You need to search your awareness and consider the limitless possibilities of existence in all things and not be so narrow-minded in your self-discovery.
Perhaps you're not the next Buddha. Perhaps you're not the Maitreya. Perhaps that's not your job in this incarnation. Perhaps you have to enjoy life and learn about life through whatever way that you find yourself going.
If you are going to set out to develop mystical powers to impress your friends and do other things to your enemies, the difficulty with it is that you will not be moving towards enlightenment.
People want to will their self realization. They want to know what the right thing to do all the time is. There is no right thing. There's no code. There are certain basic recommendations.
Do not feel that you are destined to enlightenment in this life. You have no idea. This is an illusion of selfhood. It's gross ignorance and egotism.
Do not feel that you are destined not to make that final liberation in this life. This is egotism in a reverse form. Don't be concerned one way or the other.
The way you succeed at all this stuff is by stopping trying to succeed and just working very hard without thinking about it, just trusting, completely. It's that faith that creates the bridge on which you walk across to eternity.
Self-hate doesn't create enlightenment. It just causes you to not enjoy the current moment.
As Buddhist monks, our task is to bring ourselves resolutely more and more into light, to forgive and forget, to forget those who create problems for us because to remember them is only to keep problems is mind.
Put the mind in alignment with the ten thousand radiances of enlightenment and experience them in various gradations forever. That's the total purpose of a monk.
Are you still carrying everyone who's insulted you, injured you or interfered with you? That's a lot of weight. I'd let it go, personally, and just move on and forget. Be in the moment. Don't even notice.
Don't care what anybody says about enlightenment, except the enlightened and those who seek it.
A Buddhist monk has a responsibility first and foremost to themselves, and that's to find the truth each day in every part of their life.
Our sense of being worthwhile, our sense of being good, our sense of being anything must go - Final clearance sale.
We seek to unify ourselves with the endless light of truth, of God, of nirvana. We recognize the infinite playing through all beings and all forms, but we only have to concern ourselves with ourselves.
That's what self-discovery seems to mean to most people. You're going to beat yourself up. You're going to reduce what you're supposed to be and do to a set of rules so you can defy them, or so you can perform them and feel smug.
Spiritual dignity says that I don't have to compete with anyone; I don't have to do what my friends do. All I have to do is be myself and be dignified in my meditation and my lifestyle.
I have a great deal of spiritual dignity. It's on loan from eternity, and you do too, and we have to use it in our relationship with each other.
Without that poise and balance and gentle humor and caring sense, nothing happens at all. It's just egotism and vanity and jealousy and possessiveness.
You've gained some powers by your entrance into other dimensions and you use them to attack others or to make others miserable, then power reverses on you and it pulls you apart because it's not supposed to be used that way.
Buddhism is a practice in which we learn to avoid injuring others, and ourselves. It's a practice in which we learn to respond to beauty, and to respond to difficult circumstances with patience, with a sense of calm, with clarity.
It is not bad living in a monastery. I've done it many times in many lives. But I think you can do a better job outside the monastery, if you have the necessary component parts.
I think one can advance faster outside a monastery if you use the experiences of daily life to advance yourself.
The spirit of the West, of America, is different than the East. The cultural conditioning is very different. It seems to be harder for people to work in teams, more difficult for people here to live in harmony, in a monastery.
The person who's in the Zen monastery, who's doing a kind of poor job at meditating and a half-ass job cleaning the gardens is not doing very good yoga.
