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Quote by Koshin Paley Ellison

“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.”

Quote by Koshin Paley Ellison

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Koshin Paley Ellison

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“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.”

“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”

“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.”

“The point is not that one stops choosing, but that one chooses in the knowledge that there is really no choice. [...] It is simply that in a universe of relativity, all choosing, all taking of sides, is playful. But this is not that one feels no urgency. To know the relativity of light and darkness is not to be able to gaze unblinkingly into the sun; to know the relativity of up and down is not to be able to fall upward. To feel urgency without compulsion is the seemingly paradoxical way of describing what it is like for a feeling to arise spontaneously without its happening to a feeler.”