Liberated Ways of Looking
by Susy Keely
Selected sources from a Dharma talk with Susy Keely on March 22, 2020.
“The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.”
-Marcel Proust
“The Blessed One said, “Monks, the ending of the effluents is for one who knows & sees, I tell you, not for one who doesn’t know & doesn’t see. For one who knows what & sees what? Appropriate attention & inappropriate attention. When a monk attends inappropriately, unarisen effluents arise, and arisen effluents increase. When a monk attends appropriately, unarisen effluents do not arise, and arisen effluents are abandoned.”
-Sabbāsava Sutta (MN 2)
“Yet even now, mostly I do not feel as if the horizons of my existence have shrunken. What calls me deeply calls me still in its beauty, with its intimacies and its distances, and that seems to keep the mind and heart, and the sense of existence and its scope, open, endless even.”
-Rob Burbea
“So it’s good to keep reminding ourselves of this point, because our prime focus in the meditation should always be on the mind. We’re not trying to analyze things outside in and of themselves. We’re trying to see how the mind’s quest for happiness relates to the way things behave. You always want to keep your focus here, on the mind’s quest, even when you focus on the breath.”
-Thanisarro Bhikku
“I know of no more encouraging fact than the unquestionable ability of man to elevate his life by a conscious endeavor. It is something to be able to paint a particular picture, or to carve a statue, and so to make a few objects beautiful; but it is far more glorious to carve and paint the very atmosphere and medium through which we look, which morally we can do. To affect the quality of the day, that is the highest of arts.”
-Henry David Thoreau