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24. True happiness is based on peace.

“Many people think excitement is happiness-. But when you are excited you are not peaceful. True happiness is based on peace.”

– Thich Nhat Hanh

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Integrating Realization

Spiritual realization is relatively easy compared with the much greater difficulty of actualizing it, integrating it fully into the fabric of one’s daily life. Realization is the movement from personality to being, the direct recognition of one’s ultimate nature, leading toward liberation from the conditioned self, while actualization refers to how we integrate that realization in all the situations of our life.

– John Welwood, “The Psychology of Awakening”

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The Basic Fuel for Practice

Awareness of the truth of suffering and impermanence always provides fertile ground for spiritual practice.

– Pamela Gayle White, “Who Are We Without Our Memories?”

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The basis of all integrity is accepting what’s happening in the present moment. Fighting reality, through denial, minimization, fantasy, or avoidance, puts everything we think and do on a wobbly foundation. To accept reality, we must allow ourselves to know everything we know and feel everything we feel–not ten minutes ago, not ten minutes from now, just right at this very moment.

– Martha Beck, The Integrity Cleanse

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Gentle Meditation

Although we are not often taught this, the most skillful way through an impasse in meditation is to become aware of it and of what holds it together and keeps it running. To do this, you need to keep doing the meditation instructions that have gotten you to this point, but instead of following them “harder,” try approaching them in a softer, gentler manner. Do them loosely, and don’t do them all of the time.

– Jason Siff, “The Problem with Meditation Instructions”

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Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be. This is the interrelated structure of reality.

– ­ Martin Luther King, Jr.

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“The rush and pressure of modern life are a form, perhaps the most common form, of its innate violence. To allow oneself to be carried away by a multitude of conflicting concerns, to surrender to too many demands, to commit oneself to too many projects, to want to help everyone in everything is to succumb to violence. More than that, it is cooperation in violence. The frenzy of the activist…destroys his own inner capacity for peace. It destroys the fruitfulness of his own work, because it kills the root of inner wisdom which makes work fruitful.”

– Thomas Merton

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Understanding and Respect

Learning about other faiths helps us to understand, and to live side by side with, differing views and belief systems. To remain in one tradition without absorbing the benefits of the others seems disrespectful to the gifts that the Buddha passed down to us. Only through mutual understanding and respect can we successfully implement what the Buddha taught.

– Scott Hunt, “Scott Hunt’s Seaworthy Dream In Two Parts”

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“Don’t ask what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive, and go do it. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive.”

– Howard Thurman

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“We have to live in such a way that we realise our dream every day. We all need a dream to nourish us and give life meaning. We can even ask our parents, Have you realised your dream? Can I help you realise it?”

– Thich Nhat Hanh

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