Sunday Wisdom

Transformational Truth 2: The Digha Nikaya

You should be an island to yourself, a refuge to yourself, not dependent on any other but taking refuge in the truth and none other than the truth. And how do you become an island and a refuge to yourself? In this way. You see and contemplate your body as composed of all the forces of the universe. Ardently and mindfully you steer your body-self by restraining your discontent with the world about you. In the same way, observe and contemplate your feelings and use that same ardent restraint and self-possession against enslavement by greed or desire. By seeing attachment to your body and feelings as blocking the truth, you dwell in self-possession and ardent liberation from those ties. This is how you live as an island to yourself and a refuge to yourself. Whoever dwells in this contemplation, islanded by the truth and taking refuge in the truth–that one will come out of the darkness and into the light.

~ The Digha Nikaya

"After nourishment, shelter and companionship, stories are the thing we need most in the world."

- Philip Pullman

"All good things are wild and free."

- Henry David Thoreau

"Sometimes Heaven is just a new pair of glasses." 

- Anne Lamott

“When you are able to shift your inner awareness to how you can serve others, and when you make this the central focus of your life, you will then be in a position to know true miracles in your progress toward prosperity.”

- Wayne W. Dyer: an American self-help author and motivational speaker

“We cannot live for ourselves alone. Our lives are connected by a thousand invisible threads, and along these sympathetic fibers, our actions run as causes and return to us as results.”

- Herman Melville

"And in the end

the love you take

is equal to the

love you make."

~ Paul McCartney

“We seldom realize, for example that our most private thoughts and emotions are not actually our own. For we think in terms of languages and images which we did not invent, but which were given to us by our society.”

- Alan W. Watts: was a British-born philosopher, writer, and speaker, best known as an interpreter and populariser of Eastern philosophy for a Western audience

“Friendship is born at that moment when one man says to another: 'What! You too? I thought that no one but myself . . .'”

― C.S. Lewis

“When we honestly ask ourselves which person in our lives mean the most to us, we often find that it is those who, instead of giving advice, solutions, or cures, have chosen rather to share our pain and touch our wounds with a warm and tender hand. The friend who can be silent with us in a moment of despair or confusion, who can stay with us in an hour of grief and bereavement, who can tolerate not knowing, not curing, not healing and face with us the reality of our powerlessness, that is a friend who cares.”

― Henri J.M. Nouwen: was a Dutch-born Catholic priest, professor and write