acceptance

Everything in life that we really accept undergoes a change.

The continued and complete avoidance of something gives away the very urgent necessity for -at some point - that very same thing to be discovered, delved deeply into, and actually utilised in your life. As such, the only way out of something is often to go into it...confront, it face it, and overcome.

Each person's ego can be calibrated as to its level of consciousness. Each level represents a strata or level analogous to the light spectrum. To people in the yellow range, everything looks yellow; in the blue range, everything seems blue. The human mind tends to dissociate from levels that are too unlike its own. this tends to fragment society into classes. Each class has its characteristic language, style, vernacular, customs, occupational standards, acceptable behaviors, and norms. there is a tendency to disparage the other classes or their styles or modes of behavior. There is also denial of the reality of other ways of thinking or proceeding. ..

In my lifetime I have learnt that one race is not superior to another.
In my lifetime I have learnt that one sex is not superior to another.
I await the day when one religion is not considered superior  to another.

Don't try to teach a pig to sing.  It doesn't work, and it annoys the pig.

I started out with nothing and I still got most of it left.

"If you think you're enlightened go spend a week with your family."

One finds that no matter how sincere one's intention to be attentive and aware, the mind rebels against such instructions and races off to indulge in all manner of distractions, memories and fantasies....The comforting illusion of personal coherence and continuity is ripped away to expose only fragmentary islands of consciousness separated by yawning gulfs of unawareness....The first step in this practice of mindful awareness is radical self-acceptance.

Such self-acceptance, however, does not operate in an ethical vacuum, where no moral assessment is made of one's emotional states. The training in mindful awareness is part of a Buddhist path with values and goals. Emotional states are evaluated according to whether they increase or decrease the potential for suffering. If an emotion, such as hatred or envy, is judged to be destructive, then it is simply recognized as such. It is neither expressed through violent thoughts, words or deeds, nor is it suppressed or denied as incompatiable with a "spiritual"life. In seeing it for what it is - a transient emotional state - one mindfully observes it follow its own nature: to arise, abide for a while, and then pass away.

You can't put people in boxes, and you can't fit life into compartments.

We avoid the things that we're afraid of because we think there will be dire consequences if we confront them. But the truly dire consequences in our lives come from avoiding things that we need to learn about or discover.