You write in order to change the world, knowing perfectly well that you probably can’t but also knowing that literature is indispensable to the world….The world changes according to the way people see it, and if you alter, even by a millimeter, the way…people look at reality, then you can change it.

According to the Sufi’s, God said to the Prophet Mohammad, “I am a hidden treasure, and I want to be known.” In his yearning to be loved and experienced, God set in motion an evolutionary pattern that reached its pinnacle in the human capacity for spiritual awakening. God, or Truth, in other words, is seeking to awaken itself through you, to see itself everywhere through your eyes and taste itself everywhere through your lips. “That which you are seeking is always seeking you” wrote an anonymous sage.

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.

Trying to be happy by accumulating possessions is like trying to satisfy hunger by taping sandwiches all over your body.

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

We are all a paradoxical bundle of rich potential that consists of both neurosis and wisdom.  

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).

It is difficult to undo our own damage, and to recall to our presence that which we have asked to leave. It is hard to desecrate a grave and change your mind. The very holy mountains are keeping mum. We doused the burning bush and cannot rekindle it; we are lighting matches in vain under every green tree. Dd the wind use to cry, and the hills shout forth praise? Now speech has perished from among the lifeless things of earth, and living things say very little to very few.
……and whenever there is stillness there is a still small voice, God’s speaking from the whirlwind, nature’s old song and dance, the show we drove from town.

(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.

When circumstances bring our emotions to a sharp point, at that point both confusion and wakefulness emerge from the same ground. If we are willing to practice in that groundless ground, that too is smiling at our fear. In the Kagyu tradition, this is also called practicing in the place where rock meets bone…..I learned recently that it refers to crushing bone for soup with a heavy rock mallet. That sense of crushing or breaking through our confusion or hesitation is also an expression of opening everything up, letting everything go, exposing the innermost marrow of the situation. It is about our ultimate vulnerability.

Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, I wish someone told me. All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it's just not that good. It's trying to be good, it has potential, but it's not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. A lot of people never get past this phase, they quit. Most people I know who do interesting, creative work went through years of this. We know our work doesn't have this special thing that we want it to have. We all go through this. And if you are just starting out or you are still in this phase, you gotta know it's normal and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work...It is only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions. And I took longer to figure out how to do this than anyone I've ever met. It's gonna take a while. It's normal to take a while. You've just gotta fight your way through.

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 long ago abandoned the notion of a life without storms, or a world without dry and killing seasons. Life is too complicated, too constantly changing, to be anything but what it is. And I am, by nature, too mercurial to be anything but deeply wary of the grave unnaturalness involved in any attempt to exert too much control over essentially uncontrollable forces. There will always be propelling, disturbing elements, and they will be there until...the watch is taken from the wrist.

It is, at the end of the day, the individual moments of restlessness, of bleakness, of strong persuasions and maddened enthusiasms, that inform one's life, change the nature and direction of one's work, and give final meaning and color to one's loves and friendships.

(quoted in Sarah Wilson's First, We Make the Beast Beautiful)

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.

Contemporary spirituality is a closed belief system. The possibility of error is never considered because one’s feelings are always right. They usually fail to deal with evil. It encourages disastrous self-absorption allowing people to believe they are part of a spiritual elite. “Like extremist; political movements they shine with moral vanity.”

Several things dovetailed in my mind, & it struck me, what quality went to form a Man of Achievement especially in Literature & which Shakespeare possessed so enormously--I mean Negative Capability, that is when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason.

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.

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.

The pursuit of happiness seems to me a really dangerous idea and has led to a contemporary disease in Western society, which is fear of sadness...I'd like just for a year to have a moratorium on the word "happiness" and to replace it with the word "wholeness". Ask yourself "is this contributing to my wholeness?" and if you're having a bad day, it is.

The emergent science of ecology is easily summed up: Everything is connected. But interconnection is anathema to a consumer notion of the world, where each of us is useful precisely to the degree that we consider ourselves the center of everything.

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.

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.

From "Writing to Change the World"

My dad told me about a rule he and other soldiers followed in the Pacific during WWII. It was called the Law of 26, and it postulates that for every result you expect from an action there will be twenty-six results you do not expect.

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.

I beg you, to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don't search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.

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.

Mind is harder to describe. It is not a “thing” we can point to as easily as we can identify the body or speech. However deeply we investigate this aspect of being, we can’t really locate any definite object that we can call mind….
At best, centuries of investigation have been able to determine the mind has no specific location, shape, color, form, or any other tangible quality we can ascribe to other basic aspects….
In fact, the more scientists scrutinize mental activity the more closely they approach the Buddhist understanding of mind as a perpetually evolving EVENT rather than a distinct entity.
…….a constantly evolving occurrence arising through the interaction of neurological habits and the unpredictable elements of immediate experience.
When we look at our mind, it’s like trying to see the back of our head without the aid of a mirror.

The Tibetan Buddhist term for mind is sem:  That which knows. Not so much an object as a capacity to recognize and reflect on our experiences. The brain is the physical support for the mind.

The mind is, in many ways, like the ocean. The “color” changes from day to day or moment to moment, reflecting the thoughts, emotions, and so on passing “overhead”, so to speak. But the mind itself, like the ocean, never changes. It’s always clean and clear, no matter what it is reflecting.

The neuronal gossip that keeps you from seeing your mind in its fullness doesn’t really change the fundamental nature of your mind. Thoughts like “I’m ugly, I’m stupid, or I’m boring are nothing more than a kind of biological mud, temporarily obscuring the brilliant qualities of Buddha nature or natural mind.

Thinking is the natural activity of the mind. Meditation is not about stopping your thoughts. It is simply a process of resting the mind in its natural state, which is open and naturally aware of thoughts, emotions, and sensations as they occur. It is like a river.
But that doesn’t mean you have to be a slave to whatever your mind produces.

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.

I feel the vacuum, the loneliness, the silence, the dehydration of the soul as people who want desperately to save our constitution, country and planet still wander the streets without knowing how to say hi to one another.

If women ruled the world and
    we all got massages,
there would be no war.

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

Nirvana is not the blowing out of the candle. It is the extinguishing of the flame because day is come.

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.

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.

Let me quickly tell you about the time I ran into my mate Uge, a surfer I’ve known from around the neighborhood for a number of years. He was sitting in the sun having a coffee at a café. I asked what he was doing because he wasn’t reading the paper or talking into a phone. He was just sitting there. “Sez, I’m checking in with my Inside People,” he said everyday-ishly.
   I pressed him on this. He explained this entailed just sitting and asking of one’s people, “Are we happy? Comfortable? Heading in a good direction?” …..
   
   It’s pretty much meditation spelled out fresh. In fact, it reminds me of Sky’s advise to just meditate. It’s a powerful point. Just create the space with your Inside People and the rest will unfurl as it needs to.
   Uge tells me that we then feel where our inside peeps are at. Try saying to yourself, as he does, “Are we good? Are we comfortable? Is this where we should be? Is it making sense?”
    “Don’t think or plan in this space, just check in,” he says.

   Chatting to Uge I realized it’s also important to listen to what your peeps tell you when you ask them how they are. It will probably be heard with a feeling, perhaps an expansiveness, a release. It’s funny, for me, the answer that I hear is invariably, “Better than we thought, actually.” Inside peeps are like that. When you check in on them

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.