The 'how' of our acceptance of circumstances is more important than the 'what' of our circumstances. Our relationship to the situation is what is important. W/ equanimity or w/ rejection..? Do I continually push away my experience? especially the ones I don't like?
Can we meet our experience w/ kindness? The path to our freedom.
We can choose how we meet our experience e. our happiness depends on how we choose. Do I do this w/ acceptance...Happiness is an inside job..depending on how we meet our experience.
What I resist, persists... (Jung?)
Experience is a 'dependent arising'... how do I relate to what is arising? "We who lived in Concentration camp...remember those who walked through huts giving comfort."..'to choose how we react, how we meet our experience' is our ultimate freedom. A realization we do have choice...fundamental to Peace, freedom, joy.
Anthony de Mello: absolute coooperation with the Inevitable. Saying 'yes' to what is unavoidable. Saying no, resisting what is, is insanity.
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Below is the summary post by Hugh:
Live Session Summary, Sunday, April 14, 2024: It was good to be with you for our Live session today. The theme of the talk was “Awakening to the peace and freedom that are always here.'
Here are some of the main themes, quotes, and poems:
I began by sharing the reflection that perhaps the most important realization we can come to in spiritual life—and in our life as a whole—is that our happiness and freedom depend on ourselves and that we are not passive victims of luck or inevitability. It’s been said that ‘happiness is an inside job’: we can choose how we respond to our experience—and how we meet our experience makes all the difference in the world. It is the difference between freedom and suffering.
When we resist life, resist our experience here and now, we suffer. As Carl Jung said, ‘What you resist persists.’ When we open with acceptance to our experience, to life as it is unfolding, this is the gateway to freedom. The Indian Jesuit philosopher, writer, and teacher, Anthony de Mello, spoke of complete freedom, or enlightenment, as ‘absolute cooperation with the inevitable.’
Psychologist Viktor Frankl, who survived the Auschwitz concentration camp, saw our ability to choose our response in any situation as the fundamental human freedom that no one can take from us:
• “We who lived in concentration camps can remember the men who walked through the huts comforting others, giving away their last piece of bread. They may have been few in number, but they offer sufficient proof that everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way.”
This realization that we can cultivate happiness and realize true freedom is like being imprisoned and suddenly realizing you have always had the keys to your jail cell in your pocket. This realization of our inherent capacity to be free—called in different traditions, our Buddha nature, our true nature, or our awakened heart—is at the core of many authentic spiritual teachings.
Teachers and teachings can point us to this truth, but even the wisest teachings, as is said in Zen Buddhism, are only fingers pointing at the moon. Mistaking the finger for the moon is the source of all fundamentalisms and inevitably leads to suffering. (Another image is of eating the menu rather than the meal.)
However, even when we realize that happiness is in our own hands—that choosing how we meet our experience is a key to our freedom—we can get pulled back into unconsciousness, caught up in behaviors and thinking that lead to unhappiness and suffering. Our past habit energies—of worrying, ruminating, craving, aversion, thinking we need something to be happy (a drink or a drug or a pleasant feeling), or believing that this person, situation, or experience should be different—can keep us mired in unconsciousness, lost in the ‘dream state,’ and forgetting that freedom, joy, and peace, are always here in every moment.
The Buddha’s teachings provide a path of training that leads to awakening, to complete freedom from suffering. At the heart of the practice is the instruction to ‘abandon the unskillful’—let go of harmful mind states, like greed, aversion, craving, and unconsciousness—and ‘cultivate the good’—develop beneficial states and qualities that lead to happiness and well-being, such as gratitude, generosity, compassion, mindfulness, and equanimity.
Others teachers of awakening, including contemporary teachers, such as Eckhart Tolle, Adyashanti, Gangaji, and others, remind us that we are already free—that freedom, joy, peace are our true nature and we simply need to let go of the stories and beliefs in our mind—and our habits of unconsciousness—that prevent us from remembering and realizing our true nature, who we truly are.
All of these approaches, or ‘ways of seeing’—including the Buddha’s teaching of mindfulness as a ‘direct path to liberation’—view opening fully to our present moment experience as the doorway to awakening, to realizing the freedom that is who we truly are, our true nature. I shared a quote that I memorized about three decades ago, origin unknown:
• ‘It is a great joy to realize that the path to freedom that all of the Buddhas have trodden is ever present, ever available, and ever open to those who wish to enter upon it.’
Poems I shared include: Wendell Berry’s ‘The Peace of Wild Things’; William Blake’s ‘Eternity’; excerpts from Dorothy Hunt’s ‘Peace is this moment without judgment’ and from Rumi’s ‘The Guest House.’
It was lovely to be with you today. Wishing you a good week ahead and see you next Sunday, April 21, at 9am eastern for our next Live session. Warmly, Hugh 🙏🏻 💜 🌻
