Darkness, Play, Joy

"What if this is what it looks like while my dream of the end of Apartheid is happening?  What if my being in this very situation is... part of... my overcoming?"~Nelson Mandela about his imprisonment

"Just how do we deal with agitations of the dark? How do we make our way through the tangle of being confused or sad or blocked in understanding a way to tomorrow? It seems natural enough to treat our problems like an overgrown path and go hacking our way through, doing small violence to ourselves. Yet this insight from an ancient Chinese text implies something harder and simpler. It implies that agitation itself is dark, that only when we can keep our hands off will there be room for light. It seems that agitations of the dark always cover over.  For myself, I worked for years covering over sore lesions of esteem with agitations of accomplishment, till my heart was covered over with a thicket of achievements. Only when I put the achievements aside did the light begin to move. Only then did a Universal warmth reach my sore center. Only when I let the dark energies rest did I begin to heal" ~Mark Nepo

"Play is simply the pleasure that comes from doing something directly for the soul and spirit, something that is free of the heavy ego and the seriousness of our own intentions. This idea takes us back to the important discussion we had about enjoying life rather than justifying it by working hard and being intent on helping others. Thoreau once said that if a neighbor came to his house to help him, he'd go out the back door. (not his exact words). If helping isn't a form of play, then it, too, may not be very spiritual. The lack of play is a sign of too much ego or a history of repression." ~Thomas Moore

"When we are willing to be intimate with what actually is here now, to look directly at all of our experience, we might recognize that this is our life, however different from our thoughts and ideas about it. It is as if we hunker down and actually get very real, recognizing that our thoughts of gaining and losing, good and bad, happy and sad, are what distance us from ourselves. When we breathe in fully and pause, we clear a space in our mind without judgment. If we are willing to hang in with the practice over and over again, noticing how our thoughts of gaining or losing distance us from ourselves and from what is, we open ourselves to a whole new reality. We came into intimacy with everything; we enter a world of joy that is so close, to pervasive, that we are surprised we haven't been aware of its presence all along. Once Dongshan was asked, 'What is the deepest truth? What is the wisdom that liberates?' His response was, 'I am always close to this.' It is the closeness itself- the intimacy with what is here with us now- that is the truth that liberates us. Imagine being so close to your experience of life!" ~Roshi Pat Enkyo O'Hara

What do you think about thinking?

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