A small collection of quotes and short videos for Sunday contemplation.
The bad news is you’re falling through the air, nothing to hang on to, no parachute. The good news is there’s no ground. – Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche
What a metaphor for all of life and all us sentient beings are living it.
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Pema on being comfortable with the groundlessness…because we really wish we could rely on something solid. This is really good and very brief- a little nutshell pointing to freedom. I highly recommend watching.
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and for a little fun and nostalgia, Tom Petty: Free-falling…because we’re all doing it whether we realize it or not.
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So being that this is the case I practice surrender, acceptance and letting go. Because like it or not we are not in charge. This is perhaps my most important practice and while I have many practices I think this one is at the foundation of everything. Surrender.
I’m finishing with a little blurb on using spirituality to build ego rather than to let go, also from Pema:
We start with ourselves. We make ourselves right or we make ourselves wrong, every day, every week, every month and year of our lives. We feel that we have to be right so that we can feel good. We don’t want to be wrong because then we’ll feel bad. But we could be more compassionate toward all these parts of ourselves. When we feel right, we can look at that. Feeling right can feel good; we can be completely sure of how right we are and have a lot of people agreeing with us about how right we are. But suppose someone does not agree with us? Then what happens? Do we find ourselves getting angry and aggressive? If we look into the very moment of anger or aggression, we might see that this is what wars are made of. This is what race riots are made of: feeling that we have to be right, being thrown off and righteously indignant when someone disagrees with us. On the other hand, when we find ourselves feeling wrong, convinced that we’re wrong, getting solid about being wrong, we could also look at that. The whole right and wrong business closes us down and makes our world smaller. Wanting situations and relationships to be solid, permanent, and graspable obscures the pith of the matter, which is that things are fundamentally groundless.
Instead of making others right or wrong, or bottling up right and wrong in ourselves, there’s a middle way, a very powerful middle way. We could see it as sitting on the razor’s edge, not falling off to the right or the left. This middle way involves not hanging on to our version so tightly. It involves keeping our hearts and minds open long enough to entertain the idea that when we make things wrong, we do it out of a desire to obtain some kind of ground or security. Equally, when we make things right, we are still trying to obtain some kind of ground or security. Could our minds and our hearts be big enough just to hang out in that space where we’re not entirely certain about who’s right and who’s wrong? Could we have no agenda when we walk into a room with another person, not know what to say, not make that person wrong or right? Could we see, hear, feel other people as they really are? It is powerful to practice this way, because we’ll find ourselves continually rushing around to try to feel secure again — to make ourselves or them either right or wrong. But true communication can happen only in that open space. — Pema Chödrön from When things fall apart