“We washed her body, chanted, and stayed to witness the funeral director shrouding her and whisking her down the hall. I thought of the Zen teaching that talks about how all we need to do is allow ourselves and the world to change. Easy to say, I thought. And yet, here I was in the midst of my experience of fullness of the pain, grief, love, and joy of my grandma’s death. Everything did change.
Everything I teach now I learned from my relationship with Mimi. Being deeply in relationship changes the world. I didn’t know then that my life would pivot to teaching others and to being with many, many Mimis.”
Source: Awake at the Bedside: Contemplative Teachings on Palliative and End-of-Life Care
“The thought that he might have to leave did not upset him; he knew that eventually he would have to go but that, as on TV, what would follow next was hidden; he knew the actors on the new program were unknown. He did not have to be afraid, for everything that happened had its sequel, and the best that he could do was to wait patiently for his own forthcoming appearance.”
Source: Being There
“[S]ocial institutions are simply rules of communication which have no more universal validity than, say, the rules of a particular grammar.”
Source: psychotherapy east and west
“[L]iberation does not involve the loss or destruction of such conventional concepts as the ego; it means seeing through them - in the same way that we can use the idea of the equator without confusing it with a physical mark upon the surface of the earth. Instead of falling below the ego, liberation surpasses it.”
Source: psychotherapy east and west
“[A]wareness of time ceases to be an asset when concern for the future makes it almost impossible to live in the present[.]”
Source: psychotherapy east and west
“The world is a goddamned evil place, the strong prey on the weak, the rich on the poor; I’ve given up hope that there is a God that will save us all. How am I supposed to believe that there’s a heaven and a hell when all I see now is hell.”
Source: Doomsday Diaries III: Luke the Protector
“Under any civilized conditions it is, of course, impossible for anyone to act without laying plans, or to refuse absolutely to participate in an economy of waste and violence, [...]. It is, however, possible to see that this competitive "rat race" need not be taken seriously, or rather, that if we are to persist in it at all it must not be taken seriously unless "nervous breakdowns are to become as common as colds”
Source: psychotherapy east and west
“Whenever a tradition becomes venerable with the passage of time, the ancient masters and sages are elevated to pedestals of sanctity and wisdom which lift them far above the human level. The way of liberation becomes confused with a popular cult; the ancient teachers become gods and supermen, and thus the ideal of liberation or Buddha-hood becomes ever more remote. No one believes that it can be reached except by the most gifted and heroic prodigies. Consequently the medicine of the discipline becomes a diet, the cure an addiction, and the raft a houseboat. In this manner, a way of liberation turns into just another social institution and dies of respectability.”
Source: psychotherapy east and west
“[T]he world of knowledge may, like Earth, be round-so that immersion in material particulars may quite unexpectedly lead back to the universal and the transcendent.”
Source: psychotherapy east and west
“If, then, man is to rediscover his own image in the macroscopic and microscopic worlds which science reveals, this will be the "own image" in which God is said to have created him[.]”
Source: psychotherapy east and west