The masters say if you create an auspicious condition in your body and your environment then meditation and realization will automatically arise.
Interpretation
Creating a supportive environment and a healthy body leads to better meditation and spiritual insight.
This quote suggests that the quality of our physical state and surroundings plays a crucial role in our ability to meditate effectively and attain deeper understanding. By cultivating a favorable environment and taking care of our bodies, we open ourselves up to the natural process of meditation and the insights that come with it.
In practice
Use this quote during a meditation workshop to emphasize the importance of creating the right atmosphere.
Sit, then, as if you were a mountain, with all the unshakeable, steadfast majesty of a mountain. A mountain is completely natural and at ease with itself, however strong the winds that try to bother it, however thick the dark clouds that swirl around its peak. Sitting like a mountain, let your mind rise and fly and soar
Real devotion is an unbroken receptivity to the truth. Real devotion is rooted in an awed and reverent gratitude, but one that is lucid, grounded, and intelligent.
There would be no chance at all of getting to know death if it happened only once. But fortunately, life is nothing but a continuing dance of birth and death, a dance of change. Every time I hear the rush of a mountain stream, or the waves crashing on the shore, or my own heartbeat, I hear the sound of impermanence. These changes, these small deaths, are our living links with death. They are death's pulses, death's heartbeat, prompting us to let go of all the things we cling to.
{While meditating} I sit quietly and rest in the nature of mind; I don't question or doubt whether I am in the "correct" state or not. There is no effort, only rich understanding, wakefulness, and unshakable certainty. When I am in the nature of mind, the ordinary mind is no longer there. There is no need to sustain or confirm a sense of being: I simply am.
We may idealize freedom, but when it comes to our habits, we are completely enslaved.
Death is a vast mystery, but there are two things we can say about it: It is absolutely certain that we will die, and it is uncertain when or how we will die. The only surety we have, then, is this uncertainty about the hour of our death, which we seize on as the excuse to postpone facing death directly. We are like children who cover their eyes in a game of hide and seek and think that no one can see them.
I know the two great commandments, and I'd better get on with them.
Strength of mind is exercise, not rest.
Grown-ups never understand anything for themselves, and it is tiresome for children to be always and forever explaining things to them.
There are three sorts of pleasures which are advantageous, and three which are injurious. Finding pleasure in the discriminating study of ceremonies and music, finding pleasure in discussing the good points in the conduct of others, and finding pleasure in having many wise friends, these are advantageous. But finding pleasure in profligate enjoyments, finding pleasure in idle gadding about, and finding pleasure in feasting, these are injurious.
Every failure, every adversity, every heartache may be a blessing in disguise providing it softens the animal portion of our nature.
For my own part, I have never had a thought which I could not set down in words, with even more distinctness than that with which I conceived it.
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