Great Throughts Treasury

"When we reach our limit, if we aspire to know that place fully- which is to say that we aspire to neither indulge nor repress- a hardness in us will dissolve."

"When we resist change, it?s called suffering. But when we can completely let go and not struggle against it, when we can embrace the groundlessness of our situation and relax into its dynamic quality, that?s called enlightenment"

"When we scratch the wound and give into our addictions we do not allow the wound to heal."

"When we think that something is going to bring us pleasure, we don?t know what?s really going to happen. When we think something is going to give us misery, we don?t know. Letting there be room for not knowing is the most important thing of all. We try to do what we think is going to help. But we don?t know. We never know if we?re going to fall flat or sit up tall. When there?s a big disappointment, we don?t know if that?s the end of the story. It may be just the beginning of a great adventure. Life is like that. We don?t know anything. We call something bad; we call it good. But really we just don?t know."

"When we touch the center of sorrow, when we sit with discomfort without trying to fix it, when we stay present to the pain of disapproval or betrayal and let it soften us, these are times that we connect with bohdichitta."

"When we've seen ourselves completely, there's a stillness of body that is like a mountain."

"When you are working, it's so easy to become consumed, particularly by computers. They have a way of hypnotizing you, but you could have a timer on your computer that reminds you to create a gap. No matter how engrossing your work is, no matter how much it is sweeping you up, just keep pausing, keep allowing for a gap. When you get hooked by your habit patterns, don't see it as a big problem; allow for a gap."

"When you have made good friends with yourself, your situation will be more friendly too."

"When you meet the Buddha, kill the Buddha? means that when you see that you?re grasping or clinging to anything, whether conventionally it?s called good or bad, make friends with that. Look into it. Get to know it completely and utterly. In that way it will let go of itself."

"When you start to take the warrior's journey, you're going to find that it's often extremely inconvenient. When you start to want to live your life fully instead of opting for death, you discover that life itself is inconvenient. Wholeheartedness is a precious gift, but no one can actually give it to you. You have to find the path that has heart and then walk it impeccably. In doing that, you again and again encounter the inconvenience of your own uptightness, your own headaches, your own falling flat on your face. But in wholeheartedly practicing and wholeheartedly following the path, this inconvenience is not an obstacle. It's simply a certain texture of life, a certain energy of life. Not only that, sometimes when you just get flying and all feels so good and you think, "This is it, this is that path that has heart," you suddenly fall flat on your face. Everybody's looking at you. You say to yourself, "What happened to that path that had heart? This feels like the path full of mud in my face. Since you are wholeheartedly committed to the warrior's journey, it pricks you, it pokes you. It's like someone laughing in your ear, challenging you to figure out what to do when you don't know what to do. It humbles you. It opens your heart."

"When you wake up in the morning and out of nowhere comes the heartache of alienation and loneliness, could you use that as a golden opportunity? Rather than persecuting yourself for feeling that something terribly wrong is happening, right there in the moment of sadness and longing, could you relax and touch the limitless space of the human heart? The next time you get a chance, experiment with this."

"Whether we?re seeking inner peace or global peace or a combination of the two, the way to experience it is to build on the foundation of unconditional openness to all that arises. Peace isn?t an experience free of challenges, free of rough and smooth, it?s an experience that?s expansive enough to include all that arises without feeling threatened."

"While we are sitting in meditation, we are simply exploring humanity and all of creation in the form of ourselves."

"Without giving up hope?that there?s somewhere better to be, that there?s someone better to be?we will never relax with where we are or who we are."

"Without loving-kindness for ourselves it is difficult, if not impossible, to genuinely feel it for others."

"Without loving-kindness, staying in pain is just warfare."

"Words themselves are neutral. It's the charge we add to them that matters"

"Working with obstacles is life's journey. The warrior is always coming up against dragons. Of course the warrior gets scared, particularly before the battle. It's frightening. But with a shaky, tender heart the warrior realizes that he or she is just about to step into the unknown, and then goes forth to meet the dragon. The warrior realizes that the dragon is nothing but unfinished business presenting itself, and that it's fear that really needs to be worked with. The dragon is just a motion picture that appears there, and it appears in many forms: as the lover who jilted us, as the parent who never loved us enough, as someone who abused us. Basically what we work with is our fear and our holding back, which are not necessarily obstacles. The only obstacle is ignorance, this refusal to look at our unfinished business. If every time the warrior goes out and meets the dragon, he or she says, "Hah! It's a dragon again. No way am I going to face this," and just splits, then life becomes a recurring story of getting up in the morning, going out, meeting the dragon, saying, "No way," and splitting. In that case you become more and more timid and more and more afraid and more of a baby. No one's nurturing you, but you're still in that cradle, and you never go through your puberty rites."

"Yesterday I talked about cultivating precision, gentleness, and openness, and described how the meditation technique helps us to remember the qualities that we already possess."

"You are the sky. Everything else ? it?s just the weather."

"You could endlessly try to have suffering cease by dealing with outer circumstances?and that?s usually what all of us do. It is the usual approach; you just try to solve the outer problem again and again and again. But the Buddha said something quite revolutionary, which most of us don?t really buy: if you work with your mind, you will alleviate all the suffering that seems to come from the outside. When something is bothering you?a person is bugging you, a situation is irritating you, or physical pain is troubling you?you must work with your mind, and that is done through meditation. Working with our minds is the only means through which we?ll actually begin to feel happy and contented with the world that we live in."

"You must learn to sit with the restless, painful energy and not let the momentum pull you under and cause you to do the same thing over and over that's ruining your life and the lives of those around you."

"You're the only one who knows when you're using things to protect yourself and keep your ego together and when you're opening and letting things fall apart, letting the world come as it is - working with it rather than struggling against it. You're the only one who knows."

"Being fully present isn?t something that happens once and then you have achieved it; it?s being awake to the ebb and flow and movement and creation of life, being alive to the process of life itself. That also has its softness. If there were a goal that you were supposed to achieve, such as ?no thoughts,? that wouldn?t be very soft. You?d have to struggle a lot to get rid of all those thoughts, and you probably couldn?t do it anyway. The fact that there is no goal also adds to the softness."

"If we see our so-called limitations with clarity, precision, gentleness, goodheartedness, and kindness and, having seen them fully, then let go, open further, we begin to find that our world is more vast and more refreshing and fascinating than we had realized before. In other words, the key to feeling more whole and less shut off and shut down is to be able to see clearly who we are and what we?re doing."

"Meditation is about seeing clearly the body that we have, the mind that we have, the domestic situation that we have, the job that we have, and the people who are in our lives. It?s about seeing how we react to all these things. It?s seeing our emotions and thoughts just as they are right now, in this very moment, in this very room, on this very seat. It?s about not trying to make them go away, not trying to become better than we are, but just seeing clearly with precision and gentleness? The problem is that the desire to change is fundamentally a form of aggression toward yourself. The other problem is that our hangups, unfortunately or fortunately, contain our wealth. Our neurosis and our wisdom are made out of the same material. If you throw out your neurosis, you also throw out your wisdom."

"Precision, gentleness, and the ability to let go ... are not something that we have to gain, but something that we could bring out, cultivate, rediscover in ourselves."

"The honesty of precision and the goodheartedness of gentleness are qualities of making friends with yourself... As you work with being really faithful to the technique and being as precise as you can and simultaneously as kind as you can, the ability to let go seems to happen to you. The discovery of your ability to let go spontaneously arises; you don?t force it. You shouldn?t be forcing accuracy or gentleness either, but while you couldmake a project out of accuracy, you could make a project out of gentleness, it?s hard to make a project out of letting go."

"The innocent mistake that keeps us caught in our own particular style of ignorance, unkindness, and shut-downness is that we are never encouraged to see clearly what is, with gentleness. Instead, there?s a kind of basic misunderstanding that we should try to be better than we already are, that we should try to improve ourselves, that we should try to get away from painful things, and that if we could just learn how to get away from the painful things, then we would be happy."

"This is what we are here to see for ourselves. Both the brilliance and the suffering are here all the time; they interpenetrate each other. For a fully enlightened being, the difference between what is neurosis and what is wisdom is very hard to perceive, because somehow the energy underlying both of them is the same. The basic creative energy of life... bubbles up and courses through all of existence. It can be experienced as open, free, unburdened, full of possibility, energizing. Or this very same energy can be experienced as petty, narrow, stuck, caught... The basic point of it all is just to learn to be extremely honest and also wholehearted about what exists in your mind ? thoughts, emotions, bodily sensations, the whole thing that adds up to what we call ?me? or ?I.? Nobody else can really begin to sort out for you what to accept and what to reject in terms of what wakes you up and what makes you fall asleep. No one else can really sort out for you what to accept ? what opens up your world ? and what to reject ? what seems to keep you going round and round in some kind of repetitive misery? This is the process of making friends with ourselves and with our world. It involves not just the parts we like, but the whole picture, because it all has a lot to teach us."

"We see how beautiful and wonderful and amazing things are, and we see how caught up we are. It isn?t that one is the bad part and one is the good part, but that it?s a kind of interesting, smelly, rich, fertile mess of stuff. When it?s all mixed up together, it?s us: humanness."