"Nothing is worth more than this day. "
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
"to be alive becomes the fundamental luck each ordinary, compromising day manages to bury"
"At certain moments, always unforseen, I become happy... I look at the strangers near as if I had known them all my life... everything fills me with affection... It may be an hour before the mood passes, but lately I seem to understand that I enter upon it the moment I cease to hate. "
- William Butler Yeats
I love this quote:
You will find that silence or very gentle words are the most exquisite revenge for insult.
Author: Judge Hall
moderation is arbitrary and capricious- as it is on all moderated threads
only on this one
I say it up front :-)
so you know
Freedom of association- it's important. It gives us the right to associate with folks we find congenial. That's a good thing. If you come here and trash others, I will consider you uncongenial. Trashing other posters (no matter how obnoxious you consider the other posters) just makes you look like you have nothing better to do, and that would be sad, and while I would feel compassion for you, I wouldn't want to hang out with you do if you do that. So when you post here, post about ideas, or public figures, books, movies, wine, food- and don't be nasty, because nasty looks so...nasty.
The Calming and Contemplation* of Anger
There are persons who tend toward a preponderance of anger, who ceaselessly surge with emotion and are prone to such frequent outbreaks of temper that they are utterly unable to arrest or control themselves even for a moment.
Such an individual should allow his anger to arise freely so that he can illuminate it with the practice of calming and contemplation.*
In contemplating the four phases of the anger, he should inquire from whence they arise. If their arising cannot be apprehended then neither can their perishing. He should then consider each of the twelve items, asking from whom the anger arises, who is the angry one, and who is the object of that anger. Contemplating in this manner, he realizes that the anger is utterly inapprehensible. Its coming and going, the traces it leaves behind, as well as its manifest features, are all both empty and quiescent.
He contemplates anger as the ten realms [of the dharmadhatu] and contemplates anger as the four meritorious qualities, just as explained above. Thus one attains the way of the Buddha through the nonway of anger.
One should contemplate in this fashion the remaining obscurations — immorality, laziness, mental distractedness, and the stupidity of adherence to false views — as well as all other evil forms of phenomenal activity.
(From The Great Calming and Contemplation [a translation of the Maka Shikan], p. 317-318 — I changed the format for readability.) |
