Whenever you aren’t manipulating your experience, you’re meditating. As soon as you meditate because you think you should, you’re controlling your experience again, and you’ve squeezed all the value out of your meditation.
It is good to remember that the goal of Buddhism is to create Buddhas, not Buddhists, as the goal of Christianity is to create Christs, not Christians. In the same vein, my teachings are not meant to acquire followers or imitators, but to awaken beings to eternal truth and thus to awakened life and living.
The mind may accept or deny that you are awareness, but either way it can’t really understand. It cannot comprehend. Thought cannot comprehend what is beyond thought.
As soon as you believe that a label you've put on yourself is true, you've limited something that is literally limitless, you've limited who you are into nothing but a thought.
At each moment we are expressing what we know ourselves to be. If we know ourselves very little we will express and manifest that unconsciousness of our true nature.
If we know who and what we are very thoroughly, we will express and manifest that in what we do.
It is all very simple.
Awakening to the truth is a deep realization of what you are as an experience. What is it that is listening? What is it that is feeling? Feel it. Sense it. Welcome it.
There is nothing wrong with thought and it can be used whenever necessary. But in every moment you can choose to follow your thoughts or you can recognize that which is not thinking. Don’t try to stop thinking, let it happen. Just recognize that which is not thinking.
Stop all delays, all seeking and all striving. Put down your concepts, ideas and beliefs. For one instant be still and directly encounter the silent unknown core of your being. In that instant Freedom will embrace you and reveal the Awakening that you are.
Enlightenment is the natural state of consciousness, the innocent state of consciousness, that state which is uncontaminated by the movement of thought, uncontaminated by control or manipulation of mind.
True sincerity reveals a powerful form of clarity and discernment that is necessary in order to perceive yourself honestly without flinching or being held captive by your conditioned mind's judgments and defensiveness.
What matters are not the truths other people tell us or the practices that we are able to mimic, but the spiritual discoveries we make through personal investigation.
As I often tell my students, the person you’ll have the hardest time opening to and truly loving without reserve is yourself. Once you can do that, you can love the whole universe unconditionally.
If you think that people should be nice to one another, then by
all means be nice. But when you project that belief onto the
people and the world around you as if it were an objective reality,
or worse still, as if it were their job to be nice to you, you put
yourself at odds with what is, and suffering will surely follow.
True Meditation is the space in which everything gets revealed, everything gets seen, everything gets experienced. And as such, it lets go of itself. We don't even let go. It lets go of itself.