When we sit down to meditate, we are trying to transcend our everyday consciousness, the consciousness used to transact ordinary business, the one used in the world’s marketplace as we go shopping, bring up our children, work in an office or in our business, clean the house, check our bank statements, and all the … Read the rest >
How to be whole in what I do? We always want to get rid of something. Each moment can become a moment of practice — The street can be a cloister — the subway, the cooking, all must become practice. We have no time, don’t let a moment pass without working spiritually.
No reveries, no conversations, no tracing out of the meaning of phantasies, contain this now, which belongs to a higher order of consciousness. The time-man in us does not know now. He is always preparing something in the future, or busy with what happened in the past. He is always wondering what to do, … Read the rest >
Subhuti asked: “Is perfect
wisdom beyond thinking? Is it unimaginable and totally unique but
nevertheless reaching the unreachable and attaining the unattainable?”
The Buddha replied: “Yes,
Subhuti, it is exactly so. And why is perfect wisdom beyond thinking? It
is because all its points of reference cannot be thought about but can
be apprehended. … Read the rest >
The Reality that came to me is profound and hard to see or understand because it is beyond the sphere of thinking. It is sublime and unequaled but subtle and only to be found by the dedicated. Majjhima Nikaya
Just as space reaches everywhere, without discrimination, just so the immaculate element, which in its … Read the rest >
What is of primary importance for an aspirant on this path is to learn to get away from his habitual state of being, the ordinary state into which he constantly falls each time after he has made the vital effort to rise and be connected anew to his Inner Source.
This habitual condition of … Read the rest >
For all its problems, uncertainties, and pains, life as it is affords the human being the indispensable and only means of learning right and noble conduct, and with the chance to sublimate himself through these very difficulties.
After death, the conditions necessary for his transformation will no longer be there. Without these harsh trials, … Read the rest >
As in a game of chess, the dying person sees at that fateful moment how every one of his actions unleashed a chain of events that made his life what it was as well as the turn it took, whether fruitful or sterile; he also sees in what manner and to what extent he … Read the rest >
To whatever person or object an aspirant, either consciously or unconsciously, allows his thoughts to drift and dwell upon, he is unknowingly connecting himself to that person or object. By so doing, he will subtly begin to receive certain impressions and feelings from these thoughts that will affect and color his being to a … Read the rest >
Sitting in zazen, I become nothing and everything become nothing, that is to say I and everything melt into One. So when I see a flower, the flower is I, when I see the moon, the moon is I. All things become I. There is no greater love than this.
