Keep up! There is no liberation without labor… and there is no freedom which is free.
Yogi Bhajan
To end suffering you must end the self – they rise and fall together.
Buddha
It is the denial of death that is partially responsible for people living empty, purposeless lives, for when you live as if you’ll live forever, it becomes too easy to postpone the things you know that you must do. You live your life in preparation for tomorrow or in remembrance of yesterday, and meanwhile, each today is lost.
Elisabeth Kubler-Ross
The Bodhisattva Vows:
The many beings are numberless; I vow to save them.
Greed, hatred and ignorance arise endlessly; I vow to abandon them.
Dharma gates are countless, I vow to make to them,
Buddha’s way is unsurpassed, I vow to embody it fully.
Robert Aitken
Life is mind. Life makes mind. Life suffers mind. And life can be transcended by mind. While you live in conditioned form, you make mind, thru associations, repetitions, reinforcements. When you die and the body drops off, mind makes you.
Sri Da Avabhasa
As unnecessary as a well is to a village on the banks of a river, so unnecessary are all scriptures to someone who has seen the truth.
The Ghagavad Gita
The robbed that smiles steals something from the thief. William Shakespeare
Love is essentially self-communicative. Those who do not have it catch it from those who do.
Maher Baba
If you have much, give of your wealth; if you have little, give of your heart.
Arab Proverb
If the universe is seen to be the realm of the spirit, then there is nothing outside the realm of the spirit. If it is seen to be truth, then there is nothing other than truth.
Ma-tsu
Is the abode of God anywhere but in the earth, the sea, and sky, and air, and virtue? Why do we seek the heavenly ones beyond? Whatever you see, and whatever you touch, that is God.
Lucan
There was a door to which I found no key,
There was a veil past which I could not see.
The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam
If there is any problem at all, it is to see that in this instant, you have no ‘I’ to surrender. You are completely free to do this at any moment, and nothing whatsoever is stopping you.
Alan Watts
Zen meditation is a trickily simple affair, for it consists only in watching everything that is happening, including your own thoughts, and your breathing, without comment.
Alan Watts
As a man thinkest, so shall he be. St. Mark
Our life is shaped by our mind; we become what we think. The Buddha
Time is not a line, but a series of now points. Taisen Deshimaru
That best portion of a good man’s life,
his little, nameless, unremembered acts of kindness and of love. William Wordsworth
Reincarnation, like heaven, is ego grasping. A rebirth after a 100 or a 1000 years is the same as reincarnation from yesterday, or a minute ago. All ideas of self improvement or accomplishment are an ego attempt to put off to the future what can actually only be accomplished here-now. Do it NOW. Pay attention. SEE
J. Krishnamurti
The realization of Emptiness is no more or less than seeing into the non-existence of a thingish ego-substance.
D. T. Suzuki
Everyone you meet, or know, is another face of God, another doorway thru, given by God to bring you to your attachments and clingings.
Ram Dass
At first, lack of faith causes you to surround yourself with things that get you high – people, holy books, etc. Then you realize it’s inside and you can’t lose it.
Ram Dass
You can consider all religions equal, but still dislike some more than others. All spirituality is seeking the same God, but some methods are longer, more painful, and more destructive than others.
Robert Heinlein
In order to know what God knows, you have to give up knowing you know.
Anise Flowers, at 11
Without going out my door, I can know all things on earth.
Without looking out of my window, I can know the ways of heaven.
For the further one travels, the less one knows.
The sage therefore arrives without traveling,
Sees all without looking, Does all without doing.
Lao-tzu
The best books are those which startle you by contradicting your opinions and beliefs. You learn more form your enemies than from your friends.
St. John Ervine
The one remains, the many change and pass away. Shelly
Eternal truth needs a human language. C. G. Jung
There is One only, without a second. Realize that thou art that. The Upanishad
Will power is not really power but weakness. A really powerful man has no will of his own – the whole is his will. He floats like a white cloud, one with the existence, in tune with it.
Bhabwan Shree Rajneesh
Ye are gods; and all of you are children on the most High. Psalm LXXXII, 6
Ye are the temple of the living God. II Corth. VI, 16
The great Tao flows everywhere, to the left and to the right.
All things depend upon it to exist, and it does not abandon them.
To its accomplishments it lays no claim,
It loves and nourishes all things, but does not lord it over them…
The Tao, without doing anything leaves nothing undone.
Lao-tzu
In any way that men love me in that same way they find my love: for many are the paths of men, but they all in the end come to me.
The Bhagavad Gita
We are most free when we are free from ourselves. N. Sri Ram
There is no Religion higher than truth. Motto, the Theosophical Society
Most people think that we live in the actual world while we are alive, and that after we take the last breath we somehow wander into a vague realm of the spirit. It is a great mistake to see two separate realms. Instead, where we live is in fact the spiritual realm, a realm of many billion worlds, which goes beyond three, four, or even infinite dimensions. Then the danger is that we might think that this is a realm that is empty and boundless. Watch out! It’s all manifested right here at this moment. It is alive and kicking!
Soen Nakagawa Roshi
The present Moment, because it has no past, is newly born; and, because it has no future, it is simultaneously dead. Birth and death, therefore, are simply two ways of talking about the same timeless Moment, and they are illusorily separated only by those who cannot escape from the standpoint of temporal succession so as to see all things in their simultaneity. Birth and death are one in this timeless Moment.
Ken Wilbur
Whatsoever you are, accept it so totally that nothing is left out of it to be achieved.
Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh
The mind begotten by and given to each of us by our parents is none other than Buddha-mind, birthless and immaculate, sufficient to manage all that life throws up to us.
Bankei
Hope and fear are both phantoms that arise from thinking of the self. When we don’t see the self as self, what do we have to fear?
Lao-tzu
Our life, to what shall I compare it?
An echo echoing through the mountains and into empty sky.
Ryokan
When did the honeysuckle first sense its own perfume?
When did smoke learn how to fly?
Pable Neruda
Differences, borders, lines, surfaces, and boundaries do not really divide things from each other at all; they join them together. All boundaries are held in common. When you understand this, you see that the sense of being ‘me’ is exactly the same sensation as being one with the whole cosmos. The secret in life is that what is ‘other’ eventually turns out to be you.
Alan Watts
For who realizes the Lord God, the Atman, the one existence, the Self of the universe, neither praises nor dispraises any man. Like the sun shining impartially upon all things, he looks with an equal eye upon all beings. He moves about in the world a free soul, released form all attachment.
Srimad Bhagavatam
The way of Zen is not the way of saints or of sinners. Zen is the practice of manifesting yourself as emptiness. When you manifest nothingness, only in that moment do you experience the source of God. When you experience God, Buddha or the source of everything, you don’t know what you are doing. When you are completely one with your lover, you don’t know whether you are doing something good or bad.
Joshu Sasaki Roshi
The only thing that we can know is that we know nothing and that is the highest flight of reason.
Leo Tolstoy
The religious journey begins, but never ends. Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh
You can practice mindfulness, because there is forgetfulness; but you cannot practice awareness, because there is only awareness. In mindfulness, you pay attention to the present moment. You try to ‘be here now.’ But pure awareness is the present state of awareness before you try to do anything about it. Trying to ‘be here now’ requires a future moment in which you will then be mindful; but pure awareness is this moment before you try anything. You are always already aware; you are always already enlightened.
Ken Wilbur
One goes through all sorts of austerities to become what one already is. All effort is simply to get rid of the mistaken impression that one is limited and bound by the woes of this life.
Ramana Maharshi
Truly there is no cause for you to be miserable and unhappy. You yourself impose limitations on your true nature of infinite Being, and then weep that you are a finite creature. Hence I say know that you are really the infinite, pure Being, the Self absolute. You are always that Self and nothing but that Self. Therefore, you can never really be ignorant of the Self, your ignorance is merely a formal ignorance.
Ramana Maharshi
Lightening flashes, sparks shower.
In the blink of your eyes, you have missed seeing.
The Zenrin
Through the evening mist a lone goose is flying.
Of one tone are wide waters and sky.
The Zenrin
Everything flows, and you cannot step into the same stream twice. Heraclites
Perfect Enlightenment means spontaneous realization of your Original Nature.
The Fifth Patriarch
Yield to the willow
All the loathing,
All the desire of your heart.
Basho
Know all things to be like this:
As a magician makes illusions
Of horses, oxen, carts, and other things,
Nothing is as it appears.
The Buddha
The Way is near, but men seek it afar. It is in easy things, but men seek it in difficult things.
Mencius
When we open our mind-eye inwardly towards our true self, every movement and every act of ours is directly the way of Zen.
Zenkei Shibayama
To know the objective world completely is impossible. But when you experience the objective world as yourself, then your consciousness becomes perfect and you don’t need to know.
Joshu Sasaki Roshi
The body is a vehicle thru which the universal life energy is manifesting as consciousness. The purpose of life is to transcend separateness and awaken to the metaphysical truth of Oneness, and of Death as Life.
Joseph Campbell
Realization is not like your conception of it. Dogen
In this moment, right now, we are always arriving at Mind, we are always arriving at WHAT IS NOW, whether that be suffering, seeking, pain, joy, or simple confusion. The journey does not start NOW; it ends NOW, with whatever state of consciousness is present at the moment.
Ken Wilbur
Learn how to listen and things speak for themselves. Basho
When the ordinary person realizes, he is a sage. When a sage understands, he is an ordinary man.
Zen Saying
The great way of the Buddha Law is: In a grain of dust are all the scrolls of the sutras in the universe; in a grain of dust are all the infinite Buddhas.
Dogen
And a man shell be free, and as pure as the day prior to his conception in his mother’s womb, when he has nothing, wants nothing and knows nothing.
Mister Eckhart
A billion stars go spinning through the night, blazing high above your head. But in you is the presence that will be, when the stars are dead.
Rainer Maria Rilke
And the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.
T. S. Eliot
If you cultivate the right attitude, your enemies are your best spiritual teachers because their presence provides you with the opportunity to enhance and develop tolerance, patience, and understanding.
The Dalai Lama
The soul is not some individual spook inhabiting the body, it is the whole network of relationships ranging throughout everything that there is. The ‘here and now’ is like a knot in a system of strings making a fishing net, but the whole vast network is the soul. Everyone has the same soul, but we all experience it from different points of view, in different places, at different times.
Alan Watts.
Act as you will; go on as you feel, without second thought. This is the incomparable Way.
Ekai
In the landscape of spring there is no measure of worth or value;
The flowering branches are naturally short and long.
The Zenrin
The realization of your bliss, your true being, comes when you have put aside what might be called the passing moment with its terror, and with its temptations, and with its statement of requirements about life that you should live this way… I always tell my students to follow their bliss – where the deep sense of being is from, and where your body and soul want to go.
Joseph Campbell
The real discipline of Zen begins only at the point where the individual has altogether stopped trying to improve himself….For the object of Zen is not so much to become a Buddha as to act like one.
Alan Watts
You will know in due coarse that your glory lies where you cease to exist.
J. Kristnamurti
The greatest discovery of my generation is that a human being can alter his life by altering his attitudes of mind. William James
Moonlight and the sound of pines are things we all know. Zen mind and delusion distinguish sage and fool. Go back to the place where not one thought appears. How shall I put this into words for you?
Han-shan Te-ch’ing
In eternity there is indeed something true and sublime. But all these times and places and occasions are now and here. God himself culminates in the present moment, and will never be more divine in the lapse of all the ages.
Henry David Thoreau
Life we learn too late is in the living, in the tissue of every day and hour. Stephen Leacock
The thing we tell of can never be found by seeking, yet only seekers find it. Bayazid Bistami
The present never ages. Each moment is like a snowflake, unique, unspoiled, unrepeatable, and can be appreciated in its surprisingness.
Gail Sheery
Zen practice is thus not a set of operations designed to achieve an external goal. In Zen, the effort and the result are not two different things, the means and the goal are not to be separated, the finding occurs in the very seeking itself.
Bernard Phillips
It is the energy of thought which keeps thee from thy God. John Henry Newman
The final place you end up coming to is where you complete the cycle. And you come back into every plane of consciousness and live consciously at every plane simultaneously, because every plane is another truth. You live in a Bodhisattva role, which means living in this world of illusion at the same time that you are not in the world of illusion. You’re in the world but not of it.
Ram Dass
No one gets so much of God as the man who is thoroughly dead. St. Gregory
A monk asked Yun-men; “What are the teachings of a whole lifetime?”
Yun-men said: “An appropriate statement.”
Zen mondo
Our revels now are ended: these our actors,
As I foretold you, were all spirits, and
Are melted into air, into thin air:
And, like the baseless fabric of this vision,
The cloud-capp’d towers, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve,
And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack behind: We are such stuff
As dreams are made on, and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep.
Shakespeare
Stop thinking and end your problems. Lao-tzu
You know things as thoughts, but your thoughts are not your experiences, they are the echo and after effect of your experience: as when your room trembles after a carriage goes past. I however am sitting in the carriage, and often am the carriage itself.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Awaken the mind without fixing it anywhere. The Diamond Cutter Sutra
The time of business does not with me differ from the time of prayer, and in the noise and clatter of my kitchen, while several persons are at the same time calling for different things, I possess God in as great a tranquility as if I were upon my knees at the blessed sacrament.
Brother Lawrence
In every respect, everything that the Buddha ever suggested that his followers should do, was by the nature of an experiment. Buddhism never uttered its final teaching. What is was actually after, all it describes are various experiments you can make to get on the road to it.
Alan Watts
No one who wants to be enlightened will ever be enlightened because what we are enlightened from is that someone wishing to be enlightened.
Steven Levine
Out beyond fields of wrongdoing and rightdoing, there is a field. I will meet you there.
Rumi
The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.
Marcel Proust
Man’s main task in life is to give birth to himself. Erich Fromm
Monk: “Mountains and hills – aren’t they all forms of the body of Buddha?”
Master: “Yes, they are, but it’s a pity to say so.”
Zen Mondo
People wish to be settled; but only as far as they are unsettled is there any hope for them.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Abandon this fleeing world, abandon yourself,
Then the moon and flowers will guide you along the way.