Great Throughts Treasury

"When your fear touches someone’s pain it becomes pity; when your love touches someone’s pain, it becomes compassion."

"A drop of pond water under the microscope just like in science class but now your are the pond & the microscope is mindfulness."

"As a child I could often feel the pain of others in my heart. It made me angry to be alive in such an anguished world. I couldn't stay open to the suffering I saw around me, or to the pain within. It took me years to allow my heart its vulnerability. The grief had torn me open but I hadn't known what to do with the pain... Grief can have a quality of profound healing because we are forced to a depth of feeling that is usually below the threshold of awareness. Though many of our motivations come from this level of fear, of loss, yet we don't know where these volitions originate. We simply find ourselves lost in action, in anger or fear, pushing away others, grasping at what we imagined to be our safety, constantly guarding our heart. This tearing open of the heart leaves us exposed to that which has caused us and our loved ones the pain of imagined separateness so often before. This experience of discovery that grief leads us to is, for some, like going below ground level to look at the roots of a tree whose branches and twigs, leaves and flowers were all you thought were meaningful. It is the tree of life, of your life."

"Clearly, all fear has an element of resistance and a leaning away from the moment. Its dynamic is not unlike that of strong desire except that fear leans backward into the last safe moment while desire leans forward toward the next possibility of satisfaction. Each lacks presence."

"Concepts of dying in to a heaven or hell seem a good deal more political than spiritual."

"Death is perfectly safe."

"Detachment means letting go and nonattachment means simply letting be."

"Don’t cling to your self-righteous suffering, let it go. . . . Nothing is too good to be true, let yourself be forgiven. To the degree you insist that you must suffer, you insist on the suffering of others as well."

"Forgiveness is not a condoning of the unskillful act which has caused injury, but a touching of the actor with mercy and loving kindness."

"Go to the truth beyond the mind. Love is the bridge."

"God is not someone or something separate but is the suchness in each moment, the underlying reality."

"Grief can have a quality of profound healing because we are forced to a depth of feeling that is usually below the threshold of awareness."

"Healing comes not from being loving but from being itself. It is not a case of being clear but of clear being. This healing is not about anything else but being itself. Nothing separate, no edges, nothing to limit healing. Entering, in moments, the realm of pure being, the gateless gate swings open-- beyond life and death, our original face shines back at us."

"Healing is bringing mercy and Awareness into that which we have held in judgment and fear."

"How soon will we accept this opportunity to be fully alive before we die?"

"I found that a hospital is probably the most difficult environment in which to afford a really good death. Hospitals are meant to preserve life; death is an enemy there. Death is not treated with much respect, with much compassion. There’s a lot of fear surrounding death. Death is a failure in a hospital."

"I have never lived a life so much larger than death."

"Examining who am I is like beginning to go to the movies just to see how the movie is made. As we first sit down in the dark theater we find that we are relating to the objects of the melodrama, the motion on the screen. We pay attention to the story line, which we notice is like the contents of the mind, allowing it to unfold as it will without judgment or the least interference. As we focus our attention on the process, we begin to see that frames that constitute film are like separate thoughts; then we begin to recognize the process buy which the images are produced, and it breaks our enthrallment with the story line. We notice that ll the activity is just a projection on a blank screen. That all these figures dancing before us are an illusion produced by light passing through various densities on the film. We see the film is like our conditioning, a repetitious imprint of images gone by. We see that the whole melodrama is a passing show of motion and change ... We discover that all we imagined ourselves to be — all our becoming, our memory, all the contents of mind — is just old film running off. The projectionist has died. Who am I? can't be answered. We cannot know the truth. We can only be it. Constantly living life in the past tense, rummaging through consciousness to decide who and what we are, the truth is obscured. The truth cannot be discovered in the contents of the mind. Only the untruth of false identification can be uncovered. Going beyond the false, the truth is revealed."

"I have seen even those who have long since abjured God die in grace. . . . Atheists don't use their drying to bargain for a better seat at the table; indeed they may not even believe supper is being served. They are not storing up 'merit.'; They just smile because their heart is ripe. They are kind for no particular reason; they just love."

"I have seen many die, surrounded by loved ones, and their last words were ‘I love you.’ There were some who could no longer speak yet with their eyes and soft smile left behind that same healing message. I have been in rooms where those who were dying made it feel like sacred ground."

"If our only spiritual practice were to live as though we were already dead, relating to all we meet, to all we do, as though it were our final moments in the world, what time would there be for old games or falsehoods or posturing? If we lived our life as though we were already dead, as though our children were already dead, how much time would there be for self-protection and the re-creation of ancient mirages? Only love would be appropriate, only the truth."

"If there is a single definition of healing it is to enter with mercy and awareness those pains, mental and physical, from which we have withdrawn in judgment and dismay."

"If you were going to die soon and had only one phone call you could make, who would you call and what would you say? And why are you waiting?"

"In Chinese, the word for heart and mind is the same -- Hsin. For when the heart is open and the mind is clear they are of one substance, of one essence."

"It is not for the concept, but for the experience, that we use the term the Beloved. The experience of this enormity we falteringly label divine is unconditioned love. Absolute openness, unbounded mercy and compassion. We use this concept, not to name the unnameable vastness of being-- our greatest joy-- but to acknowledge and claim as our birthright the wonders and healings within."

"Let there be peace on earth and let it begin with me. There is nothing to do but be."

"Letting ourselves be forgiven is one of the most difficult healings we will undertake…and one of the most fruitful."

"Love is not what we become but who we already are."

"Our life is composed of events and states of mind. How ewe appraise our life from our deathbed will be predicated not only on what came to us in life but how we lived with it. It will not be simply illness or health, riches or poverty, good luck or bad, which ultimately define whether we believe we have had a good life or not, but the quality of our relationship to these situations: the attitudes of our states of mind."

"Quoting son, Noah Levine: Once you see what the heart really needs, it doesn’t matter if you’re going to live or die; the work is always the same."

"Relate to the fear, not just from it."

"Simply touching a difficult memory with some slight willingness to heal begins to soften the holding and tension around it."

"That which is impermanent attracts compassion. That which is not provides wisdom."

"The process of growth is, it seems, the art of falling down.. Growth is measured by the gentleness and awareness with which we once again pick ourselves up, the lightness with which we dust ourselves off, the openness with which we continue and take the next unknown step, beyond our edge, beyond our holding, into the remarkable mystery of being."

"The saddest part about being human is not paying attention. Presence is the gift of life."

"There is nothing noble about suffering except the love and forgiveness with which we meet it. Many believe that if they are suffering they are closer to God, but I have met very few who could keep their heart open to their suffering enough for that to be true."

"There is nothing to do but be."

"Those who insist they've got their 'shit together' are usually standing in it at the time."

"Until we find out who was born this time around, it seems irrelevant to seek earlier identities. I have heard many people speak of who they believe they were in previous incarnations, but they seem to have very little idea of who they are in this one. . . . Let’s take one life at a time. Perhaps the best way to do that is to live as though there were no afterlife or reincarnation. To live as though this moment was all that was allotted."

"We are motivated more by aversion to the unpleasant than by a will toward truth, freedom, or healing. We are constantly attempting to escape our life, to avoid rather than enter our pain we, and we wonder why it is so difficult to be fully alive."

"When we realize we are already dead, our priorities change, our heart opens, and our mind begins to clear of the fog of old holdings and pretendings. We watch all life in transit, and what matters becomes instantly apparent: the transmission of love; the letting go of obstacles to understanding; the relinquishment of our grasping, of our hiding from ourselves. Seeing the mercilessness of our self-strangulation, we begin to come gently into the light we share with all beings. If we take each teaching, each loss, each gain, each fear, each joy as it arises and experience it fully, life becomes workable. We are no longer a victim of life. And then every experience, even the loss of our dearest one, becomes another opportunity for awakening."

"When we recognize that, just like the glass, our body is already broken, that indeed we are already dead, then life becomes precious, and we open to it just as it is, in the moment it is occurring. When we understand that all our loved ones are already dead — our children, our mates, our friends — how precious they become. How little fear can interpose; how little doubt can estrange us. When you live your life as though you're already dead, life takes on new meaning. Each moment becomes a whole lifetime, a universe unto itself."

"When your fear touches someone’s pain it becomes pity; when your love touches someone’s pain, it becomes compassion"

"You have to remember one life, one death–this one! To enter fully the day, the hour, the moment whether it appears as life or death, whether we catch it on the inbreath or outbreath, requires only a moment, this moment. And along with it all the mindfulness we can muster, and each stage of our ongoing birth, and the confident joy of our inherent luminosity."

"Life has difficulties in it, but the power we have to deal with life, which might never be called on if life weren't difficult at times, is miraculous. Facing life responsibly gives you confidence. The enormous power of the heart, and the power we have to receive the healing we took birth for, is within us all. If life's difficulties weren't jiggling us, we wouldn't spread our legs enough to get our balance."

"Love is the only rational act of a lifetime."

"Most people live with one foot in the womb, hopping around the world, never quite coming out. Completing our birth is a process of becoming grounded, putting both feet on the ground. It is taking responsibility for being born, but not responsibility as blame. People say they are responsible for their illness. We are not responsible for our illness, we are responsible to our illness. We are not responsible for our incarnation, we are responsible to our incarnation."

"Near-death experiences, where we see that we are not the body, and that death draws us to a center of love, are great wisdom teachings. They also show that the ignorance we pick up during life doesn't go away easily."

"Human beings, when not stressed, are utterly beautiful. It is only when we are confused that our hearts shrivel and our minds figure crafty ways out of situations. The rational mind is a completely amoral, problem-solving device. When we relate to life from our minds, we take our feet off the ground. It's like not wanting to touch the floor, fearing that we will be burned."

"Aversion to pain is the greatest decreaser of life experience. When you always turn away from difficulties, you're not going to go far. Anyone who has done genuine, long-range spiritual practice knows there are periods that are very difficult. Letting go of our suffering is the hardest work we do."