"The Way It Is," is my favorite book of the past several months. It's directed towards expeienced meditators, and the lectures transcribed there are brilliantly simple and insightful. Go Ajahn Sumedho!
"Now how many of you feel you have a mission in life to perform? It’s something that you’ve got to do and some kind of important task that’s been assigned to you by God or fate or something. People frequently get caught up in that view of being somebody who has a mission.
Who can be just with the way things are, so that it is just the body that grows up, gets old and dies, breathes and is conscious? We can practise, live within the moral precepts, do good, respond to the needs and experiences of life with mindfulness and with wisdom-- but there’s nobody that has to do anything. There’s nobody with a mission, nobody special; we’re not making a person or a saint or an avatar or a tulku or a messiah or Maitreya."
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"I remember my own experience. I always had the view that I was somebody special in some way. I used to think, ‘Well, I must be a special person. Way back when I was a child I was fascinated by Asian and as soon as I could, I studied Chinese at the university, so surely I must be a reincarnation of somebody who was connected to the Orient.’
But consider this as a reflection: no matter how many signs of being special or previous lives you can remember or voices from God or messages from the Cosmos, whatever-- not to deny or say that these things aren’t real-- but they’re impermanent. They’re anicca, dukkha, anatta. We’re reflecting on them as the really are-- what arises, ceases: a message from God is something that comes and ceases in your mind, doesn’t it? God isn’t always talking to you continuously...."
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"Then the missions we have are responses, not to experiences that we have in our lives-- they’re not personal anymore, it’s no longer me, Sumedho Bhikku, with a mission as if I’m specially chosen from above, more so than any of you. It’s not that any more. That whole manner of thinking and perceiving is relinquished. And whether or not I do save the world and thousands of beings...it’s not from the delusion of being a person; it’s a natural resonse from wisdom.
This I trust; this is what saddha is-- it is a faith in the Buddha’s word. Saddha: it’s a real trust and confidence in Dhamma, in just waiting and being nobody and not becoming anything, but being able to wait and just respond.
...And there is the response because when we have vigour and intelligence and talent, then life always comes to us asking us to respond to it in some skilful and compassionate way, which we are willing and very able to do."
Ajahn Sumedho, “Being Nobody,” from The Way It Is, 1991.
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I just discovered "Father Joe," a recent bestselling spiritual memoir. I'm planning to pass it along to Ryushin. It's almost impossible to put this book down.
From the Prologue:
A saint is a person who practices the keystone human virtue of humility. Humility in the face of wealth and plenty, humility in the face of hatred and violence...humility in the face of love and beauty, humility in the face of pain and death. Saints are driven to humbling themselves before all the splendor and horror of the world because they perceive something divine in it, something pulsing and alive beneath the hard dead surface of material things, something inconceivably greater and purer than they. (p.4)
(On needing attention, also known as “extending ourselves out into other people’s awareness”:)
“Without God, people find it very hard to know who they are or why they exist. But if others pay attention to them, praise them, write about them, discuss them, they think they’ve found the answer to both questions.
...If the result is that you only have a personality other people shape. If you really exist only in other people’s minds... I’ve just described pride, dear.” (p. 194)
"Father Joe", by Tony Hendra, Random House, 2004.
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