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Short Pema Chodron Buddhism Quotes

My spiritual quotes Katinka — Wed, 06 Oct 2010 08:28:20 +0000

Life has taught me the wisdom of moving toward what scares me.

Although it is embarrassing and painful, it is very healing to stop hiding from yourself. It is healing to know all the ways that you’re sneaky, all the ways that you hide out, all the ways that you shut down, deny, close off, criticize people, all your weird little ways. You can know all of that with some sense of humor and kindness. By knowing yourself, you’re coming to know humanness altogether. We are all up against these things. We are all in this together.

Pema Chodron, Start Where You Are: A Guide to Compassionate Living

Welcome the present moment as if you had invited it. It is all we ever have so we might as well work with it rather than struggling against it. We might as well make it our friend and teacher rather than our enemy.

From the new Pema Chodron Fan Site

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Albert Low zen quotes

My spiritual quotes Katinka — Fri, 27 Aug 2010 07:27:49 +0000

The vow of the Bodhisattva is that she will not go into Nirvana until every single suffering being has entered Nirvana. One has to understand what this means. Our awakening is not a personal triumph. We do not have to win a spiritual sprint. We are one mind. Awakening is to penetrate more and more deeply into this truth. The world is alive. And as long as there is suffering then this living whole is shattered. Whether it is my suffering or the suffering of another, when seen from the perspective of the Bodhisattva makes no difference, because, seen from this perspective there is no ‘me’ or ‘another.’ In the Diamond Sutra, “Although the Bodhisattva saves all sentient beings, there are no sentient beings to save.”

From an article on a Zen Koan

The heart of our practice is perplexity, wonder, care, concern, in the face of our situation. One only has to pick up a newspaper to realize the truth of Shakespeare’s words, “what a tangled web these mortals weave.” How contradictory our lives are; how full of pettiness and greatness, stupidity and wisdom.

A Fountain of Miracles

Go where the heart of the problem lies.Our practice is all about seeing into the conditional nature of the world, me and God. We are not people or things, among other people or other things in the world. It is illusory to look on this structure as absolute. It is conditional, it is relative, it is useful. It is useful in the same way a filing system is useful. The filing system does not itself impinge in any way on the material that is filed. It does not alter in any way the letters, correspondence, forms or invoices. It is the melting down of this structure that our practice is about.

Go where the heart of the problem lies

Life is a constant creation. It is a moment by moment, instant by instant creation. I don’t mean by this that it is a set of discrete creations, it is not like that. But nevertheless, this spontaneity is constantly arising. And it is within this that is our freedom.

A Non-Buddhist Questions the Buddha

Often, when doing a spiritual practice one comes face to face with the desert, a feeling of being abandoned, a feeling of dryness and an endless sense of nothing to look forward to. At its most intense it is not a feeling to which one can give a name. At first this is very painful and one has a strong tendency to want to stir things up, try to make something happen, to try this, do that… But one has entered this desert because one has let go of the various ways one has used in the past to entertain oneself. These ways have, for the moment at least, come to an end. It is now possible for a much deeper unity to manifest, a unity that is not dependent upon an integration from outside.

Albert Low on Pain

More about Albert Low. More about Zen Buddhism

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My spiritual quotes Katinka — Tue, 06 Jul 2010 14:37:46 +0000

H.P.Blavatsky in “Our Cycle and the Next”.

For real Theosophy is Altruism, and we cannot repeat it too often. It is brotherly love, mutual help, unswerving devotion to Truth. If once men do but realize that in these alone can true happiness be found, and never in wealth, possessions, or any selfish gratification, then the dark clouds will roll away, and a new humanity wild be born upon the earth . . . . .

But if not, then the storm will burst, and our boasted civilization and enlightenment will sink in such a sea of horror that its parallel History has never yet recorded.

Paul Brunton, The Inner Reality, Chapter I

I should prefer to say all I have to say in a single page, or better still, compress it into the single line of the Biblical Psalmist: Be still and know that I am God.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Treat people as if they were what they ought to be and you help them to become what they are capable of being.

The Theosophist, Volume I, august, 1880, p. 287

At whatsover moment you catch yourself trying to persuade yourself that you are particularly humble, be assured that then you are farthest from humility.

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