Half the spiritual life consists of remembering what we are up against and where we are going.
The heart is always the place to go. Go home into your heart, where there is warmth, appreciation, gratitude and contentment.
It is often thought that the Buddha’s doctrine teaches us that suffering will disappear if one has meditated long enough, or if one sees everything differently. It is not that at all. Suffering isn’t going to go away; the one who suffers is going to go away.
If we want to be loved, we are looking for a support system. If we want to love, we are looking for spiritual growth.
If the whole universe can be found in our own body and mind, this is where we need to make our inquires. We all have the answers within ourselves, we just have not got in touch with them yet. The potential of finding the truth within requires faith in ourselves.
Trying to achieve something in the spiritual world is just as foolish as trying to achieve something in the material world. There’s nothing to achieve. There’s only letting go. As we let go, more and more, of ego identifications, desires, and support systems, bliss will arise.
To look for total satisfaction in oneself is a futile endeavor. Since everything changes from moment to moment, where can self and where can satisfaction be found? Everybody is unhappy simply because of unfilled desire. Everybody is looking for something that isn’t available.
The Buddha compared anger to picking up hot coals with one’s bare hands and trying to throw them at the person with whom one is angry. Who gets burned first? The one who is angry, of course.
Whatever we attempt is a reflection of our inner thirst, which we hope to quench in all these external ways. What we are looking for lies within us, and if we gave out time and energy to an interior search, we would come across it much faster, since that is the only place where it is to be found.
Mindfulness is a mental activity that in due course eliminates all suffering.
A truly happy person is someone who is joyfully independent of outer conditions.
As long as we have practiced neither concentration nor mindfulness, the ego takes itself for granted and remains its usual normal size, as big as the people around one will allow.
From contact comes feeling. From feeling comes reaction. This is what keeps us in the cycle of birth and death. Our reactions to our feelings are our passport to rebirth.
If we do not try, we will not know.