Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Even a good self will create another good self in the next life, and another one, and that good self will never be enlightened. You'll be bound, life after life, by good karma.
In meditation all the fake dull thoughts that you think, all the ridiculous philosophies, the necessities, all the things that won't matter a bit when you are dead - fade away.
If President Bush does a lousy job, then he'll lose power. If the guy at McDonalds who's selling burgers does a great job, then he'll be much more powerful than President Bush.
If you are having sex with someone who is not on the same frequency that you are on, it can be very problematic. The greatest karmic transfer occurs in having sex with someone.
There is no fanaticism in any of this. There is intensity. You have to make it happen. You have to put your will into perfecting your daily life, into monitoring your thoughts.
We learn to avoid blocking others, interfering with others, because that will decrease our happiness, slow our vibratory rate and generally bring us down and make us miserable.
People can insert thoughts into your mind. This is more dangerous for psychic people. Use concentration exercises and read to combat this; boredom is an easy way to be drained.
There is the experience of enlightenment, to be very aware of what lies beyond the boundaries of cognitive perception, reflection and self-awareness as seen by the personality.
There are some teachers who just perform miracles. They can manifest things from the other world into this world. They have siddha powers. They are not necessarily enlightened.
Tantra is for the desperate. Unless you've really experienced pain and suffering, tantra won't work. Unless you've really experienced exultation and ecstasy, tantra won't work.
It's funny, people who have a lot of sexual energy think of themselves as being not spiritual. They are probably more spiritually inclined. All that sexual energy is kundalini.
The rhythm of life is give and take. It is necessary to put things back into the system. To not do that is to foul your own nest - to use up all the natural resources greedily.
It's up to you to avail yourself to knowledge. Knowledge doesn't need you. The idea of a compassionate God was formulated, obviously, by someone who didn't want to do any work.
Karma means changing planes of reality or changing fields of attention. There will be perhaps a resulting physical action stemming from the change of these fields of attention.
When you die you forget. Death is a sleep, a forgetting. You forget about your previous lifetime. The essence of your being is the same. But at death, the personality dissolves
Souls have different journeys. The best thing to know is, not what everybody else does, but what you do. Self-discovery essentially is finding your own dharma, your own rhythm.
The good news is that you don't have to stop thoughts completely to meditate. It takes a long time to stop thought impeccably. What you need is to detach yourself from thought.
You might have a warrior spirit in there somewhere, and it's just waiting for the opportunity to come out. If you do, you might be a candidate for the pathway to enlightenment.
In both Surfing the Himalayas and Snowboarding to Nirvana, I have tried to transmit as best I could the spirit of humor, and the sense of humor of the monks I have encountered.
Sometimes their immediate reaction is to want to run away because they realize inwardly that the transpositions their life will go through will be remarkable, change everything.
There was a time when you came forth from infinity, your essence that is. You've always existed, and you'll always exist. But there are different states of mind in the universe.
If the world does not shine brightly, even just the physical, sensual perception after meditation, you have not meditated. You have sat and thought of things that were not real.
Trivial Pursuit means that you've got nothing going on in your life. Trivial Pursuit is more than a board game. It is the way most people live. Their lives are trivial pursuits.
Meditation is a refocusing on symbols. It's not emptiness. We are using symbols, doorways to step from one world to another, from darkness into light, from death to immortality.
It is not bad living in a monastery. I've done it many times in many lives. But I think you can do a better job outside the monastery, if you have the necessary component parts.
There are planes that are not light. There are planes that are shadowy. But that is not our interest in meditation. We want brightness, ecstasy, brilliance beyond comprehension.
You and I are both life. There's just the experience of every moment. We like to call them moments. There isn't really such a thing. There's just is-ness; there's just eternity.
Between the creative, open and spontaneous approach to life, and the highly disciplined, pragmatic approach, there's a doorway, if you can find it - and it leads to immortality.
Free will exists and operates outside causality. It is not hooked to karma. Free will is like a well that is on your property. You can choose to draw water from the well or not.
In most cases, energy is lost in little games of manipulation, in little struggles of will, in the attempts to possess others, to wrap them up, to delude them, to shine them on.
True teachers of enlightenment are hard to find. The popular ones, of course, usually aren't enlightened because how could they be? They just tell people what they want to hear.
If your're not having a very good time with your life, its because you haven't done much for others. You may have done many things but you havent done much for those around you.
It's as if all your past is written on the blackboard, and if we could erase it, your past would no longer exist. The way you do that - the only way you do that - is in samadhi.
Tantra is the perception of the oneness and the perfection of all things. Not just the perception of light, but the perception of darkness, seeing God in both beauty and horror.
A child in the 4th grade who's just learning algebra is not imperfect. While there may be a child in the 12th grade who's much better, the child who's learning is not imperfect.
When you're going though a difficult time, forget about yourself for a while. Go do something for someone else. This is the fastest way to pull yourself out of a negative state.
Don't worry about your future lives, past lives. Button up your shirt! Stand up straight! Go out and do something. Go out and have some fun. Be alive, change, dissolve, explode!
People are kept in line in society because they fear punishment. The assumption that underlies this mentality is that a human being will follow their desires without mitigation.
Advanced meditators are not even desirous of liberation anymore - that is just another attachment. There is no liberation. There is no bondage. These are just ideas of the mind.
None of this has ever been or will ever be; all is an appearance, all is an illusion. Illusions are truth. All illusions are real. We say illusion, meaning that they're shadows.
All the sutras in the world are useless. All the lectures of all the teachers don't really mean anything. They are only words. They point in a direction, that is their only use.
People who are advanced meditators don't worry about liberation and self-realization; they instead are interested in the welfare of others and aiding others in their liberation.
You've got to make a person aware of how miserable they really are and show them how happy they can be. Otherwise, why should they seek this nebulous goal called self-discovery.
Advance yourself by advancing others. Do not judge others. Be of service to them, but realize that you are not necessarily the instrument of perfecting and immortalizing others.
The world is always chaos, but we pretend that it's not because it makes us feel better. In doing so we're able to go through it in a specific manner and form: That's the tonal.
All of the energy of existence is going to flow through you. You will be in thousands of planes of consciousness at once or beyond in nirvana or having a sandwich with a friend.
We have two choices in life: One is to fulfill ourselves. The other is to take the time and energy that we would utilize in fulfilling ourselves and use it to make others happy.
Studying with a teacher doesn't simply mean going to an occasional seminar or Zen retreat. It means fully applying yourself to what the teacher says, most of which is not verbal.
We are inspired by the God that we see in others and suddenly we find ourselves changing. We find ourselves giving more. We find that our lives become rather amazingly beautiful.
When you are enlightened and have united your mind with the deepest and most ancient part of the mind of the universe, you are not affected by suffering the way other people are.