Be quiet
in your mind,
quiet in your senses,
and also quiet in your body.
Then, when all these are quiet,
don’t do anything. In that
state truth will reveal
itself to you.
Be quiet
in your mind,
quiet in your senses,
and also quiet in your body.
Then, when all these are quiet,
don’t do anything. In that
state truth will reveal
itself to you.
What lies
outside my mind
is of no concern to it.
If you could learn this lesson,
you’d be standing straight.
You can come back
to life.
Anything could happen,
and whether we act or not has everything
to do with it. Though there is no lottery ticket for the lazy
and the detached, for the engaged there is a tremendous gamble
for the highest stakes right now. I say this to you not because I haven’t
noticed that this country has strayed close to destroying itself and everything
it once stood for, in pursuit of empire in the world and the eradication of democracy
at home, that our civilization is close to destroying the very nature on which we
depend—the oceans, the atmosphere, the uncounted species of plant and
insect and bird. I say it because I have noticed: wars will break out,
the planet will heat up, species will die out, but how many,
how hot, and what survives depends on whether
we act. The future is dark, with a
darkness as much of
the womb as the
grave.
Rebecca Solnit
There
are three miracles of our
Brother Jesus not yet recorded in the Book:
the first that he was a man like you and me; the second that
he had a sense of humor; and the third that he
knew he was a conqueror though
conquered.
Kahlil Gibran
Why do
people hate Jesus,
or at least prefer the ethereal dead
version known as Christ? Because Jesus made
outrageous demands: Love your enemy,
renounce material possessions,
give all you have to
the poor.
Barbara Ehrenreich
A
conservative is
someone who admires radicals
centuries after they’re
dead.
Leo Rosten
Once you
merge your tracks
into the stream of zen,
you spend your days silencing
your mind and studying with your
whole being. You realize that this Great Cause
is not obtained from anyone else but is just a matter
of taking up the task boldly and strongly, and making constant
progress. Day by day you shed your delusions, and day by day you
enhance your clarity of mind. Your potential for enlightened perception
is like fine gold that is to be refined hundreds and thousands of times.
What is essential for getting out of the dusts, what is basic for
helping living creatures, is that you must penetrate
through freely in all directions and arrive at
peace and security free from doubt and
attain the stage of great
potential and great
function.
This work
is located precisely in
your own inner actions. It is just
a matter of being in the midst of the interplay
of the myriad causal conditions every day, in the confusion
of the red dusts, amid favorable and adverse circumstances and
gain and loss, appearing and disappearing in their midst,
without being affected and turned around by
them, but on the contrary, being able
to transform them and turn
them around.
…When you
go on grinding and polishing
like this for a long time, you are liberated
right in the midst of birth and death, and you look upon
the world’s useless reputation and ruinous projects as mere dust
in the wind, as a dream, as a magical apparition, as an
optical illusion. Set free, you pass through the
world. Isn’t this what it means to be a
great saint who has emerged from
the dusts of sensory
attachments?