meditation

With 70,000 thoughts a day and 95% of our activity controlled by the subconscious mind, no wonder that it feels as though we are asleep most of the time. To awake, we need to train Self-Remembering and Mindfulness.

Meditation and mindfulness are tools for working with the mind, but where they have led me is to a blossoming of the heart...

Meditation is not a religion but a scientific way to enhance the concentration power of the mind.

Each meditation should last hours - three, four, six hours.

Where ego comes in, loving kindness departs. So wherever there is ego, there is very little space for true bliss and true happiness because true bliss and true happiness isn't exclusive to the attachments the ego enjoys playing with, but rather a free state of mind that is part of loving kindness and its activities inside and outside of oneself.

To be able to die consciously, we need to prepare for death while we are still living.Only if we live consciously, we can die consciously.Only a meditator is able to die consciously as life is an opportunity to prepare for death. Meditation is a death, a death of the ego. Death is not in opposition of life, death is the finale, the crescendo of life. How we die shows us how we have been living. Death is not an end, death is a new beginning, a new life.

Compassion is born out of lovingkindness.It is born of knowing our oneness, not just thinking about it or wishing it were so. It is born out of the wisdom of seeing things exactly as they are.

To study the self is to forget the self. Maybe if you sat enough zazen, your sense of being a solid, singular self would dissolve and you could forget about it. What a relief. You could just hang out happily as part of an open-ended quantum array.

Life is a collection of moments. Mindfulness is beautification of the moments.

The East has failed because it tried meditation without love. The West has failed because it tried love without meditation. My whole effort is to give you a synthesis, the whole__hich means meditation plus love.

Nothing you hear or read will be of any benefit to you unless you meditate and digest itdeeply.

That which is aware of sadness is not sad. That which is aware of fear is not fearful. The moment I am lost in thought, however, I'm as confused as anyone else.

I have tried everything except being myself!

...after much practice and struggle, you come to feel for yourself that enlightenment is not only possible, but in process.

Essentially, meditation allows us to live in ways that are less automatic. This necessarily means less time spent worrying, ruminating, and trying to control things we can__ control. It means we become less vulnerable to the throes of the fear-driven, older parts of our brains, and freer to use our newer and more sophisticated mental abilities: patience, compassion, acceptance and reason.

The phrases of the Lord's Prayer, "are words we pray, not always because we believe them, but because we WANT to believe them.

People who want to acquired powers over somebody else, for them imagination is a powerful tool. If you are seeking liberation, if you want to become free, the first thing that you must become free from is your imagination, because that is the deepest trap. Your memory and your imagination are the two traps. Do you see? One of your legs is stuck in memory; another leg is stuck in imagination. If you release yourself from these, meditation is just natural. When you sit for meditation, what is your basic problem? You are either thinking about tomorrow or thinking about what happened yesterday, isn't it? If you are free from memory and imagination, you will always be meditative.

For, indeed, this is the great horror, solitude, when the soul can no longer bathe in the ever-changing mind, laugh as its sunlit ripples lap its skin, but, shut up in the castle of a few thoughts, paces its narrow prison, wearing down the stone of time, feeding on its own excrement. There is no star in the blackness of that night, no foam upon the stagnant and putrid sea. Even the glittering health that the desert brings to the body, is like a spear in the soul's throat. The passionate ache to act, to think: this eats into the soul like a cancer. It is the scorpion striking itself in its agony, save that no poison can add to the tortue of the circling fire; no superflux of anguish relieve it by annihilation. But against these paroxisms is an eightfold sedative. The ravings of madness are lost in soundless space; the struggles of the drowning man are not heeded by the sea.