“[W]hen I leave the Church and the city behind and go out under the sky, when I am with the birds, [...] with the clouds, [...] and with the oceans, [...] I cannot feel Christianity because I am in a world which grows from within. I am simply incapable of feeling its life as coming from above[.] More exactly, I cannot feel that its life comes from Another, from one who is qualitatively and spiritually external to all that lives and grows. On the contrary, I feel this whole world to be moved from the inside, and from an inside so deep that it is my inside as well, more truly I than my surface consciousness.”
“According to Zen legend, when a visitor asked the fifteenth-century master Ikkyu to write down a maxim of “the highest wisdom,” Ikkyu wrote one word: “Attention.” The visitor asked, irritably, “Is that all?” This time, Ikkyu wrote two words: “Attention. Attention.”
Source: Rational Mysticism: Spirituality Meets Science in the Search for Enlightenment
“Suppose I feel I have no friends, and I’m very lonely. What happens if I sit with that? I begin to see that my feelings of loneliness are really just thoughts. As a matter of fact, I’m simply sitting here. Maybe I’m sitting alone in my room, without a date. Nobody has called me, and I feel lonely. In fact, however, I’m simply sitting. The loneliness and the misery are simply my thoughts, my judgments that things should be other than what they are. I haven’t seen through them; I haven’t recognized that my misery is manufactured by me. The truth of the matter is, I’m simply sitting in my room. It takes time before we can see that just to sit there is okay, just fine. I cling to the thought that if I don’t have pleasant and supportive company, I am miserable.”
Source: Nothing Special: A Zen Buddhist Guide to Awakening Through Daily Life's Feelings, Relationships, and Work
“Zhaozhou often quoted this saying by Sengcan: “The great way is not difficult if you just don’t pick and choose.”
Source: Bring Me the Rhinoceros: And Other Zen Koans to Bring You Joy
“Count on your beginner's mind to help you through any times when you might feel resistant or self-conscious about your practice.”
Source: Practical Meditation for Beginners: 10 Days to a Happier, Calmer You
“In zazen, you create the conditions for your mind to “decompress” from its habitual mode of thinking and open up to new perspectives and insight.”
“Zazen can ultimately retrain your mind to see the world from an entirely new perspective.”
Source: Practical Meditation for Beginners: 10 Days to a Happier, Calmer You
“The monks find comfort, contentment, and even joy in the simplest of tasks, living each moment to its fullest by grounding themselves in the present.”
Source: Practical Meditation for Beginners: 10 Days to a Happier, Calmer You
“Zazen is actually not complicated. The real problem is, we don’ t want to do it. If my boyfriend begins to look at other women, how long am I going to be willing simply to experience that? We all have problems constantly, but our willingness just to be is very low on our list of priorities, until we have practiced long enough to have faith in just being, so that solutions can appear naturally. Another mark of a maturing practice is the development of such trust and faith.”
Source: Nothing Special: A Zen Buddhist Guide to Awakening Through Daily Life's Feelings, Relationships, and Work
“When we’re engaged in pure activity, we’re a presence, an awareness. But that’s all we are. And that doesn’t feel like anything. People feel that the so-called enlightened state is flooded with emotional and loving feelings. But true love or compassion is simply to be nonseparate from the object. Essentially, it’s a flow of activity in which we do not exist as a being separate from our activity.”
Source: Nothing Special: A Zen Buddhist Guide to Awakening Through Daily Life's Feelings, Relationships, and Work