Welcome! Singapore
There is a wonderful Zen saying, "The only truth you find on top of the mountain is the truth you brought with you."
We discover happiness through making peace with ourselves and the circumstances of our lives, not through trying to escape from them, nor through living in fantasies about the future.
Our lives will continue to present us with unexpected challenges and opportunities. Our bodies will age and become fragile, our teenagers will rebel, our colleagues may frustrate us, financial demands will continue to appear.
We will meet with allies and adversaries. We will be asked to find room in our hearts for the needs of others, to embrace our own demons, and to respond to the changing circumstances of each moment.
We make peace with our lives through learning to connect with the simple truths of each moment.
As the graffiti on the bridge tells us, "We are not in a traffic jam. We are the traffic jam."
It is so simply and clearly that the source of happiness and unhappiness lies nowhere else but in our minds and hearts.
We can make endless journeys to find happiness, and engage in countless struggles to rid ourselves of unhappiness, but the key traveller on all the journeys and the central player in all the strategies is ourselves, and it is to ourselves we always return.
Here the 4 Reliances: -
Rely on the message of the teacher, not on his personality;
Rely on the meaning, not just on the words;
Rely on the real meaning, not just the provisional one;
Rely on your wisdom mind, not on your ordinary, judgmental mind.
When we see clearly, we can change.
Even when we don't see clearly, we still change - though usually for the worse.
