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.
BRAD WARNERYou 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.
More Brad Warner Quotes
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As for enlightenment, that’s just for people who can’t face reality.
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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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So I was first exposed to this guy Tim McCarthy, and he’s talking about Zen, but deeper than that he was a genuine person. I thought maybe he’s someone I can trust and follow this thing he’s talking about all the time.
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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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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.
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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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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.
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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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True mindfulness is the awareness that everything you encounter is a vigorous expression of the same living universe as you.
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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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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.
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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 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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The thinking brain influences the body’s responses and it makes a neat little loop.
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