“The seeker should not stop until he finds. When he does find, he will be disturbed. After being disturbed, he will be astonished. Then he will reign over everything.” _ Jesus in the Gospel of Thomas
“Anything we can acquire from the outside will eventually fade away.” _Buddha
“What was your true face before your parents were born?” Zen koan—a riddle existencing.
The more I teach, the more I discover that the fundamentals are the most important part of any teaching. They are the easiest to forget, our minds have a natural tendency to move into complexity. How we perceive life from the perspective of separation, willing to entertain the possibility that we may not know what we think we know, in this gap of not knowing, in the suspension of any conclusion
Believing or thinking we are our thoughts is the beginning of suffering, the primary reasons we suffer is because we believe what we think because we believe what we think, that the thoughts in our heads come uninvited into our consciousness, swirl around, and we attach to them. We identify with them and grab hold of them heads come uninvited into our consciousness, swirl around, and we attach to them. We identify with them and grab hold of them.
Silence that is always present, and that noise happens within this silence—even the noise of the mind. Thinking simply happens. It happens whether you want it to or not, and it stops whether you want it to or not, that your mind just thinks on its own, and it stops on its own, whether you want it to or not.
Our beliefs, our ideas, our opinions—are actually who we are. This is the prime illusion: that I am what I think, that I am what I believe, that I am my particular point of view.
“You can stop suffering. You can really stop suffering completely, right here and right now. All you have to do is to give up everything you think. You have to give up your opinions, you have to give up your beliefs, and you have to even give up believing in your own name. You have to give all this up, but that’s all you have to do. “Like Jesus said to the rich man, leave everything and follow me.
The “great internal space”: a place where you come to know that you don’t know. This is really the entry point into the end of suffering: when you become conscious of the fact that you don’t really know. I mean that you don’t really know anything—that you don’t really understand the world, you don’t really understand each other, and you don’t really understand yourself
So we begin to look into ourselves right now, in this very moment, wherever we are. I’m sitting here on a stool, and exactly where I am, when I look into what I am, I don’t really know. I find that I’m an unfathomable mystery. What do you find when you look underneath the veil of your thoughts? What do you really find when you open up to something beyond your mind? What happens when you become still and you inquire, without just jumping at the next thought? Quietly ask, “What am I, really?”
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 more than a thought.
Allow yourself to see that your self-image is just an image—not reality, not the truth, not who we really are. We can think we’re pretty good, or we can think we’re really not so worthy, but either way, both of those conclusions are based on an image we have in our minds, which is something that we’ve inherited and created based on influences from our society, our culture, our friends, our parents, anyone with whom we’ve ever engaged. As we grow up, we gain the ability to re-create this self-image, but when we’re young, society, parents, and culture condition us with an image of ourselves, "who taught you that one" "who gave you that label"
When we start to peer underneath our image, we find something quite surprising—maybe even a bit disturbing at first. We begin to find no image. If you look right at this moment, underneath your idea of yourself, and you don’t insert another idea or another image, but if you just look under however you define yourself and you see it’s just an image, it’s just an idea, and you peer underneath it, what you find is no image, no idea of yourself. Not a better image, not a worse image, but no image. Nothingness the business of the ground sweeping monk
It would be a terrible thing, indeed, if we actually were our egos, if we actually were the thought-created self in our mind. But we’re not. Rather, what we really are is that which watches the mind, what notices the mind, and what is aware of all mental activity, including the desire to control. If you genuinely begin to look at the whole notion of control,
It's in our daily lives, in our hidden suffering, in the sacrifices we make, blaming love for the destruction of our dreams. Pain is frightening when it shows its teal face, but it's seductive when it comes disguised as sacrifice or self-denial. Or cowardice. However much we may reject it, we human beings always find a way of being with pain, of flirting with it and making it part of our lives.' 'I don't believe that. No one wants to suffer.' 'If you think you can live without suffering, that's a great step forward, but don't imagine that other people will understand you. True, no one wants to suffer, and yet nearly everyone seeks out pain and sacrifice, and then they feel justified, pure, deserving of the respect of their children, husbands, neighbours, God. Don't let's think about that now; all you need to know is that what makes the world go round is not the search for pleasure, but the renunciation of all that is important.