Per's Decent Blog

When you plant lettuce, if it does not grow well, you don’t blame the lettuce. You look for reasons it is not doing well. It may need fertilizer, or more water, or less sun. You never blame the lettuce. Yet if we have problems with our friends or family, we blame the other person. But if we know how to take care of them, they will grow well, like the lettuce. Blaming has no positive effect at all, nor does trying to persuade using reason and argument. That is my experience. No blame, no reasoning, no argument, just understanding. If you understand, and you show that you understand, you can love, and the situation will change

If in our daily life we can smile, if we can be peaceful and happy, not only we, but everyone will profit from it. This is the most basic kind of peace work.

stop thinking this is all there is… Realize that for every ongoing war and religious outrage and environmental devastation… there are a thousand counter-balancing acts of staggering generosity and humanity and art and beauty happening all over the world, right now, on a breathtaking scale, from flower box to cathedral…Resist the temptation to drown in fatalism, to shake your head and sigh and just throw in the karmic towel…Realize that this is the perfect moment to change the energy of the world, to step right up and crank your personal volume; right when it all seems dark and bitter and offensive and acrimonious and conflicted and bilious…there’s your opening.

And I urge you to please notice when you are happy, and exclaim or murmur or think at some point, ‘If this isn’t nice, I don’t know what is.’

Dear Friends,
Psychotherapist Fritz Pearls said:
“Anxiety is the gap between the now and the later.”
Where is your attention? Do you live in “the later” more than the now?
Then you are trapped in your thoughts, because what is the future other than a thought in your head?
Only your thoughts can make you anxious!
Bring your attention to the now. Seeing, listening, breathing, feeling the aliveness inside your body. Welcome home.
With love,
Eckhart.

Zazen, and Buddhist practice in general, helps us to become aware of the emptiness (shunyata) of all phenomena, including mental phenomena. We open up to the empty ground from which thoughts, memories, intentions and feelings arise. It is important, indeed necessary, to realize that thoughts, etc., are not the product of an ego-self but just the opposite: one’s sense of self is constructed by the ways that the thoughts themselves interact. The ego-self does not create thoughts, it’s a product of thought. The “mind stream” has a deeper origin. With meditation practice we become aware of this groundless ground. Awakening, kensho, is like the bottom falling out of a bucket. It’s realizing that thoughts, etc., arise from a much deeper place.

Yell. Jump. Play. Out-run those sons of bitches. They’ll never live the way you live. Go do it.