What attracted me to Zen was my first teacher, Tim McCarthy. He was extremely genuine. It wasn’t even really a Zen thing, that sort of came along later.
BRAD WARNERSuffering occurs when your ideas about how things ought to be don’t match how they really are.
More Brad Warner Quotes
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I mean Godzilla is eternally pissed off at everything but of course he’s gonna be because every time he pops out of the water for a look around somebody is firing a missile at him. Buddha would probably have to act as a mediator between the people and Godzilla.
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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.
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You can always improve your situation. But you do so by facing it, not by running away.
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Much of the hatred and fear of sexuality found in religions stems from the idea that sex is a thing of the body and that the body must be denied so that the spirit may be elevated. In Buddhism there is no notion that the body is made of inferior matter while the spirit flies free within.
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So he [Shoko Asahara] was insane but managed to convince a couple thousand people that he was enlightened. Western culture, which Japan is now definitely a part of, doesn’t have an understanding of what Enlightenment is.
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Buddha might be the one thing that could settle Godzilla down. He might say, “Listen Godzilla, you don’t have to do all this. Just chill out a little bit and everything will be fine”.
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Zen practice is about not getting high on anything and in so doing getting high on absolutely everything. We then find that everything we encounter – bliss or nonbliss – possesses a tremendous depth and beauty that we usually miss.
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Reality’s all you’ve got. But here’s the real secret, the real miracle: it’s enough.
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You won’t understand life and death until you’re ready to set aside any hope of understanding life and death and just live your life until you die.
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I was very attracted to the way that Zen did not go into the imagination land. And now I’ve forgotten what your first question was and how we were going to tie this together.
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As for enlightenment, that’s just for people who can’t face reality.
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I mean, I can do that all day long. I can tell you the Vulcan’s are not actually devoid of emotion. That they work hard to suppress their emotions. And of course, there actually are no real Vulcan’s, though I know the ins and outs of them as fictional characters.
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the only real time as far as Buddhism is concerned is right now. Right now there is no old age or death because old age and death are descriptions of things as they are now when we compare them to things as they used to be.
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The trick to not thinking is not adding energy to the equation in an effort to forcibly stop thinking from happening. It’s more a matter of subtracting energy from the equation in order not to barf the thoughts up and start chewing them over again.
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Truly compassionate action arises spontaneously without thought and is carried out in real action with no anticipation of reward and, indeed, no concept of a doer of that action.
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