The Fly in The Ointment

Image by Bence Mate

Why do we suffer? Why so much greed, folly, and violence in the world? The Zen answer is that because our mind and senses deceive us into seeing ourselves as separate from each other and the world, we begin to think “I hate that.”, “I love this.”, “This is mine.”, “That’s yours.” — J’aime ona Pangaia

“The high value put upon every minute of time, the idea of hurry-hurry as the most important objective of living, is unquestionably the most dangerous enemy of joy,” Hermann Hesse

Honesty is not the revealing of some foundational truth that gives us power over life or another or even the self, but a robust incarnation into the unknown unfolding vulnerability of existence, where we acknowledge how powerless we feel, how little we actually know, how afraid we are of not knowing and how astonished we are by the generous measure of grief that is conferred upon even the most average life. — David Whyte

Sitting in church as a child and hearing about “the mote in your own eye” was the first time I realized that adults knew about projection, that their judgements of others were probably flawed. Not just flawed, but somehow linked to not looking inward.

Not knowing that we don’t know ourselves, we proceed as if we do, that the fault is out there somewhere. If we can locate the error in someone…