Quotes For The Path
Sub thik ho jayega
No appointment, no disappointment.
- Swami Satchitananda
It’s a wonderful feeling when you discover some evidence to support your beliefs.
Anonymous
Ten thousand flowers in spring, the moon in autumn,
a cool breeze in summer, snow in winter.
If your mind isn’t clouded by unnecessary things,
this is the best season of your life.
- Wu-Men
We are not human beings having a spiritual experience,
but spiritual beings having a human experience.
- Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
Our problems began when we acquired a male, judgmental God who resides off the planet.
- Gary Snyder
In times like these it helps to recall that there have always been times like these.
- Paul Harvey
The world is moving so fast these days that the man who says it can’t be done is generally interrupted by someone doing it.
- Elbert Hubbard
Let him criticize who has the heart to help.
- Abraham Lincoln
If there is a doubt, there is no doubt.
-Anon
Money can buy a clock, but not time.
- Chinese proverb
The believer is happy; the doubter is wise.
- Hungarian proverb
That which we do not bring to consciousness appears in our lives as fate.
- Carl Jung
If you don't take care of your body, where will you live?
- Anon
There is nothing noble in being superior to your fellow men.
True nobility lies in being superior to your former self.
- Ernest Hemingway
See if you can catch yourself complaining, in either speech or thought, about a situation you find yourself in, what other people do or say, your surroundings, your life situation, even the weather. To complain is always non-acceptance of what is. It invariably carries an unconscious negative charge. When you complain, you make yourself into a victim. When you speak out, you are in your power. So change the situation by taking action or by speaking out if necessary or possible; leave the situation or accept it. All else is madness.
- Eckhart Tolle, The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
“The research worker is sometimes a difficult person, because he has no great confidence in his opinions, yet he also is [skeptical] of others’ views. This characteristic can be inconvenient in everyday life.”
- W.I.B. Beveridge in The Art of Scientific Investigation (1957)
When we shut ourselves off from vulnerability, we distance ourselves from the experiences that bring purpose and meaning to our lives.
- Brene Brown
You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, or who had ever been alive.
― James Baldwin
Roses:
The flowers are easy to paint,
The leaves difficult.
- Shiki
While alive
Be a dead man
Thoroughly dead;
And act as you will,
And all is good.
- Bunan, 17th Century Zen Master
If they ask for me, say:
He had some business
In another world.
- Sokan (Socho) 1448-1532
Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect.
- Mark Twain
You can be trapped by your own way.
You should not try too hard.
- Shunryu Suzuki Rosh
The experiencing of the manifold dharmas through using oneself is delusion;
the experiencing of oneself through the coming of the manifold dharmas is satori.
- Eihei, Zen master
The meaning of life is that it stops.
- Franz Kafka
If you would shoot a general,
First destroy his horse.
- Japanese proverb
Only the Zen-man knows tranquility:
The world-consuming flame can't reach this valley.
Under a breezy limb, the windows of flesh shut firm,
I dream, wake, dream.
- Fugai (17th century Soto)
Though I'm in Kyoto,
When the cuckoo sings
I long for Kyoto
- Basho (1644-1694
You think that what you do not do yourself does not happen.
Thus, the master no longer seeks, but finds.
- Master Kenzo Awa, Zen archer
Let yourself be silently
Drawn by the stronger
Pull of what you love.
- Rumi
Keep walking, though there's no place to get to.
Don't try to see through the distances.
That's not for human beings.
Move within, but don't move the way fear makes you move.
- Rumi, The Illuminated Rumi, Coleman Barks
A saint is one until he or she knows it.
- Sufi saying
Be always sure you're right, then go ahead.
- Davy Crockett
The human race always does the most intelligent thing after it's exhausted all the stupid ones first.
- Buckminster Fuller
What is all this fuss about the mystery of the unconscious? What about the mystery of the conscious? What do they know about that?
- James Joyce
However expressive, symbols can never be the things they stand for.
- Aldous Huxley, The Doors of Perception
If you can't enjoy what you have, you can't enjoy more of it.
- Richard Bandler
You see, there's something terrible about knowing your wrong,
but not knowing what you're supposed to do do differently.
- John Grinder, Transformations, P.126
Physics change, but reality stays the same.
- Richard Bandler
I suppose it is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail.
- Abraham Maslow
Self-actualizing people have a deep feeling of identification, sympathy, and affection for human beings in general. They feel kinship and connection, as if all people were members of a single family.
- Abraham Maslow
How to live. How to get the most life. As if you were to teach the young hunter to entrap game. How to extract honey from the flower of the world. That is my everyday business.
- Henry David Thoreau
Those who can change and who can adapt themselves to meet the changing problems which life presents the do not necessarily become great and famous people - that is a function of luck, ambition, and a host of other variables.
But they do become great people. They are the ones in every class and socio-economic group to whom the rest of us go to for advice. We do not go to them because they are always right, but because they seem to have an understanding of their lives which helps us to clarify our own. I believe that one of the purposes of education is to produce more of these great people - people who have developed a conscious grasp of the processes through which they themselves grow. A curriculum with that goal educates him in his own humanity, in his power to change his life by changing the processes he uses to form himself.
- Terry Borton, Reach, Touch, and Teach,
Mc-Graw-Hill, New York, 1970, pp 90-91
There's something about the Western mind, and I suppose philosophical styles that can be traced back to the Greeks, that we don't feel satisfied until we have closure. Well, closure is an illusion!
- Terrence McKenna
Remember this. The world wants to assign you a role. And once you accept that role, you’re doomed.
- Robert Greene
Look at every path closely and deliberately. Try it as many times as you think necessary. Then ask yourself, and yourself alone, one question. This question is one that only a very old man asks. My benefactor told me about it once when I was young, and my blood was too vigorous for me to understand it. Now I do understand it. I will tell you what it is: Does this path have heart? All paths are the same: they lead nowhere. They are paths going through the bush, or into the bush. In my own life I could say I have traversed long, long paths, but I am not anywhere. My benefactor's question has meaning now. Does this path have a heart? if it does, the path is good; it it doesn't, it is of no use. Both paths lead nowhere; but one has a heart, the other doesn't. One makes for a joyful journey; as long as you follow it, you are one with it. The other will make you curse your life. One makes you strong; the other weakens you.
- Carlos Castaneda, The Teachings of Don Juan
Men are closer to the concrete and aim at the abstract. Women are close to the abstract yet indulge themselves in the concrete. Incredible, isn't it?.
- Florinda Donner, author of Being In Dreaming, in a Zone magazine interview, Oct-Feb.1992
Discard all symbols. Become wise.
But remember that the wise will not stop at becoming wise. The wise man walks this earth listening to his spirit-self, his familiar voice. Nor will he ever act contrary to this true-voice, this familiar-voice that commands but never forbids
- Leksi speaking to Ableza, Hanta Yo, Ruth Beebe Hill, P.763
So as you let your memory wend its way through the events of your life that formed your present body, realize how the unexperienced aspect of these events has frozen into your body. It's not a big deal to sprain an ankle. But fearing the possibility that I may experience more pain, I put lots of effort into avoidance. I favor the ankle too much, producing a distortion in my hips and spine beyond what the simple sprain would have ever caused.
- Don Johnson, The Protean Body,
A Rolfers View of Human Flexibility, 1977, P.47
Replace fear with love.
- Don Miguel Ruiz, The Four Agreements
The difficulty we have in accepting responsibility for our behavior lies in the desire to avoid the pain of the consequences of that behavior.
-M. Scott Peck, The Road Less Traveled, P.42
Sooner or later, if they are to be healed, they must learn that the entirety of one's adult life is a series of personal choices, decisions. If they can accept this totally, then they become free people. To the extent that they do not accept this they will forever feel themselves victims.
-M. Scott Peck, The Road Less Traveled, P.44
If you see fraud and do not say fraud, you are a fraud.
- Nassim Taleb
There are no happy endings, because nothing ends.
- Schmendrick the Magician, "The Last Unicorn" animated movie
Do not try to measure the immeasurable with words,
No more than to plunge the cord of thought into the unfathomable:
He who asks is mistaken, he who answers is mistaken.
- Buddha, from a south Indian statue, undated
The more clearly you understand yourself and your emotions,
the more you become a lover of what is.
- Spinoza
The world is my country, all mankind are my brethren,
and to do good things is my religion.
-Thomas Paine
Don't cry like a woman over what you did not defend like a man.
- Mother of the last Moorish king of Granada as a rebuke to her son
when the Catholic kings expelled them from Spain in 1492
The meaning of any communication –
not just in hypnosis but in life –
is not what you think it means;
it’s the response it elicits.
- John Grinder and Richard Bandler
Trance-Formations P.24
Lose your mind and come to your senses.
- Fritz Perls
Be who you are and what you feel because those who mind don't matter, and those who matter don't mind.
- Fritz Perls
To mature means to take responsibility for your life., to be on your own. Psychoanalysis fosters the infantile state by considering the past responsible for the illness.
- Fritz Perls
Think of yourself and feel yourself as a breather.
- Fritz Perls
An autumn night…
Don’t think your life
Didn’t matter.
- Basho
Your work is to discover your world
And then with all your heart
Give yourself to it.
- Buddha
Mind is the forerunner of all things. If mind is known, all things are known.
- Buddha
Where can I find a man
Who has forgotten words?
He is the one I would like to talk to.
- Chuang Tzu
Though I’m in Kyoto,
When the cuckoo sings
I long for Kyoto.
- Basho (1644-1694
The same principle does not apply in every situation.
- Neem Karoli Baba
Love is the only contract.
- Neem Karoli Baba
Very few among you know what to ask for.
- Neem Karoli Baba
It's all a magic shadow show.
- Advaita saying
Remember that you are dreaming.
- Anon
Between living and dreaming
there is a third thing.
Guess it.
- Antonio Machado
This is this - this is also that.
- Chuang Tzu
Things are not always as they seem, nor are they otherwise.
- Anon
Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing,
There is a field.
I'll meet you there.
- Rumi
Abandoning all thought of imposing a limit or taking sides, he rests in direct intuition.
Hence he sees that on both sides of every argument there is both right and wrong.
- Chuang Tzu
Between something and nothing,
I still don’t really know
Which is something and which is nothing.
- Chuang Tzu
Everywhere I look I see only my own desires.
- Hari Das Baba
The Kadampa Slogans of Atisha Dipankara Shrijnana offer a practical and earthy way for reversing our ego-clinging and for cultivating tenderness and compassion. “They provide a method of training our minds through both formal meditation practice and using the events of everyday life as a means of awakening.”
- Editor’s foreword, P. XV,
Training The Mind and Cultivating Loving-Kindness
- Chogyam Trungpa
If somebody asks what this world is made out of, what the substance of it is,
it is 75% "I" and 25% "Am".
- Chogyam Trungpa, Journey Without Goal, P. 103
The chains that keep you bound to the past are not the actions of another person. They are your own anger, stubbornness, lack of compassion, jealousy and blaming others for your choices. It is not other people that keep you trapped; it is the entitled role of victim that you enjoy wearing. There is a familiarity to pain that you enjoy because you get a payoff from it. When you figure out what that payoff is then you will finally be on the road to freedom.
- Shannon L. Alder
Neurotics complain of their illness, but they make the most of it, and when it comes to taking it away from them they will defend it like a lioness her young.
- Sigmund Freud
Identified with yourself, you no longer think, nor do you seek enlightenment of the mind or disburdenment of illusions....Also you must guard yourself against the easy conceptions of good and evil: your sole concern should be to examine yourself continually, asking who is above either.
- Meiho (1277-1350 Soto Zen Sect)
If you took one-tenth the energy you put into complaining and applied it to solving the problem, you'd be surprised by how well things can work out... Complaining does not work as a strategy. We all have finite time and energy. Any time we spend whining is unlikely to help us achieve our goals. And it won't make us happier.
- Randy Pausch, The Last Lecture
The heart has its reasons, of which reason knows nothing.
- Blaise Pascal
All our so-called consciousness is a more or less fantastic commentary upon an unknown text, one that is perhaps unknowable but still felt.
- Friedrich Nietzsche
The human body is the best picture of the soul.
- Ludwig Wittgenstein
If you have a garden and a library, you have everything you need.
- Marcus Tullius Cicer
The odds against any one of us being on this most wondrous of planets exceed the odds of being a single atom plucked from the entire universe. To quote the evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins, ‘In the teeth of these stupefying odds it is you and I that are privileged to be here, privileged with eyes to see where we are and brains to wonder why.’ Combine our inherent uniqueness with our one-of-a-kind personal history, and I daresay it’d be impossible to ascertain how any of us ends up doing what we’re doing.
- Guy Mcpherson
A clay pot has space inside of it and outside of it. The space inside is not any different from the space outside. When the clay pot breaks, the space merges the inside with the outside. It's only space. So it is with us. Your body is like a clay pot, and it appears you have to go within to find the truth. The outward appears to be within you. The outward is also without you. There's boundless space. When the body is transcended, it's like a broken clay pot. The Self within you becomes the Self outside of you ... as it's always been. The Self merges with the Self. Some people call the inner Self the Ātman. And yet it is called Brahman. When there is no body in the way, the Atman and the Brahman become one ... they become free and liberated.
Robert Adams, (1999), Silence of the Heart: Dialogues with Robert Adams, USA:
Acropolis Books Inc.Robert Adams, (1999), Silence of the Heart: Dialogues with Robert Adams, USA:
Acropolis Books Inc.
I will die in Paris with a downpour,
a day which I can already remember.
I will die in Paris—and I don't budge—
maybe a Thursday, like today, in autumn.
Thursday it will be, because today, Thursday,
as I prose these lines, I have forced on
my humeri and, never like today, have I turned,
with all my journey, to see myself alone.
Cesar Vallejo has died, they beat him,
all of them, without him doing anything to them;
they gave it to him hard with a stick and hard
likewise with a rope; witnesses are
the Thursdays and the humerus bones,
the loneliness, the rain, the roads...
- Cesar Vallejo
(Translated by Clayton Eshleman)
The organizing principle of a relationship should be a commitment to each other's well-being. We should not seek in each other an escape from living and life. We should seek in each other support and companionship, passion and compassion for the adventure, love, and a sense of humor regarding the lessons each of us has had to learn and for the revelation of our own foolishness. That is an enormous commitment, but once it is made and acknowledged, the relationship will survive anything.
- Stewart Emery
People love to hear good news about their bad habits.
- Dr. John McDougall
Even the best psychologist will tell you that , that people don't really want to be cured. What they want is relief; a cure is painful.
- Anthony De Mello
Ultimately there are only two things, love and fear.
- Anthony De Mello
You can have only two things in life, reasons or results.
Reasons don't count.
- Dr. Robert Anthony, Think
Trying provides two excuses,
an excuse for not doing and an excuse for not having.
- Dr. Robert Anthony, Think
In the creative orientation, when you answer the question, "What do I want to create?" it is not clear whether what you want is possible.
- Robert fritz, The Path of Least Resistance, P.51
Q: How should we show love to others?
A: If you have love inside, it will spread everywhere. Love can't be made and shown if there is no love inside our heart. If there is love inside of us we don't need to show it. It will reflect by itself around us and will light the hearts of others.
What we need to do: not to hate anyone.
- Hari Dass Baba
We are retrospective creatures because we are always looking at ourselves instead of being ourselves.
- Khigh Alx Dhiegh, The Taoist Book of Days 1980
People seem not to realize that their opinion of the world is also a confession of character.
-Ralph Waldo Emerson
Women give sex to get affection,
Men give affection to get sex.
- Anon
Facing someone who would kill you, wound you, takes courage. But facing someone who will heal you perhaps takes more courage.
- Ahbleza, Ruth Beebe Hill, Hanta Yo, p.461
If you do not need it, you can have it.
- Ram Dass
In pain everyone cries out; in pleasure none recall the Godhead
Whoever being happy centers on Him walks away from sorrow.
- Kabir
Knowledge studies others,
Wisdom is Self-known;
Muscle masters brothers,
Self-mastery is bone;
Content need never borrow,
Ambition wanders blind;
Vitality cleaves to the marrow,
Leaving death behind.
- Lao Tse
He alone sees, who sees all beings as himself.
- Isha Upanishad
I've tried countless alchemical formulas and drugs
But nowhere is there such like love -
If the tongue of love enters any part of the body
The whole is transmuted into gold
- Kabir
We must stop measuring our standard of living by automobiles, production curves, and dollars of income.....We must measure our education less by the amount of knowledge it instills in the youthful minds than the wisdom of living it creates.
- Charles Lindbergh, Of Flight and Life, P.46-47
When the heart weeps for what it has lost, the spirit laughs for what it has found.
- Sufi aphorism (from The Perennial Philosophy, by Aldous Huxley)
Look forward, not backwards. See what you still lack, not what you have already; for that is the quickest way of getting and keeping humility.
Your life now must be one of longing, if you are to achieve perfection.
- The Cloud of Unknowing, Verse 2
(translated by Clifton Wolters, Penguin Books, 1961)
The religious man was born to be saved; psychological man is born to be pleased.
- Philip Rieff, Triumph of the Therapeutic, P.24
Lenny Bruce used to point out that a naked body was permissible in the mass media as long as it was mutilated. This is true, but for a very good reason: our society needs killers from time to time - it does not need lovers. It depends heavily upon its population being angry and discontented; the renunciation of violence would endanger our society as we now know it.
- Philip Slater, The Pursuit of Loneliness
"Watanabe assumed the "Shadow-cut" posture of Zinkage-ryu with his bokken close to the right side of his face. Kage stood with his feet slightly apart, his bokken pointing to the floor and his eyes half-closed. Master Onizuka was disturbed. He had never seen a posture used like the one used by Kage."
- Concerning Kage Genshiro, 1602, utilizing Mumei Hushin-ryu, "Heart-of-Wind" style, a rare offshoot of O-Ma-Ryu, mentioned to this day only in Onizuka Budaya's One Hundred Items on Kendo; from an article in "Black Belt" magazine, March 1971, P.4
Such a fine first dream…
But they laughed
At me…they said
I had made it up
- Takuchi
I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately; to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.
- Henry David Thoreau, Walden
I celebrate myself, and sing myself,
And what I assume you shall assume,
For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.
I loaf and invite my soul,
I lean and loaf at my ease observing a spear of summer grass....
- Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass, "Song Of Myself"
When I die, I want to die like my grandfather who died peacefully in his sleep, not screaming like all the passengers in his car
- Will Rogers
Find that Guru
who makes all others useless.
Enjoy that pleasure
which dulls all others.
Acquire that knowledge
which darkens all others.
Die in such a way
that you do not see death again.
I have reversed the Ganges
and fused it with the Jamuna:
at the confluence of my heart.
I bathe where there is no water.
My eyes see everyone as equal -
that is my way.
When you meditate upon truth
why think of other things?
Water, fire,
air, earth, sky:
Like all these,
I live close to Hari.
Kabir, say,
"I remember Niranjan.
I have gone to that house
from which I will not come out."
- Kabir, The Songs of Kabir from the Adi Granth, Raga Gauri, Verse 18, Nirmal Dass, 1991
Only the curious have, if they live, a tale worth telling at all
- Alastair Reid
If a pickpocket meets a saint, he only sees his pockets.
- Hari Dass Baba
I know that you know that I love you,
what I want you to know is that I know you love me.
- Werner Erhard
We have just enough religion to make us hate,
but not enough to make us love one another.
- Jonathan Swift
One should always be drunk. Drunk with what? With wine, with poetry, or with virtue, as you please. But get drunk.
-Charles Baudelaire, Paris Spleen, "Get Drunk"
One wonders, indeed, what makes the notion of linguistic relativity so fascinating even to the nonspecialist. Perhaps it is the suggestion that all one's life one has been tricked, all unaware, by the structure of language into a certain way of perceiving reality, with the implication that awareness of this reality will enable one to see the world with fresh insight.
- B.L.Whorf, Language, Thought, and Reality, P.27
Words and speech are not the same thing. As we shall see, patterns of sentence structure that guide words are more important than the words.
- B.L.Whorf, Language, Thought, and Reality, P.252
Actually, thinking is most mysterious, and by far the greatest light upon it that we have thrown by the study of language. This study shows that the forms of a person's thoughts are controlled by inexorable laws of pattern of which he is unconscious. The patterns are the unperceived intricate systematizations of his own language - shown readily enough by a candid comparison and contrast with other languages, especially those of a different linguistic family. His thinking itself is in a language - in English, in Sanskrit, in Chinese. And every language is a vast pattern-system, different from others, in which are culturally ordained the forms and categories by which the personality not only communicates, but also analyzes nature, notices or neglects types of relationship and phenomena, channels his reasoning, and builds the house of his consciousness.
- B.L.Whorf, Language, Thought, and Reality, "Language, Thought, and Reality", P. 252
The Matrix is a system, Neo. That system is our enemy. But when you’re inside, you look around, what do you see? Businessmen, teachers, lawyers, carpenters. The very minds of the people we are trying to save. But until we do, these people are still a part of that system and that makes them our enemy. You have to understand, most of these people are not ready to be unplugged. And many of them are so inured, so hopelessly dependent on the system, that they will fight to protect it.
- Morpheus, “The Matrix”
To explain this, consider music: the family dog listening with us to Bach on the phonograph hears the sounds, the successive pulses of noise through serial time; but he cannot perceive the fugue. He is perceiving sounds diachronically, and knows only their vanishing; when the music is gone, it is gone; we, however, are perceiving the sounds synchronically as music; when the music is finished, it is gathered up into resolved form; it is consummated in pure consciousness; the very vanishing of the music is the very condition that gives us aesthetic joy in the accumulation of the forms.
- William Irwin Thompson, Passages About Earth, 1973, "Of Physics and Tantra Yoga"
We cannot go to church to find radiant Godhead, to the army to find glory in war, or to the universities to find aesthetic transfiguration or wisdom. Now only mysticism seems well-suited to the post-institutional anarchism of the technetronic culture, on the one hand, and the infinite posthuman universe on the other.
- William Irwin Thompson, Passage About Earth, 1973, "Planetary Mythologies,
P. 140-141
Mysticism seems impractical in technological culture because it is the dialectical negation of that culture and the affirmation of the next culture. Gardening was impractical in hunting culture when busy men of affairs had to be on the move in search of game, and that is why it remained for women to transform food-gathering into agriculture. Stone age men were too busy with their elaborate tools to create the dazzlingly more simple and advanced civilization based upon agriculture. Now, once again, man is too busy with his elaborate tools to create the even more dazzlingly simple and advanced planetization.
- William Irwin Thompson, Passage About Earth, 1973, "Planetary Mythologies,
P. 140-141
Truth or reality is avoided when it is painful. We can revise our maps only when we have the discipline to overcome that pain. To have such discipline, we must be totally dedicated to the truth. That is to say that we must always hold truth, as best we can determine it, to be more important, more vital to our self-interest, than our comfort. Conversely, we must always consider our personal discomfort relatively unimportant and, indeed, even welcome it in the service of the search for truth. Mental health is an ongoing process of dedication to reality at all costs.
- M. Scott Peck, The Road Less Traveled
A clear mind, therefor, can give a distinct life, a distinct form to the thought; a mind which is confused produces indistinct thoughts.
- Hazrat Inayat Khan, Cosmic Language, 1972, Tucson, Omen Press
I regard consciousness as fundamental. I regard matter as derivative from consciousness. We cannot get behind consciousness. Everything that we talk about, everything that we regard as existing, postulates consciousness.
- Max Planck, Interview in 'The Observer' (25 January 1931), p.17, column 3
Q: So the existential level, in a sense, is the clearing house for higher or spiritual development, even if, at that level, it looks like spirit doesn't exist at all.
A: Actually, the rational and existential levels combine to strip us of childish and adolescent approaches to spirit. They clean out the magical and mythical notions of spirit as a cosmic parent who doles out reward for belief or eternal damnation for non-belief. You can be at the existential level and still believe in spirit. You might , for example, believe in mystical Christianity, which accurately reflects the subtle and causal dimensions. But you still are going to have to strip away any remaining magical and mythical beliefs about spirit before you actually progress into a more
mature realization of spirit. And this is hard. You get in a really life-threatening situation and you will probably find yourself bargaining with God. That's magic and mythic plea-bargaining. But that God no longer exists. You are praying to thin air.
You have to realize that if you are to prepare for a mature and authentic relationship with spirit. Nobody will save you but you. You alone have to engage your own contemplative development. There are all sorts of help available, and all sorts of good agency to quicken this development, but nobody can do it for you. And if you do not engage this development, and on your deathbed you confess and scream for help to God, nothing is going to happen. Spiritual development is not a matter of mere belief. It is a matter of actual, prolonged, difficult growth, and merely professing belief is meaningless and without impact. It's like smoking for twenty years, then saying, "Sorry, I quit." That will not impress cancer. Reality, in other words, is not interested in your beliefs; it's interested in your actions, what you actually do, your actual Karma. And this is why infantile and childish views of God, once appropriate, are so detrimental for mature spirituality.
- Ken Wilber, The Quest magazine, Spring 1989, "Paradigm Wars", P.16
All bibles or sacred codes have been the causes of the following errors:
1. That man has two real existing principles: a body & a soul.
2. That energy, called evil. is alone from the body: & that reason, called good, is alone from the soul.
3. That God will torment man in eternity for following his energies.
But the following contraries to these are true:
1. Man has no body distinct from his soul: for that called body is a portion of soul discerned by the five senses, the chief inlets of soul in this age.
2. Energy is the only life, and is from the body; and reason is the bound or outward circumference of energy.
3. Energy is eternal delight.
- William Blake
Whoever wants music instead of noise,
joy instead of pleasure,
soul instead of gold,
creative work instead of business,
passion instead of foolery,
finds no home in this trivial world of ours.
- Herman Hesse
Many people who are going through the early stages of the awakening process are no longer certain what their outer purpose is. What drives the world no longer drives them. Seeing the madness of our civilization so clearly, they may feel somewhat alienated from the culture around them. Some feel that they inhabit a no-man’s land between two worlds.
- Eckhart Tolle
The tremendous leisure industry that has arisen in the last few generations has been designed to help fill free time with enjoyable experiences. Nevertheless, instead of using our physical and mental resources to experience flow, most of us spend many hours each week watching celebrated athletes playing in enormous stadiums. Instead of making music, we listen to platinum records cut by millionaire musicians. Instead of making art, we go to admire paintings that brought in the highest bids at the latest auction. We do not run risks acting on our beliefs, but occupy hours each day watching actors who pretend to have adventures, engaged in mock-meaningful action.
This vicarious participation is able to mask, at least temporarily, the underlying emptiness of wasted time. But it is a very pale substitute for attention invested in real challenges.
- Mihaly Csikszentmihaly, Flow - The Psychology of Optimal Experience
31. Words turn back with the mind without reaching It as It is without qualities, without actions and without attributes.
34. Illumining the modifications which have for their objects waking, dream, and deep sleep, the all-pervading Self is the same in all beings and is the witness of them all.
1. Impossible* to be negated, the Self is left over on the authority of the Sruti, ‘Not this, not this.’
*For the Self is witness to the process of negation itself.
Intellect = the object portion in the consciousness ’I’ .
While using the word ‘I’ people mix up Pure Consciousness and the intellect.
The intellect is the object portion of the consciousness ‘I’, pure consciousness is the non-object portion.
- Sri Sankaracharya, Upadesa Sahasri, (A Thousand Teachings), Chapter xv., “Impossibility of One Being Another”, P.151-153,
translated by Swami Jagadananda
The essence of crazy wisdom is that you have no strategized programs or ideals any more at all. You are just open.
- Chogyam Trungpa, Crazy Wisdom, Crazy Wisdom Seminar II, P.46
The genuine heart of sadness comes from feeling that your nonexistant heart is full. You would like to spill your heart’s blood, give your heart to others. For the warrior, this experience of sad and tender heart is what gives birth to fearlessness.…Real fearlessness is the product of tenderness. It comes from letting the world tickle your heart, your raw and beautiful heart. You are willing to open up, without resistance or shyness, and face the world. You are willing to share your heart with others.
- Chogyam Trungpa, Shamballa, P.46
Real fearlessness is the product of tenderness. It comes from letting the world tickle your heart, your raw and beautiful heart. You are willing to open up, without resistance or shyness, and face the world. You are willing to share your heart with others.
- Chogyam Trungpa
The approach of crazy wisdom here is to give up hope. The is no hope of understanding anything at all. There is no hope of finding out who did what or what did what or how anything worked. Give up your ambition to put the jigsaw puzzle together. Give it up altogether, absolutely; throw it up in the air, put it in the fireplace. Unless we give up this hope, this precious hope, there is no way out at all.
It is a completely hopeless situation, absolutely hopeless. We do not understand - and we have no possibility of understanding - anything at all. It is hopeless to look for something to understand, for something to discover, because there is no discovery at the end at all, unless we manufacture one.
- Chogyam Trungpa, Crazy Wisdom, Crazy Wisdom Seminar II, P.84
The Flower of the Fruit
In the silence of flowers is found a sacred love
That changes the future.
Being is, for its own road, the end
If some grace grants it
Fragrance and quiet.
Sweet blood explodes upon the tongue
When you break
The body of fruit:
This is the word, vivid and absolute
With which each tree tries out its virtue.
Man is mystic tree and barely grasps
Space and Time if he can turn himself
Into soul's flower and veins' fruit;
For, from his double essence, unconfused
The bees of death draw honey
And the roses of life their fragrance.
- Alfonso Cortes
(Translated by Thomas Merton, Emblems of a Season of Fury, P. 144,
New Directions, 1961)
I realized that I could lose myself in a character. I could live in a character. It was a choice. And when I finished with that, I took a month to remember who I was. ‘What do I believe? What are my politics? What do I like and dislike?’ It took me a while, and I was depressed going back into my concerns and my politics. But there was a shift that had already happened. And the shift was, ‘Wait a second. If I can put Jim Carrey aside for four months, who is Jim Carrey? Who the hell is that?’ ... I know now he does not really exist. He’s ideas. ... Jim Carrey was an idea my parents gave me. Irish-Scottish-French was an idea I was given. Canadian was an idea that I was given. I had a hockey team and a religion and all of these things that cobble together into this kind of Frankenstein monster, this representation. It’s like an avatar. These are all the things I am. You are not an actor, or a lawyer. No one is a lawyer. There are lawyers, law is practiced, but no one is a lawyer. There is no one, in fact, there.
- Jim Carrey
Black Stone On Top Of A White Stone
I shall die in Paris, in a rainstorm,
On a day I already remember.
I shall die in Paris - it does not bother me -
Doubtless on a Thursday, like today, in autumn.
It shall be a Thursday, because today, Thursday
As I put down these lines, I have set my shoulders
To the evil. Never like today have I turned
And headed my whole journey to the ways where I am alone.
Cesar Vallejo is dead. They struck him,
All of them, though he did nothing to them.
They hit him hard with a stick and hard also
With the end of a rope. Witnesses are: the Thursdays,
The shoulder bones, the loneliness, the rain and the roads....
- Cesar Vallejo
(Translated by Thomas Merton, Emblems of a Season of Fury, P. 137,
New Directions, 1961)
Black Stone on a White Stone
I will die in Paris with a downpour,
a day which I can already remember.
I will die in Paris—and I don't budge—
maybe a Thursday, like today, in autumn.
Thursday it will be, because today, Thursday,
as I prose these lines, I have forced on
my humeri and, never like today, have I turned,
with all my journey, to see myself alone.
Cesar Vallejo has died, they beat him,
all of them, without him doing anything to them;
they gave it to him hard with a stick and hard
likewise with a rope; witnesses are
the Thursdays and the humerus bones,
the loneliness, the rain, the roads...
- Cesar Vallejo (Translated by Clayton Eshleman)
The Eye Is A Dog Howling In The Distance
The jaguar king sent to my eyes
Two raging dogs.
He knew the poet
Was a hunter of magic birds,
Tracker of secret spoors,
Wandering archer.
But I said, when youth was over, to the perverse magician:
- "Chain these dogs of mine. I am
Weary. Let me rest under the trees."
- "Leave them," he said, "they would bite
The ankles of the goddess who forsakes you.
My sister the stained moon, is glad
When a tired heart hastens onward."
- Pablo Antonio Cuadra
(Translated by Thomas Merton, Emblems of a Season of Fury, P. 101,
New Directions, 1961)
42. The Self is not an object (of knowledge). There is no change or manyness in It. It is, therefore, capable of neither being accepted or rejected (by Itself or) by anyone else.
1 - For no one else exists except the Self.
Upadesa Sahasri of Sri Sankaracharya, (A Thousand Teachings), translated by Swami Jagadananda, Sri Ramakrishna Math, 1973.
Chapter XVII, Right Knowledge, Verse 41, P. 192
As a man who has devoted his whole life to the most clearheaded science, to the study of matter, I can tell you as a result of my research about the atoms this much: There is no matter as such! All matter originates and exists only by virtue of a force which brings the particles of an atom to vibration and holds this most minute solar system of the atom together. . . . We must assume behind this force the existence of a conscious and intelligent Mind. This Mind (Spirit) is the matrix of all matter.
- Max Planck, Das Wesen der Materie [The Nature of Matter], a 1944 speech in
Florence, Italy
43. Why should a man who knows that he is the Self comprising the interior2 and exterior and that he is beyond birth, decay, death and old age have even the least fear.
2 - The interior and the exterior with reference to the body. The Self is the substratum of both the interior and exterior together with the body.
Upadesa Sahasri of Sri Sankaracharya, (A Thousand Teachings), translated by Swami Jagadananda, Sri Ramakrishna Math, 1973.
Chapter XVII, Right Knowledge, Verse 41, P. 192
31. Words turn back with the mind without reaching It as It is without qualities, without actions and without attributes.
Upadesa Sahasri of Sri Sankaracharya, (A Thousand Teachings), translated by Swami Jagadananda, Sri Ramakrishna Math, 1973.
Chapter XV, Impossibility of One Being Another, Verse 31, P. 151
48. The elements with and without forms and the seat of desires, superimposed through delusion by ignorant people on the Self, are thrown out of It which contains Consciousness only on the authority of the Vedic evidence, 'Not this, not this'. The self alone is then left over. [In this verse the whole of the gross and the subtle universes is negated from the Self.]
Upadesa Sahasri of Sri Sankaracharya, (A Thousand Teachings), translated by Swami Jagadananda, Sri Ramakrishna Math, 1973.
Chapter XIV, Dream and Memory, Verse 48, P. 142
35. Just as the reflection and the heat of the sun, found in water, do not belong to water, the Consciousness though perceived in the intellect, is not its quality; for It is of a nature opposite to that of the intellect.
Upadesa Sahasri of Sri Sankaracharya, (A Thousand Teachings), translated by Swami Jagadananda, Sri Ramakrishna Math, 1973.
Chapter XVII, Right Knowledge, Verse 35, P. 190
41. Just as a second lamp is not necessary in order to illumine the first one a second consciousness is not necessary to make known Pure Consciousness which is of the nature of the Self.
Upadesa Sahasri of Sri Sankaracharya, (A Thousand Teachings), translated by Swami Jagadananda, Sri Ramakrishna Math, 1973.
Chapter XVII, Right Knowledge, Verse 41, P. 191
1. Impossible 1 to be negated, the Self is left over on the authority of the Sruti, 'Not this, not this'. So the Self becomes clearly known on the reflection, 'I am not this, I am not this.' 2
1 - For the Self is the witness of the process of negation itself.
2 - i.e., I am not the body, the senses, the mind, the intellect and the vital force. But I am the witness of them all.
Upadesa Sahasri of Sri Sankaracharya, (A Thousand Teachings), translated by Swami Jagadananda, Sri Ramakrishna Math, 1973.
Chapter XIV, Negation, Verse 48, P. 83
' "Gathering in", great king, is the characteristic quality of attention, and "cutting off" is the characteristic quality of wisdom.'
The Heart of Buddhist Meditation, Nyanaponika Thera, Rider and Company, 1962, Flowers of Deliverance, #64, P. 189
There is no mental process concerned with knowing and understanding, that is not without mindfulness.
The Heart of Buddhist Meditation, Nyanaponika Thera, Rider and Company, 1962, Flowers of Deliverance, #74, P. 194
Bodhisattvas claim to be the bravest and most powerful warriors of all. But the bodhisattva's trying to live up to his virtue becomes a hang-up, a problem. Still searching for warriorhood rather than being a warrior becomes a problem. As bodhisattvas, when we sit down to meditate, we're trying to become good meditators rather than being in the meditation.
There is no pronounced good intention involved in tantra. Nor for that matter a bad intention either, if you're concerned about that.
The Lion's Roar, Chogyam Trungpa, Nine Yanas Seminar, "Overcoming Moralism", P. 127
We Came Whirling
we came whirling
out of nothingness
scattering stars
like dust
the stars made a circle
and in the middle
we dance
the wheel of heaven
circles God
like a mill
if you grab a spoke
it will tear your hand off
turning and turning
it sunders
all attachment
were that wheel not in love
it would cry
'enough! how long this turning?'
every atom
turns bewildered
beggars circle tables
dogs circle carrion
the lover circles
his own heart
ashamed,
I circle shame
a ruined water wheel
whichever way I turn
is the river
if that rusty old sky
creaks to a stop
still, still I turn
and it is only God
circling Himself
- Rumi (translated by Daniel Liebert)
Tending Two Shops
Don't run around this world
looking for a hole to hide in.
There are wild beasts in every cave!
If you live with mice,
the claws will find you.
The only real rest comes
when you're alone with God.
Live in the nowhere that you came from,
even though you have an address here.
That's why you see things in two ways.
Sometimes you look at a person
and see a cynical snake.
Someone else sees a joyful lover,
and you're both right!
Everyone is half and half.
like the black and white ox.
Joseph looked ugly to his brothers,
and most handsome to his father.
You have eyes that see from that nowhere,
and eyes that judge distances,
how high and how low.
You own two shops,
and you run back and forth.
Try to close the one that's a fearful trap,
getting always smaller. Checkmate,
this way. Checkmate that.
Keep open the shop
where you're not selling fishhooks anymore.
You are the free-swimming fish.
- Rumi (translated by Coleman Barks)
Quatrains
***
The minute I heard my first love story
I started looking for you, not knowing
how blind that was.
Lovers don't finally meet somewhere.
They're in each other all along.
***
I have lived on the lip
of insanity, wanting to know reasons,
knocking on a door. It opens.
I've been knocking from the inside!
- Rumi (translated by Coleman Barks)
A Community Of The Spirit
There is a community of the spirit.
Join it, and feel the delight
of walking in the noisy street,
and being the noise.
Drink all your passion,
and be a disgrace.
Close both eyes
to see with the other eye.
Quit acting like a wolf, and feel
the shepherd's love filling you.
At night, your beloved wanders.
Don't accept consolations.
Close your mouth against food.
Taste the lover's mouth in yours.
You moan, 'She left me.' 'He left me.'
Twenty more will come.
Be empty of worrying.
Think of who created thought!
Why do you stay in prison
when the door is so wide open?
Move outside the tangle of fear-thinking.
Live in silence.
Flow down and down in always
widening rings of being.
- Rumi (translated by Coleman Barks)
Tonglen - Sending and taking
Through slogan practice, we begin to realize that our habitual tendency, even in our smallest gestures, is one of self-centeredness.
The practice of tonglen is a direct reversal of such a habit pattern and is based on the practice of putting others before self.
- Training The Mind and Cultivating Loving-Kindness, Chogyam Trungpa, Shambhala
Publications, 1993, Editor's Foreward, xvii
Tonglen is a particularly powerful way of dealing with pain and loss.
The formal practice of tonglen, like mindfulness-awareness practice, works with the medium of the breath.
- Training The Mind and Cultivating Loving-Kindness, Chogyam Trungpa, Shambhala
Publications, 1993, Editor's Foreward, xviii
Whatever arises in your experience, you simply breathe in what is not desirable and breathe out what is desirable.
The essential quality of this practice is one of opening your heart - wholeheartedly taking in and wholeheartedly letting go. In tonglen nothing is rejected: whatever arises is further fuel for the practice.
- Training The Mind and Cultivating Loving-Kindness, Chogyam Trungpa, Shambhala
Publications, 1993, Editor's Foreward, xix
The practice of tonglen is quite straightforward; it is an actual sitting meditation practice. You give away your happiness, your pleasure, anything that feels good. All of that goes out with the outbreath. As you breathe in, you breathe in any resentments and problems, anything that feels bad. The whole point is to remove territoriality altogether.
- Training The Mind and Cultivating Loving-Kindness, Chogyam Trungpa, Shambhala
Publications, 1993, The Main Practice, 46-47
We simply breathe out any old good and breathe in any old bad.
It seems to be completely impractical.
The more negativity we take in with a sense of openness and compassion, the more goodness there is to breathe out on the other side. So there is nothing to lose. It is all one process.
It doesn't matter if it works or not: if it works, you breathe that out; if it does not work, you breathe that in. So you do not possess anything. That is the point.
- Training The Mind and Cultivating Loving-Kindness, Chogyam Trungpa, Shambhala
Publications, 1993, The Main Practice, 47-4
So in ordinary samsaric life, you don't send and receive at all. You try as much as possible to guard those pleasant little situations you have created for yourself....You try to hold on to as much as you can, and anything outside of your territory is regarded as altogether problematic....You are constantly trying to ward off as much as you can.
The basic idea of practicing sending and taking is almost a rehearsal, a discipline of passionlessness, a way of overcoming territory.
- Training The Mind and Cultivating Loving-Kindness, Chogyam Trungpa, Shambhala
Publications, 1993, The Main Practice, 48-49
The problem with most people is that they are always trying to give out the bad and take in the good......But now we are on the mahayana path and the logic is reversed. That is fantastic, extraordinary! We are getting the inner "scoop", so to speak, on Buddha's mind, directly and at its best. Please think of that.
- Training The Mind and Cultivating Loving-Kindness, Chogyam Trungpa, Shambhala
Publications, 1993, The Main Practice, 55-56
You don't practice tonglen and then wait for the effect. You just do it and then drop it. You don't look for results.
Tonglen practice is not a very subtle thing. It is not philosophical, it is not even psychological. It is a very, very simple-minded approach. The practice is very primitive, in fact, the most primitive of all Buddhist practices.
- Training The Mind and Cultivating Loving-Kindness, Chogyam Trungpa, Shambhala
Publications, 1993, The Main Practice, 58
If you don’t do your own thinking, someone else will do it for you.
- Edward de Bono
Nothing is, but thinking makes it so.
- William Shakespeare
Man is not what he thinks he is, but what he thinks, he is.
- Elbert Hubbard
We are what we think, having become what we thought
- Siddhartha Buddha
As a man imagines himself to be, so shall he be, and he is that which he imagines.
- Paracelsus
The significant problems we face today cannot be solved by the same level of thinking that created them.
- Albert Einstein
Wisdom cannot be imparted.
Wisdom that a wise man attempts to impart always sounds like foolishness to someone else...
Knowledge can be communicated, but not wisdom.
One can find it, live it, do wonders through it, but one cannot communicate and teach it.
- Herman Hesse
There’s no emptiness in the life of a warrior. Everything is filled to the brim. Everything is filled to the brim, and everything is equal.
- Carlos Castaneda, A Separate Reality
We hardly ever realize that we can cut anything out of our lives, anytime, in the blink of an eye.
- Carlos Castaneda, Journey To Ixtlan
The hardest thing in the world is to assume the mood of a warrior. It is of no use to be sad and complain and feel justified in doing so, believing that someone is always doing something to us. Nobody is doing anything to anybody, much less to a warrior.
- Carlos Castaneda, Journey To Ixtlan
Acts have power. Especially when the warrior knows that those acts are his last battle. There is a strange consuming happiness in acting with the full knowledge that whatever he is doing may very well be his last act on earth.
- Carlos Castaneda, Journey To Ixtlan
A warrior acts as if he knows what he is doing, when in effect he knows nothing. The trick is in what one emphasizes. We either make ourselves miserable, or we make ourselves strong. The amount of work is the same.
- Carlos Castaneda, Journey To Ixtlan
When a warrior learns to stop the internal dialogue, everything becomes possible; the most far-fetched schemes become attainable.
- Carlos Castaneda, Tales of Power
The flaw with words is that they always make us feel enlightened, but when we turn around to face the world they always fail us and we end up facing the world as we always have, without enlightenment. For this reason, a warrior seeks to act rather than to talk, and to this effect, he gets a new description of the world – a new description where talking is not that important, and where new acts have new reflections.
- Carlos Castaneda, Tales of Power
Only as a warrior can one withstand the path of knowledge. A warrior cannot complain or regret anything. His life is an endless challenge, and challenges cannot possibly be good or bad. Challenges are simply challenges
- Carlos Castaneda, Tales of Power
When faced with odds that cannot be dealt with, warriors retreat for a moment. They occupy their time with something else. Anything would do. That is the fifth principle of the art of stalking.
- Carlos Castaneda, The Eagle’s Gift
In order to apply the seventh principle of the art of stalking, one has to apply the other six: a stalker never pushes himself to the front. He is always looking on from behind the scenes.
- Carlos Castaneda, The Eagle’s Gift
Applying these principles brings about three results. The first is that stalkers learn never to take themselves seriously; they learn to laugh at themselves. If they are not afraid of being a fool, they can fool anyone. The second is that stalkers learn to have endless patience. Stalkers are never in a hurry; they never fret. And the third is that stalkers have an endless capacity to improvise.
- Carlos Castaneda, The Eagle’s Gift
Self-importance is man’s greatest enemy. What weakens him is feeling offended by the deeds and misdeeds of his fellow men. Self-importance requires that one spend most of one’s life offended by something or someone.
- Carlos Castaneda, The Fire From Within
One of the greatest forces in the lives of warriors is fear, because it spurs them to learn.
- Carlos Castaneda, The Fire From Within
The mystery of awareness is darkness. Human beings reek of that mystery, of things which are inexplicable. To regard ourselves in any other terms is madness. So a warrior doesn’t demean the mystery of man by trying to rationalize it.
- Carlos Castaneda, The Fire From Within
For a warrior, the spirit is an abstract only because he knows it without words or even thoughts. It’s an abstract because he can’t conceive what the spirit is. Yet, without the slightest chance or desire to understand it, a warrior handles the spirit. He recognizes it, beckons it, entices it, becomes familiar with it, and expresses it with his acts.
- Carlos Castaneda, The Power of Silence
For a warrior, the spirit is an abstract only because he knows it without words or even thoughts. It’s an abstract because he can’t conceive what the spirit is. Yet, without the slightest chance or desire to understand it, a warrior handles the spirit. He recognizes it, beckons it, entices it, becomes familiar with it, and expresses it with his acts.
- Carlos Castaneda, The Power of Silence
For a warrior, the spirit is an abstract only because he knows it without words or even thoughts. It’s an abstract because he can’t conceive what the spirit is. Yet, without the slightest chance or desire to understand it, a warrior handles the spirit. He recognizes it, beckons it, entices it, becomes familiar with it, and expresses it with his acts.
- Carlos Castaneda, The Power of Silence
The thrust of the warrior’s way is to dethrone self-importance. And everything warriors do is directed toward accomplishing this goal.
- Carlos Castaneda, The Power of Silence
The art of stalking is learning all the quirks of your disguise, and learning them so well that no one will know you are disguised. For that you need to be ruthless, cunning, patient and sweet. Ruthlessness should not be harshness, cunning should not be cruelty, patience should not be negligence, and sweetness should not be foolishness.
- Carlos Castaneda, The Power of Silence
Shamans have unmasked self-importance and found that it is self-pity masquerading as something else.
- Carlos Castaneda, The Power of Silence
Only if one loves this earth with unbending passion can one release one’s sadness. A warrior is always joyful because his love is unalterable and his beloved, the earth, embraces him and bestows upon him inconceivable gifts. The sadness belongs only to those who hate the very thing that gives shelter to their beings. Only the love for this splenderous being can give freedom to a warrior’s spirit; and freedom is joy, efficiency, and abandon in the face of any odds. That is the last lesson. It is always left for the very last moment, for the moment of ultimate solitude when a man faces his death and his aloneness. Only then does it make sense.
We are alone, but to die alone is not to die in loneliness.
- Carlos Castenada
One who is not alone has not discovered his identity.
- Thomas Merton
If a person does not feel alone and sad, he cannot be a warrior at all.
- Chogyam Trungpa, Shamballa
It's easier to put on a pair of shoes than to wrap the earth in leather.
- Chogyam Trungpa
Hannah Mountain
I may not exist
Anymore it is so quiet only
Mice rattling the walls and outside
The mountain shifting
Its weight.
At night
After rain the stars chant
Pure cold light like fish
Caught in a net of darkness mountain
Ridges fall and rise around me
Like blood in the deep tunnels of my body.
I want to be a mountain now feel
My hide crack in spring thaws
Stand between dark carcasses of clouds
And lean upward to hawks, floating
In rivers of darkness and light
- Steven Eckerstrom
In my first thirty years of life
I roamed hundreds and thousands of miles.
Walked by rivers through deep green grass
Entered cities of boiling red dust.
Tried drugs, but couldn’t make immortal;
Read books and wrote poems on history.
Today I’m back at cold mountain:
I’ll sleep by the creek and purify my ears
- Han-Shan (translated in Gary Snyder’s poem)
What is to give light must endure burning.
- Viktor Frankl
Life is like stepping onto a boat which is about to go out to sea and sink..
- Suzuki Roshi
All things have mind as their forerunner. If mind is known, all things will be known.
- Arya-Ratnamegha Sutra
Wherever we go in the mountains we find more than we seek.
- John Muir
The next earthquake comes when the last one is forgotten.
- Peruvian Saying
Nothing is, but thinking makes it so.
- William Shakespeare
For all things there is a polish that taketh away rust,
The polish of the heart is the remembrance of God.
- Mohammed
God, whose love and joy are present everywhere,
can’t come to visit you unless you aren’t there.
- Angelus Silesius (1624-1677)
We begin to discover that really all that is available to us is an alteration in our response to our process, not an alteration in the process itself.
- Stewart Emery
Even a good thing is not as good as nothing.
- Zen Koan
Events in my life caused me to start questioning my goals and the correctness of everything I had learned. In matters of religion, medicine, biology, physics, and other fields, I came to discover that reality differed seriously from what I had been taught. As a result of this questioning process, I was startled to realize how much of my "knowledge" was indeed questionable.
- T.S.Eliot
I know that you know that I love you, what I want you to know is that I know that you love me.
- Werner Erhard, founder of EST training
Everyone carries a shadow, and the less it is embodied in the individual’s conscious life, the blacker and denser it is. At all counts, it forms an unconscious snag, thwarting our most well-meant intentions.
- C. G. Jung
Between living and dreaming there is a third thing.
Guess it.
- Antonio Machado
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I – I took the one less traveled by, and that has made all the difference.
- Robert Frost
There is a general misconception about Buddhism in relation to this point. People wonder who, if there’s no ego, is attaining enlightenment, who is performing all one’s actions? I you have no ego, how can you eat, how can you sleep? In that case ego is misunderstood to be the physical body, rather than what it is – a paranoid insurance policy, the fortified nest of ego.
Your being can continue without your being defensive about yourself. In fact you become more invincible if you are not defending yourself.
- Chogyam Trungpa
Sanity lies somewhere between the inhibitions of conventional morality and the looseness of extreme impulse, but the area in between is very fuzzy. The Bodhisattva delights in the play between hesitation and extreme impulsiveness – it is beautiful to look at – so delight in itself is the approach to sanity.
Delight is to open our eyes to the totality of the situation rather than side with this or that point of view.
- Chogyam Trungpa
I am not bound to win,
But I am bound to be true,
I am not bound to succeed,
But I am bound to live up to
What light I have.
I must stand with anybody
That stands right;
Stand with him while he is right,
And part with him when
He goes wrong.
- Abraham Lincoln
That’s the flaw with words. They always force us to feel enlightened, but when we turn around to face the world they always fail us and we end up facing the world as we always have, without enlightenment. For this reason, a sorcerer seeks to act rather than to talk and to this effect he gets a new description of the world – a new description where talking is not that important, and where new acts have new reflections.
- Carlos Castenada
Love is like everything else.
If you don’t have it, you can’t get it.
- Walt Disney
Quite possibly there is no such thing as spiritual practice except stepping outside of self-deception, stopping our struggle to get hold of spiritual states. Just give that up. Other than that there is no spirituality.
- Chogyam Trungpa
The Zen teacher hates the horse but the horse carries him.
At the river both have to get into a boat.
For crossing mountains it’s best just to carry an old stick.
- Chogyam Trungpa
Curriculum Vitae
I used to dream sex.
Now I dream dope.
Soon I’ll dream light.
Thank God there’s still hope.
- Abdul Mati Klarwein
As I would not be a slave, so I would not be a master.
- Abraham Lincoln
Eliminate all other factors, and the one which remains must be the truth.
- Sherlock Holmes, “The Science of Deduction” in The Sign of Four
Few men have imagination enough for reality.
- Goethe
There are no atheists on a turbulent airplane.
- Erica Jong
You are the people.
You are this season’s people.
There are no other people this season.
If you blow it, it’s blown.
- Stephen Gaskin, of “The Farm”
A diablero is a diablero, and a warrior is a warrior. Or a man can be both. There are enough people who are both. But a man who only traverses the paths of life is everything. Today I am neither a warrior or a diablero. For me there is only the traveling on the paths that have heart, on any path that may have heart. There I travel, and the only worthwhile challenge for me is to traverse its full length. And there I travel – looking, looking breathlessly.
- Carlos Castenada
The range of what we think and do is limited by what we fail to notice.
And because we fail to notice that we fail to notice, there is little we can do to change
until we notice how failing to notice shapes our thoughts and deeds.
- R.D. Laing
The first principle is that you must not fool yourself – and you are the easiest person to fool.
- Richard Feynman
The influence of the senses have in men overpowered the thought to the degree that the walls of time and space have come to look solid, real and insurmountable…Yet time and space are but inverse measures of the power of the mind. Man is capable of abolishing them both.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
A thousand half-loves must be forsaken to take one whole heart home.
- Rumi
“I will have to remember ‘I am here today to cross the swamp, not to fight all the alligators.’ ”
- Rosamund and Benjamin Zander
Take what is useful
- Friedrich Nietzsche
Most people are on the world, not in it.
- John Muir
It is not a lack of love, but a lack of friendship, that makes unhappy marriages.
- Friedrich Nietzsche
Nothing exists except atoms and empty space; everything else is opinion
- Democritos of Abdera
He worked like hell in the country so he could live in the city, where he worked like hell so that he could live in the country.
- Don Marquis
You are the sun in drag.
You are God hiding from yourself.
Remove all the “mine”—that is the veil.
Why ever worry about
Anything?
Listen to what your friend Hafiz
Knows for certain:
The appearance of this world
Is a Magi’s brilliant trick, though its affairs are
Nothing into nothing.
You are a divine elephant with amnesia
Trying to live in an ant
Hole.
Sweetheart, O sweetheart
You are God in
Drag!
- Hafiz
Always stay in your own movie.
- Ken Kesey
Never be two places at the same time.
- John Grinder
When I Consider How My Light is Spent
When I consider how my light is spent
Ere half my days in this dark world and wide,
And that one talent which is death to hide
Lodg'd with me useless, though my soul more bent
To serve therewith my Maker, and present
My true account, lest he returning chide;
"Doth God exact day-labour, light denied?"
I fondly ask. But Patience to prevent
That murmur, soon replies: "God doth not need
Either man's work or his own gifts; who best
Bear his mild yoke, they serve him best. His state
Is kingly. Thousands at his bidding speed
And post o'er land and ocean without rest:
They also serve who only stand and wait."
- John Milton
Why shouldn’t things be largely absurd, futile, and transitory? They are so, and we are so, and they and we go very well together.
- George Santayana
It’s all a magic shadow show.
- Advaitist saying
May you live all the days of your life.
- Jonathan Swift
Be ahead of all parting, as if it already were.
- Rainer Maria Rilke, The Sonnets to Orpheus II, 13
The course of every intellectual, if he pursues his journey long and unflinchingly enough, ends in the obvious, from which the nonintellectuals have never stirred.
- Aldous Huxley
LSD is a chemical, not a drug. People take drugs to escape their lives; those who take hallucinogens are looking into it.
- Cary Grant, in Rolling Stone magazine
It is out of her that all has come into being.
It is in her spell that everything remains.
And back to her that everything must return.
No one is long permitted to remain what they are
- Bhairava Yamala
In just refusing to retreat from something one gains the strength of two men.
- Shungaku
Win first, fight later.
- Shungaku
I do not know the way to defeat others, but the way to defeat myself
- Yamamoto Tsunetomo, Hagakure
Stamp quickly and pass through a wall of iron.
Yamamoto Tsunetomo, Hagakure
How to live. How to get the most life. As if you were to teach the young hunter to entrap game. How to extract honey from the flower of the world. That is my everyday business.
- Henry David Thoreau
Either peace or happiness, let it enfold you. When I was a young man, I felt these things were dumb, unsophisticated. I had bad blood, a twisted mind, a precarious upbringing. I was hard as granite, I leered at the sun. I trusted no man and especially no woman…. I challenged everything, was continually being evicted, jailed, in and out of fights, in and out of my mind…. Peace and happiness to me were signs of inferiority, tenants of the weak and addled mind. But as I went on ... it gradually began to occur to me that I wasn’t different from the others, I was the same... Everybody was nudging, inching, cheating for some insignificant advantage, the lie was the weapon and the plot was empty…. Cautiously, I allowed myself to feel good at times. I found moments of peace in cheap rooms just staring at the knobs of some dresser or listening to the rain in the dark. The less I needed the better I felt…. I re-formulated. I don’t know when, date, time, all that but the change occurred. Something in me relaxed, smoothed out. I no longer had to prove that I was a man, I didn’t have to prove anything. I began to see things: coffee cups lined up behind a counter in a cafe. Or a dog walking along a sidewalk. Or the way the mouse on my dresser top stopped there with its body, its ears, its nose, it was fixed, a bit of life caught within itself and its eyes looked at me and they were beautiful. Then- it was gone. I began to feel good, I began to feel good in the worst situations and there were plenty of those…. I welcomed shots of peace, tattered shards of happiness…. And finally I discovered real feelings of others, unheralded, like lately, like this morning, as I was leaving, for the track, I saw my wife in bed, just the shape of her head there…. so still, I ached for her life, just being there under the covers. I kissed her in the forehead, got down the stairway, got outside, got into my marvelous car, fixed the seatbelt, backed out the drive. Feeling warm to the fingertips, down to my foot on the gas pedal, I entered the world once more, drove down the hill past the houses full and empty of people, I saw the mailman, honked, he waved back at me.
- Charles Bukowski
Everything we come across is to the point.
- John Cage
Experience is a wonderful thing; it enables you to recognize a mistake every time you repeat it.
- Anonymous
In capitalism, man exploits man. In socialism, it’s exactly the opposite.
- Ben Tucker, Vaudeville comedian
I have recently been examining all the known superstitions of the world and do not find in our particular superstition (Christianity) one redeeming feature. They are all alike, founded on fables and mythology
- Thomas Jefferson
The government of the United States is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion.
- George Washington
Our country, right or wrong. When right, to be kept right; when wrong, to be put right.
- Carl Schurz, 1899
If we are not careful we will end up where we are headed.
- Chinese proverb
Money can buy you a clock but not time.
- Chinese proverb
All gardeners live in beautiful places because they make them so.
- Joseph Joubert
The best way to predict the future is to invent it.
- Alan Kay (DMA)
Snake does not bite man; snake bites what man thinks.
- Vinson Brown
Things that hurt, instruct.
- Benjamin Franklin
Every utterance has at least two meanings.
- Kongo proverb
Death – I say? There is no death, only a change of worlds.
- Chief Seattle
Liberty is always dangerous, but it is the safest thing we have.
- Harry Emerson Fosdick
Posterity! You will never know how much it cost the present generation to preserve your freedom. I hope you will make good use of it.
- John Quincy Adams
Though a good deal is too strange to be believed, nothing is too strange to have happened.
- Thomas Hardy
The essence of warriorship, or the essence of human bravery, is refusing to give up on anyone or anything.
- Chogyam Trungpa, Shamballa, P.33
To laugh often and much, to win the respect of intelligent people and the affection of children; to earn the appreciation of honest critics and endure the betrayal of false friends; to appreciate beauty, to find the best in others, to leave the world a bit better, whether by a child, a garden patch, or a redeemed social condition, to know even one life has breathed easier because you have lived. This to have succeeded.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
A depression is a period when people do without things their parents never had.
- Anon
To be a man is to wonder and to doubt. Especially in today’s world, nothing less is appropriate than certainty. When the New York Times, upon the appointment of Alexander Haig as Secretary of State, reported that he was a “man without self-doubts”, I knew either the paper was wrong or we were in trouble. A triple-heart bypass and no self-doubts? I certainly do not want someone without immense self-doubts to have his finger on the doomsday button.
The more power a man holds, the more he should question his deepest convictions, consider that they may be self-serving rationalizations. Animals act without question or hesitation. Men reflect, deliberate, and suffer the agony involved in any momentous decision.
- Sam Keen, “The Rites of Manhood”, Gentleman’s Quarterly, August, 1986
There are no happy endings because nothing ends.
- Shmendrick the Magician, in the movie “The Last Unicorn”
We don’t see things as they are, we see things as we are.
- Anais Nin
Judge a man by his questions rather than his answers.
- Voltair
The ordinary world becomes magical when the magical world becomes ordinary.
-Jimbo, Jan.25.1980
Turn off your projector to enjoy the real show.
- Jimbo
Mother is the necessity of all invention.
- Jimbo
You can't have all the answers unless you know all the questions.
- Jimbo, July.1.200
What It Is
We think we know
What it is,
We spend our life
Doing what we think
It is.....and
We go to sleep
Still wondering.
Take a moment
In your waking dream
To ask
What is it?
- Jimbo - Aug.19.2004
What?
This !!
- Jimbo - June.29.2020
Many are cold, few are frozen.
- Celeste, my wife
“I was always ashamed to take. So I gave. It was not a virtue. It was a disguise.”
- Anaïs Nin
“I remember standing on a street corner with the black painter Beauford Delaney down in the Village waiting for the light to change, and he pointed down and said, ‘Look.’ I looked and all I saw was the water. And he said, ‘Look again,’ which I did, and I saw oil on the water and the city reflected in the puddle. It was a great revelation to me. I can’t explain it. He taught me how to see, and how to trust what I saw. Painters have often taught writers how to see. And once you’ve had that experience, you see differently.”
- James Baldwin
The Senator from Wisconsin cannot frighten me by exclaiming, My country, right or wrong. In one sense I say so too. My country; and my country is the great American Republic. My country, right or wrong; if right, to be kept right; and if wrong, to be set right.
- Carl Schurz
'if '
If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too;
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or being lied about, don't deal in lies,
Or being hated, don't give way to hating,
And yet don't look too good, nor talk too wise:
If you can dream - and not make dreams your master,
If you can think - and not make thoughts your aim;
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
And treat those two impostors just the same;
If you can bear to hear the truth you've spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,
And stoop and build 'em up with worn-out tools:
If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it all on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
And never breathe a word about your loss;
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you'
Except the Will which says to them: "Hold on!"
If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
Or walk with kings - nor lose the common touch,
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,
If all men count with you, but none too much;
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds' worth of distance run,
Yours is the Earth and everything that's in it
, And - which is more - you'll be a Man, my son!
Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936)
Grief. The pain now is part of the happiness then. That’s the deal.
- C. S. Lewis
For in grief nothing ‘stays put’. One keeps on emerging from a phase, but it always recurs. Round and round. Everything repeats. Am I going in circles, or dare I hope I am on a spiral?
- C. S. Lewis
Her absence is like the sky, spread over everything.
- C. S. Lewis
If I never see you again
I will always carry you
inside
outside
on my fingertips
and at brain edges
and in centers
centers
of what I am of
what remains.
- Charles Bukowski
There is no heart more whole than a broken one.
- The Kotzker Rebbe
The meaning of life is that it ends.
- Franz Kafka
Why are there beings at all, rather than just nothing?
- Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, 1646 to 1716, quoted in A History of God by Karen Armstrong, 1993
From nowhere we came, into nowhere we go. What is life? It is a flash of a firefly in the night. It is the breath of a buffalo in the wintertime. It is the little shadow which runs across the grass and loses itself in the sunset.
- The last words of Crowfoot, 1830 to 1890, a Blackfoot Indian chief]
Life is simple.
Everything happens
for you, not to you.
Everything happens
at exactly the right
moment, neither too
soon nor too late.
You don't have to like it..
it's just easier if you do.
- BYRON KATIE
It’s at these times that I remember something my father taught me: “I am responsible for what I say, but I am not responsible for what you hear.” I am responsible to the tips of my fingers and no further, and how someone reacts to what I say or do is out of my control.
- Don Miguel Ruiz, Jr.
The meaning of your communication is the response you get.
- John Grinder, NLP
When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe.
- John Muir
Learn how to see. Realize that everything connects to everything else.
- Leonardo Da Vinci
A lot of people in our industry haven’t had very diverse experiences. So they don’t have enough dots to connect, and they end up with very linear solutions without a broad perspective on the problem. The broader one’s understanding of the human experience, the better design we will have.
- Steve Jobs
I’ve never heard of anybody who awakens in their comfort zone.