Brad Warner Quotes

Disappointment is just the action of your brain readjusting itself to reality after discovering things are not the way you thought they were.

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.

You can always improve your situation. But you do so by facing it, not by running away.

Compassion is the ability to see what needs doing right now and the willingness to do it right now.

There are many diamonds in the world and if you lose your favorite, you can work hard, earn a lot of money and get another one to replace it. But the moments of your life aren't like that. Once they're gone, they'll never return. Each and every one is the most precious thing in existence. You can never meaningfully compare one moment with any other. You can never meaningfully compare your life with anyone else's. No matter how rich someone else may be, no matter how happy they look, no matter how enlightened they seem, they can never be you. Never, ever, ever. Only you can live your life.

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.

Reality's all you've got. But here's the real secret, the real miracle: it's enough.

If you want to believe in reincarnation, you have to believe that this life, what you're living through right now, is the afterlife. You're missing out on the afterlife you looked forward to in your last existence by worrying about your next life. This is what happens after you die. Take a look.

You won’t understand life and death until you’re ready to set aside any hope of understanding life and death and just live your life until you die.

Do what you do as well as you possibly can. That's Buddhist morality.

Your role is to do and say the things that need to be done and said from your unique perspective.

You can't function in society if you don't involve yourself in the fictions society accepts about time. But you do so with the understanding that you're playing a game.

The problem is the way we let our desires stand in the way of our enjoyment of what we already have.

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.

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.

Truly compassionate action arises spontaneously without thought and is carried out in real action with no anticipation of reward and, indeed, no concept of a doer of that action.

we ourselves are not something apart from our circumstances. What we are and where we are are one and the same.

People imagine enlightenment will make them incredibly powerful. And it does. It makes you the most powerful being in all the universe- but usually no one else notices.

True mindfulness is the awareness that everything you encounter is a vigorous expression of the same living universe as you.

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.

Faith keeps you going, but doubt keeps you from going off the deep end.

If a tree falls in the forest and it hits a mime, would he make a noise?

Since then, my approach to all things spiritual is rather cynical you could say. When somebody present something to me as spiritual, my first instinct is to be cynical and think, "oh yeah, one of those again." You see so much of it see in "spiritual culture" and people get very excited about it. It's all very "hoo haw."

Real morality is based on a single criterion: right action, appropriate action, in the present moment and present situation.

Just know that your expectations are only thoughts in your head, and keep on doing what you do.