We are always doing something to cover up our basic existential anxiety. Some people live that way until the day they die.
Awareness is our true self; it’s what we are. So we don’t have to try to develop awareness; we simply need to notice how we block awareness, with our thoughts, our fantasies, our opinions, and our judgments. We’re either in awareness, which is our natural state, or we’re doing something else. The mark of mature students is that most of the time, they don’t do something else. They’re just here, living their life. Nothing special.
When we’re lost in thought, when we’re dreaming, what have we lost? We’ve lost reality. Our life has escaped us.
Daily sitting is our bread and butter, the basic stuff of dharma. Without it we tend to be confused.
Joy is being the circumstances of our life just as they are.
That’s essentially what Zen practice is about: functioning from moment to moment.
When I watch my mind and stay with my body, out of that comes some course of action.
Living Zen is nothing special: life as it is. Zen is life itself, nothing added.
Who knows how we should be? We simply do our best, over and over and over.
Human beings are basically good, kind, and compassionate, but it takes hard digging to uncover that buried jewel.
In practice, we return over and over again to perception, to just sitting. Practice is just hearing, just seeing, just feeling.
At any given moment, we are the way we are, and we see what we’re able to see.
Doing one thing at a time and giving oneself wholly to doing it is the most efficient way one can possibly live, because there’s no blockage in the organism whatsoever. When we live and work in that way, we are extremely efficient without being rushed. Life is very smooth.
103When we try to be something that we are not, we become the slave of a rigid, fixed mind, following a rule about how things have to be. The violence and the anger in us remain unnoticed, because we are caught in our pictures of how we should be.
But if other people are irritable, we may divorce their behavior from their experiencing. We can’t feel their experience; and so we judge their behavior. If we think, “She shouldn’t be so arrogant,” we only see her behavior and judge it, because we have no awareness of what is true for her.
The minute we have even a passing thought of judging another person, the red light of practice should go on.
Shakespeare’s Polonius said, “To thine own self be true, and it must follow, as the night the day, thou canst not then be false to any man.
Practice is not a trimming on your life. Practice is the foundation. If that’s not there nothing else will be there.
So there are two kinds of suffering. One is when we feel we’re being pressed down; as though suffering is coming at us from without, as though we’re receiving something that’s making us suffer. The other kind of suffering is being under, just bearing it, just being it.
There’s nothing wrong with conceptualization per se; but when we take our opinions about any event to be some kind of absolute truth and fail to see that they are opinions, then we suffer. That’s false suffering.
What makes it unbearable is your mistaken belief that it can be cured.