change

Don't let yourself be weighed down by what other people think, because in a few years, in a few decades, or in a few centuries, that way of thinking will have changed.  Live now what others will only live in the future.

Nothing has to be changed, because all is beautiful -- that is enlightenment. All is as it should be, everything is perfect. This is the most perfect world, this moment lacks nothing -- the experience of this is what enlightenment is.

This is the way of meditation: encountering the present in all its tremendous beauty, just being in the present. Inside, the mind stops. Outside, the world changes totally. It is no more the ordinary world you have known before. In fact, you have not known it at all. Your mind was distorting everything, your mind was creating fantasies. Your eyes were full of fantasies and you were looking though those fantasies. They never allowed you to see that which is. If the mind is gone, even for a moment, suddenly the whole existence explodes upon you.

Empty your mind, be formless, shapeless - like water. Now you put water into a cup, it becomes the cup, you put water into a bottle, it becomes the bottle, you put it in a teapot, it becomes the teapot. Now water can flow or it can crash. Be water, my friend.

Such self-transformation is the most difficult and dangerous challenge to the imagination, and it is the most rewarding. Meeting it is only possible for the person whose mind is open to contradictions and well-practiced in free conjecture.

Every day of our lives we are on the verge of making those slight changes that would make all the difference.

Despite our differences, we are all in this together. No act of kindness or compassion goes unnoticed. To change the world, take compassionate action within your immediate sphere of influence. To change yourself, start by being still and making time just to listen.

It may seem hard to extend our gratefulness and appreciation to the time in which we live and the challenges it presents-to financial crisis, global climate change, terrorism, wars, energy depletion, and any other disasters looming on the horizon.  It would be much easier to appreciate an era of good feeling, peace and calm stability!  But difficult times are also times of growth, of new insights and opportunities, of creativity, and of emergence.

That morning I experienced vividly, if almost subliminally, the reality of change itself: how it fools our sentinels and undermines our defenses, how careful we are to look for it in the wrong places, how it does not reveal itself until it is beyond redress, how vainly we search for it around us and find too late that is has occurred within us.

The only way to change is by changing your understanding.