It is inevitably true that life is suffering. But the reverse is also true: suffering is life. It is in the midst of suffering that we get to exercise so many of the virtues that make us human. Our sense of courage, justice, compassion, wisdom; all these things manifest and operate in and because of the reality of suffering.
— Barry Magid, Ending The Pursuit Of Happiness
…reality is that which does not go away even if you don’t believe in it.
— Robert Saltzman
From radical nonduality, you get nothing. Or put differently, you get everything, just as it is. Radical nonduality is not about improvement or progress. It offers a description of reality, never a prescription for how to fix it. It suggests no path, no methodology, nowhere to go, nothing to do other than what is already happening effortlessly by itself.
— Joan Tollifson, Death The End Of Self Improvement
Belief is the problem not what is believed.
Not knowing, intimacy, mystery—all are words that convey a simple, yet profound, openness to the moment without any attempt to master, control, or understand it.
— Barry Magid, Ending The Pursuit Of Happiness
There is no stillness or silence, there is always movement and sound.
There is nowhere to go. We take ourselves everywhere and find ourselves everywhere.
There is no one to whom we are not related. Yes, the idea of me and mine is a cultural cornerstone, but like all ideas, it’s false.
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.
— Carl Jung
This is what Zen means by being detached – not being without emotion or feeling, but being one in whom feeling is not sticky or blocked, and through whom the experiences of the world pass like the reflections of birds flying over water.
— Alan Watts
What is the ‘silence' that you are after? Do you hear those trucks passing by on the road and the flushing of the toilet? Do you want to escape from all this and go and sit in the caves? There is noise inside you wherever you go.
We truly become ourselves when we forget ourselves.
I stroll along the stream up to where it ends.
I sit down watching the clouds as they begin to rise.
Wang Wei
The inflation of the ego is brought about by its identification with the collective values.
On this, World Meditation Day, a few random thoughts on practice:
- You can’t do meditation wrong. There’s no success or failure.
- In practicing meditation, we’re not trying to live up to some kind of ideal— quite the opposite. We’re just being with our experience, whatever it is…
- Ordinary everyday life is meditation enough if we attend to it in the moment with simplicity, an open curious mind and without taking ownership of any of it.
- The only way one really gets any of the most important benefits of meditation practice is by giving up on the notion that there are any benefits to meditation practice.
- The heart of meditation is simply being interested in what is here now – being more interested in what is… rather than in what was, what will be, or what should be.
And finally…
What we’re really in the business of doing is helping people stay with the thoughts and feelings they are coming to meditation to escape.
— Ordinary Mind Zen teacher Barry Magid