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Sometimes the truth hurts. And sometimes it feels real good.
Here’s one of my beliefs: everything is sacred. Every blade of grass, every cockroach, every speck of dust, every flower, every pool of mud outside a graffiti-splattered warehouse is God. Everything is a worthy object of worship.
You cannot possibly honor God if you can’t honor every last one of God’s manifestations.
Truth doesn’t screw around, and truth doesn’t care about your opinions.
the truth is not open to negotiation—not by you, not by me, and not by the Leader of the Free World or the Moral Majority. The truth simply is.
Religions offer authority figures: trust the wise people’s learned excretions and you’ll be fine. Uh-huh.
Politicians can’t solve the problem of how to find their own asses with two hands and a flashlight, let alone figure out anything more complex and subtle.
Don’t believe something because your hero, your teacher, or even Buddha himself said it. Look for yourself. See for yourself, with your own eyes. “Be lamps unto yourselves.” It’s another way of saying, “Question authority.”
Question authority. Question society. Question reality.
Deferring to authority is nothing more than a cowardly shirking of personal responsibility.
people who take God as their ultimate authority are always capable of the worst humanity has to offer.
Real anarchy has to come from deep within. Real anarchy isn’t immoral or amoral; it’s intensely moral. A pseudo-anarchist spraypaints a letter “A” in a circle on the side of a government building “to make a point.” A true anarchist understands that action in the present moment is what really matters and lives his life accordingly.
Even Johnny Ramone said that being a rock-and-roll guitar player was a pretty good job, but that, in the end, it also sucked just like any other job.
You may find that having is not so pleasing a thing as wanting. This is not logical but it is often true. MISTER SPOCK
An old Chinese Zen master once said, “From birth to death it’s just like this!”
It’s as if we’re afraid to really commit to this moment because a better one might come along later.
In the end, what did money, power, and fame do for Kurt Cobain…or Keith Moon…or Sid Vicious…or Elvis?
The pain of having your dreams come true appears vividly when you realize that even if your dreams really come true, they never really come true.
Religions always talk about love. But to a Buddhist, love is second rate—if that. Compassion is far more important. Compassion is the ability to see what needs doing right now and the willingness to do it right now.
This is another major point where Buddhism differs from religions. All religions firmly insist on the historical accuracy of their texts, however dubious that insistence may be. Buddhism, however, doesn’t care either way. It is the meaning of the texts right here and now in our lives that is important—and that has nothing to do with mere historical veracity.
Emptiness is not a nihilistic concept of voidness. Emptiness is not meaninglessness. Emptiness is that condition which is free from our conceptions and our perceptions. It’s the world as it is before we come along and start complaining about the stuff we don’t like.
But if you’re not trying to run away from the unavoidable hell of suffering, if you just let it be, your whole experience is transformed utterly. The Buddhist author and nun Pema Chödron calls this transformation “the wisdom of no escape.”
Everything exists in this moment. This moment is the basis of all creation. The universe wasn’t created the Biblical six thousand years ago or even the scientific fifteen billion. The universe is created right now and right now it disappears. Before you even have time to recognize its existence, it’s gone forever.
Zazen isn’t about blissing out or going into an alpha brainwave trance. It’s about facing who and what you really are, in every single goddamn moment. And you aren’t bliss, I’ll tell you that right now. You’re a mess. We all are.
The biggest, ugliest, most damaging lie that religions spread is that truly moral people never have immoral thoughts. What a dangerous, damaging load of crap.
Experiencing anger is like sitting in the bathtub frantically thrashing around and throwing handfuls of water into the air while simultaneously wondering why the hell your head and face keep getting wet. You’re in a stupor so deep you cannot even see that you’re the one causing the problem.
A guy walks up to a Zen master and asks, “Is there life after death?” The Zen master says, “How should I know?” The guys replies indignantly, “Because you’re a Zen master!” “Yes,” says the Zen master, “but not a dead one.”
If I just quoted Buddha and Dogen and left it at that, I’d be like one of those guys with the bumper stickers that say, “THE BIBLE SAID IT, I BELIEVE IT, AND THAT SETTLES IT.” I hate that kind of thing, and I’ll bet those bumper stickers don’t do much for you either.
We don’t return to God, because we never left God in the first place.
When you’re so committed to the future, it’s real easy to let your life right now turn to shit.
Do what you do as well as you possibly can. That’s Buddhist morality.
Comparing one state of consciousness to another and saying one is “higher” and the other is “mundane” is like eating a banana and complaining it’s not a very good apple.
Are the visions you can experience on LSD “real” religious visions? Sure they are. And as such they are worse than useless. Religious visions and acid experiences are both fantasies, delusions, projections of your own hidden desires. They have nothing whatsoever to do with the truth, nothing to do with reality.
You can never meaningfully compare your life with anyone else’s. No matter how rich someone else may be, no matter how happy they look, no matter how enlightened they seem, they can never be you. Never, ever, ever. Only you can live your life.
When the end comes you’ll be wishing you could have back all those boring moments you zipped through. But you killed them. Dead and gone. Try putting some of that time to good use and see what happens.
Believe only in the universe as it is right now. See the world and yourself for what they are. Don’t be deceived by your imagination no matter how beautiful it is.
Your life is yours alone, and to miss your life is the most tragic thing that could happen. So sit down, shut up, and take a look at it.
