wonder.surrender - images I see, words I read.

''A few decades ago, I came up with three critical questions on priorities.

Before any decision on where to invest my time, this is what I ask myself:

1. What is REQUIRED of me? Any realistic assessment of priorities in any area of life must start with a realistic assessment of what you must do. For you to be a good spouse or parent, what is required of you? To satisfy your employer, what must you do? If you lead others, then what must you personally do that cannot be delegated to anyone else?

2. What gives me the greatest RETURN? As you progress in your career, you begin to discover that some activities yield a much higher return for the effort than others. After determining requirements, focus on choices with a high return on investment (ROI).

3. What gives me the greatest REWARD? If you do only what you must, along with what is effective, then you will probably be highly productive. But you may not be content. I think it’s also important to consider what gives you personal satisfaction.

Note: These questions are meant to be asked IN ORDER. Many of us would love to skip down to #3 and focus on the most rewarding/fun/exciting activities. But no one can be successful who doesn’t possess the discipline to take care of the first two areas before adding the third.

The time that you have on this earth is precious – every minute of it. As Ralph Waldo Emerson advised, 'Guard well your spare moments. They are like uncut diamonds. Discard them and their value will never be known. Improve them and they will become the brightest gems in a useful life.''

- John C Maxwell

When I was growing up, one of the questions I used to hear from motivational speakers was this: "If the possibility of failure were erased, what would you attempt to achieve?"

That seemed to me to be an intriguing question. At the time it prompted me to look ahead to life's possibilities. But then one day I realized that it was really a bad question. Why? Because it takes a person’s thinking down the wrong track.

There is no achievement without failure. To even imply that it might be possible gives people the wrong impression.

So, here's a better question: If your perception of and response to failure were changed, what would you attempt to achieve?

- John Maxwell, Failing Forward

WHAT’S THE ROOT OF ACHIEVEMENT? What makes the difference? Why do some people achieve so much? Is it . . . • Family background? Having a good family growing up is something to be grateful for, but it's not a reliable indicator of achievement. High percentages of successful people come from broken homes. • Wealth? No, some of the greatest achievers come from households of average to below-average means. Wealth is no indicator of high achievement, and poverty is no guarantee of low achievement. • Opportunity? You know, opportunity is a peculiar thing. Two people with similar gifts, talents, and resources can look at a situation, and one person will see tremendous opportunity while the other sees nothing. Opportunity is in the eye of the beholder. • High morals? I wish that were the key, but it's not. I've known people with high integrity who achieve little. And I've known scoundrels who are high producers. Haven't you? • The absence of hardship? For every achiever who has avoided tragedy, there's a Helen Keller who overcame extreme disabilities or a Viktor Frankl who survived absolute horrors. So that's not it either. No, none of these things are the key. When it comes right down to it, I know of only one factor that separates those who consistently shine from those who don't: The difference between average people and achieving people is their perception of and response to failure. Nothing else has the same kind of impact on people's ability to achieve and to accomplish whatever their minds and hearts desire.

- John C. Maxwell, Failing Forward

…But learning reinforces the learner. Seeking strengthens the seeker. Effort confirms the one who makes the effort.

So, the very activities that are supposed to lead beyond the separate self itself, actually reinforce the separate self’s existence and its sophistication and spiritual identity.

And then the path becomes the prison. The method becomes the obstacle. The teaching becomes the teacher’s way of maintaining their role as teacher and the student’s way of maintaining their role as student.

This is why so many sincere practitioners find themselves caught in endless cycles of spiritual learning without spiritual transformation…

What if consciousness cannot be improved because it is already perfect? What if awareness cannot be developed because it is already complete? What if truth cannot be acquired because it is already present? What if awakening is not an achievement, but a recognition, a discovery of what has never been absent within you?

The mind reacts to this possibility with sophisticated resistance…

The very structure of individual consciousness exists on the assumption that it is something separate from what it seeks to know, and the separate self exists only as the one who does not know truth directly, who must learn consciousness, who must develop awareness through practice. If truth is already present, if consciousness is already complete, if awareness requires no development, then what happens to the separate self?

This is the terror that underlies all spiritual learning. It is not the fear of not achieving awakening, it is the fear of discovering that there is no one to awaken. It is not the concern of making insufficient progress, but the recognition that there is no one to make progress. It is certainly not the worry of understanding the teachings correctly, but the reality that there is no one to understand anything.

The learning mind cannot survive the recognition that learning is unnecessary. The seeker cannot continue seeking once it becomes clear that what is sought was actually never absent. The spiritual student cannot become a student if truth requires no learning.

That is why the most sophisticated spiritual learning often becomes the most subtle obstacle to spiritual recognition. It’s not because any of the knowledge or learning is in correct. But the very act of learning reinforces the learner who must disappear for the recognition to occur.’’

- Anandi Sano

''The opposite of spare time is, I guess, occupied time. In my case I still don’t know what spare time is because all my time is occupied. It always has been and it is now. It’s occupied by living.'' - Ursula Le Guin, responding to being asked what she does in her spare time

Sketch by Dame Laura Knight

“Everybody is ignorant, only on different subjects.” - Will Rogers

‘’To be truly radical is to make hope possible rather than despair convincing.’’ – Raymond Williams

“The role of the guru is to give you a glimpse of the real – not a teaching, but an awakening. The guru is not a teacher: the guru is an awakener. He has not to give you doctrines. If he gives you doctrines, he is a philosopher. If he talks about the world as illusory and argues and proves that the world is illusory, if he discusses, debates, if he intellectually gives you a doctrine, he is not a guru, he is not a master. He may be a teacher, a teacher of a particular doctrine, but he is not a master, not a guru.

A guru is not a giver of doctrines. He is a giver of methods – of methods which can help you to come out of your sleep. That is why a guru is always a disturber of your dreams, and it is difficult to live with a guru. It is very easy to live with a teacher because he never disturbs you. Rather, he goes on increasing your accumulation of knowledge. He helps you to be more egoist; he makes you more knowledgeable. Your ego is more fulfilled. Now you know more, you can argue more. You can teach yourself, but a guru is always a disturber. He will disturb your dream and your sleep, and you may have been dreaming a very beautiful dream. You may have been on a trip, a beautiful trip. He will disturb it, and you will get angry.

A guru is always in danger from his disciples. Any moment they can kill him because he is going to disturb; that is what his work is. He cannot help you to be yourself as you are because you are false. He has to destroy your false identity. It is painful. That is why, unless there is a very deep love, the work is impossible. A very deep intimacy is needed; otherwise hate will be there. So a guru cannot allow you to be near him unless you have surrendered; otherwise you are going to be an enemy. Only with your total surrender can a guru work, because it is a spiritual surgery.”

- Osho

The practical de-escalation of worry In order to maintain its power, common anxiety (sometimes called worrying) needs your help. Constant reminders, moments of conflict and concrete examples all pitch in to keep our worry on the warpath, amplifying it and further frazzling us. The feeling of experiencing failure in advance happens to many of us. But with active encouragement we can make it much worse. Without our help, it’ll likely fade away. But if we work at it, we can keep it going for hours. Not only do each of us experience worry, the feeling of imminent failure, but we often escalate it with our words and actions. “Don’t you know that this is the biggest meeting of my career? How could you have forgotten to pick up the dry cleaning!” or “The inspector is coming, and if we fail, they shut down this franchise. I want you to redo this entire section, and work overtime doing it. In fact, call in Jim and Bob from their day off, right now.” What’s happening here? We’re connecting the feeling of worry (it’s not really the biggest meeting of the year, it just feels that way, and the inspector has never failed us before, it just feels that way) with the real world. That gives us the ability to turn that worry into a concrete component of the actions that we’re taking. By doing so, we further reinforce the tactile and imminent nature of our feeling. The thing that just happened is real, our action is real, therefore the anxiety must be real as well. It takes this continuous narrative to keep the worry roaring along. What happens if instead we say, “Yikes. This big meeting that’s coming up has me stressed, and I was hoping my lucky jacket would be here from the cleaners. But it’s not, so I’ll need a minute to find an alternative. Either way, the meeting is going to go fine, it always does.” or “The inspector is coming and our perfect record is something we’re proud of. Would you spend a few minutes going over these three spots so we can know that we did our very best?”

You could make the choice to actually work to amplify your fear of the negative outcome instead of working on the real problem. But you can’t do both at the same time. Either you’re amplifying your worry or you’re working on a solution to the problem. The alternative, a path worth seeking out, is to create a positive cycle, where each action we take creates a bit more confidence and calm, not less. We can choose words and tones that are softer, that don’t raise our blood pressure (or the ire of the person who’s working to support us) and that more directly get us to where we’d actually like to go. And it’s free. The Situation Room might be a profitable TV show, but you don’t have to live there.

- Seth Godin

‘’…we assume that when things go wrong, it is the other side’s responsibility to address the incident. It is a very passive approach to these situations and one that can leave us very frustrated because they typically won’t do what we want.

We, as perceivers, those on the other side of the equation, have quite a bit of this responsibility as well. We have the responsibility to investigate what happened, we have the responsibility to initiate that dialogue, to create situations that would allow trust to flourish rather than simply assume that it is either not there or there. We can create an infrastructure to make that possible.

We have a duty to respond to these incidents in a way that will nurture the kinds of responses that we want most.

Quite a bit of the times, our responses will discourage the kinds of apologies, the kinds of reparative attempts that we so desperately want.’’

- Prof Peter Kim, author of How Trust Works: The Science of How Relationships Are Built, Broken, and Repaired, in conversation with Marcel Shwantes

 What is hard for our ego to understand is sometimes to savour even our sorrows.

Many years ago, I was in a project working with my teacher, and we worked several nights, it was physical labour. When it was all done, I was walking with him in NYC in January. It gets cold, damp and windy. I was very poor in those days. I didn’t have much of a coat. I was really cold and trying to warm up. I was in a state of frustration and annoyance. It was cold. I wished it wasn’t cold. I was annoyed with my coat. I was in a state of reaction to where I was, wanting a different experience than the one I was having.

My teacher looked at me with kindness and he put his hand on my shoulder and he said, *‘’It’s not that much further to the subway. And I want to invite you to consider that once you’re dead, you will never be able to experience this again.’’*

Something about his words really went into me, the way he said it with such kindness. And I realised it was true. And suddenly the cold was just an experience, and the moment there with him, and the way the moon was there in the sky…instantly, the sense of what was happening to me was transformed. It was still cold. but I wasn’t in reaction to the cold. And I could then savour everything that was beautiful about that moment. It stayed with me the rest of my life. I am sharing it with you now because that was such a powerful moment for me. Had I stayed with my reaction and wanting something else to be going on, it would have been dead forever.

It is kind of a far out thing to say, but I have the sense sometimes that my deeper self is made of the moments that I savoured, Or I might say my soul is constructed from the moments in which I was awake with my heart available.’’ -

- Russ Hudson, The Enneagram, Nine Pathways To Presence

''Intimacy is dropping away of assumed identities that I put on myself and others. It is a rapturous dissolving of assumptions we have about one another.''

- Russ Hudson - The Enneagram, Nine Pathways to Presence

 I was on a plane recently and I was sitting next to somebody who I didn’t know.

I think he was scrolling through the tv channels, looking for something to watch, and at one point he just cursed and he looked at me and said, ‘’Why can’t I find anything to watch!? There is 500 channels on here and I can’t find anything to watch!

And I told him, I said, ‘’It’s because that’s entertainment and you’re probably looking for inspiration.’’ -

- Robert Holden, in conversation with Caroline Myss, Your Hero's Journey

''Kalyanamitra is the Sanskrit word for spiritual friendship. This friendship is something much more than someone to hang out with, but rather connotes a person or even a thing that becomes our guide, a teacher, and serves to inspire us along our path to awakening.

There is a common Zen expression that when the student is ready, the teacher appears. Ready or not, teachers are constantly appearing in our lives, but sometimes it is difficult to recognize because we are looking for someone that meets our image or idea of "teacher." Or, we regard this person or thing as an obstacle in our life, rather than as something that can awaken us to life's meaning.

For instance, we could say that illness is kalyanamitra. The death of a sibling can be kalyanamitra. The birth of our child can be kalyanamitra. Falling in love can be kalyanamitra. In short, anything which shakes us out of our ongoing slumber and creates an opening to a vista beyond our narrow image or experience of ego-self, is a spiritual friend worthy of our gratitude.

It may be difficult to regard a painful experience as a friend. We respond by pushing such experiences away or by grasping on to something else. But in zazen, we learn to sit in the midst of our suffering, much as one would do with someone in need. Just sitting. Just seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, touching, awareness - recognizing and affirming the most essential nature of our situation, whatever it may be…

“Gate! Gate! Paragate! Parasamgate! Bodhi svaha!” It means “gone, gone, gone beyond, together go beyond.”

This "together" speaks directly to our most basic vow to save all beings. Our realization only truly comes alive when it is used in the service of others, in helping others awaken to life's essential nature. So recognize and appreciate the spiritual friends in your life: you yourself serving others in this way, and others and things continually befriending you, pointing to the unsurpassable wisdom that is our life.

- Roshi Wendy Egyoku Nakao

''Loneliness is not cured by human company. Loneliness is cured by contact with reality...dropping one's illusions, making contact with the real, whatever that is, it has no name. We can only know it through dropping the unreal. You can only know what Aloneness is when you drop your clinging, when you drop your dependency. The first step towards that is that you would see it as desirable, because if you don't even see it as desirable, how will you get anywhere near it.

That loneliness of yours, will human company ever taken it away, or will it only serve as a distraction? There is an emptiness inside, isn't there? When the emptiness surfaces, what do you do? You run away, turn on the TV, turn on the radio, read a book, search for human company, seek entertainment, seek distraction. Everybody is doing that...big business nowadays. An organised industry...entertainment. Distract us, entertain us.

Self-observation is such an extraordinary thing. After a while, you don't have to make an effort. As illusion begins to crumble and you begin to know this thing that cannot be described called happiness, everything changes. You become addicted to Awareness.''

- Anthony DeMello

A man who had once been homeless said that he was no longer homeless today, and not because of all the money people had given him, allowing him to get back on his feet. That never happened. Rather, it was because one woman leaned down to touch his arm and whisper in his ear, “I’ll pray for you and you will get back on your feet again.” In recalling that woman and what she said, this man wrote that he felt his dignity pour back into his body as soon as he felt another human being “touch me with respect. She did not see me as a dirty, homeless person. I was a human being to her. I knew right then I would get out of this situation. She gave me back my dignity.”

...Yet another man who had gone through a period of being homeless recalled that during those darks days, he would often go two days without food. He had to beg on the street for enough change to buy something to eat. But for him, finally having accumulated enough change was only part of his struggle. The other equally formidable challenge for him was actually walking into a grocery store. He was terrified of the experience, specifically of ending up positioned behind someone who would fail to hold the door open for him. Having a door slammed in his face, symbolically or literally, represented the ultimate lack of respect for this man. (The particular grocery store he frequented was a corner market, not one with automatic doors, by the way. ) In order to avoid his terror of having a door slammed in his face, particularly by a businessman, he waited outside for just the right moment when he thought no one else was around. Then he would walk in, buy his few items, and get out as fast as he could.

On this one day, he arrived as usual to perch in an observational position of the grocery store. He had enough money for food for the day. Now the plan was to get in, shop, and get out. His entire mind was filled with mapping out just the right moment. And then, the right moment arrived. No one was around. He slipped out of his perch, headed for the grocery store door, only to be cut off by a man in a business suit.

They met at the door. One of them would have to open the door for the other. He was paralyzed with fear. He wanted to run away. Then, the businessman opened the door, stepped to the side, and held the door for Bill, the homeless man. As soon as they were both in the grocery store, Bill started to head for the canned goods area when the businessman stopped him, saying, “Excuse me, Sir. Could you help me out with something?”

Bill could not believe his ears. A businessman wanted his help? Couldn’t he see how he was dressed and that he badly needed a bath? Bill walked up to him, feeling as if his stomach were about to explode onto the floor. The businessman explained that he was just traveling through and needed directions. Could Bill tell him how to get to this location? Yes. Could Bill tell him where this highway was? Yes. Bill knew everything that the businessman asked. Then the businessman extended his hand as an expression of thanks. Bill was stunned. He had forgotten what the language of professionals felt like, much less to be treated like a professional man “for even a minute.”

After that experience, Bill resolved to get back on his feet again. And he did. -

- Caroline Myss

“Once children learn how to learn, nothing is going to narrow their mind. The essence of teaching is to make learning contagious, to have one idea spark another.”

– Marva Collins