use touch as a metaphor for relating through all the senses because, in fact, we are literally touched by the world through all our senses, through our eyes, ears, nose, tongue, body, and also through our mind.
For all that, we tend to be specialists at being out of touch a great deal of the time, and out of touch with just how out of touch we can be.

Jon Kabat-Zinn

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Dharma Wisdom for Personal Reflection

Image via Wikipedia

It is easy to eat without tasting, miss the fragrance of the moist earth after a rain, even touch others without knowing the feelings we are transmitting. In fact, we refer to all these ever-so-common instances of missing what is here to be sensed, whether they involve our eyes, our ears, or our other senses, as examples of “being out of touch.”
We use touch as a metaphor for relating through all the senses because, in fact, we are literally touched by the world through all our senses, through our eyes, ears, nose, tongue, body, and also through our mind.
For all that, we tend to be specialists at being out of touch a great deal of the time, and out of touch with just how out of touch we can be.

Jon Kabat-Zinn

Dharma for Personal Reflection

Image via Wikipedia

Buddhist psychology is a joyous science of the heart. It operates on the assumption that we can use our own sophisticated minds to realize our selfless and thus transformable nature. It teaches us how to take apart our absolutized self-sense in a useful way so that we are no longer in conflict with reality as we normally are, kicking and screaming and miserable but pretending that we’ve got it all together. It teaches us to free ourselves from our demons by understanding our true place in reality: ultimately selfless while relatively present, aware, and interconnected with all other beings. It teaches us to embrace infinite life. And it teaches us compassion, caring for others rather than obsessing over ourselves.

Robert Thurman

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Dharma Words for Personal Reflection

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The religion of the future will be a cosmic religion. It should transcend personal God and avoid dogma and theology. Covering both the natural and the spiritual, it should be based on a religious sense arising from the experience of all things natural and spiritual as a meaningful unity. Buddhism answers this description.....If there is any religion that could cope with modern scientific needs it would be Buddhism.

Albert Einstein

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Words of Encouragement and Wisdom

With all of its age-old power and wisdom, all its experience and deep compassion, Zen wants you to find yourself. Zen actively wants you to achieve happiness and be content with your life. Enlightenment is the goal, it is the future, but just deciding to take the right steps, just facing the right direction, can have a powerful impact on today, on how you live your life every moment from now on. There can be no doubt that Zen can be applied to any life – Zen can be entered by anyone, anywhere – and I’m convinced that the application will always be beneficial, since Zen begins and ends at the most human level, with how people think of themselves and others. The first decision is to simply let Zen help you, let it do what it is designed to do. And that isn’t hard. The only requirement is you yourself: You are all that you will ever need to begin.

Chuck Norris

(from The Secret Power Within)