If you aren’t feeding the fire of anger or the fire of craving by talking to yourself, then the fire doesn’t have anything to feed on.
It peaks and passes on.
In order to be gentle and create an atmosphere of compassion for yourself, it’s necessary to stop talking to yourself about how wrong everything is – or how right everything is, for that matter.
Pema Chödrön, Start Where You Are – a Guide to Compassionate Living
How refreshingly bright is the moon of the Fourfold Wisdom!
Being so, is there anything you lack as the absolute presents itself before you?
The place where you stand is the Land of the Lotus,
And your person — the body of the Buddha.
Hakuin, Japanese Zen poet, 1686 – 1768.
I have frequently seen people become neurotic when they content themselves with inadequate or wrong answers to the questions of life. They seek position, marriage, reputation, outward success or money, and remain unhappy and neurotic even when they have attained what they were seeking. Such people are usually confined within too narrow a spiritual horizon.
Their life has not sufficient content, sufficient meaning. If they are enabled to develop into more spacious personalities, the neurosis generally disappears
Jung, Autobiography
Much of what you see “out there” is actually manufactured “in here” by your brain
Only a small fraction of the input to your occipital lobes comes from the external world;
the rest comes from internal memory stores and perceptual-processing modules.
Rich Hanson, Buddha’s Brain
The most common way people give up their power,
is by thinking they don’t have any.
Alice Walker
A long weekend here in Ireland.
My home can be anywhere, heaven or earth.
All I need is room in my heart.
And a good source of water, of course.
You need room in your heart . . . a big empty space
To sort out what’s real from what’s not.
Hsu Yun, 1840 – 1959, renowned and influential Chinese Chan Buddhist master
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