#buddhism

Rise to the challenges that life presents you. You can't develop genuine character and ability by sidestepping adversity and struggle. ↗

— Daisaku Ikeda

#humanism #life

Anxiety and desire are two, often conflicting, orientations to the unknown. Both are tilted toward the future. Desire implies a willingness, or a need, to engage this unknown, while anxiety suggests a fear of it. Desire takes one out of oneself, into the possibility or relationship, but it also takes one deeper into oneself. Anxiety turns one back on oneself, but only onto the self that is already known. ↗

— Mark Epstein

#desire #psychology #relationships #sexuality #spirituality

The teaching of the sexual tantras all come down to one point. Although desire, of whatever shape or form, seeks completion, there is another kind of union than the one we imagine. In this union, achieved when the egocentric model of dualistic thinking is no longer dominant, we are not united with it, nor am I united with you, but we all just are. The movement from object to subject, as described in both Eastern meditation and modern psychotherapy, is training for this union, but its perception usually comes as a surprise, even when this shift is well under way. It is a kind of grace. The emphasis on sexual relations in the tantric teachings make it clear that the ecstatic surprise of orgasm is the best approximation of this grace. ↗

— Mark Epstein

#desire #dualistic-thinking #grace #meditation #objectification

Mindfulness is life. Whenever we don’t have mindfulness, when we are heedless, it’s as if we are dead. ↗

— Ajahn Chah

#life

Praise and blame, gain and loss, pleasure and pain, fame and disripute, these are just the worldly winds of existence. ↗

— T. Scott McLeod

#buddhism #life-truths #truth #truth-of-life #life

People can only live fully by helping others to live. When you give life to friends you truly live. Cultures can only realize their further richness by honoring other traditions. And only by respecting natural life can humanity continue to exist. ↗

— Daisaku Ikeda

#humanism #life

There were so many beliefs which we had about the world, which then influenced everything, everything, about how we saw the world and interacted in the world and were with others. Everything. It was profound to me, amazing, the ramifications, the implications, the far-reaching impact that one’s beliefs could have on the world. It was actually mind-blowing for me. Figuratively speaking. Like, it was just, holy shit. Look at that. And nobody, hardly anybody sees it. They’re just ideas. Ideas. And yet, I’d believed them for so long, and still, was still shirking free of them. How was it that we believed in them, so readily, so easily? ↗

— T. Scott McLeod

#enlightenment #life-s-greatest-answers #life-truths #spirituality #truth

A man is not called wise because he talks and talks again; but if he is peaceful, loving and fearless then he is in truth called wise. ↗

— Gautama Buddha

#buddhism #wisdom #love

With the practice of meditation we can develop this ability to more fully love ourselves and to more consistently love others. ↗

— Sharon Salzberg

#meditation #love

When we practice metta, we open continuously to the truth of our actual experience, changing our relationship to life. ↗

— Sharon Salzberg

#insight #love #mindfulness #psychology #art