Sit Down and Shut Up: Punk Rock Commentaries on Buddha, God, Truth, Sex, Death, and Dogen's Treasury of the Right Dharma Eye

by Brad Warner

Nature equipped you with buttons intended for emergency use only, which were supposed to be pressed maybe ten or fifteen times throughout your life, yet some of us are mashing down on these buttons every single day. Why? Because it’s exciting!

anger always starts out very, very small. It’s always based on the difference between how I think things should be and how they actually are.

To let go of anger is to let go of my sense of self.

Something needs doing, and it gets done. When it’s finished, no one even remembers it. There are no medals given out, no pats on the back from the master, no ticker-tape parades. In fact, there’s no evidence it ever even happened. All truly compassionate action works exactly like this.

even those people doing things we deem to be “evil” probably feel their jobs are of some benefit to someone.

How are you going to recognize your enlightened state if you can’t even recognize the state you are in right now?

Whenever your mind is disturbed, it affects everything you do.

matter how thoroughly I satisfy any of my desires, they never stay satisfied very long.

No matter what happens to us, the very fact that it has happened to us transforms whatever it is into part of what we consider “mundane” or “ordinary.”

To understand real things in terms of mere words is an exercise doomed to failure because words are by nature limited, while the real world is infinite.

But boredom is what life is all about, really. Because if you’re a healthy person, most of your life is probably pretty damned boring.

You can’t control your circumstances. Control is an illusion. But how you respond to them is totally up to you. And once you learn to respond better, an interesting thing happens. The world starts to behave exactly as you want it to. Or is it just that you no longer expect it to behave in any way other than it does?

when human beings disagree with each other, it’s because they don’t know the difference between real differences and pretend ones.

Real enlightenment is not an experience. Real enlightenment is the ongoing work you do to keep from getting caught up in your experiences.

The ability to understand that you do not understand is what real enlightenment is all about. Eventually little bits of understanding — most of which you don’t even notice when you gain them — will start to accrue, and one day you’ll reach a point where the general principles will become abundantly clear.

The truth is very quiet.