spiritual-journey

I loved Enso Roshi__ teachings. I loved learning about life. I loved life. It was a good thing to feel. I loved life, and I loved learning, and I was still learning. I was not, yet, done. At the end of our journeys, there would be an end to the journey. Maybe. If I was lucky. If providence shone down upon me gently. I would find love. I would find acceptance. Complete love. Complete acceptance. I would know, that the self, is an illusion. I would come to enlightenment, but that would also mean, there would be no ___ there. I would realize that the ___ was an illusion, all along, just like some great dream. This is what the wise sages say, the great teachings, the mystical teachings, not only from the East, but also from the West. The Gospel of Saint Thomas. Thomas Merton. Thomas, like I was Thomas, and also doubting, the main reasons I__ chosen the name. If nothing else, it was lovable, just as it is. My life. Even the parts I didn__ love, could I love them? The struggles. It was all part of the journey, and would I not look back fondly on this, at some time? Look at how arduous and sincere I__ been. Look at how worried I__ been. Look at how insecure I__ been. Look at how I__ struggled. Trying to find my way. Would I not look back upon myself, affectionately and fondly and with love?

Let whatever happens, be what needs to happen, so that I may awaken.

The word of lust touches the body, the word of love touches the soul: feed the soul and starve the body.

If you lead me astray, then my wanderings will bring me to my destination.

Always remember, wherever you are, whether near or far, you had a mother who really, really loved you. The original mother. Once you've found your true inner guru you can never again be divided. Perfect union with the divine, through the grace of your real teacher, transcends time, space, death and all worldly limitations. Your real teacher is the original mother - regardless in which manifest or non-manifest form, or gender, she appears. The one who nurtures you and the one who also, out of wisdom and compassion, corrects you if you are misguided.

When the fuel is dried up in a vehicle, it stops driving automatically. You are a vehicle in the spiritual and the physical world, so you need some oil for alacrity, in order to get to your destination. The greater the quantity of your oil, the more you cover the distance, and the more you cover the distance, the closer you get to your success.

In order to understand why one chooses to be a Tantric practitioner, there has to be an understanding of cause and effect, cyclic existence, the awareness that the reality that we think we are seeing is not reality as it really truly is. So enlightenment is seeing reality with bare awareness, non-conceptual reality.

This thing I am feeling, I__ almost certain, is the closest I__l ever come to standing somewhere in between truth and reconciliation.

O Lord lead me along a sacred straight path.

Beauty is light set free.

If you have strength of character, you can use that as fuel to not only be a survivor but to transcend simply being a survivor, use an internal alchemy to turn something rotten and horrible into gold.

It is more important to go slow and gain the lessons you need along the journey then to rush the process and arrive at your destination empty.

Individually, every grain of sand brushing against my hands represents a story, an experience, and a block for me to build upon for the next generation.

There are Tantrics who deliberately seek to do more active forms of renunciation, so transgression of social norms and breaking of taboo, and breaking of social taboos especially, is a form of renunciation.

The material world is all feminine. The feminine engergy makes the non-manifest, manifest. So even men (are of the feminine energy). We have to relinquish our ideas of gender in the conventional sense. This has nothing to do with gender, it has to do with energy. So feminine energy is what creates and allows anything which is non-manifest, like an idea, to come into form, into being, to be born. All that we experience in the world around us, absolutely everything (is feminine energy). The only way that anything exists is through the feminine force.

In the beginning we seek truth. In the middle we seek reason. In the end we seek peace.

Still, as much as I had experienced, there was more waiting to be found. I had started out with a feeling of burning dullness and desperation. Now I was filled with a thrill and expectation of new discovery.

The title of this Chautauqua is "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance," not "Zen and the Art of Mountain Climbing," and there are no motorcycles on the tops of mountains, and in my opinion very little Zen. Zen is the "spirit of the valley," not the mountaintop. The only Zen you fin on the tops of mountains is the Zen you bring up there.