If any individual considers himself enlightened, then he is not.
The precondition of enlightenment is that the identified individual self has been annihilated.
No personal self or individual phenomenon has ever been enlightened.
The person disappears along with all other phenomena when he awakens from this dream
of existence.
Our lives are in fact being lived for us rather than by us as we seem to think.
All our experience, if carefully analyzed, would clearly show that volition is really not a significant factor in our lives.
Only the most minute fraction of our total physical and mental functioning even appears to be subject to volition.
Did you exercise volition when you were conceived?
And when the conceived material grew in the mother’s womb?
How long can you live without sleep, without food and water?
How long can you go without the excretory movements of the body?
How do you breathe and digest your food?
Do you have the absolute certainty of remaining alive for even the next five minutes on the strength of your own volition.
“I knew what it was like to be hurt,” she said. “The many times that that happened, I wish someone would have stood up for me.”
“But violence is violence - nobody deserves to be hurt, especially not for an idea.”
“For the most part, people who hurt… they come from hurt. It is a cycle. Let’s say they had killed him or hurt him really bad. How does [his] son feel? Does he carry on the violence?”
Steven Spazuk is a Canada-based artist who uses candle soot to create elegant drawings. After depositing soot on his media with a candle or torch, he etches lines and patterns in the soot with pencils and feathers.
Though Spazuk has spent the last 14 years developing and perfecting his soot painting technique, the creation process always has an element of random spontaneity and improvisation.
Does a man ridicule me? That’s his business. It’s my job to make sure that nothing I say or do deserves to be ridiculed. Will he hate me? His business again. Mine is to remain gentle and well disposed toward everyone, ready to show even this fellow the mistake in his thinking, not in a scolding tone or with a show of forbearance, but graciously and genuinely…
