Ecstatic love is an ocean, and the Milky Way is a flake of foam floating on it. Rumi
The first factor of enlightenment is mindfulness. Mindfulness is the quality of noticing, of being aware of what’s happening in the moment, not allowing the mind to be forgetful. The Buddha said he knew of no other factor which was as powerful as mindfulness for the cultivation of wholesome states of mind and the diminishing of unwholesome ones. There is nothing special we have to do to eliminate unskillful states or to make skillful ones happen, except to be aware of the moment.
Joseph Goldstein
True love and prayer are learned in the hour when love becomes impossible, and the heart has turned to stone.
Thomas Merton
Why do you fret at one man dying and care little for the millions dying every day? Entire universes are imploding and exploding every moment – am I to cry over them? One thing is quite clear to me: all that is, lives, and moves, has its being in consciousness, and I am in and beyond that consciousness. I am in it as the Witness. I am beyond it as Being.
Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj
It is what you are! That is your religion. It is not your religion which makes you what you are.
Confucius
All beings are primarily Buddhas.
Like water and ice,
There is no ice apart form water;
There are no Buddhas apart form beings.
Not knowing how close the Truth is to them,
Beings seek for it afar – what a pity! ….
The reason why beings transmigrate through the six worlds,
Is because they are lost in the darkness of ignorance….
But if you turn your eyes within yourselves,
And testify to the truth of Self-nature—
The Self-nature that is no-nature,
You will have gone beyond the ken of sophistry.
The gate of the oneness of cause and effect is opened;
The path of non-duality and non-trinity runs straight ahead.
Your form being the form of no-form,
Your going and returning takes place nowhere but where you are;
Your thoughts being the thoughts of no-thought, …
At this moment what is there that you lack!
Nirvana presents itself before you,
Where you stand is the Land of Purity.
Your person, the body of Buddha.
Hakuin
At the moment of inner enlightenment there is a going beyond appearance and emptiness.
The changes that appear to occur in the empty world we call real only because of our ignorance.
Do not search for the truth;
only cease to cherish opinions.
Third Zen Patriarch
Verbal definitions of God…are far more dangerous idols than stone statures.
Alan Watts
We are not human beings having a spiritual experience,
We are spiritual beings having a human experience.
DeePak Chopra
…do what you have to. Nobody’s here by accident. Dogen
You cannot stay on the summit forever, you have to come down again… So why bother in the first place? Just this: What is above knows what is below, but what is below does not know what is above.
One climbs, one sees. One descends, one sees no longer but one has seen. There is an art to conducting oneself in the lower regions by the memory of what one saw higher up.
When one can no longer see, one can at least still know.
Rene’ Daumal
The universe is made up of experiences that are designed to burn out your reactivity, which is your attachment, your clinging to pain, to pleasure, to fear, to all of it. And as long as there is a place where you’re vulnerable, the universe will find a way to confront you with it.
Ram Dass
Death reveals a fact about your life. And whatsoever you have been thinking is very concrete and real is very flimsy. It is dream-stuff. It can be taken from you any moment. So don’t be too much concerned with it. Remain a little aloof. This is not your home. At the most it is an overnight stay, a motel. You stay for the night and in the morning you are gone. Once death is accepted joyously, nothing can frustrate you.
Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh
It is not a question of searching and seeking. It is a question of remaining silent and allowing.
Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh
If you can’t change you circumstances, change you attitude.
Zen saying
We must be diligent today. To wait until tomorrow is too late. Death comes unexpectedly,
How can we bargain with it?
The Buddha
The morning glory which blooms for an hour,
Differs not at heart from the giant pine which lives for a thousand years.
The Zenrin
The fish swims in the water but is unmindful of the water;
The bird flies in the wind but know not of the wind.
The Zenrin
Zen…is simply this: An unquenchable thirst for truth and the sure belief that only somewhere in the inner space of self can truth be found.
Zen is a do-it-yourself kit of complete understanding of who you are, who you were, why you are, and what you’ll be.
Ken Noyle
Every ‘thing’ is a ‘think’ – an abstraction from the indivisible flow of life.