On the most basic level, evil is running from pain. At the deepest level, evil is running from joy.

A path is created by clarifying one’s aims and removing what gets in the way of their realization. It is carved from commitment and opened up by letting go. It entails both doing something and allowing something to happen. A path is both a task and a gift. In exerting too much control, one inhibits its spontaneous unfolding, whereas just by letting everything be, one loses sight of a guiding vision. The art of creating a path is to do neither too much nor too little.

Stephen Batchelor

One learns the importance of taking responsibility for one’s experience. It’s a gradual awakening that can begin with a single moment of initial ah-ha, but like any new perspective, it takes practice.

Our dharma dialogue tonight was on letting go of the need to control - a need that underlies all forms of anxiety and self-defeating ways. The lesson: it’s easier to release control when we realize we don’t “have” things, as in ownership, in the first place.

The only way
to make sense out of change
is to plunge with it,
move with it,
and join the dance.

One of my first Zen teachers in 1970, Alan Watts

When mind knows, we call it knowledge.
When heart knows, we call it love.
When being knows, we call it meditation.

Osho

I think I’m sometimes the only one in the dozens of meetings I’m in weekly who notices a glaring lack of humor. Serious business is serious, I understand, but perspective without humor is a very narrow perspective indeed.

Taking the subject matter seriously is one thing; taking ourselves too seriously is another. No wonder friction is much the norm when we’re low on the social lubricant of humor. It’s a worthy intention to en-lighten any dialogue, and always a delight to discover at least one other set of twinkling eyes.

Trying to change who we are is the most subtle and effective form of not being who we are. And that which we resist, persists. So, the paradox, that radical acceptance is the first step toward change.

Reliance on experts, not to mention thinking of oneself as an expert, closes down inquiry and therefore is a fast lane to no innovation. The artist draws from a power beyond the ego.