In Zen you practice zazen, mindfulness and other forms of introspection to find out who you are and what you want, to balance your spirit, develop willpower, increase your sense of humor and gain wisdom.
It is only in the last 800 years that the rules have come into being and conservative Zen has surfaced. It is not particularly popular in Japan at all. Hardly anybody practices Zen any more because it's just too strict; there are too many rules.
If you're very, very conservative and you like that sort of practice, go find a very conservative Zen master and just do traditional Japanese practice, which is not that traditional actually.
People who practice Zen correctly are not spaced-out or unrealistic. They are balanced and grounded.
Zen is a very fast path to enlightenment, fast in comparison to some other paths, not fast for the person who practices it. There is no sense of speed.
Zen is the fastest method I know of, aside from mysticism, of dissolving the fixations people have about spiritual practice and themselves.
You never devote yourself to a teacher. You devote yourself to the practice.
Most people we observe who practice self-discovery just get caught up in a new description, a new "ism", a new religion, a new god. But nothing changes.
If you think of spiritual practice as unpleasant work - it is not spiritual practice as I know it.
If you practice a little jnana yoga in your daily life, it will help you tremendously.
A true master has developed, in their inner practices and studies, certain powers. These powers are sometimes of the miraculous nature, the transmission of attention.
The role of the teacher is to make sure that the practice is pure. By guiding the student, you make sure that they are really going into the planes of light and not fooling themselves.
Life is eternal and it's worth living. What we do in this life is not futile. Death is not the end. Our practice in this life will assist us in our next life.
When we practice mindfulness, our nonphysical side merges with the nonphysical side of that which we are experiencing.
Mindfulness is passive meditation. It is passive because your energy and your attention are divided between your actions and your practice, your meditation.
The practice of mindfulness is monitoring your mind all day and all night. It's enjoyable to just remove things that make you unhappy from your mind, to clarify your emotions.
The practice of meditation is emptying the mind. When the mind is empty, completely empty, it's perfect meditation. It's really that simple.
Try to feel that you are beyond time and space when you practice meditation. Go beyond this world, beyond time, beyond life, not a feeling of being spaced out, but in touch with the moment and with eternity.
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.
The problem is with any practice is that it is a practice. That is why people don't win. The reason why people don't win is they get stuck in ideas, habits, and ways of seeing life.
The tremendous population increase has made meditation and psychic perception, things that come naturally to spiritually evolved people, difficult to practice and participate in.
I think everyone is equally psychic. But through the practice of meditation, you learn to make your thoughts quiet and become more aware of your innate psychic abilities.
If a person sets out to practice meditation in this lifetime and they have a little bit of spiritual evolution behind them and they're quite dedicated, it really is not at all an impossible task to enter into salvakalpa samadhi in this particular lifetime.
When you have grown accustomed to sitting and meditating, try to stop your thoughts. That's the bottom line in meditative practice.
Only when there are no impressions of others clouding our mind, can we sit and practice the glorious practice of meditation.
