In practicing meditation, we're not trying to live up to some kind of ideal -- quite the opposite. We're just being with our experience, whatever it is.
The child is naturally meditative. He is a sort of samadhi; he's coming out of the womb of existence. His life river is yset absolutely fresh, just from the source. He knows the truth, but he does not know that he knows.... His knowledge is not yet aware. It is innocent. It is simply there, as a matter of fact. And he is not separate from his knowledge; he is his knowledge. He has not mind, he has simple being.
But I am not perfect in my way of putting things Because I lack the divine simplicity Of being only what I appear to be.
I am still a consumer; the consumer world was the world I emerged into, whose air I breathed for a very long time, and its assumptions still dominate my psyche—but maybe a little less each year....There are times when I can feel the spell breaking in my mind….There are times when I can almost feel myself simply being.
We learn in our guts, not just in our brain, that a life of joy is not in seeking happiness, but in experiencing and simply being the circumstances of our life as they are; not in fulfilling personal wants, but in fulfilling the needs of life.
The Rose is without an explanation; She blooms, because She blooms.
Your duty is to Be, and not to be this or that.
Don't try to be spiritual. That is only a word in the dictionary. Make it your goal to become a normally functioning individual. Let these principles shape you according to your real nature of a simple, decent, honest, unafraid human being.
Ask the world to reveal its quietude- not the silence of machines when they are still, but the true quiet by which birdsongs, trees, bellworts, snails, clouds, storms become what they are, and are nothing else.
I so much like real things - the realities that come naturally from the depths of us like - what shall I say? - the way trees grow, from some inner essential principle of them, just expressing itself.
A cat is a cat. She has no race creed or collar.
Man is a simple being, and however rich, varied, and unfathomable he may be, the cycle of his situations is soon run through.
It means that Tao doesn't force or interfere with things, but lets them work in their own way, to produce results naturally. Then whatever needs to be done is done.
I don't want to test that simple sense of being human. I don't want to transform it.
Above thought is the intellect, which still seeks: it goes about looking, spies out here and there, picks up and drops. But above the intellect that seeks is another intellect which does not seek but stays in its pure, simple being, which is embraced in that light.
I have no interest in problematizing things. So what I am writing to is that simple sense of being human in myself.
It is not quite right to describe One Taste as a "consciousness" or an "awareness," because that's a little too heady, too cognitive. It's more like the simple Feeling of Being. You already feel this simple Feeling of Being: it is the simple, present feeling of existence.
The roses under my window make no reference to former roses or better ones; they are what they are; they exist with God today. There is no time to them. There is simply the rose; it is perfect in every moment of its existence.
