Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Hate poisons your life.
A possession can't make you happy.
I am daily making myself what I am.
Live fully each day to the full . . .
Wisdom is tolerance of cognitive dissonance.
I think humans will find their humanity sometime, somehow.
In the practice of exchanging self & other, paradoxes abound.
You should never be ashamed of the suffering you've been through.
If you love your enemy, that means you want your enemy to be happy.
What makes me fully alive is anything. Really just being alive is enough.
The worldly person is insane from the point of view of the spiritual person.
More than whether you live or die, it's how you are living or dying that is important.
Everyone has the same life purpose, which is the quest of happiness for oneself and for others.
It isn't the meaning of love where you somehow desire that one or you want them or want them to love you.
The person who is tormenting the Tibetans feels they have to get rid of the Tibetans in order to be happy.
When all is lost, when all is let go of, when all is abandoned, what you are left with is an ocean of bliss.
Enlightenment is not meant to be an object of religious faith. It is an evolutionary goal, something we want to become.
That love, in the sense of wishing their happiness, will cause your actions to be effective in relation to that person.
Greed, the desire to incorporate, is magnified and fed back to produce the pretan realms, just as hate creates the hells.
It took me forty years of dealing with buddhism to finally realize that actually Buddha's discovery was happiness and bliss.
Those caught in the cycle of self-concern suffer helplessly, while the compassionate are more free and, implicitly, more happy.
Nonviolence against humans cannot take firm hold in society as long as brutality and violence are practiced toward other animals.
If your enemy is happy, then why would they be bothered to be your enemy? Being someone's enemy is no fun. It does not add to happiness.
Buddhism is all about science. If science is the systematic pursuit of the accurate knowledge of reality, then science is Buddhism, Buddhism is science.
Thich Nhat Hanh is one of the greatest teachers of our time. He reaches from the heights of insight down to the deepest places of the absolutely ordinary.
You take up energy towards someone because you think loving your enemy doesn't just mean caving into your enemy. It means first of all liberating yourself.
Actually there's a very bad trend in some cults about how Guru's are supposed to be mean to their students, and there are some who revel in this and are abusive.
If someone gets a bigger house, does that automatically make them happy? Maybe for a second. But then they worry about the bigger house and how to take care of it.
Human beings are such social animals. We're very connected with the feelings of those we're close to, so we can't really be happy when the ones we are close to are unhappy.
Struggling with the world and having the problem of you vs. the world is a really big problem. You're going to lose because the world is so much bigger than you, and longer lasting.
You have to be responsible for yourself, refer to yourself, develop yourself, help others, whatever it may be. So we shouldn't have an idea that the whole thing is to shatter ones ego.
The problem in our society is the ego psychology and conventional wisdom about "look out for #1." That conventional wisdom thinks that "love your enemy" is to some a principle no one can ever live by.
However, because of your interconnectedness with all things, other beings still have a problem, and when you realize that you have no absolute self apart from things, you realize that essentially, you are all the other beings.
The better teachers recognize that by freeing yourself of the rigid ego identity habit, you actually strengthen the resilient, flexible, creative ego, and you then can be more effective in helping others, and creative in whatever work you do.
When all is lost, when all is let go of, when all is abandoned what you are left with is an ocean of bliss. What you emerged with what you are is an ocean of bliss. Your cells and atoms and brain and bones and blood stream all of it is bliss.
You're more responsible ethically for being there with your interconnection to the world, but the you now is an always changing one, and you're responsible for how you change it. It's very important to understand that whole thing about the ego.
The most important enemy for everyone is their own illusion that makes them unrealistic or exaggerates their sense of self-importance in the world. Ironically, you're the super secret enemy. Whether lay or householder, everyone has that internal enemy.
This question, Is loving your enemy a life practice?, I like that question. It is a life practice, certainly, for everyone. It relates to the idea of, Is this a householder practice or is it a monk practice? I think it's both. Everyone has that practice.
Take the example of people who are being most unrealistic - people who are beating monks to death and torturing them. Why shouldn't you be angry or hate that person? Well, the person who is doing that is very unhappy. They are being ordered by a higher-up.
The Buddhists think that, because we've all had infinite previous lives, we've all been each other's relatives. Therefore all of you, in the Buddhist view, in some previous life ... have been my mother - for which I do apologize for the trouble I caused you.
The point is that you free the ego. The ego is only a pronoun. It's a Greek first person pronoun, ergo. When you're in Greece you say, Ergo wants to take a bus, and you don't mean your ego wants to take a bus, like some big entity, you only mean I want to take a bus.
People in Tibet have an expression. When you reach a certain degree of venerableness and age, and people ask, "How are you?," there is an expression that people use that means, "Just barely not dead." Some people might be frightened by it but I think it's quite funny.
Therefore, what you do as a spiritual practitioner in this life shapes that. To seek and find this beautiful, continuing existence, where there can be more progress towards Buddha-hood, toward love, and wisdom, and helping all being etc. So that's the great value of it.
First of all, "no self" doesn't mean there is no self, haha. So the "no problem" is jumped at a little too fast I'm afraid. Especially in American culture where people tend to be materialistic philosophically. I don't mean running to the mall, but philosophically, you see?
Imagine a culture in which everything is geared toward helping all individuals become the best human beings they can be; in which individuals are driven to devoting their lives to becoming enlightened by the natural flood of compassion for others that arises from their wisdom.
The understanding of it [absolute] is very important as a beginning point. Then you can use meditation, further reasoning, long-term familiarity etc., you can use all kinds of methods to deepen this understanding and to have it counter the instinctual sense of being an absolute you.
They [Chinese] will need a sympathetic intercessor with other people in the world to avoid conflict and create trust, and of course, Dalai Lama would be ideal. In another ten years from now though, he won't have the time to be really effective for them. They're truly wasting their time not using him now.
A lot of people, after seeking a bit, have some experience, and sometimes will believe they're enlightened. One has to be careful about that. Especially Americans, who are very external stimulus oriented. When they have some type of deep inner experience, often they think that was the ultimate experience.
You could then use the dream to learn more about yourself, others, the world, and the nature of life. You can come awake in the matrix and realize you're the one in your own dream. People on the spiritual path can do that, thus they can avoid wasting the whole night, and use it in a developmental, nice way.