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The act of regarding anything at all as more worthy of respect than anything else is the first step down the short and slippery path to the utter annihilation of all mankind.
You cannot possibly honor God if you can’t honor every last one of God’s manifestations. Killing someone in God’s name is ridiculous. If we do that, we are killing God and killing truth.
But the point is, a lamp is something you use to guide yourself in the dark. “Be lamps unto yourselves” means be your own master, be your own lamp. 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.
What you call “you” can never enter the gates of heaven, no matter how convictedly you believe. Heaven and paradise aren’t in your future because you have no future. There is no future for you. There is no future for anyone. There is no future at all. Future is an idea.
The fact is, it’s hard to find a group of people who misunderstand Buddhism more thoroughly than Buddhist scholars. And often, the more renowned the scholar the more likely he’s got his head firmly wedged in his ass.
It’s only with great reluctance that I call myself “a Buddhist” even today—although I’ve been involved with Buddhism for the better part of twenty years now. My definition of Buddhist has nothing at all to do with the social institutions all over the world that call themselves by that name. Zen Buddhism is direct pointing to the truth. It’s cutting through the crap and getting to the ground of things as they really are. It’s getting rid of all pretense and seeing what’s actually here right now.
EVERY SINGLE HUMAN BEING in the world at some time thinks that “if only” this or that one of our conditions could be met then we’d be all set. “If only I had a girlfriend / boyfriend / million bucks, then I’d be happy.” Or in the case of the more spiritually minded: “If only I were enlightened, then that would settle everything once and for all.” Think again.
We always imagine that there’s got to be somewhere else better than where we are right now; this is the Great Somewhere Else we all carry around in our heads. We believe Somewhere Else is out there for us if only we could find it. But there’s no Somewhere Else. Everything is right here.
You read a lot these days about “fear of success” and people deliberately sabotaging their own lives in order to keep their dreams from being realized. Maybe it’s not that people like this fear success so much as they fear discovering that success really isn’t success at all.
I’d never thought about it but superhero shows, popular with kids all over the world, do teach children to believe in power: we are in trouble and we can’t help ourselves, so someone more powerful—a superhero—has to fly in and fix our problems.
Emptiness is the single most misunderstood word in all of Buddhism. The original Sanskrit word for this is shunyata, which ultimately points to the as-it-is-ness of things, the state of things being as they are without being colored by our views and ideas.
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.
We usually believe that the past creates memory. Real events occurred in the real past and we remember them—but in fact that’s only half the truth. The other half, every bit as important, is that memory creates the past. We are actively constructing our own past right now every bit as much as we create our own future.
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.
In other words, we can’t know the present in the usual sense because the present is obscured by the present itself and by the act of perceiving it and conceiving of it.
You can’t attain liberation the way you can attain a 1968 Camaro or a D-plus on a math test. You can only attain liberation by clearly seeing there is nothing to attain.
Complete liberation sounds like a big deal. And it is. It’s the biggest deal around. But don’t make too much of it—because it’s also absolutely nothing at all.
There are people who think of the spiritual life as a journey. Buddhism isn’t like that. We may use the word path, but we’re not trying to get anywhere. We’re trying to fully experience the wonder and perfectness of being right here.
Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away. PHILIP K. DICK
But zazen is a pretty hard thing to believe in since the results appear so slowly. In fact, I’d be inclined to tell you these days that the results never appear at all. Well, it isn’t that there aren’t any results. Not exactly. The problem is in the concept of what constitutes a “result.”
People imagine enlightenment will make them incredibly powerful. And it does. It makes you the most powerful being in all the universe—but usually no one else notices.
Repo Man is one of my all-time favorite movies. It’s the only fictional film I know of that makes any attempt to present the early ’80s American punk scene as it really was.
We may not realize it, but I suspect we care so much about what famous people say or do because we understand that their ability to focus gives them a kind of rare insight we rightly admire. We see their balance but don’t see that it comes from pursuing one thing wholeheartedly.
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. It’s not that a “good person” has only moral thoughts. It’s that they act only upon the moral thoughts and not the immoral ones.
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.
It takes far more energy to sustain anger than to let it go. It only seems difficult to drop your anger because you have built up a habit of responding in a certain way to certain situations.
The universe desires to perceive itself and to think about itself and you are born out of this desire. The universe wants to experience itself from the point of view of a tree, and so there are trees. The universe wants to feel what it’s like to be a rock, and so there are rocks. The universe wants to know what it’s like to be a famous Austrian body-builder cum film star and so there is Arnie.
The standard thing for me to do right here would be to to explain to you all of the ways in which the Buddhist idea of rebirth is completely different from the older Brahmanistic notion of transmigration. According to that theory of transmigration, there is a soul, an atman, that lives inside our bodies like a person renting an apartment. When the landlord, God, kicks the person out for making too much noise or not paying rent on time, the person moves to another building. We do not know if the soul gets its security deposit back, but I’m guessing that God pockets it and claims it was spent on
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A Buddhist learns that his thoughts are just thoughts, nothing requiring any response. But most of us feed into them: a little spark of a complaint appears and instead of letting it die out, we stoke it up. If we work really hard at it, we can make a tiny spark turn into a raging blaze in no time at all. Then we get upset because it’s getting too hot. Once the blaze has gotten that big, though, it’s hard work to put it out.
Unfortunately, what happens to most people is that they don’t just accept authority, they believe in it. We have, buried within us, an unspoken, unacknowledged belief that there are some people who are somehow better than others, more deserving than ourselves—that authorities are somehow worthy of the authority they wield.
It’s not that the “worthy” causes aren’t worth pursuing—of course they are. It’s that all too often our image of “worthy” causes completely obscures the stuff right under our noses—and that’s the stuff that needs our attention, right here and right now.
When you’re so committed to the future, it’s real easy to let your life right now turn to shit.
ONCE TIM TOLD ME the story of how one of his teacher Kobun Chino’s students slipped him some acid. Kobun was a very trusting guy. When he was handed an acid-soaked sugar cube and told, “Here, eat this. It’ll make you feel good,” Kobun swallowed it without a second thought. His comments afterward about the LSD experience? “It was stupid,” he said. Spoken like a true Zen master.
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. The state of consciousness you have right now is 100 percent purely what it is.
