Zen Quotes - Page 5

Life is full of highs and lows. We need them both to grow to our fullest potential. Just hang on tight & enjoy the ride.

You know you have arrived when you have stopped caring about the destination

Srividya Srinivasan

Clarity clattered into my thoughts and brought about a satori, an enlightenment, if you will.

I'm born with wild horses in my head..With an imagination to conquer this world..I will not settle for comforts of a golden cage.

Jasz Gill

Who would then deny that when I am sipping tea in my tearoom I am swallowing the whole universe with it and that this very moment of my lifting the bowl to my lips is eternity itself transcending time and space?

In the name of Him Who created and sustains the world, the Sage Who endowed tongue with speech. He attains no honor who turns the face from the doer of His mercy. The kings of the earth prostate themselves before Him in supplication. He seizes not in haste the disobedient, nor drives away the penitent with violence. The two worlds are as a drop of water in the ocean of His knowledge. He withholds not His bounty though His servants sin; upon the surface of the earth has He spread a feast, in which both friend and foe may share. Peerless He is, and His kingdom is eternal. Upon the head of one He placed a crown another he hurled from the throne to the ground. The fire of His friend He turned into a flower garden; through the water of the Nile He sended His foes to perdition. Behind the veil He sees all, and concealed our faults with His own goodness. He is near to them that are downcast, and accepts the prayers of them that lament. He knows of the things that exist not, of secrets that are untold. He causes the moon and the sun to revolve, and spreads water upon the earth. In the heart of a stone hath He placed a jewel; from nothing had He created all that is. Who can reveal the secret of His qualities; what eye can see the limits of His beauty? The bird of thought cannot soar to the height of His presence, nor the hand of understanding reach to the skirt of His praise. Think not, O Saadi, that one can walk in the road of purity except in the footsteps of Mohammed (Peace and Blessings be Upon Him)

Saadi

Perfectionists are neurotic people. The world is perfectly beautiful in its imperfection.

The object of Zen is not to kill all feelings and become anesthetized to pain and fear. The object of Zen is to free us to scream loudly and fully when it is time to scream.

Francis Harold Cook

When angry, count to Zen.

Hand over your responses to the man who triggers them, and you have already lost the battle for self. Look beyond, and find yourself there instead.

Richard K. Morgan

Shigemori's body of work is a compelling manifesto for continuous cultural renewal.

Christian Tschumi

The best way for you to get that new experience is to change your response to what happens.

With life the truth is not what is right or wrong, but with life the truth is the process, where life unfolds in every individual, and takes him to the whole.

To speak conventionally - and I think it is easier for the general reader to see Zen thus presented - there are unknown recesses in our minds which lie beyond the threshold of the relatively constructed consciousness. To designate them as “sub-conciousness” or “supra-consciousness” is not correct. The word “beyond” is used simply because it is a most convenient term to indicate their whereabouts. But as a matter of fact there is no “beyond”, no “underneath”, no “upon” in our consciousness. The mind is one indivisible whole and cannot be torn in pieces. The so-called terra incognita is the concession of Zen to our ordinary way of talking, because whatever field of consciousness that is known to us is generally filled with conceptual riffraff, and to get rid of them, which is absolutely necessary for maturing Zen experience, the Zen psychologist sometimes points to the presence of some inaccessible region in our minds. Though in actuality there is no such region apart from our everyday consciousness, we talk of it as generally more easily comprehensible by us.

We grow up to believe that we are supposed to somehow "become" who we are meant to be through the trial-by-fire that is life here on planet Earth.Reality is...there's no "becoming".It's actually all an "un-becoming", only to reunite with who you were born to be in the first place before society told you otherwise.

Jennifer Sodini

Consider this:1. Would you ride in a car whose driver was on the consciousness-expanding "entheogenic" drug LSD?And here's a bonus question:2. Why does an "expanded consciousness" include the inability to operate a motor vehicle?

Perfection itself is not the ultimate goalbut the ultimate condition of life.

Eric Micha'el Leventhal

Learning how to think' really means learning how to exercise some control over how & what you think. It means being conscious & aware enough to choose what you pay attention to & to choose how you construct meaning from experience.

David Foster Wallace

Suffering builds character and impels you to penetrate life’s secrets. It’s the path of great artists, great religious leaders, great social reformers. The problem is not suffering per se, but rather our identification with our own ego: our divided, dualistic, cramped view of things. ‘We are too ego-centered,’ Suzuki tells Cage.’ The ego-shell in which we live is the hardest thing to outgrow. We seem to carry it all the time from childhood up to the time we finally pass away.

Why are you here?Where am I?You have come to this place… to lie in the ground?The derision in the question was clear.I have come to this place to find peace.And what is peace?Laughter in the recesses of his mind.This is peace. Perhaps it is. I don’t know.A pause.Talking to yourself, eh?There is no one else around.That is the beginning of wisdom.And what of it?Who are you?I am Peter.What are you?I… I am that which says I.Clever.Sometimes.He sparked a cigarette, nicotine bringing a touch of stability to his otherwise entirely too excited cognitions.What is I?I am.That is all?I don’t know.Where is I?Where am I?I am between this and that.This is again wisdom.He laughed aloud now, pulling deeply on his smoke, exhaling through clenched teeth.I am space.Of a sort.I am a character in a story.Sometimes.Nothing more?A page of your life turns. Do you see it?Sometimes.The blank of the page, the openness of its margins, do you see?Yes.This is the void of your unfolding imagination.Indeed.Would you fill it with your own story?I am void. I am between. I am neither this nor that. I am an idea of a between.What story would you have?Whatever I can. I am nothing.That is enough?No.What would you be?A man.This is also wisdom.

Shall you live authentically who you are or will you spend your allotted living the life of someone you imagine your self to be?

Earl R Smith II

Observe things as they are and don't pay attention to other people. There are some people just like mad dogs barking at everything that moves, even barking when the wind stirs among the grass and leaves.

Huang Po

Humility is just as much the opposite of self-abasement as it is of self-exaltation. To be humble is not to make comparisons. Secure in its reality, the self is neither better nor worse, bigger nor smaller, than anything else in the universe. It *is*--is nothing, yet at the same time one with everything. It is in this sense that humility is absolute self-effacement.To be nothing in the self-effacement of humility, yet, for the sake of the task, to embody its whole weight and importance in your earing, as the one who has been called to undertake it. To give to people, works, poetry, art, what the self can contribute, and to take, simply and freely, what belongs to it by reason of its identity. Praise and blame, the winds of success and adversity, blow over such a life without leaving a trace or upsetting its balance.

Dag Hammarskjöld

This accidentalmeeting of possibilitiescalls itself I.I ask: what am I doing here?And, at once, this Ibecomes unreal.

Dag Hammarskjöld

Like vanishing dew,a passing apparitionor the sudden flashof lightning -- already gone --thus should one regard one's self.

Ikkyu

He who fights is powerless, but he who loves is power itself.

Eric Micha'el Leventhal

The sacred stillness of your brilliant hearthas as the myriad wonders masqueraded.But if you knew this secret from the start,then you'd have quit this Game before you played it.

Eric Micha'el Leventhal

Pardon all runners,All speechless, alien winds,All mad waters.Pardon their impulses,Their wild attitudes,Their young flights, their reticence.When a message has no clothes onHow can it be spoken.

Zen is magic. It gives you the key to open the miraculous. And the miraculous is in you and the key is also in you.

Osho

He said he’d heard the sound of one hand clapping. He said, once his mind took in the wondrous no-sound of holy oneness, the empty echo of eternal bliss, he was never the same. He could hear it still, he said, resounding in the ether and tickling the back of his brain.Something not normal was going on with his brain. No argument there.

Brenda Marie Smith

Most of the pain we experience, whether we realize it or not, comes from the fantasies we live in.We create our own worlds, where there are certain rules, things to be done and said and events to happen. And every time that doesn’t go according to the plan (which, basically, means anything because we have no control over what might happen and can’t predict it), we panic.

Lidiya K.

Who you allow into the circle of your life will make the difference in the quality of your life.

Mindfulness helps you understand that the past is gone, can’t be changed and all the lessons are already learned.

Lidiya K.

Kids want to be grown ups, adults want to be young and careless again.Single people desperately want a relationship, but those who are in one still complain almost all the time and wish for freedom.The poor want money, the rich want more of it.This means that changing your situation doesn’t prevent you from suffering, doesn’t make your desires go away.So you need to change something on the inside.

Lidiya K.

There’s a void inside most people.It’s been created by not being contented with who we are, not being happy with what we have, not being present and looking for something more, better, more exciting out there.And we’ve always been trying to fill this void with something external.

Lidiya K.

The most expected thing you can expect is what's unexpected.

Often we suffer because we don’t realize what’s essential.We may want to be rich, but the rich are lonely.We see all those people on TV that have won the lottery and want to be at their place, but studies show that they are even more miserable after having won the big check. They don’t really know what to do with all that money, take poor decisions on how to spend them, change themselves and their friends don’t see them in the same way.

Lidiya K.

What is first seen as a loss is now seen as a gain. For he finds solitude, not in far off, quite places; he creates it out of himself, spreads it around him, wherever he may be, because he loves it and slowly he ripens in this tranquility. For the inner process is beginning to unfold, stillness is extraordinarily important.

Janwillem van de Wetering

You can be happy if you are willing to let go of your past and leave yourself unencumbered so you can fly freely.

The glass is neither half empty, nor half full. The glass is just a glass and it's content can perpetually change with your perception.

Jennifer Sodini

To doubt the literal meaning of the words of Jesus or Moses incurs hostility from most people, but it’s just a fact that if Jesus or Moses were to appear today, unidentified, with the same message he spoke many years ago, his mental stability would be challenged. This isn’t because what Jesus or Moses said was untrue or because modern society is in error but simply because the route they chose to reveal to others has lost relevance and comprehensibility. "Heaven above" fades from meaning when space-age consciousness asks, Where is "above"? But the fact that the old routes have tended, because of language rigidity, to lose their everyday meaning and become almost closed doesn’t mean that the mountain is no longer there. It’s there and will be there as long as consciousness exists.

Robert M. Pirsig

If you don’t practice presence, you never learn how to have busyness facilitate accomplishment.

Darrell Calkins

As a soul, you have the freedom – and earned responsibility – to transpose your personal process of evolution, to manifest your greatest talents and vision, into the work that matters to you most as a means to personal redemption.

Darrell Calkins

General attitude and outlook—the way we perceive and experience anything—is more influenced by our physical state than anything other single factor. I’d guess that for most of us, at least 50% of our struggles and discontent are brought on by being physically out of balance. The causes of that imbalance are many, but at the core, there’s an insensitivity or inability to locate and maneuver essential physical processes within us: how to breathe, how to sit, stand and walk, how to see and hear, how to slow down or speed up, how to relax, how to sleep, how to eat, how to adjust our physiological responses to the different circumstances we find ourselves within. This kind of removal or abstraction from our physicality causes an enormous amount of problems on many levels. One key result of it is a distrust in our own ability to influence our emotional state and our energy and perspectives in general; we often feel that we can’t get our hands on the control switches, as if most of life just happens and we can’t do much about it.

Darrell Calkins

On an even subtler dimension, clarity, intuitive knowledge and contentment are primarily determined by chemical and hormonal balances in the body and brain. Most of this is entirely manipulable through fairly simple physical exercises that anyone can do.

Darrell Calkins

In my work, I try to create situations in which we take ideas, information, experiences and qualities to a pragmatic arena. Then within those, to relearn or experiment with how we respond to internal and external variables. There’s no point to understanding something but remaining incapable of applying it. I think real knowledge and understanding is experiential, and the easiest way to access those is through our physical being.

Darrell Calkins

Traditional stoicism, indifference to pleasure or pain, is a form of imposing conscience so as to block more immediate desires. The problem is that it eventually collapses on itself because natural emotional and physiological impulses are being ignored or repressed. To pass beyond that dichotomy—”I want to eat ice cream, and yet I don’t”—requires conceiving and creating an integrated mind in which our passions and childlike impulses find expression through conscience. In other words, what we feel like doing and what we “should” do become one and the same.

Darrell Calkins

We don’t know how to feel with conscience. Ideas like integrity or devotion remain abstract, theoretically correct and good, but lacking the ability to produce immediately fulfilling emotions or sensations. What I mean by learning to think emotionally and physiologically is rediscovering the visceral joy of investing in what we already love, the kind of unquestioned spiritual relentlessness we had as kids. As adults, that demands an internal dialogue through which we transpose the search for pleasure onto a platform that is in harmony with our conscience and real responsibilities. We find the pleasure in applied conscience. That’s a lot easier than it sounds. Basically, it’s about recognizing and feeling passion for what we really want to do in our lives.

Darrell Calkins

On those who try to make me their guru or master, my approach is to start destroying that from the first moment we meet. It probably seems naive and idealistic, but I rely on basic, old-fashioned qualities in keeping my interactions clean: integrity, chivalry, honesty. In my experience, it’s not that difficult to eliminate the guru paradigm and stereotype, if one really wants to. Finally, it comes down to simply not accepting a role or the associated temptations offered.

Darrell Calkins

There is a pivot point, however, to become an adult. That transition comes from recognizing and acting in accordance with your own deepest impulses. On the responsibility front, that means acting in harmony with your conscience, not because you’re going to be punished if you don’t, or paid for it if you do (heaven, enlightenment, salvation, or whatever), but because you know it to be right. On the freedom front, that means acquiescing to your deepest inspirations, following what truly compels you, even when it’s difficult to do so. These two principles brought together in the same time and space is what integrity is all about. And it is only through such integrity that you resolve conflict between the two of them: what you “know to do” and what you “want to do.

Darrell Calkins

Whether or not one believes in the accelerating dangers of the climate crisis, the end of fossil fuels, or the permanent annihilation of species of plants, insects and animals that essentially cover our ass by maintaining an inconceivably complex environment in which we have the freedom and responsibility to do pretty much whatever we’d like, it’s not too difficult to at least perceive the dangers of heightened tensions between cultures that now, for the first time, have the power to annihilate each other or the entire planet.

Darrell Calkins

We all understand the value of sacrifice, even if that only involves setting aside dessert so as to lose weight, or putting money in the bank so as to later buy a house. Progress or achievement in any arena requires choices that often oppose what one feels like doing. The trick in truly succeeding with this in the long run is locating enough depth of feeling that the experience of conflicting desires dissolves. For that to happen, one has to learn how to think emotionally and physiologically.

Darrell Calkins

There are some things that don’t function as one would assume. For example, the impulse and linear thinking associated with the search for happiness most often produce questions like, “What’s in it for me?” or “How do I get what I want?” Paradoxically, if you will, that very question pushes authentic happiness away. Now, to try to explain that to someone in such a way that they hear and are interested by the idea is going to probably involve some paradox and non-linearity.

Darrell Calkins

Freedom and responsibility themselves are at stake. One does not find freedom or enact responsibility by surrendering to another’s conceptualization of these ideas. Living out the rules of conscience laid down by someone else for the attainment of an unquestioned goal, a freedom designed and articulated by someone else, is the surrender of human imagination and intuition.In the more extreme versions of this, we end up with a collective momentum resulting in events such as Nazi extermination of millions of Jews, the Inquisition, or similar events recently in Africa and elsewhere. That comes from allocating one’s conscience to someone else, not attending to one’s own deeper intuitive sense of right and wrong.

Darrell Calkins

Each religion has provided a tremendous service in defining elements of conscience. They have made it possible for us to live together in a society, to work toward common goals, and to learn how to accept or tolerate relative opposition to our own opinions. I also think that this has been done much as a parent needs to provide a similar service for an adolescent. Internal and external conflict requires discipline to organize and structure some form of minimizing the chaos imposed on others.

Darrell Calkins

We do have some capacity to determine how things evolve, and how we evolve, individually and as a community or race. That’s a tremendous freedom and a tremendous responsibility.

Darrell Calkins

Whether or not we personally do impact some ultimate evolution beyond ourselves, we can definitely influence what happens today. To choose to waste a day, or a lifetime, is opposed to the essential spirit of life, expressed, sacrificed for, and upheld through every perceivable interaction in nature. It’s also opposed to every human expression of spirit throughout history. We know to live up to our potential, to fulfill the trust of creation by moving forward, even if we don’t believe it or feel like it or know why.

Darrell Calkins

The primary reason that I’m not a representative of specific groups or schools of thought is that that choice gives me the freedom to look at these groups and thoughts from the inside and the outside. I’m trying to be honest in that role—what really works here and what does not? That is, I have nothing to sell or win by any given position. I’m promoting a similar process for any person I interact with in my work, including toward me.Investment in a given idea or group tends to immediately shut down options for perception, and then choice. Prejudice, bigotry and arrogance breed from that. One is forced to think a certain way to stay within the group or thought, and then to defend against apparent opposition. This constructs and feeds the kinds of adamant separation and conflict we see so many manifestations of on every level. In many cases, it’s also the cause of deep internal conflict in most individuals, yet it isn’t really addressed.

Darrell Calkins

It’s misleading or deceptive in a way that such skills are learned like any other — simple practice, sincere investment over time. Yes, like small steps, one at a time, to cross the bridge. Just a single step today.

Darrell Calkins

The sweet spot is a term used by audiophiles and recording engineers to describe the focal point between two sources of sound, where an individual is fully capable of hearing the audio mix the way it was intended to be heard by the musicians. Different static methods exist to broaden the area of the sweet spot.Sound engineers also refer to the sweet spot of any sound-producing body that may be captured with a microphone. Every individual instrument and voice has its own sweet spot, the perfect location to place the microphone or microphones in order to obtain the best sound.In tennis, baseball, or cricket, a given swing will result in a more powerful impact if the ball strikes the racquet or bat on the sweet spot, where a combination of factors results in a maximum response for a given amount of effort. The actual sweet spot on a racquet or bat is a very small area, where dispersing vibrations and spin in multiple directions are canceled out, resulting in a perfect contact point between incoming and outgoing energies.

Darrell Calkins

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