We’re never called on to do what hurts. We just do what hurts out of ignorance and habit. Once we see what we’re doing, we can stop.
What makes human life–which is inseparable from this moment–so precious is its fleeting nature. And not that it doesn’t last but that it never returns again.
The buddha-dharma … is about directly seeing Truth, prior to forming any ideas about it. It is about responding to each particular situation as it comes … , not according to some … program of dos and don’ts.
[T]here is really nothing ‘out there’ to get because, already, within this moment, everything is whole and complete.
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.
[I]mpermanence [is] the very thing that makes [life] vibrant, wonderful, and alive.
Whatever the world dishes up, we take it on–not on our own terms, but on the world’s.
[W]hen you practise right meditation, you ‘cease from practice based on intellectual understanding, pursuing words and following speech, and learn the backward step that turns your light inwardly to illuminate your self.
[A] book is not merely a book, it is the sun as well.
[W]e have endless opportunities to forget the self – in planting a tree for future generations; in creating a poem, a meal, a vessel of clay;
There’s no rule in the end, but only the situation and the inclination of your mind
[H]ow can something cease to exist that has no solid existence in the first place?
The only way we can be free in each moment is to become what each moment is.
How can a hard and fast view of a world that is never hard and fast possibly be accurate?
Truth is not … something to believe or disbelieve. The things we believe are always less than Truth[.]
[A] view of the world is nothing more than a set of beliefs, a way to freeze the world in our mind. … [T]his can never match Reality, … because the world isn’t frozen.
We can only be here. We can’t leave. We are always here.
If your idea of good opposes something else, you can be sure that [it] is not absolute or certain.
Belief is at best an educated, informed conjecture about Reality.
Good and bad aren’t absolutes. They are beliefs, judgements, ideas based on limited knowledge as well as on the inclinations of our minds.
Good times come and go. And bad times do the same.
[E]ven in getting the wonderful things we long for, we tend to live in want of something more[.]
We have all sorts of stories about heaven and hell, about oblivion and nothingness, about ‘coming back,’ and so on. But they are all stories.
Belief may serve as a useful stopgap measure in the absence of actual experience, but once you see … [it] becomes unnecessary.
There’s nothing you can find – … nothing you can even imagine – that doesn’t originate, develop, or exist in relation to other things.
We imagine that things come into existence, endure for a while, and then pass out of existence
To forget the self is to remember that we don’t exist alone, but in relation to other people, to other creatures, to the planet, and to the universe.
[F]ocus not on ourselves as a force in charge of the manipulation of others, but on how our lives interpenetrate those of others – and … all creatures of a dynamic universe.