Great Throughts Treasury

"There's a reason you can learn from everything: you have basic wisdom, basic intelligence, and basic goodness. Therefore, if the environment is supportive and encourages you to be brave and to open your heart and mind, you'll find yourself opening to the wisdom and compassion that's inherently there. It's like tapping into your source, tapping into what's already there. It's the willingness to open your eyes, your heart, and your mind, to allow situations in your life to become your teacher. With awareness, you are able to find out for yourself what causes misery and what causes happiness."

"Things are as bad and as good as they seem. There's no need to add anything extra."

"Things falling apart is a kind of testing and also a kind of healing. We think that the point is to pass the test or to overcome the problem, but the truth is that things don?t really get solved. They come together and they fall apart. Then they come together again and fall apart again. It?s just like that. The healing comes from letting there be room for all of this to happen: room for grief, for relief, for misery, for joy."

"Thinking that we can find some lasting pleasure and avoid pain is what in Buddhism is called samsara, a hopeless cycle that goes round and round endlessly and causes us to suffer greatly. The very first noble truth of the Buddha points out that suffering is inevitable for human beings as long as we believe that things last?that they don?t disintegrate, that they can be counted on to satisfy our hunger for security."

"This meditation is called nontheistic, which doesn't have anything to do with believing in God or not believing in God, but means that nobody but yourself can tell you what to accept and what to reject."

"This process of experiencing laziness directly and nonverbally is transformative. It unlocks a tremendous energy that is usually blocked by our habit of running away. This is because when we stop resisting laziness, our identity as the one who is lazy begins to fall apart completely. Without the blinders of ego, we connect with a fresh outlook, a greater vision. This is how laziness?or any other demon?introduces us to the compassionate life."

"Through formal meditation... we begin to get the hang of not indulging or repressing and of what it feels like to let the energy just be there. That is why it's so good to meditate every single day and continue to make friends with our hopes and fears again and again."

"Throughout my life, until this very moment, whatever virtue I have accomplished, including any benefit that may come from this book, I dedicate to the welfare of all beings."

"Times are difficult globally; awakening is no longer a luxury or an ideal. It's becoming critical. We don't need to add more depression, more discouragement, or more anger to what's already here. It's becoming essential that we learn how to relate sanely with difficult times. The earth seems to be beseeching us to connect with joy and discover our innermost essence. This is the best way that we can benefit others."

"True compassion does not come from wanting to help out those less fortunate than ourselves but from realizing our kinship with all beings."

"Trying to run away is never the answer to being a fully human. Running away from the immediacy of our experience is like preferring death to life."

"Usually we think that brave people have no fear. The truth is that they are intimate with fear."

"War begins when we harden our hearts, and we harden them easily whenever we feel uncomfortable. It?s so sad, really, because our motivation in hardening our hearts is to find some kind of ease, some kind of freedom from the distress that we?re feeling. We can do everything in our power, but war is never going to end as long as our hearts are hardened against each other."

"We act out because, ironically, we think it will bring us some relief. We equate it with happiness. Often there is some relief, for the moment. When you have an addiction and you fulfill that addiction, there is a moment in which you feel some relief. Then the nightmare gets worse. So it is with aggression. When you get to tell someone off, you might feel pretty good for a while, but somehow the sense of righteous indignation and hatred grows, and it hurts you. It?s as if you pick up hot coals with your bare hands and throw them at your enemy. If the coals happen to hit him he will be hurt. But in the meantime, you are guaranteed to be burned."

"We all know what addiction is; we are primarily addicted to ME. Interestingly enough, when the weather changes and the energy flows through us, just as it flows through the grass and the trees and the moose and the ocean and the rocks, we discover that we are not solid at all."

"We are like children building a sand castle. We embellish it with beautiful shells, bits of driftwood, and pieces of colored glass. The castle is ours, off limits to others. We?re willing to attack if others threaten to hurt it. Yet despite all our attachment, we know that the tide will inevitably come in and sweep the sand castle away. The trick is to enjoy it fully but without clinging, and when the time comes, let it dissolve back into the sea."

"We are the awakened one, meaning one who continually leaps, one who continually opens, one who continually goes forward."

"We are undoing a pattern... It's the human pattern: we project onto the world a zillion possibilities of attaining resolution."

"We awaken this bodhichitta, this tenderness for life, when we can no longer shield ourselves from the vulnerability of our condition, from the basic fragility of existence. In the words of the sixteenth Gyalwa Karmapa, You take it all in. You let the pain of the world touch your heart and you turn it into compassion. It is said that in difficult times, it is only bodhichitta that heals."

"We call something bad; we call it good. But really we just don't know."

"We can bring ourselves back to the spiritual path countless times every day simply by exercising our willingness to rest in the uncertainty of the present moment - over and over again."

"We can lead our life so as to become more awake to who we are and what we're doing rather than trying to improve or change or get rid of who we are or what we're doing."

"We can step into uncharted territory and relax with the groundlessness of our situation; [we can] dissolve the dualistic tension between us and them, this and that, good and bad, by inviting in what we usually avoid. My teacher described this as leaning into the sharp points."

"We can still be timid or jealous or full of feelings of unworthiness. The point is not to try to change ourselves. Meditation practice isn't about trying to throw ourselves away and become something better. It's about befriending who we are already. The ground of practice is you or me or whoever we are right now, just as we are. That's the ground, that's what we study, that's what we come to know with tremendous curiosity and interest."

"We cannot be present and run our story-line at the same time."

"We don?t set out to save the world; we set out to wonder how other people are doing and to reflect on how our actions affect other people?s hearts."

"We don't have to be harsh with ourselves when we think, sitting here, that our meditation or our oryoki or the way we are in the world is in the category of worst horse."

"We have a choice. We can spend our whole life suffering because we can't relax with how things really are, or we can relax and embrace the open-endedness of the human situation, which is fresh, unfixated, unbiased."

"We insist on being Someone, with a capital S. We get security from defining ourselves as worthless or worthy, superior or inferior. We waste precious time exaggerating or romanticizing or belittling ourselves with a complacent surety that yes, that?s who we are. We mistake the openness of our being?the inherent wonder and surprise of each moment?for a solid, irrefutable self. Because of this misunderstanding, we suffer."

"We think that by protecting ourselves from suffering, we are being kind to ourselves. The truth is we only become more fearful, more hardened and more alienated. We experience ourselves as being separate from the whole. This separateness becomes like a prison for us - a prison that restricts us to our personal hopes and fears, and to caring only for the people nearest to us. Curiously enough, if we primarily try to shield ourselves from discomfort, we suffer. Yet, when we don't close off, when we let our hearts break, we discover our kinship with all beings."

"We think that if we just meditated enough or jogged enough or ate perfect food, everything would be perfect. But from the point of view of someone who is awake, that?s death. Seeking security or perfection, rejoicing in feeling confirmed and whole, self-contained and comfortable, is some kind of death. It doesn?t have any fresh air. There?s no room for something to come in and interrupt all that. We are killing the moment by controlling our experience."

"Welcome the present moment as if you had invited it. Is all we have perhaps we might as well work with it rather than struggle against it. We might as well make it our friend and teacher rather than our enemy."

"Welcome the present moment as if you had invited it. Why? Because it is all we ever have."

"We're afraid that this anger or sorrow or loneliness is going to last forever... Instead, acting it out is what makes it last."

"We're here to get to know and study ourselves. The path, the way to do that, our main vehicle, is going to be meditation, and some sense of general wakefulness."

"What happens with you when you begin to feel uneasy, unsettled, queasy? Notice the panic, notice"

"What I have realized through practicing is that practice isn't about being the best horse or the good horse or the poor horse or the worst horse."

"What is the lesson in this wind? What is the storm trying to tell you? What will you learn if you face it with courage? With full honesty and ? lean into it."

"What we hate in ourselves, we?ll hate in others. To the degree that we have compassion for ourselves, we will also have compassion for others. Having compassion starts and ends with having compassion for all those unwanted parts of ourselves, all those imperfections that we don?t even want to look at. Compassion isn?t some kind of self-improvement project or ideal that we?re trying to live up to."

"What you do for yourself- any gesture of kindness, any gesture of gentleness, any gesture of honesty, will affect how you experience your world."

"What you do for yourself, any gesture of kindness, any gesture of gentleness, any gesture of honesty and clear seeing toward yourself, will affect how you experience your world. In fact, it will transform how you experience the world. What you do for yourself, you?re doing for others, and what you do for others, you?re doing for yourself."

"When one of the emperors of China asked Bodhidharma (the Zen master who brought Zen from India to China) what enlightenment was, his answer was, Lots of space, nothing holy. Meditation is nothing holy. Therefore there?s nothing that you think or feel that somehow gets put in the category of sin. There?s nothing that you can think or feel that gets put in the category of bad. There?s nothing that you can think or feel that gets put in the category of wrong. It?s all good juicy stuff?the manure of waking up, the manure of achieving enlightenment, the art of living in the present moment."

"When people start to meditate and work or to work with any kind of spiritual discipline, they often think that somehow they're going to improve, which is a sort of subtle aggression against who they really are. It's a bit like saying, 'If I jog, I'll be a much better person.' 'If I could only get a nicer house, I'll be a better person.' 'If I could meditate and calm down, I'd be a better person.' Or the scenario may be that they find fault with others; they might say, 'If it weren't for my husband, I'd have a perfect marriage.' 'If it weren't for the fact that my boss and I don't get along, my job would be great.' And 'If it weren't for my mind, my meditation would be excellent.' But loving-kindness, or maŒtri, toward ourselves doesn't mean getting rid of anything. Maitri means that we can still be crazy after all these years. We can still be angry after all these years."

"When something is precious, instead of holding it tightly, we can open our hands and share it."

"When the Buddha taught, he didn?t say that we were bad people or that there was some sin that we had committed?original or otherwise?that made us more ignorant than clear, more harsh than gentle, more closed than open. He taught that there is a kind of innocent misunderstanding that we all share, something that can be turned around, corrected, and seen through, as if we were in a dark room and someone showed us where the light switch was. It isn?t a sin that we are in a dark room. It?s just an innocent situation, but how fortunate that someone shows us where the light switch is. It brightens up our life considerably. We can start to read books, to see one another?s faces, to discover the colors of the walls, to enjoy the little animals that creep in and out of the room."

"When things fall apart and we can?t get the pieces back together, when we lose something dear to us, when they whole thing is just not working and we don?t know what to do, this is the time when the natural warmth of tenderness, the warmth of empathy and kindness, are just waiting to be uncovered, just waiting to be embraced. This is our chance to come out of our self-protecting bubble and to realize that we are never alone. This is our chance to finally understand that wherever we go, everyone we meet is essentially just like us. Our own suffering, if we turn toward it, can open us to a loving relationship with the world."

"When we are caught up in the eight worldly dharmas, we suffer."

"When we are willing to stay even a moment with uncomfortable energy, we gradually learn not to fear it."

"When we feel dread, when we feel discomfort of any kind, it can connect us at the heart with all the other people feeling dread and discomfort. We can pause and touch into dread. We can touch bitterness of rejection and the rawness of being slighted. Whether we are at home or in a public spot or caught in a traffic jam or walking into a movie, we can stop and look at the other people there and realize that in pain and in joy they are just like me. Just like me they don?t want to feel physical pain or insecurity or rejection. Just like me they want to feel respected and physically comfortable."

"When we protect ourselves so we won't feel pain, that protection becomes like armor, like armor that imprisons the softness of the heart."