An unknown Sung Dynasty Nun.

Searching for spring all day I never saw it,
straw sandals treading everywhere
among the clouds, along the bank.

Coming home, I laughed, catching
the plum blossoms’ scent:
spring at each branch tip, already perfect.

Bonhoeffer was a Lutheran Theologian executed by the Nazis.

Nothing can make up for the absence of someone whom we love, and it would be wrong to seek a substitute; we must simply hold out and see it through. That sounds very hard at first, but at the same time, it is a great consolation, for the gap, as long as it remains unfilled, preserves the bonds between us. It is nonsense to say that God fills the gap; God doesn’t fill it, but on the contrary, keeps it empty and so helps us to keep alive our former communion with each other, even at the cost of pain.

Happiness is somebody to love,
Something to do
And something to hope for.

All shall be well
and all shall be well
and all manner of things
shall be well.

Your life experience is a vehicle for coming to God.  

The mind is a wonderful servant, but a terrible master.   

From "The Gift of Fear"

Anxiety kills more Americans each year than the dangers we fear (through high blood pressure, heart disease, depression, and a myriad of other stress related ailments).

(Zen Master)

If you go out and confirm the ten thousand things, this is delusion; if you let the ten thousand things come and confirm you, this is enlightenment.

Every creative act reveals God and expands his being.
I know that may be hard to comprehend.
All creatures are doing their best to help God in his birth of Himself.

….to begin depriving death of its greatest advantage over us….let us deprive death of its strangeness, let us frequent it, let us get used to it; let us have nothing more often in mind than death….we do not know where death awaits us so let us wait for it everywhere. To practice death is to practice freedom. A man who learns how to die has unlearned how to be a slave. 

Subject and object are like sandalwood and
its fragrance. Samsara and nirvana are like ice
and water. Appearances and emptiness are like
clouds and the sky. Thoughts and the nature of
the mind are like waves and the ocean.

Tell a wise person, or else keep silent,
because the mass man will mock right away.
I praise what is truly alive,
what longs to be burned to death.

In the calm waters of the love-nights,
where you were begotten, where you have begotten,
a strange feeling comes over you.
When you see the silent candle burning.

Now you are no longer caught
in the obsession with darkness,
and a desire for higher love making
sweeps you upward.

Distance does not make you falter,
now, arriving in magic, flying,
and finally, insane for the light,
you are the butterfly and you are gone.

And so long as you haven’t experienced 
this: to die and so to grow,
you are only a troubled guest
on the dark earth.

In times of change, the learners will inherit the Earth while those attached to their old certainties will find themselves beautifully equipped to deal with a world that no longer exists.

Science is not enough, religion is not enough, art is not enough, politics and economics are not enough, nor is love, nor is duty, nor is action, however disinterested, nor, however sublime, is contemplation. Nothing short of everything will really do.

It takes a certain amount of intelligence and imagination to realize the extraordinary queerness and mysteriousness of the world in which we live.

….what consciousness is, we know not; and how it is that anything so remarkable as a state of consciousness comes about as the result of irritating nervous tissue, is just as unaccountable as the appearance of the Djin when Aladdin rubbed his lamp, or as any other ultimate fact of nature.

I wish I knew the beauty 
of leaves falling
To whom are we beautiful
As we go?

Let the young rain of tears come.
Let the calm hands of grief come.
It’s not as evil as you think.

As told by Carlos Castenada:

The basic difference between an ordinary man and a warrior is that a warrior takes
everything as a challenge, while an ordinary man takes everything as a blessing or a curse.

What is not brought to consciousness is brought to us as fate.

Perhaps I myself am the enemy who must be loved.

The first part of the spiritual journey should properly be called psychological rather than spiritual because it involves peeling away the myths and illusions that have misinformed us.

Security is mostly a superstition. It does not exist in nature, nor do the children of men as a whole experience it. Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. Life is a daring adventure or it is nothing.

It was late August when we left, I gave away my plants, all but a few.
The huge van, idling at the curb all morning, was suddenly gone.

We got into the car. Friends handed us the cats through half-closed
windows. We backed out to the street, the trailer behind, dumb and
stubborn.

We talked little, listening to a Tiger double header on the car radio.
Dust and cat hair floated in the light. I ate a cheese sandwich I didn’t want.

During the second game, the signal faded until it was too faint to hear.
I felt like a hand without an arm. We drove all night and part of the
next morning.

The barn bears the weight
of the first heavy snow
without complaint.

White breath of cows
rises in the tie-up, a man
wearing a frayed winter jacket
reaches for his milking stool
in the dark.

The cows have gone into the ground,
and the man,
his wife beside him now.

A nuthatch droops
to the ground, feeding,
on sunflower seed and bits of bread
I scattered in the snow.

The cats doze near the stove.
They lift their heads
as the plow goes down the road,
making the house 
tremble as it passes.

How much better it is
to carry wood to the fire
than to moan about your life.
How much better to throw the garbage
onto the compost, or to pin the clean
sheet on the line
with a gray-brown wooden clothes pin!

THE CIRCLE AND THE GRASS
By Jane Kenyon
    1
Last night the wind came into the yard,
and wrenched the biggest branch
from the box elder, and threw it down
--no, that was not what it wanted---
and kept going.

    2
Eighty years ago, someone
planted the sapling,
midway between porch and fence,
and later that day,
looked down from the bedroom
on the highest branch.

The woman who stood at the window
could only imagine shade,
and the sound of leaves moving overhead,
like so many whispered conversations.

    3
I keep busy in the house,
but I hear the high drone
of the saw, and the drop in pitch
as chain cuts into bark.

I clean with the vacuum
so I won’t have to listen,
finally the man goes for lunch,
leaving the house quiet
as a face paralyzed by strokes.

     4
All afternoon I hear the blunt
shudder of limbs striking the ground.
The tree drops its arms
like someone abandoning a conviction:
--perhaps I have been wrong all this time—

When it’s over, there is nothing left
but a pale circle on the grass,
dark in the center, like an eye

It’s quiet here. The cats
sprawl, each
in a favored place.
The geranium leans this way
to see if I’m writing about her:
head all petals,, brown
stalk, and those green fans.
So you see,
I am writing about you.

I turn on the radio. Wrong.
Let’s not have any noise
in this room, except
the sound of a voice reading a poem.
The cats request
The Meadow Mouse by Theodore Roethke.

The house settles down on its haunches
for a doze.
I know you are with me, plants,
and cats—and even so, I’m frightened,
sitting in the middle of perfect
possibility.

Several quotes from "Conscious Business"

I realized that the people oppressing me had absolutely no concern whatsoever for my well-being. I realized that the only way I could improve my situation was to take responsibility to protect myself. I stopped expecting the rulers, who only had ill will toward me, to change, I decided to do what I could, given that they wouldn’t.

External facts are not stimuli—they are information.

If you are the one suffering, you are the one with the problem. And that means that you are the one who had better take corrective action. If you expect the ones who made the decision that suited their needs to solve your problem, I wish you luck.

Discipline is the capacity to maintain awareness and choose consciously in the face of instinctual pressures….as an individual, you need discipline beause you are genetically programmed to respond instinctually to immediate risks or opportunities in the environment.

A good life subordinates success to integrity.

Excerpts from "Bringing Home the Dharma"

Distractions are the natural movement of the mind, which is often like muddy or turbulent water. Each time an enticing image or an interesting memory floats by, it is our habit to react, to get entangled, or to get lost. When painful images or feelings arise, it is our habit to contract, to avoid them, or unknowingly distract ourselves. We can feel the power of these habits of desire and distraction, of fear and reaction. In many of us these forces are so great that after a few unfamiliar moments of calm, our mind rebels. We repeatedly encounter restlessness, busyness, plans, unfelt feelings, and these all interrupt our focus again and again. The heart of meditation practice is working with these distractions, steadying our canoe so to speak, letting the waves wobble us and pass by, coming back again and again to this moment in a quiet and collected way.

The steady power of our concentration shows each part of our life to be in change and flux, like a river, even as we feel it.

But where have we actually gone? It is only that a mood or thought or doubt has swept through our mind. As soon as we recognize this, we can let go and settle back again in the next moment. We can always begin again.


Always remember that in training a puppy we want to end up with the puppy as our friend. In the same way, we must practice seeing our mind and body as “friend”. Even its wanderings can be included in our meditation with a friendly interest and curiosity. Right away we can notice how it moves. The mind produces waves. Our breath is a wave, and the sensations of our body are a wave. We don’t have to fight the waves. We can simply acknowledge, “Surf’s up.” “Here’s a wave of memories from when I was three years old.”
“Here’s a wave of planning the future.” Then its time to reconnect with the wave of the breath….
Our task is to train the puppy to become our life long friend.

Don’t worry about what the world wants from you, worry about what makes you come more alive. Because what the world needs are people who are more alive. Your real job is to increase the color and zest of your life.

From "The Seeker's Guide"

If you drew a long line and put modern cynicism at the start and Beginner’s Mind at the end, you’d have a map for the contemporary spiritual pilgrim. Somehow our culture has evolved to the point where pessimism has become synonymous with intelligence, and where an overload of information is mistaken for knowledge.

If we bypass our humanness, each path leads back to the same question: What are we hiding from in ourselves and in each other?
Rumi called this the “Open Secret.” The veils we wear so we won’t see our foolishness, our pain, our tenderness. We hide from the secret fact of our very humanness. “The full catastrophe” as Nikos Kazatzakis had Zorba the Greek call it. 

From "The Seeker's Guide"

I am talking about the little ways in which we deceive ourselves on the spiritual path—the ways that allow us to read about simplicity and freedom as we become more complicated and attached; the ways that let us talk about being “free of ego”, while feeling really special saying it.

From "The Seeker's Guide"

1—choice based
2—unavoidable
3—reactive, how we react to 1 & 2
4—Time stress—how does our perception of time and the reality of time frequently differ
Greet our reactions as messengers. Messages from reality.

It’s better to view the ego as a vehicle given to us to navigate life’s journey, rather than something to be annihilated on the one hand or exalted on the other. The best way to deal with ego is to get to know it well enough to understand when it is serving you and when it is leading you astray.

Paraphrased from "The Seeker's Guide"

Abraham Maslow said that the fear of knowing is very deeply a fear of doing. Elizabeth Lesser takes this idea further, “How much do we want to know if knowing pulls us out of the safety zone? How much responsibility for our own discontent would we be willing to take? Are we ready to stop projecting our lack of fulfillment onto other people and take our lives into our own hands?”

From "The Seeker's Guide"

Take responsibility but give up control.

We are all in this together, just bozos on the bus.

You can call it wisdom, or sanity, or health, or enlightenment. I use the word God as a shortcut. I am comfortable with the word God because I don’t have the foggiest idea what it means.

For every complex problem there is a simple solution.
And it is always wrong.

If you want to identify me, ask me not where I live,
or what I like to eat, or how I comb my hair,
but ask me what I am living for, in detail,
and ask me what I think is keeping me
from living fully for the thing
I want to live for.

With all its many risks, this life endures
No more than wind-blown bubbles in a stream.
How marvelous to breathe in and out again,
To fall asleep and then awake refreshed

At the end of his life:

Do you know what astonished me most in the world? The inability of force to create
anything. In the long run, the sword is always beaten by spirit.

I am the rain coming from the dew
that causes the grasses to laugh with the joy of life.
I call forth tears, the aroma of holy work.
I am the yearning for good.

One day I saw with the eyes of my eternity
in bliss and without effort, a stone.
This stone was like a great mountain
and was of assorted colors.
It tasted sweet, like heavenly herbs.
I asked the sweet stone: Who are you?
It replied: “I am Jesus.”

From "Why Meditate"

No change occurs if we just let our habitual tendencies and automatic patterns of thought perpetuate and even reinforce themselves, thought after thought, day after day, year after year. But those tendencies and patterns can be challenged.
…..How could it (the mind) be subject to change without the least effort, just from wishing alone? That makes no more sense than expecting to play a Mozart Sonata by just occasionally doodling around on the piano.

From "Why Meditate"

Awareness makes it possible for us to perceive phenomena of every kind. Buddhism describes this basic quality of the mind as luminous because it illuminates both the external world through perceptions and the (internal) inner world of sensation, emotion, reasoning, memory, hope, and fear.
Although this cognitive faculty underlies every mental event it is not itself affected by any of these events. A ray of light may shine on a face disfigured by hatred or on a smiling face; it may shine on a jewel or on a garbage heap; but the light itself is neither dirty or clean. Understanding that the essential nature of consciousness is neutral shows us that it is possible to change our mental universe. We can transform the content of our thoughts and experiences. The neutral and luminous background f our consciousness provides us with the space we need to observe mental events rather than be at their mercy. We then also have the space we need to create the conditions necessary to transform these mental events.

From "Why Meditate"

We expect a lot of effort to improve the external conditions of our lives, but in the end it is always the mind that creates our experience of the world and translates this experience into either well-being or suffering. If we transform our way of perceiving things, we transform the quality of our lives. It is this kind of transformation that is brought about by the form of mind training called meditation.
SO, the primary goal of meditation is to transform our experience of the world.

According to Buddhism, the mind is not an entity but rather a dynamic stream of 
experiences, a succession of moments o consciousness.

Quotes from "Why Meditate"

The past no longer exists, the future hasn’t arisen yet, and the present is paradoxically both ungraspable and unchanging. It is ungraspable because it never stays still, and it is unchanging because, in the words of the physicist Erwin Shroedinger, “The present is the only thing with no end.” Cultivating mindfulness does not mean that you should not take into account the lessons of the past or not make plans for the future; rather it is a matter of living clearly in the present experience, which includes all three times.


Most of the time our mind is unstable, disorderly, and driven by whims as it bounces back and forth between hope and fear. It is self-centered, hesitant, fragmented, confused, and sometimes even absent, as well as weakened by internal contradictions and a feeling of insecurity. It rebels against any kind of training and is constantly occupied by a stream of inner chatter that generates a constant background noise we are barely aware of. Because these dysfunctional states are nothing but the product of the mind itself, it makes sense that the mind can also remedy them. That is the object of practicing (meditation).

According to Buddhist analysis, the world is a result of the coming together of an infinite number of causes and conditions that are continually changing. Just as a rainbow is formed at the precise moment the sun shines on a collection of raindrops and disappears as soon as the factors that produce it are no longer present, phenomena exist in an essentially interdependent mode and have no permanent, independent existence. Ultimate reality is therefore described as “empty” of independently existing animate or inanimate phenomena. Everything is relationship; nothing exists in and of itself.

Excerpt from "The Man Watching"

When we win it’s with small things,
And the triumph itself makes us small.
What is extraordinary and eternal
Does not want to be bent by us.

….Winning does not tempt that man.
This is how he grows: by being beaten, decisively,
By constantly greater things.

It is possible I am pushing against solid rock
in flintlike layers, as the ore lies, alone;
I am such a long way in I can see no way through,
and no space: everything is close to my face,
and everything close to my face is stone.

I don’t have much knowledge yet in grief—
so this darkness makes me feel small.
You be the master: make yourself fierce, break in:
then your great transforming will happen to me,
and my great grief cry will happen to you.

From seeing the bars, his seeing is so exhausted
that it no longer holds anything anymore.
To him the world is bars, a hundred thousand
bars, and behind the bars, nothing.

The lithe swinging of that rhythmical easy stride
which circles down to the tiniest hub
is like a dance of energy around a point
in which a great will stands stunned and numb.

Only at times the curtains of the pupils rise
without a sound….then a shape enters,
slips through the tightened silence of the shoulders,
reaches the heart, and dies.

In all the directions of the universe,
there is only one truth.
When we see clearly, the great teachings are the same.
What can ever be lost? What can be attained?
If we attain something, it was there from the beginning of time.
If we lose something, it is hiding somewhere near us.

Excerpt from Shambhala Sun--May 2014

On distraction.  It is not just a modern obsession. According to Buddhism, it is the ego’s fundamental defense mechanism. What we are actually distracting ourselves from—what we are protecting ourselves against—is the open space and full intensity of reality.
From the ego’s point of view, enlightenment is the worst possible news.

That to me is the most wonderful thing about any vital spiritual practice. It doesn’t necessarily say, stop doing that. Or if it does, it says, here’s how to stop doing that. Because you can only get so good with sheer will power. You have to look into the way things actually work to empower yourself to do better.
Here is a wonderful metaphor I sometimes use with my students. Imagine you are on a cruise ship in heavy seas. You’re the only person who’s stable, and everybody else is moving around in a crazy way. You decide to have mercy on them, and that’s pretty good, right?
But I think a better model is to imagine you’re on a cruise ship and the surface is made of ice, and you’re carrying six trays, and you’re wearing roller skates, and you’re drunk and so is everyone else.
So nobody’s the boss and the situation is unstable. There’s no fixed point. When I think of life that way, it sums up the proper level of mercy and tolerance. We really don’t know what’s going on, so our feelings of sympathy or empathy is related to our mutual lostness.
                         Everybody’s lost at once.

Don't mistake my frivolity for shallowness, and I won't mistake your seriousness for
profundity.

In the beginning of heaven and earth
There were no words,
Words came out of the womb of matter
And whether a man dispassionately
Sees to the core of life
Or passionately sees the surface
The core and the surface are essentially the same,
Words making them seem different
Only to express appearance.
If name be needed, wonder names them both:
From wonder into wonder
Existence opens.

Translation:  Amaravali Sangha

Whatever living beings there may be,
Whether they are weak or strong, omitting none,
The great or the mighty, medium, short, or small,

The seen and the unseen,
Those living near and those living far away,
Those born and to-be-born,
May all beings be at ease!
Let none deceive another,
Or despise any being in any state.
Let none through anger or ill-will
Wish harm upon another.

Even as a mother protects with her life
Her child, her only child,
So with a boundless heart
Should one cherish all living beings:

Radiating kindness over the entire world.
Spreading upwards to the skies,
And downwards to the depths,
Outwards and unbounded,
Freed from hatred and ill will

Whether standing or walking, seated or lying down,
Free from drowsiness,
One should sustain this mindfulness.
That is said to be the sublime abiding.

We do not see things as they are.
We see them as we are.

I honor the place in you
where the entire universe resides.
I honor the place in you
of love, of light, of truth, of peace.

I honor the place in you
where if you are in that place in you and
I am in that place in me,
there is only us.

Ram Dass quoting Alan Watts about using drugs to obtain altered states of consciousness.

"Once you've gotten the message, hang up the phone."

I wake up in the morning torn between the desire to save the world and to enjoy the world. This makes it hard to plan the day.

The strategic mind tells us that we need to be in control to be safe. The soul says something more radical and frightening to us, wholly unlike the soothing reassurances of the strategic mind. Out of the silence the soul startles us by telling us we are safe already, safe in our own experiences, even if that may be the path of failure. The soul loves the journey itself. The textured and undulations of the path it has made through the landscape by hazard and design, are nourishing in themselves.

The motivational speakers and self-help books are all wrong: there is no way of creating a life where we are full participants one hundred percent of the time. There is no way of being fully human without at times being fully stuck or even completely absent; we are simply not made that way. There is no possibility of pursuing a work without coming to terms with all the ways it is impossible to do it. Feeling far away from what we want tells us two things about our work: that we are at the beginning or that we have forgotten where we are going.

The imagination and its ability to discern bigger underlying patterns is just as important if not more important than a firm grasp of details of what we want. The mighty interior wish is more important than mere outward details that see to tell others that you don’t have a clue what you are doing.

In many ways, our to-do lists have become the postmodern equivalent of the priest’s rosary, the lama’s sutra, or the old prayer book—keeping a larger, avalanching reality at bay. Above all, the to-do list keeps the evil of not-doing at bay, a list that many of us like to chant and cycle through religiously as we make our way to work through the commute.
…..Little wonder, then, made as we are and trained to organize complexity, we are constantly trying to assign each and everything a name so that we can organize it and control it, so much so that it can be tempting to try to name and organize something that cannot be pressured or regulated, this elusive thing called the self.

As human beings, we have a necessary conceit about our own ability to influence events. The truth about our own modest contribution might immobilize us: much easier then, to tell ourselves a story about how much we make our own reality. The United States, that supposed bedrock of upward mobility, is actually one of the developed industrial nations where people are most likely to live and die in the class to which they were born. We are creatures who like to believe our own publicity, and we do not like to face powers that can easily surpass and encompass our best hopes. We hope always for a free pass to circumvent forces that humble us on a daily basis.

Engaging within the self, starting to treat ourselves as if we were a living, learning surprise, worthy of existence despite our constant fears, enables us to engage in a real way with others, to see others as possible surprises and even gifts.

Men marry because they are tired; women because they are curious. Both are disappointed.

There is no sense talking about "being true to myself" until you are sure what voice you are
being true to. It takes hard work to differentiate the voices of the unconscious.

I have felt
A presence that disturbs me with the joy
Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused,
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean and the living air,
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man;
A motion and a spirit, that impels
All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
And rolls through all things.

Two miles I had to walk along the fields
Before I reached my home. Magnificent
The morning was, a memorable pomp,
More glorious that I ever had beheld,
The sea was laughing at a distance; all
The solid mountains were as bright as clouds,
Grain tinctured, drenched in empyrean lights;
And in the meadows and the lower grounds
Was all the sweetness of a common dawn,
Dews, vapours, and the melody of birds,
And labourers going forth into the fields.
Ah! Need I say, dear Friend, but to the brim
My heart was full; I made no vows, but vows
Were then made for me; bond unknown to me
Was given, that I should be, also sinning greatly,
A dedicated Spirit. On I walk’d
In blessedness, which even yet remains.