real mindfulness

Once sati is established, every moment is pregnant with the potential for awakening.

Analayo in Satipatthana : The Direct Path to Realization, p 252


The real challenge, the place requiring skillful effort, is in establishing sati, establishing sati in formal practice so it can bear fruit in every experience of life.

timelessness

"...thought, as one knows it, generally is in time; it is based on notion of time; thought itself is time; thought itself creates time; when there is no time there is no thought."

Ramesh Grover - reflections on Bohm and Krishnamurti The Ending of Time in Kalachakra Meditations


When you are dwelling in the past or the future - remembering, planning, regretting, fearing - you are not alive in this moment. You are missing this moment, lost in time. Time is a construct. The past does not exist substantially in the present, nor has the future come to be.

Can you choose to be alive right now? Can you choose to be fully open to this moment? To this breath? To sounds and sensations right here, right now?

Mary

lost in emptiness

Many questions come up about non-duality. This passage addresses one problem with embracing the experience or an idea about it too quickly. Non-duality includes a need to be deeply aware of clarity, spaciousness, and stillness but to also know clearly and immediately how to pay attention and navigate skillfully in the world.

The danger is that we hear too much too soon. We think we have understood shunyata, err on the side of the absolute in a nihilistic fashion, and are obscured by concepts. Nagarjuna said, "it is sad to see those who mistakenly believe in material, concrete reality, but far more pitiful are those who believe in emptiness." Those who believe in things can be helped through various kinds of practice, but those who have fallen into the abyss of emptiness find it almost impossible to re-emerge, since there seem to be no handholds, no steps, no gradual progression, and nothing to do.

Nyoshul Khenpo