There are two primary ways of studying Zen. Either an individual will enter into a Zen monastery and study with a Zen master there, or they will study with a Zen master who lives in the contemporary world.
The world is always ending and always beginning at every moment.
You find yourself in this world, you find yourself out of this world and there's no one to find the Self. There's no Self to find.
Personal power is the ability to go into other planes, to cross that threshold from one dimension to another. Why do that? Because it is there to do; knowledge, power, and beauty lie in those other worlds.
We call someone a saint in a world in which everyone is abnormal. The normal person becomes extraordinary. But there's nothing extraordinary about being a saint, that's just someone who's somewhat online with life.
While notable advances in certain parts of the world in woman's rights have occured in the last hundred years, the centuries of conditioning and the mentality that views women as inferior still prevade our world today.
The most important problem for our world to solve is the inequality of men and women.
There are some teachers who just perform miracles. They can manifest things from the other world into this world. They have siddha powers. They are not necessarily enlightened.
Once in a while an enlightened teacher goes out into the world and spreads the dharma. They attract some attention, and it is a great spectacle to see who and why and what is drawn.
There is obstruction. Enlightenment is not very popular in this world. History tells us that enlightened teachers who made themselves largely available to human beings had problems.
When you meditate with an enlightened teacher, you will feel something from them. They just dissolve completely, absorption in nirvana, where they don't even have physical contact with this world anymore.
The world of enlightenment doesn't know of its own existence. We're beyond both the knower and known. There's no conceptual identity whatsoever.
At the end of this lifetime, you will leave this world. Your awareness field will stay together in a certain sense and then it will seek to return to things that are familiar. You will reincarnate.
Nothing is here in this world that is of any interest at all.
Stopping thought also involves shifting your values. Thought is stimulated by ideas that we have about life and the world.
If the tonal predominates, which we see now more in the world, there's no mystery - understanding of consciousness or awareness.
Reason is necessary. It is necessary to deal with the world.
In the world order, if the nagual dominates and not the tonal, then we'll live in times of fear and superstition.
The world is always chaos, but we pretend that it's not because it makes us feel better. In doing so we're able to go through it in a specific manner and form: That's the tonal.
The tonal is the sense of place. It is order and reason in a world of chaos.
Everything has a nothingness. On the other side of physical reality, there is another world, and in that world, everything is something else.
I realized after being married for some time that it wasn't enough. It wasn't enough to lead an individual life where I loved on person and we created a world together.
Build a shield between yourself and the descriptions of the world that everyone else has.
Most persons spend their lives stuck in relatively low states of mind. In these states of mind their views of themselves and the world around them are often severely limited.
Learn to accept the transitory nature of existence of the body and the mind; see eternity in everything, this world, the other worlds, and nirvana.
