The Truth of This Life: Zen Teachings on Loving the World as It Is

See if you can do that, if your present activity, your present breath, is compelling enough to draw you out of your planning mind, out of your past mind.

Each time we leave our story line to return to the breath, we strengthen our awareness that breathing is what is actually happening and storytelling is our fictional life.

We resist seeing or hearing things we are opposed to or are afraid of. When we try, we find it harder than we imagined to settle the mind enough to let in what we resist or feel threatened by.

Noticing our thoughts, and understanding how they determine our actions and relationships, helps us understand that we cocreate the world we live in with everyone. We cocreate our lives with others.

The wish to respond differently must be as deep and strong as the habitual response. The path to that depth arises from seeing, again and again, how we repeat ourselves—and vowing to do it differently.

At just this moment we are not having an experience, we are the experience. We are being that time, and that is our buddha-nature.

We are all a configuration of attributes, qualities, aspirations, and conditions, and at the same time we are completely free of all that. We are our causes and conditions, and simultaneously we are free of them.

We are trying to be our rigid self in the middle of just being a relational being interwoven with everything else.

“You are hearing my voice, but you are listening to the sound of your own consciousness.”

who binds you? Don’t look outside; look into the mind, investigate the opinionated mind. Become familiar with its opinions and judgments; then you won’t be so vulnerable to them.