Categories: education | spirituality | justice | life | science | other | ALL
|
"年をとって幸せになれない世の中は、若者にとっても希望がもてません。" (片岡妙晶) [Asahi] "We become set in our opinions precisely because we have lost sight of the fact that they are merely opinions...our culture is suffering from what one might call ‘opinion creep’—the elevation of unsupported thoughts to the status of opinions and opinions to convictions. ... We tend to have convictions about many things and to have opinions about almost everything else. We blind ourselves to the enormity of our ignorance." (Jim Ferrell via Barry Brownstein) [Intelectual Takeout] "... Burning with what? Burning with the fire of craving, with the fire of hate, with the fire of delusion..." (The Buddha, The Fire Sermon) [Need to be aware of what is burning, though.] "My ultimate goal is to disappear spiritually, without physically disappearing, and to become the world spiritually, until physically becoming the world." "人は生きてきたように死ぬ" (沼野尚美)、そして、"人は死ぬように生きる。" "All civilizations are to fall because of ignorance. However, a more important point may be that every civilization rises also because of ignorance." "Climate change is merely a symptom of the underlying problems. So is electing a dangerous demagogue for President (of any country). The real source of all these problems are greed, hatred, and ignorance, just as the Buddha pointed out more than 2,500 years ago." "Our worth is determined ... not by what we do in life, but by what we do with what life gives us." (Chris Hedges, interpreting the work/life of Eugène Delacroix) [truthdig] "Meditation could help only if the meditator is intrinsically motivated and self-directed, just like any other forms of learning." "A country will be safe from terrorism when its relationship with all parties in all directions are honest, noble, and just." (Andrew Olendzki, Unlimiting Mind) "Since the causes of human suffering area ultimately psychological, the healing process is also psychological." (Andrew Olendzki, Unlimiting Mind) "The outward wars around us started because of an inward war that went unnoticed: someone started seeing others as objects, and others used that as justification for doing the same." (The Arbinger Institute, The Anatomy of PEACE) "[F]or many problem in life, solutions will have to be deeper than strategies of discipline or correction." (The Arbinger Institute, The Anatomy of PEACE) "A heart at war needs enemies to justify its warring. It needs enemies and mistreatment more than it wants peace." (The Arbinger Institute, The Anatomy of PEACE) "Lasting solutions to our outward conflicts are possible only to the extent that we find real solutions to our inner ones." (The Arbinger Institute, The Anatomy of PEACE) "My trouble with the word ‘happiness’ is that we never know what we’re talking about when we talk about happiness ... We might mean life satisfaction, or being joyful every day. It’s a bit ambiguous." (Frank Martel) [NY Times] "Nothing in life is to be feared. It is only to be understood." (Chinese fortune cookie) "... a good heart is never proud." (Hans Christian Andersen in The Ugly Duckling) "To lead others, you must first lead yourself." (Raymond Kethledge and Michael Erwin) "The whole world is a series of miracles ... but we are so used to them that we take them for granted." (a character in Hans Christian Andersen's The Puppeteer) "If you are trying to change the past, you are deluded. If you are trying to change the present, you will be suffering. If you are trying to change the future, you must be responsible." "[B]eing transparently open is far more rewarding than being defensive." (Carl Rogers, A Way of Being) "A leader is best: When people barely know that he exists, Not so good when people obey and acclaim him, Worst when they despise him.... But of a good leader, who talks little, When his work is done, his aim fulfilled, They will all say, "We did this ourselves." " (Lao-tse via Bynner) "The greatest mistake a man can make is to be afraid of one." (Chinese fortune cookie) "You can transform your nation into a prison because you are committed to an ideology." (Thich Nhat Hanh) "[B]eing closer to the truth can never be a harmful or dangerous or unsatisfying thing." (Carl Rogers, On Becoming a Person) "Thinking is a useful and essential means of interpreting experience, but it is pathological if it dominates consciousness." (Kenneth Cohen) "The person who wins the battle is the one who doesn't show up." (James Mooney) "Our spirituality is not a religion where you say an 'Our Father' in the morning and a 'Hail Mary' at night ... Our spirituality is a way of life. The churches came in and they taught the Bible, which wasn't the same as our spirituality. They taught us that our children were born with sin. That's just not right. Our children are sacred beings." (Eileen Janis, Lakota) "The greatest sources of our suffering are the lies we tell ourselves." (Elvin Semrad) "If I die, I won't see you again." (Awajún farewell greeting via Michael Brown) "Eating entails suffering ..." (Thanissaro Bhikkhu) "[F]ood is a form of suffering." (Da Shi) "People say that the best defense is a good offense. But we can certainly change our view point. Let's say, the best offense is no offense. Along the same line, the best medicine is no medicine. The best insurance is no insurance. The best teaching is no teaching. The best test is no test. The best grade is no grade (maybe, the best scores are music scores). The best gift is no gift. The best advice is no advice. The best help is no help. The best gun is no gun. And turning to spirituality, the best action is no action. The best accomplishments are no accomplishments. Finally, the best decision is your decision. And also, the biggest surprise is no surprise." "The basic message of the news is that your time is unimportant, that the important things in the world are what other people are doing in other places." (Thanissaro Bikkhu) "People are not given a soul--a deep emotional life. Instead, they are given the possibility of soul. How much soul you have depends upon how much you deal with your own soul-like experiences; how much the pain is faced, how much the anxieties are confronted." (Stephen Skulsky) "Self-help books are like car repair manuals; you can read them all day, but doing so doesn't fix a thing." (Thomas Lewis, et al.) "If you don't program yourself, life will program you." (Chinese fortune cookie) "According to Buddhism there is nothing that can be called a 'just war'--which is only a false term coined and put into circulation to justify and excuse hatred, cruelty, violence and massacre." (Walpola Rahula) "Morality, if it's to be true and skillful, has to come from the wisdom of individual human being. If you try to impose morality on people, then it becomes a law that can be very oppressive." (Ajahn Sumedho) "Judgment is often an attempt to cover over inadequacy, a rooted belief most of us assume to be true. It is important to note that judgment and the feeling of inadequacy are simultaneous experiences, and judgment is a reaction to the sense of being insufficient. Like a teeter-totter, if I can lower your image through my judgment, I can raise and enhance my own. The judgment gives me a brief respite from the pain of my belief, but over time the teeter-totter will continue to swing toward the weighted conditioning of my assumed inadequacy if left unobserved." (Rodney Smith) "If we do not care for one another, who else will care for us? Who among us has the right to say of another, "He is of no use?" For better or worse, whether we like it or not, we are all in this together." (Andrew Olendzki) "The future is always other than you imagined it." (the Buddha) "Wanting things to be otherwise is the very essence of suffering." "The greatest gift is the act of giving itself." (Stephen Levine) "Pain is not a punishment; pleasure is not a reward." (Pema Chödrön) "If we could change ourselves, the tendencies in the world would also change. As a man changes his own nature, so does the attitude of the world change towards him....We need not wait to see what others do." (Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi) "The way of meditation is the way to die before your body dies. It's a way of dying before death and dying to death so that, poetically speaking, death is dead, rather anything else." (Ajahn Sumedho) "When I am told only what is known, it seems to be "all there"--nothing that I can contribute to it. I can only learn what others have found out. It is a closed world. When I know how small the known is in relation to the unknown, the whole world opens up before me. I am free to explore and make my own discoveries instead of being a passive recipient of what is known--to the point that I think that everything is known by someone else and that it is only through others that I can acquire knowledge." (Barry Stevens) "He who knows others is wise. He who knows himself is enlightened." (Chinese proverb) "Punishing other person is self-punishment." (Thich Nhat Hanh) "We are terrified of letting go, terrified, in fact, of living at all, since learning to live is learning to let go." (Sogyal Rinpoche) "True security is felt when we are comfortable with diversity and uncertainty." "It seems necessary, unless the dying person is in a coma or cannot communicate, that he should be told he is dying. It may be difficult to actually take such a step, but if one is a friend or a husband or wife, then this is the greatest opportunity of really communicating trust. It is a delightful situation, that at least somebody really cares about you, somebody is not playing a game of hypocrisy, is not going to tell you a lie in order to please you, which is what has been happening throughout your whole life. This comes down to the ultimate truth, it is fundamental trust, which is extremely beautiful." (Chögyam Trungpa) "True responsibility is to stay mindful and do the right thing ... at every moment." "I am convinced, that if all men were to live as simply as I then did, thieving and robbery would be unknown. These take place only in communities where some have got more than is sufficient while others have not enough." (Henry David Thoreau) "The greatest enemy to the conditioned mind is the reality of the present moment." (Matthew Flickstein) "Mindfulness practice is the practice of being 100 percent honest with ourselves." (Henepola Gunaratana) "By protecting oneself, one protects others; by protecting others, one protects oneself." (Samyutta Nikaya, 47:19) "鳴かずんば、それでもやっぱりホトトギス" cf. "鳴かずんばそれもまたよしホトトギス" (松下幸之助) [Note: The both are similar; but the former is just about acceptance and involves NO judgment as the latter (with the word "よし").] "Security is mostly a superstition. It does not exist in nature, nor do the children of men as a whole experience it. Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. Life is either a daring adventure, or nothing. To keep our faces toward change and behave like free spirits in the presence of fate is strength undefeatable." (Helen Keller) "A human being is part of a whole, called by us the 'Universe,' a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings, as something separated from the rest--a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circles of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty." (Albert Einstein) * End of List * |