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InnerSelf's Daily Inspiration
April 24, 2024
The focus for today is:
I persist as love despite all evidence to the contrary.
Today's inspiration was written by Paul Weiss:
On the window ledge over my kitchen sink sits a large Chinese Buddhist statue of Guanyin, the goddess of compassion. Guanyin is said to have ears that enable her to listen to all the suffering of the world, a heart that can hold it all, and the willingness to appear in any form that will help alleviate suffering.
This capacity is founded in her realization of “emptiness.” Not an emptiness, we have learned, that is the nihilistic denial of experience or of suffering. Rather, it is emptiness that is empty of “story” or drama, empty of projection or reification, and empty of reactivity. It is this emptiness that leaves the heart the maximum space with which to embrace experience without flinching, and thus be able to receive and to bless.
Guanyin represents a potential capacity within human beings. It is a capacity that the suffering of the world is asking of us; not only because it needs it of us, but also because we need it of ourselves. We stand in the world at the heart of paradox, with one foot in the beauty that we are, and one foot in the sorrow. And that must ever be the crucible of our capacity to love. To persist as love despite all evidence to the contrary.
CONTINUE READING:
Today's inspiration was adapted from the InnerSelf.com article:
What the Suffering of the World is Asking of Us
Written by Paul Weiss.
Read the complete article here.
This is Marie T. Russell, co-publisher of InnerSelf.com, wishing you a day of living Love (today and every day)
Comment from Marie: If we can "be" angry, judgmental, critical, etc., we can also "be" Love. It is a choice of attitude, of choosing "where we are coming from". We can act and respond from the egoic part of us, or we can respond from the heart, from Love. The way to true peace and happiness, is always to choose to respond from Love, and to persist as Love whatever seems to be taking place around. Anything else leads to separation. Love joins us all together, or rather, allows us to see that we are all joined together. The ego tries to tell us that we are separate, that it is a "us against them" world. But, the truth is that we are One, we are Love. Anything else is a deception of the ego, and of other people's egos.
Our focus for today: I persist as Love despite all evidence to the contrary.
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RELATED BOOK: The Dharma of Direct Experience
The Dharma of Direct Experience: Non-Dual Principles of Living
by Paul Weiss.
Exploring the direct perception of non-dual, “non-ordinary” reality, Paul Weiss shares guidance for navigating ordinary reality in an open, compassionate, and ever-maturing way. He affirms our shared human potential for the “direct experience” of reality--unmediated by our more relativistic mental faculties--and reveals this experience as an essential dimension of our conscious capacity for growth.
Interweaving perspectives from psychology and neuroscience with important lessons from spiritual traditions around the world, Paul explores how to live a life of integrity, reciprocity, and openness to reality, offering practical teachings for spiritual understanding, emotional development, and the cultivation of compassion, viewed by ancient Buddhist sages as the true meaning of existence. He addresses such human qualities as vulnerability, empathy, reciprocity, openness, and intimacy and shows how they express and participate in deeper conscious truths. The author also examines practical wisdom teachings within both Buddhist and Christian paths to realization.
For more info and/or to order this book, click here. Also available as an Audiobook and as a Kindle edition.
About the Author
Paul Weiss began serious practice in Zen as well as tai chi in 1966 and spent years in several training and monastic settings, including in schools and clinics in China. In 1981 he founded the Whole Health Center in Bar Harbor, Maine, where he teaches, counsels, and offers meditation retreats and his True Heart, True Mind Intensive. A lifelong poet, he is the author of two collections of poems and essays, You Hold This and Moonlight Leaning Against an Old Rail Fence: Approaching the Dharma as Poetry.
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