Posts in the “zen” category

“Hard times are the sandpaper of our incarnation. They shape us.”

~ Ram Dass

“The great way is not difficult if you just don’t pick and choose.”
~ Zen Saying

“Everything is suffering for those who discriminate.”
~ Patanjali (in the Yoga Sutras)

“Many paths lead to the same garden.”
~ Me

This is a page of quotes from Daniel Ingram, mostly from two versions of his book, Mastering the Core Teachings of the Buddha. There are maybe five great books I have read about meditation, and this is one of the Top 5, maybe #1.

All of the following quotes come from Mr. Ingram.

The quotes from Daniel Ingram

Until you gain access concentration, you ain’t got squat.

... if we can simply know our sensate experience clearly enough, we will arrive at fundamental wisdom.

Insight practice is all about ... grounding attention in our six sense doors and their true nature.

There are six sense doors. Sensations arise and vanish. Notice this for every sensation.

The gold standard for training in concentration is how quickly we can enter into specific, skillful, altered states of consciousness...

The gold standard for training in wisdom ... is that we can quickly and consistently perceive the true nature of the countless quick sensations that make up our whole reality...

A favorite mindfulness meditation that helps bring me back to the present moment:

In just this moment, what do you feel?
What do you smell?

(Or, more generally, “What do you sense?”)

That isn’t a mantra per se, but more of what I call a “mindfulness reminder” to help bring you back to the present moment.

To my surprise, I saw that this favorite old Zen book was sponsored by the late Prince Philip.

Similarly, many people have thanked me for creating my free Scala and Functional Programming training videos, but the thanks go to Ziverge. These videos will take months to create, and I could not do this without them.

The realized yogi continues to function and act in the world, but in a way that is free. She is free from the desires of motivation and free from the desires of the rewards of action.

The yogi is utterly disinterested but paradoxically full of the engagement of compassion. She is in the world but not of it. The yogi is beyond cause and effect, action and reaction.

Later we shall see the role that Time plays in this — how there is freedom because the Illusion of Time no longer exists to bind us to the past and future.

~ from Light on Life, by B.K.S. Iyengar

Possibly my favorite part of the movie Spanglish is when Cloris Leachman’s character says, “I love you. I love everyone. That’s what’s killing me.”

From a Zen/Buddhist perspective, that’s the emotion of a Bodhisattva (an enlightened being who chooses to stay here out of compassion, to save all beings). You love everyone, and there are consequences of that.

I think I managed to alienate all of my “Facebook friends” by writing about things like Zen, meditation, mindfulness, yoga, and all the experiences that come from studying and practicing these things. And I also understand that alienation, because there are many “spiritual” things I’m not interested in from certain other spiritual/religious perspectives. (I’m more open than that sounds, but I have a hard time when people don’t practice what they preach, or cherry-pick a few things Jesus taught while ignoring the teachings they don‘t like.)

That being said, the things that Shinzen Young — a modern day meditation master in the U.S. — speaks about here and in this two-minute video echo everything I’ve discovered on my own and wrote about. So while, yes, I feel bad about oversharing about this sort of thing with people who don’t have similar interests on my now-defunct Facebook account, well, at least I was right. :)

I was listening to an audio recording by Shinzen Young, and he mentioned that he likes to think of meditation as being like sharpening an axe. Just like you sharpen an axe so it is a more effective tool, you meditate so that your brain and your concentration are also more effective. I like that.

As a “note to self,” I like some of Shinzen Young’s sayings/analogies/metaphors in the first core lessons of the Brightmind app. The ones that come to mind are:

• Try to listen to your mental talk in your head just like it’s a sound in nature, like listening to a bird. In this way, “you” can observe the thoughts in your head as the fly by, without getting attached to them.
• In regards to your awareness, you can think of it in two different ways: (a) aiming your attention at a spot/area, or (b) hugging a friend.

For more details, check out the Brightmind app.

“The Zen way of calligraphy is to write in the most straightforward, simple way, as if you were a beginner. Not trying to make something skillful or beautiful, but simply writing with full attention, as if you were discovering what you were writing for the first time; then your full nature will be in your writing. This is the way of practice, moment after moment.”

~ from the book, Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind

I don’t have much time to write today, so very quickly, here are two Zen quotes on non-attachment and duality.

First:

“The Great Way is not difficult for those who don’t make good and bad. When love and hate are both absent, everything becomes clear. Make the smallest distinction, however, and heaven and earth are set infinitely apart.”

Some Zen koans are entirely dependent on you being aware of some long-ago foreign culture, like the one about putting sandals on your head (which apparently was an Asian ritual after a funeral ~2,000 years ago). Other ones, like those from Zen Master Seung Sahn, can be dependent on you knowing his style of teaching.

For this one you need to know almost nothing:

Just as a student sits down for his private face-to-face meeting with a Zen Master in the interview room, the Master yells, “Leave this room!”

So the confused student gets up to leave through the door he came in.

“Not through the door,” the Master yells.

“People tend to overestimate or underestimate how wonderful the experience (enlightenment) is. How wonderful is it? Well, I would say that anyone who has entered into the world of no-self, emptiness, and wisdom mind, who abides in that world, if you gave them a choice to live one day knowing what they know, or live an entire lifetime but not be allowed to know that, I think — I can’t speak for everyone — but I would say most people who live in that world would say, ‘I’d rather have one day knowing what I know than a lifetime of not being able to know this.’ So that’s how wonderful it is.”

~ Shinzen Young, in this video

“Enlightenment is like a free fall. It’s like falling off a cliff that never ends, and you’ve acclimatized to it.”

~ Shinzen Young, in this video

“What is it on this planet that needs doing that I know something about, that probably won’t happen unless I take responsibility for it?”

I found the quote in the book, Wherever You Go, There You Are, by Jon Kabat-Zinn, and the quote itself is from Buckminster Fuller. (The image comes from this page.)

“The ideal of warriorship is that the warrior should be sad and tender, and because of that, the warrior can be brave as well.”

~ Chogyam Trungpa

I like this description of the proper mindfulness technique:

“Not judging what you see, not considering it good or bad, just seeing what you see, with interest and curiosity. Staking out your inner experience, like a wildlife photographer in an exotic location, waiting for the moment to snap.”

It comes from the “Base” recording under the “Waiting Around” category of the Buddhify app. (Sorry, I don’t know the name of the speaker.)

If you think about it, it’s awesomely, amazingly wonderful just to be alive! It’s a wonderful gift, and especially on a beautiful spring day like today.

But it took me several years of meditation practice and a heart attack before I really got it that just to be alive is awesome. As I was walking out of the hospital I thought, “Wow! I could be dead. The rest of my life is just a gift.” And then I thought, “Well, it always has been a gift from the very beginning, and I never noticed it until it was almost gone.”

The Zen teacher Kobun Chino once said in a sesshin talk that when you realize how precious your life is, and that it is completely your responsibility how you manifest it and how you live it, that is such a big responsibility that “such a person sits down for a while.”

~ a few paragraphs from this story by Zen teacher Blanche Hartman, who was impermanently here on Earth from 1926 to 2016.

“You and me together, right?”

This is most of a story from a book called, “Turning the Mind Into an Ally.” When Zeus was sick and I’d stop petting him, he’d turn and look at me like this.

~ December 3, 2016