Fingers Pointing - Birds Singing by Ron FLowers - HTML preview

PLEASE NOTE: This is an HTML preview only and some elements such as links or page numbers may be incorrect.
Download the book in PDF, ePub, Kindle for a complete version.

William James

.

A fish in the ocean can never know the Godliness of the ocean unless it leaves and returns, The journey is the goal. The means contain the end.

     Bhagwan Shree Raneesh

 

You are a spiritual entity who has taken birth and your work on earth is to work out your Karma and awaken out of the illusion of your own separateness.

     Ram Dass

 

All mystical writing really is instructions. It is not an attempt to describe the universe, to describe God, to describe ultimate reality. Every mystic knows that cannot possibly be done. The very word mysticism is from the Greek word myein which means keeping silence.

     Alan Watts

 

Renunciation is not giving up the things of this world, it is accepting that they go away.

     ?

The universe begins to look more like a great thought than a great machine.

     Sir James Jeans

 

If you can, help others. If you cannot do that, at least do not harm them.

     The Dalai Lama

                    

The purpose of life is to increase the warm heart. Think of other people.

Serve other people sincerely. No cheating….

     The Dalai Lama

 

It is the dying person’s state of mind, rather than the ability to control the manner of dying, to which importance is attached. One who dies lusting for life in this world or for salvation in the next is not enlightened.

     Yoel Hoffmann    

 

When you suffer a calamity – then be it so; now is the time of calamity. When you die – then be it so; now is the time to die. Thus you save yourself form calamity and death.

     Yamamoto Ryokan

 

However deep your knowledge of the scriptures, it is no more than a strand of hair in the vastness of space; however important seeming your worldly experience, it is but a drop of water in a deep ravine.

     Master Tokusan

     

The object to ‘learning’ is to inevitably lead to presuppositions concerning the nature of the world, and a philosophy about the creation of others, whereas meditation and the pure perception which must accompany it may lead to insight into the very nature of things, the world not yet ‘created, conceptualized, made philosophy.’

     Lucien Stryk

 

The wind blows hard among the pines

Towards the beginning

Of an endless past.

Listen: you’ve heard everything.

     Shinkichi Takahashi

 

When you allow thinking to stop, you find you are in the eternal here and now.

     Alan Watts

 

The tick, tick, tick, of time shuts our eternity, and we live in the field of time; but what is living in time is an eternal principle.

     Joseph Campbell

 

Like living, dying has its share of sadness and joy. The sadness of letting go of a person we love is tempered if we remember to hold everyone lightly, knowing they are ‘just on loan.’ When you use a glass to drink form, see it as already broken.

     Jack Kornfield

 

As the bee takes the essence of a flower and flies away without destroying its beauty and perfume, so wonder ye in this life.

     The Buddha

 

He who knows others is wise. He who knows himself is enlightened.     Lao-tzu

 

The opposite of love is not hate, but fear.                         B. S. Rajneesh

                    

Each one of us must realize our own power. In many religions, there is the tendency to surrender to a higher authority. That’s not the case in Zen. In the beginning of training it may seem so but, ultimately, the student needs to be free of the teacher, free of Buddhism, free of the whole catastrophe.

     John Daido Loori Roshi

 

From the Buddhist point of view, ego means not leaving the mind alone with just the quality of knowing or of being aware. In addition, there’s a claiming of ownership of this conscious quality. Something which is extra to just experiencing. Rather than just leaving well enough alone in any moment of experiencing, just letting whatever is in that experience be as it naturally is, there’s a sense of separating from that, looking at it from the outside by jumping out of the window of this room, and then looking back and forming the notion, ‘That is my room.’ That kind of possessive attitude is what is called ego.

     Tsoknyi Rinpoche

 

I believe that a leaf of grass is no less than the journeywork of the stars, and a pismire is equally perfect, and a grain of sand, and the egg of a wren, and a tree-toad is a chef-d’oeuvre for the highest, and the running blackberry would adorn the parlors of heaven, and the narrowest hinge in my hand puts to scorn all machinery, and the cow crunching with depress’d head surpasses any statue. And a mouse is miracle enough to stagger sextillions of infidels.

     Walt Whitman

          

One does not discover new worlds without first consenting to lose sight of all shores.

     Andre Gide

 

Any teaching becomes a false teaching when you get attached to it. You have to learn to move back and forth from one perspective to another without any hindrance….Even enlightenment has no value if you insist on remaining there.

     Dennis Genpo Merzel

 

Have a mind that is open to everything and attached to nothing.          Mileropa

 

You do not have any problems, you only think you do.               from A Course in Miracles

 

Any life, no matter how long and complex it may be, is made up of a single moment – the moment in which a man finds out once and for all who he is.

     Jorge Luis Borges

 

You must learn to be still in the midst of activity and to be vibrantly alive in repose.

     Indra Gandhi

 

Many eyes go through the meadow, but few see the flowers in it.          Ralph Waldo Emerson

 

Meditation might be considered theater. Think of it as a ticket to step outside yourself in order to get some distance on your own little dramas – to become not only an actor on the world stage but a member of the audience as well.

     Wes Nisker

 

When the soul lies down in that grass, the world is too full to talk about.

Ideas, language, even the phrase ‘each other’ doesn’t make any sense.

     Rumi

 

To be all one with what you are doing is to be totally alone.

All Oneness equals Aloneness.

     Bernard

 

The problem is that we tend to seek an easy and painless answer. But this kind of solution does not apply to the spiritual path. We have committed ourselves to the pain of exposing ourselves, of taking off our clothes, our skin, nerves, heart, brains, until we are exposed to the universe.

     Chogyam Trungpa

 

The kingdom of God cometh not with observation, neither shall they say, lo here or there, for lo, the kingdom of God is within you.

     Luke 17:20

 

If all objective events are psychic processes, then what we call ‘objective events’ are mental events, or forms of mind. This is the unique realization that makes greater human endeavors possible.    

Da Avabhasa

 

The Sage does not talk. The Talented Ones talk, and the stupid ones argue.

     Kung Tingan

 

The universe is an infinite tapestry of perfectly ordered love relationships, and when you are loving enough, you rise. It’s not even a matter of waiting until your lifetime is over. Your movement as a being is not horizontal through time, so to speak. All states of consciousness are available right now. Every possibility in the past and future exists timelessly, it’s always there, and you activate your level of reality by your own vibrations.

Thaddeus Golas

 

It is when I am with people that I am lonely, and when I am alone I am no longer lonely.

     Thomas Merton

 

Is it not written in your law, ‘I said you are all gods?’                         John 10:30

 

What more can a person gain in life than that his God-Nature reveals itself to him?