Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
As my name might suggest, I'm Jewish. My grandparents were Polish and Russian Jews who came to Australia in the late 1920s, and had they not, we wouldn't be talking now.
With the tools of democracy, democracy was murdered and lawlessness made "legal." Raw power ruled, and its only real goal was to destroy all other powers besides itself.
Writers tend to be addicted to houses ... We work at home, indulging the agoraphobia endemic to our kind. We are immersed in our surroundings to an almost morbid degree.
Romance was a game, like bridge, in which you said things instead of playing cards. Like bridge you had to pretend you were playing for money or playing for some stakes.
If every one said orders were impossible to carry out when they were received where would you be? Where would we all be if you just said, "Impossible," when orders came?
Going to another country doesn’t make any difference. I’ve tried all that. You can’t get away from yourself by moving from one place to another. There’s nothing to that.
The very ingredients that nurture love - mutuality, reciprocity, protection, worry, responsibility for the other - are sometimes the very ingredients that stifle desire.
All the persons of faith I know are sinners, doubters, uneven performers. We are secure not because we are sure of ourselves but because we trust that God is sure of us.
I survived a number of garage bands during my teens and early twenties, both as drummer and guitarist. It's nigh impossible for me to listen to music without parsing it.
Widows tend either to fade away when husbands die, committing emotional suttee, or else find that a new life burgeons. Here in Christchurch, a lot of burgeoning goes on.
If you removed all of the homosexuals and homosexual influence from what is generally regarded as American culture, you would pretty much be left with Let's Make a Deal.
Religion must remain an outlet for people who say to themselves, "I am not the kind of person I want to be." It must never sink into an assemblage of the self-satisfied.
There is a vital lesson to be learned here, a Truth our society must not lose sight of, and that is the sanctity of every human life and the dignity of every individual.
It wasn't quite a question. It was more of an invitation to tell him whatever I chose. Eldric game me a choice, and it was this that made me want to tell him everything.
Your choices are really very limited. They are limited by your level of awareness. If you can change your level of awareness radically, then you can change your destiny.
It is good not to think of karma as an alien force that is outside of yourself. You are the generator of karma. Karma is the energy patterns that emanate from your life.
Selfless actions create a higher karma, which brings you into higher states of mind. When you are in higher states of mind you will see things that you never saw before.
Sometimes, as we practice jnana yoga, we feel that life has no meaning, no purpose. We feel that there is no reason to try, that life is empty. This is another illusion.
The pathway to enlightenment is joyful. It may sound harsh. I suggest just the opposite. It is rather easy compared to the possibilities of staying in pain and illusion.
Zen was a reaction. Just as Buddha came into the world and spoke against the fall of Vedanta, so Buddhism lost its essence and became ritual. Zen was a reaction to that.
By perfecting the practices of zazen and mindfulness, by learning patience and love and by realizing the essential emptiness of all phenomena, you will discover nirvana.
I went through times of self-hate, thinking how undeveloped spiritual I was. Everyone else in the ashram, a thousand people, nobody had a girlfriend or boyfriend. I did.
Zazen's music is composed in other dimensions and it is played by some of my students. I go through the music they have played with my aura and wash out anything impure.
The way advanced meditation is taught, the way I teach it, the way all enlightened people teach it, is through transference. We transfer light and power to someone else.
Then there are most of my students who don't know a whole lot about love. You don't know what fun love is. I will remain inaccessible to you until you learn how to love.
There is a certain beauty and refinement that is often found in our world and it is expensive. It shouldn't necessarily be so. It is just the way our economic system is.
We've done this before in other worlds, in other lives. It is our strength, law, medicine, entertainment, and computers, the networking of energy. All of these are arts.
People use ideas of non-duality as an escape from reality. It is very easy to say there is no winning and losing and justify the fact that you didn't do a very good job.
Most people are taught from an early age on, to conceive of themselves as losers. They are taught that there are a very special few who are eminently successful in life.
The essential premise of Buddhism is that there is enlightenment, there is nirvana. Beyond this world, beyond all worlds, there's something radiant, perfect and eternal.
Think about the flowers. Life is just a bunch of pretty pictures. All this is supposed to do is force you beyond the mind, when you realize that you can't figure it out.
Within an atom there can be a billion kingdoms, endless. But all of them are bound by the cycle of birth and death. They all come into being for a while and then vanish.
Mysticism is concerned primarily with moving our awareness field from the beginning of the band of perception, the human band, up to the enlightened bands of perception.
Who's to say what's right or wrong? The courts and the society can be totally wrong. Nazi Germany, what did they say was the right thing to do? To destroy and burn Jews.
People who are drawn to meditation have had lots of incarnation in the world of experience, and we know the score. We know that experience is great, but it's not enough.
Rise above the limited conditions of pleasure and pain, success and failure, happiness and sorrow, that all the countless unenlightened beings in creation are slaves to.
Power either goes up or down. Your thoughts are the harness of power. It is necessary to think positive thoughts, not just wait for them to occur, but to introduce them.
A human being is bound by emotion, enslaved by their desires. A person is never really at peace with themselves because they live in the spectrum of human consciousness.
No self-effort in the direction of enlightenment is ever wasted. Even if you don't become fully enlightened in a given lifetime, you will be much happier and more aware.
Go directly to Nirvana. Don't pass go - or you'll have kids, you'll grow old together, you'll be born into another realm where you'll forget that there was even nirvana.
The best meditation I ever had, I haven't had yet. It's in the future, which as anyone knows doesn't exist - anyone who meditates knows. But yet, I will have it someday.
By the time the Egyptian civilization had begun to flourish, the earth's aura had already become so dense it was impossible to discover the secret meditation techniques.
Tantric Zen is all about the practice of zazen meditation. If you meditate well, you'll be in very powerful states of mind and then it really doesn't matter what you do.
You need energy and life force to see and feel what you need to do. Otherwise you are in a dark room and you can't tell what's going on. You need to practice meditation.
In Buddhism we don't really believe in sin and salvation as Westerners would define them. We believe in the limitless possibilities of the present and of future moments.
You're not the doer. What's to do? You can't undo what's not done. It's all one anyway, why think about it? But you need to discriminate, so you'd better think about it.
Ungrateful are those on this earthly road, Who do complain that life is made of tears, That happiness on earth one cannot find, That we are made of sorrows and of fears.
Faith in Christ is not an exercise of the understanding merely; it is an affection of the heart. "With the heart man believeth." To those who believe Christ is precious.
The illusion holds power over you when you are not able to remember that you are a powerful spirit that has taken on the physical experience for the purpose of learning.
He (God) can be revealed only to the child; perfectly, to the pure child only. All the discipline of the world is to make men children, that God may be revealed to them.