Tag: Stones on the Path

“Just go into the center of the room, and put one chair in the center. Take the one seat in the center of the room, open the doors and windows, and see who comes to visit. You will witness all kinds of scenes and actors, all kinds of temptations and stories, everything imaginable. Your only job is to stay in your seat. You will see it all arise and pass, and out of this, wisdom and understanding will come.”
~Achaan Chah

“The smoke
is now making
the first sky of the year.”
~Issa

“The first thing you learn in life is you’re a fool. The last thing you learn is you’re the same fool. Sometimes I think I understand everything. Then I regain consciousness.”
~Ray Bradbury

“Which do you think is larger, the highest mountain on earth or the pile of bones that represents the lives that you have lived over and over in every realm governed by the patterns of your own karma? Greater, my friends, is the pile of bones than the highest mountain on earth.”
~The Buddha

“Only those concerned with the matter of life and death need enter here.”
~Inscription on a plaque at the entrance to Eihei-ji Monastery

Each one of us matters, has a role to play, and makes a difference. Each one of us must take responsibility for our own lives, and above all show respect and love for living things around us, especially each other.

Together we must reestablish our connections with the natural world and with the Spiritual power that is around us. And then we can move triumphantly, joyously, into the final stage of human evolution–spiritual evolution.

~ Jane Goodall, Reason for Hope

Conscience is the soul of freedom, its eyes, its energy, its life. Without conscience, freedom never knows what to do with itself.
~ Thomas Merton

“Do not depend on the hope of results. You may have to face the fact that your work will be apparently worthless and even achieve no result at all, if not perhaps results opposite to what you expect. As you get used to this idea, you start more and more to concentrate not on the results, but on the value, the rightness, the truth of the work itself. You gradually struggle less and less for an idea and more and more for specific people. In the end, it is the reality of personal relationship that saves everything.” ~ Thomas Merton