sharanam:

As a hospice volunteer, it is common to hear from others, “what difficult work, how do you manage?” Or “how sad it must be”. Patient’s families, say “thank you, it takes a special person to do this…

so timely for me

sharanam:

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED article from Rodney Smith - too many gems to choose from, but this is relevant to some recent postings so, here it goes:

Much of my early practice carried this contradiction. My heart genuinely sought the truth, but I conceived of freedom as a very long and arduous process that needed focused determination and hard work. My efforts were directed toward surmounting myself. “I” was the problem, and “I” would apply effort toward resolving the difficulty of “me.” Often my teachers spoke of lifetimes necessary to achieve awakening and the long cultivation of mental qualities that freedom depended on. I thought of freedom as something that I was working toward but that was not accessible now.

After a few years of strenuous retreating, I ordained as a Buddhist monk and went on a pilgrimage to Bombay in January 1980, to visit the renowned sage Nisargadatta Maharaj. I had known of him years earlier through his book I Am That. After a few days of bantering back and forth about my attachment to being a monk, he said, “You are like a man holding a flashlight, trying to run beyond its beam. The view you are holding…is undermining your intent.”

“You don’t understand Buddhism,” I retorted.

“You do not understand the truth,” he replied.

I was righteous, but he was right, and his message stuck. As the days unfolded, I lost my arrogance and my identification with the Buddhist robes, leaving me naked and exposed. By directly pointing to the truth, Nisargadatta destroyed my spiritual structure, purpose, and frame of reference. In their absence, something awoke with an upsurge of energy that seemed impossible to contain. It exploded with the revelation of what the Buddha was pointing to: The path that Nisargadatta revealed was not a search but a find, not a struggle but an abiding, not a cultivation but something intrinsic to all. I had been committed to the long-enduring mind of practice but not the essence, not the inherent freedom that was immediately available. From this vantage point, there seemed far too much methodology in the Buddhism I had been practicing and not enough release.

Read more!

Rodney Smith just published Stepping Out of Self-Deception, which if you like this article might be a good purchase to make (it’s on my shelf waiting for me to finish a few others)…

as he says…