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David Whyte

REST is the conversation between what we love to do and how we love to be. Rest is not stasis but the essence of giving and receiving. Rest is an act of remembering, imaginatively and intellectually, but also physiologically and physically. We often hate ourselves for our procrastination, when it is often only the deeply disguised need to rest deeply enough to reconstitute and reimagine our approach. To rest is to become present in a different way than through action, and especially to give up on the will as the prime motivator of endeavor, with its endless outward need to reward itself through established goals. To rest is to give up on worrying and fretting and the sense that there is something wrong with the world unless we put it right; to rest is to fall back, literally or figuratively from outer targets, not even to a sense of inner accomplishment or an imagined state of attained stillness, but to a different kind of meeting place, a living, breathing state of natural exchange…
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The ability to take real rest is almost an art form; strangely, almost a discipline: the discipline of putting things aside, especially putting aside the will, and the false self, supported by endless endeavour: this is not to give up on the will but to invite it back again as a good servant to the soul's desires instead of the heartless and exhausting task master it becomes when we push it to the leading edge of our identity. DW

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‘REST’
From
CONSOLATIONS:
The Solace, Nourishment and Underlying Meaning
of Everyday Words. © 2015 David Whyte

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Planning Ahead Can Make a Difference in the End
Aaron Freeman
https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4675953

“You want a Physicist to speak at your funeral. You want the physicist to speak to your grieving family about the conservation of energy, so that they understand that your energy has not died. You want the physicist to remind your mother about the first law of thermodynamics; that no energy gets created in the universe, and none gets destroyed. You want your mother to know that all of you energy, every vibration, every BTU of heat, every wave of every particle that was her beloved child remains with her in this world. You want the physicist to tell your weeping father that amid energies of the cosmos, you gave as good as you got.
And at one point you would hope that the physicist would step down from the pulpit, and walk to your brokenhearted spouse there in the pew and tell him that all the photos that ever bounced off her face, all the particles whose paths were interrupted by your smile, by the touch of your hair, hundreds of trillions of particles have raced off like children, their ways forever changed by you. And as your widow rocks in the arms of a loving family, may the physicist let her know, that all the photons bounced from you were gathered in the particle detectors that are her eyes, that those photons created within her constellations of electromagnetically charged neurons whose energy will go on forever.
You can hope your family will examine the evidence and satisfy themselves that the science is sound and that they'll be comforted to know your energy's still around. According to the law of the conservation of energy, not a bit of you is gone; you're just less orderly."

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The Last Time: Author Unknown.

8/18/2022

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Buddha Museum: Trauben-Traurbach Germany

8/8/2022

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https://www.dropbox.com/s/obybjin4nylblaw/Buddha%20Museum%3A%20Trauben%20Traurbach%20Germany%3A%20Robert%20Beatty%20%3A%20Frank%20Leder.m4v?dl=0

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Now think about yourself. You think you are a separate and independent individual. But you are not. Without your father and mother you would not be. Without their fathers and mothers, your father and mother would not have been and you would not be…. And so we can go back endlessly to the origin of the human race and before that and before that. You, at this moment, are the apex of the great triangle formed by all these previous individual lives. In you they all exist today. They live in you today as truly as they lived individually in what we call time.

But, in addition, just as you live today by virtue of all the other individuals and existences in the world at this moment – your body is sustained by the food cultivated and processed by innumerable persons throughout the present world, your body is covered by clothing produced by innumerable persons throughout the present world, your activities are conditioned by the activities of innumerable persons living in the present world, your thinking is conditioned by the thinking of innumerable persons living in the present world – [just] so the bodies, the actions, the thinking of all your ancestors who form the great triangle of which you are the present apex, have in their turn been dependent upon and conditioned by the innumerable persons existing in the world at the time they individually lived.

But this is not all. From you will come your children and their children’s children; from your actions will come the results of your actions and the results of those results; and from your thoughts will come the future thinking and the thinking resulting from that thinking, ad infinitum.

And this is true for each sentient or non-sentient being in the universe. In you and in each one of them at this moment is all time and all space. [In other words, this moment is all.]

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The Blog

David Whyte: Rest.

Planning Ahead: Aaron Freeman

The Last Time: Author Unknown.

Buddha Museum: Trauben-Traurbach Germany

This Moment is All.

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