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At one point, one of the angels says (channelled through Gita’s friend Hanna):

You are the guardian of a sacred force.
Share it: do not keep it for yourself!
Then you have nothing to fear.
You are still afraid of the old. Without cause!
Raise the sacred force,
and the empty shell is left behind, powerless.

Gita asks: How could I always feel the force, so as to radiate it without interruption?

The angel replies:

It is just the opposite:
You feel the force only when you radiate it.
The sun never sees its rays:
its moons reflect them.
Know this: The sun, too is but a moon,
for everything mirrors the Divine Light.

THE DIVINE CONTEMPLATES ITSELF IN US.
BE PURE MIRRORS!

~Gitta Mallasz, Talking with Angels~

The middle way is wide open, but it’s tough going, because it goes against the grain of an ancient neurotic pattern that we all share. When we feel lonely, when we feel hopeless, what we want to do is move to the right or the left. We don’t want to sit and feel what we feel. We don’t want to go through the detox. Yet the middle way encourages us to do just that. It encourages us to awaken the bravery that exists in everyone without exception, including you and me.

…Usually we regard loneliness as an enemy. Heartache is not something we choose to invite in. It’s restless and pregnant and hot with the desire to escape and find something or someone to keep us company. When we can rest in the middle, we begin to have a nonthreatening relationship with loneliness, a relaxing and cooling loneliness that completely turns our usual fearful patterns upside down.

~Pema Chödrön~

Q: What is the Buddha?

A: Your Mind is the Buddha. The Buddha is Mind. Mind and Buddha are indivisible. Therefore it is written: “That which is Mind is the Buddha; if it is other than Mind, it is certainly other than Buddha.”

Q: At the moment of Enlightenment, where is the Buddha?

A: Where does your question proceed? Whence does your consciousness arise? When speech is silenced, all movement stilled, every sight and sound vanished–THEN is the Buddha’s work of deliverance truly going forward! Then, where will you seek the Buddha? You cannot place a head upon your head, or lips upon your lips; rather, you should just refrain from every kind of dualistic distinction. Hills are hills. Water is water. Monks are monks. Laymen are laymen. But these mountains, these rivers, the whole world itself, together with sun, moon and stars–not one of them exists outside your minds! The vast chiliocosm exists only within you, so where else can the various categories of phenomena possibly be found? Outside Mind, there is nothing.

~Huang-Po~

I seated myself opposite him on a cushion. He handed me tea, but did not speak a word. So we sat for a long while. There was no sound but the singing of the kettle on the hot coals. At last the Master rose and made me a sign to follow him. The practice hall was brightly lit. The Master told me to put a taper, long and thin as a knitting needle, in the sand in front of the target, but not to switch on the light in the target-stand. It was so dark that I could not even see its outlines, and if the tiny flame of the taper had not been there, I might perhaps have guessed the position of the target, though I could not have made it out with any precision. The Master “danced” the ceremony. His first arrow shot out of dazzling brightness into deep night. I knew from the sound that it had hit the target. The second arrow was a hit, too. When I switched on the light in the target-stand, I discovered to my amazement that the first arrow was lodged full in the middle of the black, while the second arrow had splintered the butt of the first and plowed through the shaft before embedding itself beside it. I did not dare to pull the arrows out separately, but carried them back together with the target. The Master surveyed them critically. “The first shot,” he then said, “was no great feat, you will think, because after all these years I am so familiar with my target-stand that I must know even in the pitch darkness where the target is. That may be, and i won’t try to pretend otherwise. But the second arrow which hit the first–what do you make of that? I at any rate know that it is not ‘I’ who must be given credit for this shot. ‘It” shot and ‘It’ made the hit. Let us bow to the goal as before the Buddha!”

The Master had evidently hit me, too, with both arrows: as though transformed over night, I no longer succumbed to the temptation of worrying about my arrows and what happened to them…

~Eugen Herrigel~

“As I grow familiar with my dreams I grow familiar with my inner world. Who lives in me? What inscapes are mine? What is recurrent and therefore what keeps coming back to reside in me? These are the animals and people, places and concerns, that want me to pay attention to them, to become friendly and familiar with them. They want to be known as a friend would. They want to be cared for and cared about. This familiarity after some time produces in one a sense of at-homeness and at-oneness with an inner family which is nothing else than kinship and community with oneself, a deep level of what can also be called the blood soul. In other words, the inner connection to the unconscious again leads to a sense of soul, an experience of an inner life, a place where meanings home…

Friendship wants to keep the connection open and flowing. The first thing, then, in this noninterpretive approach to the dream is that we give time and patience to it, jumping to no conclusions, fixing in it no solutions. Befriending the dream begins with a plain attempt to listen to the dream, to set down on paper or in a dream diary in its own words just what it says. One takes especial note of the feeling of the dream, the mood upon waking, the emotional reactions of the dreamer in the dream, the delight or fear or surprise. Befriending is the feeling approach to the dream, and so one takes care receiving the dream’s feelings, as with a living person with whom we begin a relationship.”

~James Hillman~

The cup is not only the shape, the color, the design but also that emptiness inside the cup. The cup is the emptiness held within a form; without that emptiness there would be no cup nor form. We know consciousness by outer signs, by its limitations of height and depth, of thought and feeling. But all this is the outer form of consciousness; from the outer we try to find the inner. Is this possible? Theories and speculations are not significant; they actually prevent all discovery. From the outer we try to find the inner, from the known we probe hoping to find the unknown. Is it possible to probe from the inner to the outer? The instrument that probes from the outer we know, but is there such an instrument that probes from the unknown to the known? Is there? And how can there be? There cannot be. If there is one, it’s recognizable and if it’s recognizable, it’s within the area of the known.

That strange benediction comes when it will, but with each visitation, deep within, there is a transformation; it is never the same.

~J.Krishnamurti~

Photo by Jordan Howell

Least effort is expended when your actions are motivated by love, because nature is held together by the energy of love. When you seek power and control over other people, you waste energy. When you seek money or power for the sake of the ego, you spend energy chasing the illusion of happiness instead of enjoying happiness in the moment. When you seek money for personal gain only, you cut off the flow of energy to yourself, and interfere with the expression of nature’s intelligence. But when your actions are motivated by love, your energy multiplies and accumulates — and the surplus energy you gather and enjoy can be channeled to create anything that you want, including unlimited wealth.

~Deepak Chopra~