Great Throughts Treasury

"We live in a world of many illusions and much of human belief is ritualized nonsense."

""Self-liberation" is what the Buddhist path is about; it's seeing through the illusion of a separate self and that, I think, attracted us a lot because we were burdened with too much self-the land of individual license plates and special little monads of selfhood buzzing around."

"It's my understanding that the Baby Boom generation developed a kind of spiritual hunger, and that many of the religious institutions that we were born into didn't explain life to us in an adequate way, didn't give us the stories that conformed to what we were learning in school about the scientific revolution, really didn't give us the spiritual tools to deal with the modern world. We were lucky enough to be given good educations, but we began to see that the worldviews we were being offered in our institutions were very limited. And so we began experimenting with drugs and we began to see some other realities. And we decided to go exploring. I was part of this great wave of young Westerners in the late 60s, early 70s, who went to Asia. Many of us had been reading in college about Buddhism and Taoism and had been reading the beatniks, who were also exploring. And [in Asia] we found teachers and we studied meditation and various martial art practices, and philosophy and music-and we brought it back. We smuggled these foreign gods into the country and you can see the result today. In every American city there are yoga centers and meditation centers, and Buddhism is one of the fastest-growing religions in America. So we really planted seeds that are now sprouting all over the world."

"Poetry is the special medium of spiritual crazy wisdom, the form of expression that comes closest to creating a bridge between words and what is wordless."

"After a few years of meditation practice we can even learn how to occasionally ignore ourselves. And what relief that can be!"

"A belief in reincarnation would at least give us some slack; we would have many lifetimes to get it right."

"Artists are visited by the Muses, or tormented by their own passions and demons."

"Before I became a Buddhist, I worried about my life. Now I worry about my next life."

"Any revolution has to start with the transformation of the individual, otherwise individuals are corrupted by the power they get if their revolution succeeds."

"As strange as it sounds, meditation may reveal that we are happier than we thought we were. We may discover that ancient conditioning rather than present circumstances is causing our dissatisfaction , and that this moment is quite sufficient or even wonderful, and we simply hadn't noticed."

"Artists speak to a different part of us, bypassing the cloudy filter of reason and the fears and prejudices of the habitual mind."

"By translating their inner turmoil or understanding into art, artists challenge the accepted notions of reality and create new ones."

"I meditate because evolution gave me a big brain, but it didn't come with an instruction manual. I meditate because life is too short and sitting slows it down. I meditate because life is too long and I need an occasional breakI meditate because it's such a relief to spend time ignoring myselfI meditate because I'm building myself a bigger and better perspective, and occasionally I need to add a new window."

"If you don't like the news, go out and make some of your own."

"We don't have to take our personality so personally."

"One suggestion is to regard your personality as a pet. It follows you around anyway, so give it a name and make friends with it. Keep it on a leash when you need to, and let it run free when you feel that is appropriate. Train it as well as you can, and then accept its idiosyncrasies, but always remember that your pet is not you. Your pet has its own life, and just happens to be in an intimate relationship with you, whoever you may be, hiding there behind your personality."

"What's the matter? What's the antimatter? Does it antimatter?"