If your mind is empty, it is always ready for anything, it is open to everything. In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert’s mind there are few.
Christopher McCandless:“I will miss you too, but you are wrong if you think that the joy of life comes principally from the joy of human relationships. God’s place is all around us, it is in everything and in anything we can experience. People just need to change the way they look at things.
In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities. In the expert’s mind there are few.
But if you make your best effort just to continue your practice with your whole mind and body, without gaining ideas, then whatever you do will be true practice.
So even though you have some difficulty in your practice, even though you have some waves while you are sitting, those waves themselves will help you.
While you are continuing this practice, week after week, year after year, your experience will become deeper and deeper, and your experience will cover everything you do in your everyday life.
For the beginner, practice without effort is not true practice.
The most important point is to accept yourself and stand on your two feet.
It is easy to have calmness in inactivity, it is hard to have calmness in activity, but calmness in activity is true calmness.
Things are always changing, so nothing can be yours.
Nothing outside yourself can cause any trouble. You yourself make the waves in your mind. If you leave your mind as it is, it will become calm. This mind is called big mind.
When you are fooled by something else, the damage will not be so big. But when you are fooled by yourself, it is fatal. No more medicine.
Moment after moment everything comes out of nothingness. This is the true joy of life.
Wherever you go you will find your teacher, as long as you have the eyes to see and the ears to hear.
Treat every moment as your last. It is not preparation for something else.
If you can just appreciate each thing, one by one, then you will have pure gratitude. Even though you observe just one flower, that one flower includes everything.
As long as we have some definite idea about or some hope in the future, we cannot really be serious with the moment that exists right now.
The true purpose of Zen is to see things as they are, to observe things as they are, and to let everything go as it goes. Zen practice is to open up our small mind.