All quotes from
Mark's book
The
uncovering of the past is really only a prelude to the mystery of the
present.
Mindfulness
confers upon us the capacity to relate to emotional life in an open, balanced,
accepting, and tolerant way, while freeing us to act with compassion, rather
than on impulse.
Meditation
is not a means of forgetting the ego; it is a method of using ego to observe
and tame its own manifestations.
Development of the capacity to attend to the moment-to-moment nature of
mind allows the self to be experienced without the distortions of idealization
or wishful fantasy?
The
entire ego is not transcended; the self-representation is revealed as lacking
concrete existence.
Pay
precise attention, moment by moment, to exactly what you are experiencing,
right now, separating out your reactions from the raw sensory events.
The
uncovering of the past is really only a prelude to the mystery of the
present.
Mindfulness
confers upon us the capacity to relate to emotional life in an open, balanced,
accepting, and tolerant way, while freeing us to act with compassion, rather
than on impulse.
Meditation
is not world denying; the slowing down that it requires is in service of closer
examination of the day-to-day mind.
The
personality is built on these points of self-estrangement; the paradox is that
what we take to be so real, ourselves, is constricted on a reaction against
just what we do not wish to acknowledge.
The
fabric of self is stitched together out of… holes in our emotional experience.
No matter
what we do, [the Buddha] taught, we cannot sustain the illusion of our
self-sufficiency. We are all subject to
decay, old age, and death, to disappointment, loss, and disuse. We are all engaged in a futile struggle to
maintain ourselves in our own image.
The
crises in our lives inevitably reveal how impossible our attempts to control
our destinies really are.
The mind
endeavors to make nouns even out of verbs.
We are still subject
to … a primitive tendency to believe things are the way we wish them to be
without regard for reality, logic, or even our own sensory feedback.
What is craving,
after all, but a wish – a wish for satisfaction, gratification, holding,
security, or solidarity.
Avoid the
two extremes of self-indulgence and self-mortification, or, in more
contemporary terms, of idealization and denial.
Sometimes
we feel that the only solution is to act out every emotion, that we get in
touch with. We feel as if we must
express it to whomever it is directed or that we are somehow cheating
ourselves. The idea of simply knowing
the feeling does not occur to us.