Buddha’s simple definition of enlightenment as “the end of suffering.
Be present as the watcher of your mind- of your thoughts and emotions as well as your reactions in various situations.
Past and future veil God from our sight; burn up both of them with fire.
Belief in a future heaven creates a present hell.
When a condition or situation that the mind has attached itself to and identified with changes or disappears, the mind cannot accept it. It will cling to the disappearing condition and resist the change. It is almost as if a limb were being torn off your body.
Your sense of who you are determines what you perceive as your needs and what matters to you in life – and whatever matters to you will have the power to upset and disturb you. You can use this as a criterion to find out how deeply you know yourself. What matters to you is not necessarily what you say or believe, but what your actions and reactions reveal as important and serious to you. So you may want to ask yourself the question: What are the things that upset and disturb me?
In normal everyday usage, “I” embodies the primordial error, a misperception of who you are, an illusory sense of identity. This is the ego. The illusory sense of self is what Albert Einstein, who had deep insights not only into the reality of space an time, but also into human nature, referred to as “an optical illusion of consciousness.
I have lived with several Zen masters – all of them cats. Even ducks have taught me important spiritual lessons. Just watching them is a meditation.
The fact that everyone else is doing it doesn’t make it any less insane.
What, at this moment, is lacking?
As you read, a shift takes place within you.
Things and conditions can give you pleasure, but they will also give you pain. Things and conditions can give you pleasure, but they cannot give you joy. Nothing can give you joy. Joy is uncaused and arises from within as the joy of Being.
Ego is the complete identification with form. Physical forms, thought forms, emotional forms.
Awareness means Presence, and only Presence can dissolve the unconscious past in you.
If peace is really what you want, then you will choose peace. If peace mattered to you more than anything else and if you truly knew yourself to be Spirit rather than a little me, you would remain nonreactive and absolutely alert when confronted with challenging people or situations. You would immediately accept the situation and thus become one with it rather than separate yourself from it.
Ego implies complete unawareness of the dimension of space.
The greater part of violence that humans have inflicted on each other is not the work of criminals or the mentally deranged, but of normal, respectable citizens in the service of the collective ego.
Until there is surrender, unconscious role-playing constitutes a large part of human interaction. In surrender, you no longer need ego defenses and false masks. You become very simple, very real. “That’s dangerous,” says the ego. “You’ll get hurt. You’ll become vulnerable.” What the ego doesn’t know, of course, is that only through the letting go of resistance, through becoming “vulnerable,” can you discover your true and essential invulnerability.
Enthusiasm and the ego cannot coexist.
Nobody can act beyond their level of consciousness.