Our Quotes of the Day:
People say that practicing Zen is difficult, but there is a misunderstanding as to why. It is not difficult because it is hard to sit in the cross-legged position, or to attain enlightenment. It is difficult because it is hard to keep our mind pure and our practice pure in its fundamental sense.
Where the lips are silent the heart has a thousand tongues.
The highest form of service is to help a person who is incapable of thanking in return.
The churches had left me cold, but I thought there's got to be a God. I remember going out, this is in Charleston, South Carolina, and my desire then was to be a playwright, and I was studying theater, and I went out one night, late at night, and I asked, "What can God be if there is a God?" I wasn't sure there was a God, but if there is a God, what must he be? Well, he can't be a judge, who's up there just waiting for us to make a mistake so he can clap us into hell. There's got to be something more than that.
Filling the conscious mind with ideal conceptions is a characteristic of Western theosophy, but not the confrontation with the Shadow and the world of darkness. One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious. The latter procedure, however, is disagreeable and therefore not popular.
What is illusion? M.: To whom is the illusion? Find it out. Then illusion will vanish. Generally people want to know about illusion and do not examine to whom it is. It is foolish. Illusion is outside and unknown. But the seeker is considered to be known and is inside. Find out what is immediate, intimate, instead of trying to find out what is distant and unknown.
Truth and nonviolence demand that no human being may debar himself from serving any other human being, no matter how sinful he may be.
The lamps are different, but the Light is the same. One matter, one energy, one Light, one Light-mind, endlessly emanating all things.
My fancies are fireflies, specks of living light twinkling in the dark.
The minute you don't want power, you'll have more than you ever dreamed possible.
Detachment is the beginning of mastery.
Faith intervenes not to abolish reason's autonomy nor to reduce its scope for action, but solely to bring the human being to understand that in these events it is the God of Israel who acts.
Perfect love means putting up with other people's shortcomings, feeling no surprise at their weaknesses, finding encouragement even in the slightest evidence of good qualities in them.
The offering up or cleaning up ego stuff is called purification. Purification is the act of letting go. This is done out of discriminative awareness. That is, you understand that you are an entity passing through a life in which the entire drama is an offering for your awakening.
Our humble service attitude in our life is what determines what effect chanting will have on our consciousness. Otherwise we can be chanting for millions and millions of births before we actually achieve the goal.
It is not by change of place that we can come nearer to Him who is in every place, but by the cultivation of pure desires and virtuous habits.
I talk to my inner lover, and I say, why such rush? We sense that there is some sort of spirit that loves birds and animals and the ants- perhaps the same one who gave a radiance to you in your mother's womb. Is it logical you would be walking around entirely orphaned now? The truth is you turned away yourself, and decided to go into the dark alone. Now you are tangled up in others, and have forgotten what you once knew, and that's why everything you do has some weird sense of failure in it.
If we were to place our power at the service of our imaginations rather than our primate politics we would create a civilization worthy of the name.
The auspiciousness of any situation is how it brings us closer to Krishna.
Remember the words of Christ: "Ask, and it shall be given you; seek, and ye shall find; knock, and it shall be opened unto you." These words are literally true, not figures or fiction. They were the outflow of the heart's blood of one of the greatest sons of God who have ever come to this world of ours; words which came as the fruit of realisation, from a man who had felt and realised God himself; who had spoken with God, lived with God, a hundred times more intensely than you or I see this building.
We do not "come into" this world; we come out of it, as leaves from a tree.
Be inwardly ever newly joyous, like the ever-fresh laughing waters of a gurgling brook.
The mind is like the wind. You're trying to stop the wind, dressed as a kite. How are you going to do it?
