I consider those persons to be my students who come and meditate with me on a regular basis, who, in spite of the hardships and difficulties on the path of knowledge, still continue to try, and who respect me as I respect them.
Go out into the world, do your best all day, try to think higher thoughts, try to be kind and compassionate, but don't let people take advantage of you.
There is a sense of competition in Zen. You are competing with your thoughts and trying to overcome them.
Try to have a more expanded sense of that which you are. Feel that you are eternity. There's only goodness. There's only light.
As long as you're too busy trying to become something that you're not, you can't see your own immortality.
A man, as we see in this world, is chaos, but he doesn't recognize that fact so he tries to bring order into everything. Order is disorder. Order creates disorder.
I think it is best to let the experience you have with a teacher direct itself, Instead of trying to make the experience into what you might like it to be. Leave it alone!
Stop trying to be different. Just do what you are good at, and work really hard. You have to work hard to be chaos.
We are trying to do our best to bring perfection into whatever we turn our attention to.
Don't fight with your thoughts or try to suppress them with your will. This will only frustrate you and bind you to your thoughts even more strongly.
In the beginning, when you are meditating, just ignore thought. Shine it on. Then after you are comfortable sitting there, try selectively eliminating negative thoughts, thoughts that agitate the mind.
We are learning to perceive existence in separate phases. One phase is to see that we are not our thoughts. As you sit, try and feel what is beyond thought - sense that you are separate from thought.
There are essentially three stages in learning how to meditate. In the beginning you are simply trying to ignore thought.
I'm always waiting for you, hoping that you'll be really interested, that you'll try completely. In every life I wait for you. I've always been waiting and I always will.
Don't create a plastic image of what it is to be spiritual and try to become it. You won't be capable of it and that will frustrate you. Even if you could do it, if it's not really what you're like, you'll be miserable.
Qualityless simply means there is no way to discuss it. There is no way to pin it down. It could be anything at any given moment since infinity is not bound even by itself, nor the words that human beings choose to try and talk around it.
Material success is a way of tightening up your life so that you can move into higher planes of attention. You should try to do well in every aspect of your life, because each aspect of your life affects your total being.
When you have grown accustomed to sitting and meditating, try to stop your thoughts. That's the bottom line in meditative practice.
Some people like destroying for the hell of it; they love destroying beauty; they try to feel those people and then crack the egg.
When I am writing a novel I try not to read great prose stylists into which I will fall.
What I try to do is read stuff that won't deal with the dangerous dark things I hope I am writing about.
I am such a person of words. I've spent so much of my life trying to get it right, say it right, say it eloquently, say it truthfully, say it honestly, that when I hear it said in ways that none of those adverbs would describe I find myself so repelled that it almost shuts my mind off.
A computer is a wonderful and friendly machine, because it's always just a little better than you are. You're always a little bit behind, but it stays right there with you anyway. It allows you to make the mistakes, and then to try to find out what the mistakes are, and then to repair the mistakes. It's always your friend. It quits on you, but it doesn't leave the apartment.
In a film, you always try to have your main character be changed by the end.
I'm just trying to do whatever is asked of me. I've been thrown into many different positions. Sometimes I'm on the left. Sometimes I'm in the middle. Sometimes I'm up top. So you always have to be prepared. I'm learning a lot so hopefully I can keep getting better and better.
