Sublime

Sometimes I think my role as a Zen teacher comes down to being the one person in the room who says, “I don’t know,” when everyone else is sure they know what to do—or more often than not, sure they know what somebody else should be doing.

For most of us, our self-protective, habitual ways of being in the world inevitably reassert themselves.

We have to experience the inseparability of the delusion and enlightenment, not try to eliminate one and stay always attached to the other.

once imagined—and it may not look anything like what we expected when we started out.

Whatever form it takes, practice is a call to pay attention to who we think we are, what kind of questions we are asking, what form we expect an answer to take, and what are our curative fantasies of what will happen once we find the answer.

Every insight is partial, requires long years of integration into our lives, and is liable itself to be incorporated into our narcissistic fantasies of specialness or into one or another of our secret practices.

Leaving that mind just as it is the hardest thing to do.

Questions ramify in endless directions; answers bring an end to possibility.

Our willingness to face ourselves in our anxiety or our anger in every moment becomes our practice, not something we get out of the way so our real practice can begin.