“Was not their mistake once more bred of the life of slavery that they had been living?—a life which was always looking upon everything, except mankind, animate and inanimate—‘nature,’ as people used to call it—as one thing, and mankind as another, it was natural to people thinking in this way, that they should try to make ‘nature’ their slave, since they thought ‘nature’ was something outside them” — William Morris


Thursday, March 22, 2012

Strangely Strange

Another mind bender from Trungpa:

In inviting sentient beings as guests, the bodhisattva, the practitioner in the Mahayana, has a constant sense of the impermanence of the relationship—the guest is going to leave. So we view this as an opportune time, and there is constant appreciation. Our guests come. We entertain them and relate with them. Afterward, the guests thank us, we say good-bye, and we go back to running our home. There is a sense of the preciousness and the impermanence of the relationship, a sense of that relationship being extremely special. Our guest may be our husband, our wife, or our child—everybody is the guest of everybody.




1 comment:

Atomic Geography said...

These have been fertile quotes from CT. I wonder if you could give their citations, and for any in the future?

In any case, "everybody is he guest of everybody" does bring the abstractness of thoughts like "being in the moment" to a concrete, visceral level.