My life belongs to the community

"This is the true joy of life, the being used up by a purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty one; being a force of nature instead of a feverish selfish little clod of ailments and grievances, complaining that the world will not devote itself to making you happy. I am of the opinion that my life belongs to the community and as long as I live, it is my privilege to do for it whatever I can."

-George Bernard Shaw

"To keep my health, to do my work, to love, to live.
To see to it that I gain and grow and give.
Never to look behind me for an hour.
Never to wait in weakness, nor brag in power.
Always working, searching for more truth, more light.
Always writing, teaching, what I found good and right!
Robbed, starved, beaten, fallen wide astray.
Back with the full-truth I've learned. Back to the way!"

-Dr Bronner's Magic Soap

Inspire

"Our chief want is someone who will inspire us to be what we know we could be."

-RW Emerson

Rewards for facing the fear of being alone

"1. A deeper consciousness of oneself.
2. A deeper attunement to nature.
3. A deeper relationship with the transcendent (the numinous, the divine, the spiritual).
4. Increased creativity.
5. An increased sense of freedom."

-Sara Maitland

Love's greatest killer

"Anxiety is love's greatest killer. It creates the failures. It makes others feel as you might when a drowning man holds onto you. You want to save him, but you know he will strangle you with his panic."

-Anais Nin

No spiritual epiphany

It just is, and it's great.

A consumer's awakened heart

“One sign of the moral confusion in our market-driven society is that people have the tendency to elevate consumer and lifestyle choices into matters of high moral drama, leading to overblown talk of ‘moral imperatives.’ Tortuous analysis of one’s thoughts and actions produces a facsimile of moral seriousness that is pleasing to the ego, but it is no substitute for the wisdom and compassion that arise from the awakened heart.”

-Randall Ryotan Eiger; The Slow Burn

Balance

"To live in the realm of Buddha nature means to die as a small being, moment after moment. When we lose our balance we die, but at the same time we also develop ourselves, we grow. Whatever we see is changing, losing its balance. The reason everything looks beautiful is because it is out of balance, but its background is always in perfect harmony. This is how everything exists in the realm of Buddha nature, losing its balance against a background of perfect balance. So if you see things without realizing the background of Buddha nature, everything appears to be in the form of suffering. But if you understand the background of existence, you realize that suffering itself is how we live, and how we extend our life. So in Zen sometimes we emphasize the imbalance or disorder of life."

-Shunryu Suzuki; Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind

Truth

"Rather than love, than money, than fame, give me truth. Give me the poverty that enjoys true wealth."
-Thoreau

Transform

"Understand the roots, the nature, and you will be able to transform it."

-Thich Nhat Hahn

There is kindness

"We have a great deal more kindness than is ever spoken.  Maugre all the selfishness that chills like east winds the world, the whole human family is bathed with an element of love like a fine ether. How many persons we meet in houses, whom we scarcely speak to, whom yet we honor, and who honor us! How many we see in the street, or sit with in church, whom, though silently, we warmly rejoice to be with! Read the language of these wandering eye-beams. The heart knoweth."

-Emerson

There is no right time

Thought shift

Courage to wait for the light

"Man is ignorant and blind, and he wants to remain ignorant and blind, because to come inwards looks like entering a chaos. And it is so; inside you have created a chaos. You have to encounter it and go through it. Courage is needed – courage to be oneself, and courage to move inwards. I have not come across a greater courage than that – the courage to be meditative.
[...]
In haste nobody can come to know himself. It is a very very deep awaiting. Infinite patience is needed. By and by darkness disappears. There comes a light with no source There is no flame in it, no lamp is burning, no sun is there. A light, just like it is morning: the night has disappeared, and the sun has not risen.... Or in the evening – the twilight, when the sun has set and night has not yet descended.
[...]
When you move inwards you will come to the light without any source. In that light, for the first time you start understanding yourself, who you are, because you are that light. You are that twilight, that sandhya, that pure clarity, that perception, where the observer and the observed disappear, and only the light remains."

-Ohso

Simpler than we thought

"Human existence may be simpler than we thought. There is no predestination, no unfathomed mystery of life. Demons and gods do not vie for our allegiance. Instead, we are self-made, independent, alone, and fragile, a biological species adapted to live in a biological world. What counts for long-term survival is intelligent self-understanding, based upon a greater independence of thought than that tolerated today even in our most advanced democratic societies."

-EO Wilson

Absolute freedom

Awakening to ourselves

"Every man has to learn the points of the compass again as often as he awakes, whether from sleep or any other abstraction. Not till we are lost, in other words not till we have lost the world, do we begin to find ourselves, and realize where we are and the infinite extent of our relations."

~ Thoreau

It's okay

"The first foundation of mindfulness – to become wise – is to live in the physical reality of our body, to live in feelings, to be aware of emotions, to be aware of the pleasant and neutral and unpleasant aspect of our experience, and to learn that we don't have to resist that which is painful and grasp that which is pleasant all the time.”

-Jack Kornfield

Love yourself well

"when the time comes
to love yourself well
it takes a good solid month
to stop crying
about everything
you have to let go"

-Andrea Gibson

Faith in the mystery of being human

"Even if the opponent plays him false twenty times, the Satyagrahi [person deeply committed to nonviolence] is ready to trust him the twenty-first time, for an implicit trust in human nature is the very essence of his creed."

-Gandhi

Go deeper into the wild

"One of the great disservices a culture of domination has done to all of us is to confuse the erotic with domination and violence. The God is wild, but his is the wildness of connection, not of domination. Wildness is not the same as violence. Gentleness and tenderness do not translate into wimpiness. When men — or women, for that matter — begin to unleash what is untamed in us, we need to remember that the first images and impulses we encounter will often be the stereotyped paths of power we have learned in a culture of domination. To become truly wild, we must not be sidetracked by the dramas of power-over, the seduction of addictions, or the thrill of control. We must go deeper."

-Starhawk