Home > Work > Going to Pieces Without Falling Apart: A Buddhist Perspective on Wholeness
21 " ... everything had changed but nothing was altered. "
― Mark Epstein , Going to Pieces Without Falling Apart: A Buddhist Perspective on Wholeness
22 " With some gratitude, I realized that my awareness was now stronger than my neurosis. This did not mean that things would never go to pieces, only that I did not have to fall apart when they did. In fact, my own ability to go to pieces was protecting me in this situation. I did not have to let my identity as an efficient and together person imprison me. "
23 " In making a path like the Buddha, we discover our own capacities for relationship. Doing this is like feeling our way in the dark. We need a healthy appreciation for what kind of obstacles we are facing within ourselves, and we need a method for working our way around those obstacles. It is in this sense that the path is the goal - opening leads to further opening. The Buddha's meditative teachings are about finding and incorporating a method around our obstacles. "
24 " Delusion is the mind’s tendency to seek premature closure about something. It is the quality of mind that imposes a definition on things and then mistakes the definition for the actual experience. "
25 " Implicit and explicit throughout the text is the understanding that meditative wisdom does not have to be isolated from daily life. Our need to expand awareness beyond our isolated egos is as necessary in relationships as it is in meditation. "
26 " Form is emptiness", the Buddhists teach, but form is also form. I would never be able to approach the emptiness of form if I continued to deny myself the experience of it. "
27 " Completion comes not from adding another piece to ourselves but from surrendering our ideas of perfection "
28 " The antidote to hatred in the heart, the source of violence, is tolerance. Tolerance is an important virtue of bodhisattvas (enlightened heroes and heroines)—it enables you to refrain from reacting angrily to the harm inflicted on you by others. You could call this practice “inner disarmament,” in that a well-developed tolerance makes you free from the compulsion to counterattack. For the same reason, we also call tolerance the “best armor,” since it protects you from being conquered by hatred itself. THE DALAI LAMA "