Zen tings

We always look for meaning outside of what we do. But the real meaning of anything we do, or anything we are, is not something imposed from outside. It’s not an explanation. The meaning is the thing itself.

There is more to “no teachers of Zen” than meets the eye. I still believe that students are responsible for their own practice and their own awakening. No one can communicate a truth worth knowing; the only worthwhile truth is the one you find uniquely, for your own life.

We would rather call down war upon ourselves and others, wallowing in and grasping at our conceptual distinctions, than notice the ungraspable world of Wholeness and Totality that we’re already immersed in.

See confusion as confusion. Acknowledge suffering as suffering. Feel pain and sorrow and divisiveness. Experience anger or fear or shock for what they are. But you don’t have to think of them as evil—as intrinsically bad, as needing to be destroyed or driven from our midst. On the contrary, they need to be absorbed, healed, made whole. Like

In fact, you don’t get it from anything. You don’t need to get it. You already have it. You’re inseparable from it. You only need to just see.

THERE IS ONLY one thing we need to know. It’s utterly simple. Our job, as humans who want to experience life fully, is to pay attention when we experience something.

Our central work is to shift—very slowly, usually over a lifetime—from a self-centered view of things to a life-centered view of things.

The realm of dainin—great people or true adults—has yet to begin. You could say that we are now living in an era of barbaric humanity, a sort of prehistory. We haven’t yet begun a historical period of true humanity. Now, it’s just primitive human beings being led by the nose by greed. It’s like a frenzied world of people just scraping and clawing

Now I understand that what is most critical is our objective for living. We must clarify and see without any doubt that living a truly human life is our highest value.