Many people think that it is the function of a spiritual teaching to provide answers to life’s biggest questions, but actually the opposite is true. The primary task of any good spiritual teaching is not to answer your questions, but to question your answers.
For it is your conscious and unconscious assumptions and beliefs that distort your perception and cause you to see separation and division where there is actually only unity and completeness.
Adyashanti
Adyashanti. (2012). The way of liberation: A practical guide to spiritual enlightenment. San Jose, CA: Open Gate Sangha.
Human beings are the only animals who can create their own fear where no threat exists. Chronic anxiety can compromise the immune system, lead to high blood pressure and heart disease.
Why?
Because fear is a huge stressor. Nature only designed us to experience fear in short bursts, say to run away from a predator. We have not evolved to deal with fear as a constant state. It is akin to running the motor of your car at top speeds while still in first gear.
Most yogis who went up to this level came down and rested in the heart center. Only in that center can you stay in a state of relationship to the rest of the world, as other human beings — not high, distant, withdrawn from the rest of humanity. Though you have gone to the highest, yet you come down and rest in the heart center.
Dr. R. P. Kaushik, The Ultimate Transformation
Enlightenment is not anything new or something we create or bring into existence. It is simply discovering within us what is already there. It is the full realization of our intrinsic nature. In Tibetan, buddha is ‘sang gyay’. Sang means that all of the faults have been cleared away, while gyay means “full realisation”; just as from darkness, the moon waxes, likewise from ignorance, the qualities of the mind’s intrinsic nature emerge.
Chagdud Tulku Rinpoche
We drag these bodies around with us, these bodies that have nothing at all to do with you, with me, with who we really are, these bodies give us pleasure and pain. Though I’ve learned how to abandon mine at will, it seems to me we never free ourselves completely until we love, when we lose ourselves inside each other. Then we see a little of what is called heaven. When we can be that close that we no longer are Inés and Emiliano, but something bigger than our lives. And we can forgive, finally.
Sandra Cisneros, “Eyes of Zapata” (via asmk)
