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Dec 25, 2017

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Dec 25, 2017 / 685 notes
Dec 15, 2016 / 482 notes

nprmusic:

Songs We Love: Iron & Wine, “Albuquerque” (Neil Young Cover)

On a rough-hewn home recording that predates Iron & Wine’s debut, 2002’s The Creek Drank the Cradle, Sam Beam digs into Young’s 1975 track “Albuquerque.”

Not all toxic people are cruel and uncaring. Some of them love us dearly. Many of them have good intentions. Most are toxic to our being simply because their needs and way of existing in the world force us to compromise ourselves and our happiness. They aren’t inherently bad people, but they aren’t the right people for us. And as hard as it is, we have to let them go. Life is hard enough without being around people who bring you down, and as much as you care, you can’t destroy yourself for the sake of someone else. You have to make your wellbeing a priority. Whether that means breaking up with someone you care about, loving a family member from a distance, letting go of a friend, or removing yourself from a situation that feels painful — you have every right to leave and create a safer space for yourself.
Daniell Koepke (via 2michiko)

(via hotlimesbling)

Apr 14, 2016 / 230,098 notes
Apr 14, 2016 / 114 notes

Anonymous asked: Why should incarnation cause suffering?

lazyyogi:

I don’t know, man, I didn’t make the rules. 

The deal is this:

  • All lives are filled with a mix of good and bad, happiness and suffering.
  • Happiness and suffering, pain and pleasure, partially define each other.
    • The impermanent aspect of happiness, the fact that it does not last, is itself a source of pain or suffering.
      • There is also just straight-up suffering.
    • The impermanent aspect of suffering, when suffering is momentarily relieved, is a happy or pleasurable thing.
      • There is also just straight-up happiness.
  • All happiness and suffering that is caused is by nature impermanent due to the fact that causes are impermanent. No cause continues indefinitely, this is both scientific fact (perpetual motion machines, thermodynamics, etc) and philosophical observation (interdependence and co-emergent phenomena).

Faced with this framework of insights, what is left to do but seek freedom? Such freedom is not found in this changeful world of sensory phenomena but in the awakening from the illusion of the individual. 

Peace and Bliss, the result and the nature of this awakening, have no opposite. They are uncaused but rather are innate qualities of your real existence.

When we misperceive ourselves and the world, there seems to be a being who is incarnated (the ego) and a world in which that being lives, crucified between moments of pleasure and pain. When we awaken to the reality of our existence that is primordial and without both name and form, it is recognized that none of it is what it appeared to be. That is why the world and the ego are called illusions. 

So long as we live in illusion, the individual (the ego) and the world seem like the only things that are real. When we awaken from that illusion, that which seemed so real and so big are seen to be like specks of dust floating in a beam of light. Insignificance drowned in fathomless radiance. 

Buddha put this succinctly when he said:
Form is Emptiness
Emptiness is form

This is probably more than what you were asking for but it’s hard to discuss illusion without also discussing awakening.

Namaste :)