A lot of seriously insane people have managed to acquire huge followings based on the idea that their insanity is a kind of enlightenment. An obvious example would be Charles Manson or Shoko Asahara who is the person responsible for the Sarin gas attack on the Tokyo subway.
BRAD WARNERWe believe Somewhere Else is out there for us if only we could find it. But there’s no Somewhere Else. Everything is right here…Make this your paradise or make this your hell. The choice is entirely yours. Really.
More Brad Warner Quotes
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Faith keeps you going, but doubt keeps you from going off the deep end.
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I mean somebody could write another book and say Brad’s idea about Buddhism and sex is wrong, and here’s mine, and that would be great. Just the fact that it would exist would be good because nobody is saying it, it’s like they’re trying to pretend it’s not there.
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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.
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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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The state of ambiguity – that messy, greasy, mixed-up, confused, and awful situation you’re living through right now – is enlightenment itself.
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How many Zen masters does it take to screw in a light bulb? The plum tree in the garden!
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I remember writing the post but not what I said specifically, so I’ll either repeat myself or say something completely different and baffle everybody.
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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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Just know that your expectations are only thoughts in your head, and keep on doing what you do.
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Suffering occurs when your ideas about how things ought to be don’t match how they really are.
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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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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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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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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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It’s sort of another innovation, probably a good innovation, of Western culture to separate the ideas between science and philosophy, but it’s important to remember they weren’t always separate realms of inquiry.
BRAD WARNER