Três anos

Este blog completa hoje 3 anos!

Infelizmente a história repete-s…! Embora tenha conseguido estar mais presente, continuo muito afastado… Afastado demais.

De qualquer forma um projecto com 3 anos já é qualquer coisa! O facto de ainda não ter morrido já representa qualquer coisa…

Mind full of peace

A primary method for gaining a mind full of peace is to practice emptying the mind.

— Napoleon Hill

As pessoas

Às vezes julgamos que as pessoas são décimos de lotaria: que estão ali para tornar realidade as nossas ilusões absurdas.

— Carlos Ruiz Zafón em A Sombra do Vento

O veneno do capitalismo

A maneira mais eficaz de tornar os pobres inofensivos é ensiná-los a quererem imitar os ricos. É esse o veneno com que o capitalismo cega…

— Carlos Ruiz Zafón em A Sombra do Vento

Everybody is like a magnet

Everybody is like a magnet. You attract to yourself reflections of that which you are. If you’re friendly, then everybody else seems to be friendly too.

— Dr. David Hawkins

Change the outer

Trying to change the outer is like seeing your unshaven face in the mirror and trying to shave the mirror.

— Joe Vitale

Reality

All you see in your world is the outcome of your idea about it.

— Neale Donald Walsch

I will see it…

I will see it when I believe it.

— Dr. Wayne Dyer

The great deception

The birth of a man is the birth of his sorrow. The longer he lives, the more stupid he becomes, because his anxiety to avoid unavoidable death becomes more and more acute. What bitterness! He lives for what is always out of reach! His thirst for survival in the future makes him incapable of living in the present.

— Chuang Tzu

Who we are

Perhaps the deepest reason why we are afraid of death is because we do not know who we are. We believe in a personal, unique, and separate identity; but if we dare to examine it, we find that this identity depends entirely on an endless collection of things to prop it up: our name, our “biography,” our partners, family, home, job, friends, credit cards . . . It is on their fragile and transient support that we rely for our security. So when they are all taken away, will we have any idea of who we really are?

Without our familiar props, we are faced with just ourselves, a person we do not know, an unnerving stranger with whom we have been living all the time but we never really wanted to meet. Isn’t that why we have tried to fill every moment of time with noise and activity, however boring or trivial, to ensure that we are never left in silence with this stranger on our own?

And doesn’t this point to something fundamentally tragic about our way of life? We live under an assumed identity, in a neurotic fairy tale world with no more reality than the Mock Turtle in Alice in Wonderland. Hypnotized by the thrill of building, we have raised the houses of our lives on sand. This world can seem marvelously convincing until death collapses the illusion and evicts us from our hiding place. What will happen to us then if we have no clue of any deeper reality?

When we die we leave everything behind, especially this body we have cherished so much and relied upon so blindly and tried so hard to keep alive. But our minds are no more dependable than our bodies. Just look at your mind for a few minutes. You will see that it is like a flea, constantly hopping to and fro. You will see that thoughts arise without any reason, without any connection. Swept along by the chaos of every moment, we are the victims of the fickleness of our mind. If this is the only state of consciousness we are familiar with, then to rely on our minds at the moment of death is an absurd gamble.

— Sogyal Rinpoche in The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying