Mark Bowles > Mark's Quotes

“The exercise for centering oneself is a simple one.

Stop thinking of what you intend to do. Stop thinking of what you have just done. Then stop thinking that you have stopped thinking of those things.

Then you will find the now. The time that stretches eternal, and is really the only time there is.

Then in that place, you will finally have time to be yourself.”
― Robin Hobb, Royal Assassin

“Here is Merton’s lament. “Lights on. Clocks ticking. Thermostats working. Stoves cooking. Electric shavers filling radios with static. ‘Wisdom,’ cries the dawn deacon, but we do not attend.”
― Christopher Pramuk, At Play in Creation: Merton's Awakening to the Feminine Divine

“We have traded mystery and wonder for mastery and technological manipulation, for cheap imitations of the real thing. The result is the deep sense of alienation so many feel amid mass society.”
― Christopher Pramuk, At Play in Creation: Merton's Awakening to the Feminine Divine

“The fact that you are a Zen Buddhist and I am a Christian monk, far from separating us, makes us most like one another. How many centuries is it going to take for people to discover this fact?”
― Christopher Pramuk, At Play in Creation: Merton's Awakening to the Feminine Divine

“But a wall that will not yield to a battering ram can still be breached by the gentle twining of ivy.”
― Robin Hobb, Assassin's Quest

“Talent’ is an anagram for ‘latent’ though.”
― Om Swami, Kundalini — An Untold Story: A Himalayan Mystic's Insight into the Power of Kundalini and Chakra Sadhana

“The path of awakening the kundalini is to turn inwards and pay attention to our world of emotions, thoughts and talents hidden inside us.”
― Om Swami, Kundalini — An Untold Story: A Himalayan Mystic's Insight into the Power of Kundalini and Chakra Sadhana

“no sense in trying to play that game with the past. Here is where we are today, and we can only make our moves from here.”
― Robin Hobb, Assassin's Quest

“Sometimes I think there is more rest in that place between wakefulness and sleep than there is in true sleep. The mind walks in the twilight of both states, and finds the truths that are hidden alike by daylight and dreams. Things we are not ready to know abide in that place, awaiting that unguarded frame of mind.”
― Robin Hobb, Fool's Errand

“Perhaps knowledge should not be available to all. Perhaps it should be earned, parceled out from master to worthy student only, rather than committed to paper where anyone who chances upon it may claim it for himself.”
― Robin Hobb, Fool's Errand

“No man can return to being a boy. But there are interludes in a man’s life when, for a time, he can recapture the feeling that the world is a forgiving place and that he is immortal.”
― Robin Hobb, Fool's Errand

“I make my argument that Buddhism’s diagnosis of the human predicament is fundamentally correct, and that its prescription is deeply valid and urgently important.”
― Robert Wright, Why Buddhism is True: The Science and Philosophy of Meditation and Enlightenment

“The Dalai Lama has said, “Don’t try to use what you learn from Buddhism to be a better Buddhist; use it to be a better whatever-you-already-are.”
― Robert Wright, Why Buddhism is True: The Science and Philosophy of Meditation and Enlightenment

“accepting, even embracing, an unpleasant feeling can give you a critical distance from it that winds up diminishing the unpleasantness.”
― Robert Wright, Why Buddhism is True: The Science and Philosophy of Meditation and Enlightenment

“The more I studied the accounts of others, both written and told, the more it seemed to me that we attempt such histories not to preserve knowledge, but to fix the past in a settled way. Like a flower pressed flat and dried, we try to hold it still and say, this is exactly how it was the day I first saw it. But like the flower, the past cannot be trapped that way. It loses its fragrance and its vitality, its fragility becomes brittleness and its colors fade. And when next you look on the flower, you know that it is not at all what you sought to capture, that that moment has fled forever.”
― Robin Hobb, Fool's Errand

“History is no more fixed and dead than the future. The past is no further away than the last breath you took.”
― Robin Hobb

“Richard and I both believe that something transcendental is involved with the mind, consciousness, and the path of awakening—call it God, Spirit, Buddha-nature, the Ground, or by no name at all. Whatever it is, by definition it’s beyond the physical universe. Since it cannot be proven one way or another, it is important—and consistent with the spirit of science—to respect it as a possibility.”
― Rick Hanson, Buddha's Brain: The Practical Neuroscience of Happiness, Love, and Wisdom

“Only we humans worry about the future, regret the past, and blame ourselves for the present.”
― Rick Hanson, Buddha's Brain: The Practical Neuroscience of Happiness, Love, and Wisdom

“It’s a remarkable fact that the people who have gone the very deepest into the mind—the sages and saints of every religious tradition—all say essentially the same thing: your fundamental nature is pure, conscious, peaceful, radiant, loving, and wise, and it is joined in mysterious ways with the ultimate underpinnings of reality, by whatever name we give That. Although your true nature may be hidden momentarily by stress and worry, anger and unfulfilled longings, it still continues to exist. Knowing this can be a great comfort.”
― Rick Hanson, Buddha's Brain: The Practical Neuroscience of Happiness, Love, and Wisdom

“According to the teaching of the Buddha, the idea of self is an imaginary, false belief which has no corresponding reality, and it produces harmful thoughts of ‘me’ and ‘mine,’ selfish desire, craving, attachment, hatred, ill-will, conceit, pride, egoism, and other defilements, impurities, and problems.”
― Robert Wright, Why Buddhism is True: The Science and Philosophy of Meditation and Enlightenment

“In other words, if you were to build into the brain a component in charge of public relations, it would look something like the conscious self.”
― Robert Wright, Why Buddhism is True: The Science and Philosophy of Meditation and Enlightenment

“RAIN. First you Recognize the feeling. Then you Accept the feeling (rather than try to drive it away). Then you Investigate the feeling and its relationship to your body. Finally, the N stands for Nonidentification, or, equivalently, Nonattachment. Which is a nice note to end on, since not being attached to things was the Buddha’s all-purpose prescription for what ails us.”
― Robert Wright, Why Buddhism is True: The Science and Philosophy of Meditation and Enlightenment