It doesn't matter how long we may have been stuck in a sense of our limitations. If we go into a darkened room and turn on the light, it doesn't matter if the room has been dark for a day, a week, or ten thousand years - we turn on the light and it is illuminated. Once we control our capacity for love and happiness, the light has been turned on.
Interpretation
We can change our perspective and illuminate our lives regardless of how long we've felt limited by darkness.
This quote emphasizes that no matter how long we've felt trapped by limitations or negativity, we have the power to change our situation at any moment. Just as turning on a light instantly dispels darkness, activating our capacity for love and happiness can transform our lives and reveal new possibilities.
In practice
This quote could be used in a motivational speech to encourage people to overcome their self-imposed limitations.
Patience doesn't mean making a pact with the devil of denial, ignoring our emotions and aspirations. It means being wholeheartedly engaged in the process that's unfolding, rather than ripping open a budding flower or demanding a caterpillar hurry up and get that chrysalis stage over with.
To be truly happy in this world is a revolutionary act...It is a radical change of view that liberates us so that we know who we are most deeply and can acknowledge our enormous ability to love.
The critical element in meditation practice is beginning again. Everyone loses focus at times, everyone loses interest at times, and everyone gets distracted over and over again. What is essential, and also incredibly transforming, is realizing that we have the ability to begin again, without blaming or judging ourselves, without thinking we have failed, without losing heart, we can, and need to, constantly be beginning again.
It's a rare and precious thing to be close to suffering because our society - in many ways - tells us that suffering is wrong. If it's our own suffering, we try to hide it or isolate ourselves. If others are suffering, we're taught to put them away somewhere so we don't have to see it.
Doing nothing means unplugging from the compulsion to always keep ourselves busy, the habit of shielding ourselves from certain feelings, the tension of trying to manipulate our experience before we even fully acknowledge what that experience is.
The moment that we realize our attention has wandered is the magic moment of the practice, because that's the moment we have the chance to be really different. Instead of judging ourselves, and berating ourselves, and condemning ourselves, we can be gentle with ourselves.
There is no teacher more discriminating or transforming than loss.
One of the huge mistakes people make is that they try to force an interest on themselves. You don't choose your passions; your passions choose you.
That there is something in advice very useful and salutary, seems to be equally confessed on all hands; since even those that reject it, allow for the most part that rejection to be wrong, but charge the fault upon the unskilful manner in which it is given; they admit the efficacy of the medicine, but abhor the nauseousness of the vehicle.
I don't think it's a good attitude in your life to feel that you have to be rich to have self-esteem.
A wise player ought to accept his throws and score them, not bewail his luck.
Ask a man which way he is going to vote, and he will probably tell you. Ask him, however, why, and vagueness is all.
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