Happiness comes from our response to the conditions of our lives.
What we do and what we experience has a direct correlation with our habitual states of consciousness and mental states. The more spiritually aware we are, the more harmonious and fulfilling are our lives.
We are simply committing ourselves to paying attention to our life. We use meditation to help us in that attention process. We are not trying to become good meditators. We are trying to wake up.
The first undeniable reality is that every living thing dies, and the second undeniable reality is that we suffer throughout our lives because we don't understand death. The truth derived from these two points is the importance of clarifying the matter of birth and death. The third undeniable reality is that all of the thoughts and feelings that arise in my head simply arise haphazardly, by chance. And the conclusion we can derive from that is not to hold on to all that comes up in our head. That is what we are doing when we sit zazen.
Our life is whatever we are encountering right now, and our practice is shikantaza, which is literally 'just sitting.' More broadly it means to put our energy into settling everything in our world here and now, where we really live.
I think that's the moment when we all grow up, when we stop blaming our parents for the messes we've made out of our lives and start owning the consequences of our actions.
The blues records of each decade explain something about the philosophical basis of our lives as black people. ... Blues is a basis of historical continuity for black people. It is a ritualized way of talking about ourselves and passing it on.
Writers are given the responsibility of sight. I think that the whole burden, responsibility and beauty of the gift forces us to construct our lives differently so that we are able to become vehicles to transcend, to encompass and articulate not only our own experience but the experiences of others.
Life is just like a book. Only after you've read it do you know how it ends. It is when we are at the end of life that we know how our life ran. Mine, until now, has been black. As black as my skin. Black as the garbage dump where I live.
Memory is an act of meaning-making. It collects the disparate pieces of our lives and distills them.
Our emotions are ever-changing and infinitely varied, but the words with which we describe them are fixed and rigid. Our life is like quicksilver, our vocabulary like steel. Sometimes a consummate poet succeeds in rendering the quality of life in words. For the rest of us, this is not possible.
This Western culture of ours tends to sacrifice the full range of experience to a lower common denominator that's acceptable to more people; we end up with McDonald's instead of real food, Holiday Inns instead of homes, and USA Today instead of news and cultural analysis. And we do that with the rest of our lives.
Our lives are written in disappearing ink.
Much of our understanding of God's action in our lives in achieved in hindsight. When a particular crisis or event in our life has passed we cry out in astonishment like Jacob, 'The Lord is in this place and I never knew it.
It is precisely because we cannot see God that we can only know that our prayer is valid by the effect it has upon our lives, by the way we treat our neighbor.
This conversion into prayer of our everyday joys, sorrows, hopes and desires is at first a conscious labor, but after a while it becomes second nature, so that converse with God becomes inextricably and wonderfully woven into the fabric of our lives.
Prayer, even more than eating or sleeping, is not a luxury but a necessity, and we are only fully human when we remember this and arrange our life accordingly.
The sex that is presented to us in everyday culture feels strange to me; its images are fragments, lifeless, removed from normal experience. Real sex, the sex in our cells and in the space between our neurons, leaks out and gets into things and stains our vision and colors our lives.
Wars results in immediate deaths and destruction, but the environmental consequences can last hundreds, often thousands of years. And it is not just war itself that undermines our life support system, but also the research and development, military exercises and general preparations for battle that are carried out on a daily basis in most parts of the world. The majority of this pre-war activity takes place without the benefit of civilian scrutiny and therefore we are unaware of some of what is being done to our environment in the name of 'security.
Our joys will be doubled and our sorrows will be reduced and we will walk our life in community with the body of Christ. When you are with someone else, you are not nearly as willing to give up. So find a friend, be honest and walk together.
Money can come and go, and fame comes and goes. Peace of mind and a relationship with God is far more important, so this is the precedent that we've set in our lives. The bottom line is, we all die, so Jesus is the answer.
You see everything is about belief, whatever we believe rules our existence, rules our life.
Only the truth can set us free from the fear, the drama and the conflict of our lives.
In the existence of our lives, there are many coincidences that bring people together, but there's only one person that will own your heart forever.
It's all about trying to make the world and the universe a better place. I'm proud to be connected with it. I think we need that in our lives. We need ethical, heroic people trying to do the right thing to help others and to improve life on this planet and in the universe.
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