Zen tings

And as I continued to practice and to talk with other students of the buddha dharma, I found that many people share the conditioning that leads us to think that there’s something wrong with us. If we could only get, do, or be something more, then we would be all right. It’s so easy for us to get the idea that there’s something wrong with us. And it

But when your practice deepens and it begins to dawn on you that all your thoughts are just thoughts, even that most basic of thoughts, the idea that your thoughts are generated by something called “self,” becomes questionable and finally dissolves away.

There is only one teacher. What is that teacher? Life itself. And of course each one of us is a manifestation of life; we couldn’t be anything else.

Buddhism is about letting people know they do not need to follow any authority. If you think you need an authority figure, go somewhere else.

The Tibetan teacher Kalu Rinpoche puts it this way: You live in illusion and the appearance of things. There is a reality, but you do not know this. When you understand this, you will see that you are nothing, and being nothing you are everything. That is all. Healing comes in touching this realm of nonseparation.

Zen is about an active life, an involved life. When we know our minds well and the emotions that our thinking creates, we tend to see better what our lives are about and what needs to be done, which is generally just the next task under our nose. Zen is about a life of action, not a life of passively doing nothing. But our actions must be based on

The goal of Zen is to awaken to life as it is, rather than stay in the comparative dream world of our ideas about it.