You get to the point where you have to wash the dishes. That's the fun in life. Being behind the scenes and doing things for others; being an instrument of that cause. That is the secret teaching.
Inspire people very selectively with sincerity and with respect. You want to increase your energy? Then want, inside your heart, to inspire others. It will lift you tremendously.
When you live a life devoid of ritual and convention, with honesty and self-effacement, then you are on the road to freedom.
Buddha indicated that the self, that part of you that incarnates from lifetime to lifetime was causal.
Change is continuous and the aggregate of the self is constantly shifting.
In Buddhist Yoga, we refer to our mutlilife karmic traits as samskaras. They are the internal karmic patterns that make each of us who we are.
The ashram is where everyone lives in the same building or on the same grounds. You feel that it's selfish for you to devote your life to one person. You don't just love the one, you love the many also.
Help the world in any way that you want to. I have found that the more light you give and spread, the more you will evolve.
You have to refine your being. You have to go through all of the stages and steps of erasing yourself through service to others with purity, humility, integrity.
You only become funny when you have a complete reverence for life.
Compassion and empathy are not the same as feeling sorry for oneself. They are emotions that extend our perceptual ranges.
The essence of the teachings is to lose self importance and to care more for the welfare of others and the magical world around us, than we do for ourselves and our own self images.
One of the traditional Tantric methods of mediation is to imagine that you are taking on the suffering of all beings.
As we hate ourselves less, we tend to hate other people less too.
In self-giving you must be so careful of egotism. You must be so careful when you are aiding others in their liberation not to have a sense of self.
In my estimation it's silly to go out and spend your time aiding people if you don't have your own act together yet. So I'd rather you spend the time, get it right, and it'll all work out a lot better.
In future years a number of you will become spiritual teachers. After many years of study and doing a good job, go out into the world and teach people.You'll reach points of advancement where you'll be able to be of great help to many, many people.
It's suggested that enlightenment has some tremendous compassion, some driving necessity to help humanity. I don't think that's the case at all. I think humanity wishes it were the case since it's humanity that writes the various scriptures.
I realize that there's a thing called the bodhisattva ideal, and it's a very nice pinnacle of attention. It's a very egotistical thought, ultimately.
To have to liberate everybody doesn't sound very free to me. You're gong to go liberate people who maybe don't want to be liberated.
To feel that you are the Buddha of all times and places and that in some way the salvation of anyone, including yourself, depends upon you, I think there's a lot of ego involved in such a view, not much self-transcendence.
I respect self-giving and I've tried to lead my life with that as the ideal. But real self-giving is when we take our being, that which is most precious to us, and we throw it into eternity with a total sense of offering.
Selfless-giving burns away the layers of the onion. Purity and humility keep meditation and selfless-giving clear. Love radiates through the entire practice because we do all of it only for love.
Love the fading flowers as much as you love the undifferentiated which lasts forever.
By perfecting the practices of zazen and mindfulness, by learning patience and love and by realizing the essential emptiness of all phenomena, you will discover nirvana.
