Brad Warner Quotes
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So what I liked about Zen was that it never goes off into the realm of imagination land, or if it does occasionally, the good teachers will openly address it specifically as only imagination. Both of my teachers were very good at that.
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The real goal of Zen is to find a way of life that's easy and undramatic. Strong attachments lead to upset and drama.
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You know that for sure because Godzilla was killed by an ordinary missile. He spends most of that film dodging them but then the Army finally gets a bead on him and they shoot a missile at him and he blows up and dies, and that's not what Godzilla is. Godzilla is supposed to be a thing that you can't possibly kill, no matter how hard you try.
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If a tree falls in the forest and it hits a mime, would he make a noise?
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Sanity and enlightenment...I've been reading a new book Dogen's Genjo Koan: Three Commentaries, and it contains a commentary on Genjo Koan by Shunryu Suzuki, the author who wrote Zen Mind, Beginners Mind. He doesn't mention sanity at all but I think that one possible definition of enlightenment would be a kind of profound sanity, where being insane is no longer an option.
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We ourselves are not something apart from our circumstances. What we are and where we are are one and the same.
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Zen practice is about not getting high on anything and in so doing getting high on absolutely everything. We then find that everything we encounter - bliss or nonbliss - possesses a tremendous depth and beauty that we usually miss.
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There's fantasies about what heaven is like and who Satan is and why you shouldn't masturbate or why you should vote Republican. It's funny because it's an election year and their news broadcasts are constantly talking about "Vote Republican". I think that they think they're being subtle about it, but that's definitely not the case. So I'm like, "What does this have anything to do with the nice advice you were giving about how to live your life, how to get along with your spouse etc?"
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Those who hope for purity and righteousness always try and destroy that which disturbs them. They think the disturbance comes from outside themselves. This is a serious problem. Wars, suicide bombings, and all sorts of other nasty things start from the premise that we can destroy 'evil' outside ourselves without dealing with the evil within.
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Consider this: 1. Would you ride in a car whose driver was on the consciousness-expanding "entheogenic" drug LSD? And here's a bonus question: 2. Why does an "expanded consciousness" include the inability to operate a motor vehicle?
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I mean Godzilla is eternally pissed off at everything but of course he's gonna be because every time he pops out of the water for a look around somebody is firing a missile at him. Buddha would probably have to act as a mediator between the people and Godzilla.
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If you come across an insane person who's talking gibberish, you can't make any sense of it at all and that would be one way that enlightenment is different. If you read Dogen, a lot of his stuff is very strange and is coming from a different place than what we're used to, but at the same time, it's not senseless ramblings and that's part of what attracted me to Dogen. I didn't get it, but it was sane. It's not some guy raving about UFO's or Moses living in his bathtub, it's was actually something sane that I just didn't get, if that makes sense?
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The trick to not thinking is not adding energy to the equation in an effort to forcibly stop thinking from happening. It’s more a matter of subtracting energy from the equation in order not to barf the thoughts up and start chewing them over again.
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It's crazy to me how concerned people get with what it looks like and what you can do there. People may as well be talking about JRR Tolkien or Star Trek or something.
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True nonattachment is understanding that you are fundamentally attached to everything and, through that understanding, dropping your attachment to the view that you are detached from that which you encounter. At the same time, real nonattachment means not clinging to things or people. It means dropping the idea that if you don't have this or if you can't get that, your life will be a catastrophe.
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We always imagine that there's got to be somewhere else better than where we are right now; this is the Great Somewhere Else we all carry around in our heads. We believe Somewhere Else is out there for us if only we could find it. But there's no Somewhere Else. Everything is right here...Make this your paradise or make this your hell. The choice is entirely yours. Really.
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A lot of seriously insane people have managed to acquire huge followings based on the idea that their insanity is a kind of enlightenment. An obvious example would be Charles Manson or Shoko Asahara who is the person responsible for the Sarin gas attack on the Tokyo subway.
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It may look like we're doing nothing when we sit zazen. But actually we are exposing ourselves to ourselves.
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So it's a dangerous thing and conversely, the other thing I mentioned in that post was that people see guys who are kind of in touch with that and become famous for it and then think maybe they can get in on it. Maybe they're not quite as cynical as that and there's some sincerity about them, but they don't really get it so they just imitate what they've seen from people who've done it before and of course you can make big money that way.
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When I first started watching Godzilla, I was a kid and a big dinosaur freak and was like, "Oh my gosh, there's a big dinosaur." So I immediately got into Godzilla. What I like about it are some of the things people often think are negative aspects.
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The only real time as far as Buddhism is concerned is right now. Right now there is no old age or death because old age and death are descriptions of things as they are now when we compare them to things as they used to be.
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The thinking brain influences the body’s responses and it makes a neat little loop.
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The truth comes when you can see that your self-image is just a convenient reference point and nothing more, and that you as you had imagined yourself do not exist.
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If he'd Jesus been a little more concerned for his own safety and well being he may have toned things down a little bit and probably at best he'd be remembered as a Rabbi who said some cool things but that nobody really reads anymore. There's tons of them.