There was neither death nor immortality then. No signs were there of night or day. The One was breathing by its own power in infinite peace. Only the One was: there was nothing beyond. Darkness was hidden in darkness. Then all was fluid and formless. There in the void by the fire of fervor arose the One.
- The Rig Veda
There was a man who said:
“God must think it exceedingly odd
If he finds that this tree
Continues to be
When there’s no one about in the Quad.”
One answer was given to this:
Dear Sir,
Your astonishment’s odd
I am always about in the Quad
And that’s why the tree
Will continue to be.
Yours faithfully,
God.
If you can only rid yourselves of conceptual thought you will have accomplished everything.
- Huang Po
There is that sphere wherein is neither earth nor water, fire nor air: it is not the infinity of space, nor the infinity of perception; it is not nothingness, nor it is neither idea nor non-idea; it is neither this world nor the next, nor it is both; it is neither the sun nor the moon.
It neither comes nor goes, it neither abides nor passes away; it is not caused, established, begun, supported; it is the end of suffering.
- The Buddha
“See how the world together with the devas has self-conceit for what is not-self. Enclosed by mind-and-body it imagines, ‘This is real.’ Whatever they imagine it to be, it is quite different from that. It is unreal, of a false nature and perishable….
(Source: theegonaut)
Meditation may be thought of as a technique by which we diminish the force of old thought habits and develop new ones.
- The Dalai Lama
Zen in its essence is the art of seeing into the nature of one’s being, and it points the way from bondage to freedom.
- Daisetsu Teitaro Suzuki
We believe that things come and go, because we believe in time as a stream, as something flowing incessantly.
When we sit in meditation and concentrate our mind in awareness, we may feel a timeless sensation, a moment when nothing happens.
In those moments we come to realize that our minds are responsible for the beliefs we share.
It is when we say I have a body that a body is there, ready to be studied, analyzed, understood, but when we don’t say I have a body, well, then the body dissolves into thin air.
Our minds get the responsibility for what we think we are, for what we think the world is all about, but when the mind is disconnected, as we try during meditation, all our build-ups fade away, become nonsense.
From the beginning, not a thing is, a Chinese Zen master, Hui Neng, once said.
There is no interconnectedness between what you are and all the words you can use to express this concept. All you have to do is to look inside yourself, into your wholeness.
The silence we experience when we meditate teaches us to go beyond intellectual constructs we build in our everyday life and upon which we base our beliefs.
A wonderful poem by Rumi illustrates this point very, very well:
Hear this if you can:
If you want to reach him
you have to go beyond yourself
and when you finally arrive at the land of absence
be silent
don’t say a thing
ecstasy, not words, is the language spoken there
About The Universe Inside
