Revise the story
you tell yourself about failure.
Consider yourself an apprentice in the world.
Learn all you can. Gain experience.
Keep moving.
Revise the story
you tell yourself about failure.
Consider yourself an apprentice in the world.
Learn all you can. Gain experience.
Keep moving.
Don’t
seek a Buddha,
don’t seek a teaching,
don’t seek a community.
Don’t seek virtue, knowledge,
intellectual understanding, and
so on. When feelings of defilement
and purity are ended, still don’t hold
to this non-seeking and consider it right.
Don’t dwell at the point of ending, and
don’t long for heavens or fear hells.
When you are unhindered by
bondage or freedom, then
this is called liberation
of mind and body in
all places.
So high you
cannot climb or get close to it;
raindrops scatter in the flying wind.
The gate is barred with green moss. Suddenly
forgetting thought, without attainment,
only then will you be sure
the gate has been open
all along.
“What would be really interesting for people to see is how beautiful things grow out of shit, because nobody ever believes that, you know. Everybody thinks that Beethoven had his string quartets completely in his head, they somehow appeared there and formed in his head, and all he had to do was write them down and they would be kind of manifest to the world.
“But what I think what’s so interesting, and what should be a lesson everybody should learn, is that things come out of nothing. Things evolve out of nothing. You know, the tiniest seed in the right situation turns into the most beautiful forest. And then the most promising seed, in the wrong situation, turns into nothing.
“And I think that this would be important for people to understand because it gives people confidence in their own lives to know that that’s how things work. If you walk around with the idea that there are some people who are so gifted, they have these wonderful things in their head, but you’re not one of them, you’re just sort of a normal person, you could never do anything like that, then you live a different kind of life, you know.
“You could have another kind of life where you can say, where you say, ‘Well, I know that things comes from nothing very much and start from unpromising beginnings, and I’m an unpromising beginning, and I could start something.'”
be free of all worldly affairs
You are no different from buddha.
There is no other dharma. Simply let your mind
be carefree. You do not need to contemplate your action
and to purify your mind. Let your mind be boundless and without
any obstruction. Be free from going and coming. Whether you
walk or stay, sit or lie down, and whatever you see or
meet, all are the subtle functions of buddha.
It is joy without sorrow. This is
called buddha.