- “How ironic it is then, to realize how many of we humans are masochists! That even when we are placed in paradise, the majority of us would, by choice, focus on everything outside the present moment and make ourselves suffer by thinking about Dis-Ease! Too many of us would dwell on a past that no longer exists while everything in the present moment is wonderful. What great paradoxes we as humans are capable of!” ― Alaric Hutchinson, Living Peace: Essential Teachings for Enriching Life
- “The mind is limitless, in its creations.” ― T. Scott McLeod, All That Is Unspoken
- “You have described only too well,” replied the Master, “where the difficulty lies…The right shot at the right moment does not come because you do not let go of yourself. You…brace yourself for failure. So long as that is so, you have no choice but to call forth something yourself that ought to happen independently of you, and so long as you call it forth your hand will not open in the right way–like the hand of a child.” ― Eugen Herrigel
- “Detachment is being apathetic or aloof to other people, while un-attachment is acknowledging and honoring other people, while choosing not to let them influence your emotional well being. Detached would mean I do not care, while un-attached means I care, although I am not going to alter my emotional state due to your emotions, words, or actions.” ― Alaric Hutchinson, Living Peace: Essential Teachings for Enriching Life
- “Although the future is indiscernible, we often feel the need to plan for what cannot be planned, and attempt to react to things that never happened. Our overemphasis in the future is a mere illusion, which often makes us foolishly blind to the beauty of the present moment, and is the root of creating the worst case scenarios and the what- if situations that plague the mind.” ― Forrest Curran
- “In literature, words are used to give pleasures to your mind. In spirituality, words are used to take you beyond mind into the ultimate bliss of wordlessness (silence). Many seekers mistake spirituality as literature. They just enjoy the use of poetic words and stories.” ― Shunya
- “In an animal’s or a plant’s expression of imagination (let’s leave out the rest for now, so we don’t have to deal with the question of consciousness in, for example, minerals), there is always purity in the connection between need and evolution. That which is created is a response to reality and very specific, essential concerns. This then is the origin of the union between what is so and mysterious harmony—truth and beauty. The bridge between them is inspired intuition and the actions it causes. Or, imagination causes inspiration causes intuition causes beauty, which then causes imagination again…” ― Darrell Calkins, Re:
- “Zazen is the dragons roar. This dragons roar is the wind passing and whistling through a hollow tree. This can be a metaphor for your Zazen practice and or even your life. If you can let go, greatly let go, this dragons roar can manifest through you. It is much bigger than the individual.” ― Shoryu Bradley
- “I’m a practicing Zen Buddhist and I’m influenced by my readings in that tradition, such as the notion that everyone is born a perfect being and we spend most of our lives with a clouded vision trying to realize our perfection,” he says. At critical moments in the book, T.S. registers his inkling of this realization. When he makes his maps, it feels like taking down dictation from the universe.” ― Reif Larsen
- “The impossibility of arriving at Truth by giving up your own authority and following the lights of others. Such a path will only lead to an opinion.” ― Steve Hagen, Buddhism Plain and Simple
- “For self realization you need to take a step, a step backwards.” ― ~Sw. Chidananda Tirtha
- “There are some things that don’t function as one would assume. For example, the impulse and linear thinking associated with the search for happiness most often produce questions like, “What’s in it for me?” or “How do I get what I want?” Paradoxically, if you will, that very question pushes authentic happiness away. Now, to try to explain that to someone in such a way that they hear and are interested by the idea is going to probably involve some paradox and non-linearity.” ― Darrell Calkins
- “There is a veil between you and God. Thoughts are like embroidery on that veil. People are doing more and more embroidery on your veil and making it more and more obscure.” ― Shunya
- “Find one thing that holds you in the present moment… one thing that stops the live commentary in your head. It can be anything like sipping hot beverage, taking a shower, watching the waves… That thing is your own meditation technique, your own door to connect with the supreme.” ― Shunya
- Life is a balance of holding on and letting go. Rumi
- If you think you are too small to make a difference, try sleeping with a mosquito. 14th Dalai Lama
- “itt was snowing as if you could hear wolves howling” ― Dick Allen, Zen Master Poems
- “If you have ever watched a football game, you will likely recall that while the game is being played, there is a commentator who is narrating the plays of the game and making interpretations. Our thoughts are just like this. In our mind, we have the direct experience and we have the commentator that narrates and describes our direct experience.The commentator of a football game isn’t really necessary, and he doesn’t affect the activity of the game in any way. He is just describing the game to the audience, and doing so from his perspective, with his own opinions, based on his mood, memory, education, past experiences and so on. In ourselves, the commentator is also unnecessary, and does not change the experience that it is commenting on. It merely describes it from its own biased perspective, with its own opinions, based on its mood, memory, education, past experiences, and so on.Our problem is that we have mistaken the comments of the commentator for the reality that is being commented on. We have confused our own identity as being that of the commentator, and we believe that what is being described is actually the truth of reality.” ― Joseph P. Kauffman, Awake to What Is: Discovering Peace in the Present Moment
- “It is actually not the objective circumstances that determine whether an event is traumatic, it is our interpretation, our subjective emotional experience of the event.” ― Joseph P. Kauffman, Awake to What Is: Discovering Peace in the Present Moment
- Body and mind dropped off. Dogen (on enlightenment)
- “Om is that God of love. Like a loving mother Om cleans us of our clutters collected through many incarnations.” ― Banani Ray
- “What is your heart worth to you? The answer is ‘everything’. Our hearts are worth the World.” ― Alaric Hutchinson, Living Peace: Essential Teachings for Enriching Life
- “Everyone claims to want the truth. If you really want it, I’d suggest investing seriously in humor and this mysterious skill of transforming bad news into good. Otherwise, you’ll only get more frustrated.” ― Darrell Calkins, Re:
- “Greater awareness brings about a greater appreciation of the people, places, and things in our lives. The more observant we are, the richer our daily experiences become.” ― Ernest Cadorin, The Arrows of Zen
- “In Advaita Vedanta, and in many other ancient wisdom traditions, the world is said to be an illusion. This illusion is commonly referred to as maya, a Sanskrit name which refers to the apparent, or objective reality which is superimposed on the ultimate reality in order to generate the phenomena of what we call the material world. Maya is the magic by which we create duality—by which we create two worlds from one. This creation is an illusory creation—it is not real—it is an imaginary manifestation of the one Universal Consciousness, appearing as all of the various phenomena in objective reality. Maya is God’s, or Consciousness’s, creative power of emptying or reflecting itself into all things and thus creating all things—the power of subjectivity to take on objective appearance.” ― Joseph P. Kauffman, The Answer Is YOU: A Guide to Mental, Emotional, and Spiritual Freedom
- “I discovered that it is necessary, absolutely necessary, to believe in nothing. That is, we have to believe in something which has no form and no color–something which exists before all forms and colors appear… No matter what god or doctrine you believe in, if you become attached to it, your belief will be based more or less on a self-centered idea.” ― Shunryu Suzuki
- “Zazen is better than a home. Zazen is a home that you can’t ever lose.” ― Ruth Ozeki, A Tale for the Time Being
- “Is the sunrise of Mount Fuji more beautiful from the one you see in the countryside a bit closer to home? Are the beaches of Indonesia really that much more serene than those we have in our own countries? The point I make is not to downplay the marvels of the world, but to highlight the notion of the human tendency in our failure to see the beauty in our daily lives when we take off the travel goggles when we are home. It is the preconceived notion of a place that creates the difference in perception of environments rather than the actual geological location.” ― Forrest Curran
- “Consider the sunlight. You may see it is near, yet if you follow it from world to world you will never catch it in your hands. Then you may describe it as far away and, lo, you will see it just before your eyes. Follow it and, behold, it escapes you; run from it and it follows you close. You can neither possess it nor have done with it. From this example you can understand how it is with the true Nature of all things and, henceforth, there will be no need to grieve or to worry about such things.” ― Huang Po, The Zen Teaching of Huang Po: On the Transmission of Mind
- “I used to keep a strong scaffolding in place.It separated Pure Land from ZenZen from DaoDharma quarantined from theway of mountain spirits.With a sudden glancein the middle of a storm,the bottom dropped outthe scaffolding fellalong with my mindand all of these nectarspoured into the same vat.” ― Frank LaRue Owen, The Temple of Warm Harmony