"Kontynuuj praktykę, aż zobaczysz siebie w najokrutniejszej osobie na Ziemi, w głodnym dziecku, w więźniu politycznym. Ćwicz, aż rozpoznasz się w każdym w supermarkecie, na rogu ulicy, w obozie koncentracyjnym, w liściu, w kropli rosy.
Medytuj, aż zobaczysz siebie w pyłku w odległej galaktyce. Zobacz i słuchaj całej swojej istoty. Jeśli jesteś w pełni obecny, deszcz Dharmy nawodni najgłębsze nasiona w twojej świadomości, a jutro, kiedy będziesz mył naczynia lub patrzył na błękitne niebo, ziarna wykiełkują, a miłość i zrozumienie pojawią się jako piękne kwiaty."
Thich Nhat Hanh
"Nie można rozwijać się duchowo bez przyswojenia sobie umiejętności dystansowania się od swoich emocji i zrozumienia, że są one produktami uzależnionymi od sposobu w jaki przetwarzana jest energia w naszym organizmie.
Twoje emocje - gniew, szczęście czy jakiekolwiek inne uczucie - nie zależą od tego , co dzieje się w świecie zewnętrznym, ale od sposobu w jaki przetwarzasz energie wewnątrz.
Jeśli uznasz ,że są one zależne od innych osób lub sytuacji, wciąż będziesz musiał coś lub kogoś zmieniać."
Gary Zukav
"Jeśli uważasz, że coś jest dobre i to robisz, jest to dla ciebie korzystne. Jeśli uważasz, że coś jest złe, i to robisz, jest to bardzo szkodliwym doświadczeniem."
Abraham Hicks
"Życie nie jest problemem do rozwiązania, pytaniem oczekującym odpowiedzi. Życie jest tajemnicą, którą należy kontemplować, przyglądając się jej z podziwem i rozkoszując się nią."
Anthony de Mello
"You are who you believe you are. Other people are, for you, who you believe they are; they can be nothing more than that. If you realized that the mind is one, that everyone and everything is your own projection (including you), you would understand that it’s only yourself you’re ever dealing with. You would end up loving yourself, loving every thought you think. When you love every thought, you love everything thoughts create, you love the whole world you have created. At first, the love that overflows in you seems to be about connecting with other people, and it’s wonderful to feel intimately connected to every human being you meet. But then it becomes about mind connected to itself, and only that. The ultimate love is the mind’s love of itself. Mind joins with mind—all of mind, without division or separation, all of it loved. Ultimately I am all I can know, and what I come to know is that there is no such thing as “I.”
So you discover that even mind is imagined. Inquiry wakes you up to that. When people question the apparent past, they lose their future. The present moment—that’s when we’re born. We’re the unborn. We’re born now… now… now… There is no story that can survive inquiry. “I” is imagined by “me,” and as you get a glimpse of that, you stop taking yourself so seriously. You learn to love yourself, as no one. Mind’s love affair with itself is the great dance, the only dance."
Before I had my final awakening years ago, I was crazed for enlightenment. You have to be a little crazy to seriously study Zen. My teacher used to say, "Only the crazy ones stay." One way my craziness worked was that before I went to sit with my teacher's group for a couple of hours on Sunday mornings, I would get up early, at 5:00 or 5:30 a.m., and do extra sittings. I would sit in a little room meditating and freezing to death.
Sitting there on one of those particular mornings, two things happened, one after another, and they seemed very paradoxical. The first one was a spontaneous seeing that everything was one. For me that manifested as hearing a bird call, a chirp, in the front yard, and from somewhere inside me the question arose, "What is it that hears the sound?" I had never asked this question before. I suddenly realized I was as much the sound and the bird as the one hearing the bird, that the hearing and sound and bird were all manifestations of one thing. I cannot say what that one thing is, except to say one thing.
I opened my eyes, and I found the same thing was happening in the room—the wall and the one seeing the wall were the same thing. I thought that was very strange, and I realized that the one thinking this was another manifestation of that. I got up and began to move around the house looking for something that wasn't part of the One. But everything was a reflection of that One thing. Everything was the divine. I wandered into the living room. In the middle of a step, consciousness, or awareness, suddenly left everything, whether it was a physical thing or body thing or world thing.
All in the step of a foot, everything disappeared. What arose was an image of what seemed like an infinite number of past incarnations, as if heads were lined up one behind another as far back as I could see. Awareness realized something like, "My God, I've been identified with various forms for umpteen lifetimes." At that moment, consciousness—spirit—realized it had been so identified with all these forms that it really thought it was a form right up to this lifetime.
All of a sudden, consciousness was unconfined to the form and existed independently. It was no longer defining itself by any form, whether that form was a body, a mind, a lifetime, a single thought, or a memory. I saw this, but I almost couldn't believe it. It was like someone just stuck a million dollars in my pocket, and I kept pulling it out as if I didn't believe I had it. But it couldn't be denied either. Even though I am using the word "I," there was no "I," only the One.
These two experiences happened together, one following within a few moments of the other. In the first, I became the Oneness of everything, and in the second, I became the consciousness or spirit that totally woke up out of all identification, even out of Oneness. When the Oneness dropped away, there was still a basic awakeness, but it had two different aspects: I'm everything, and I'm absolutely nothing. This was the awakening, the realization of Self.
The next thing that happened was that I took a step, just an ordinary step. It felt like the way a baby does when it takes his first good step and then smiles and looks around as if to say, "Did you see that?" and you can see his joy. So I took a step, and it was like, "Wow! The first step!" and another step, and then another, and I kept moving in circles because every step was the first step. It was a miracle.
In each "first" step, formless consciousness and Oneness just merged together so that the awakeness that had always identified itself as form was now actually inside of the form, unidentified. It wasn't looking through any thoughts or memories of what had come before, just through the five senses. With no history or memory, every step felt like a first step.
Then the funniest thought came through my mind—funny to me after 13 years of Zen practice—"Oops. I just woke up out of Zen!" When you wake up, you realize that you wake up out of everything, including all the things that have helped to bring you there. The next thing I did was write my wife this odd note. It said something like, "Happy birthday. Today is my birthday. I've just been born." I left it for her, and when I drove past our house to go to my meditation group, I saw her standing there waving the note in her hand. I don't know how, but she knew exactly what it meant.
I didn't tell my teacher anything about the experience for about three months because it seemed pointless. Why would anyone need to know this? I felt no need to tell anyone or be congratulated. It seemed totally sufficient in and of itself. It was only later that I learned that my experience corresponded to what my teacher had been talking about all along. I realized that this awakening was what all the teachings were about. In a very real way, that experience, which continues and is still the same today, is the foundation of everything I talk about. ...
When I realized that what was looking through my eyes and senses was awakeness or spirit rather than conditioning or memory, I saw that the same spirit was actually looking through all the other pairs of eyes. It didn't matter if it was looking through other conditioning; it was the exact same thing. It was seeing itself everywhere, not only in the eyes, but also in the trees, the rocks, and the floor." - Adyashanti
