Quotes from Ethan Nichtern

If we long to save the whole world but we can't deal with our own family and friends, something has gone wrong in our understanding of what it means to be human.

one of the greatest lessons that comes from meditation is that a relaxed curiosity about life and sleepwalking through it are two radically different choices

thoughts aren't the problem. Problems only develop when thoughts no longer arise from or refer to actual experience. That's when thoughts start ossifying into their own bureaucratic institutions, becoming assumptions and dogma.

There's a bumper sticker that says, "If you're not outraged, you're not paying attention." Anyone who never gets angry when he sees their friends and loved ones doing things that are harmful to themselves or others has to be pretty numb to the deep sadness of suffering. Anyone who just walks on by when she sees humans being treated like objects needs to take a second look. And a third one.

Here's my personal definition of a Buddhist: someone who prioritizes cultivating her relationship to her own heartmind—and her relationship to other sentient beings—above whatever else she might achieve in life.

war doesn't end war any more than a heroin fix ends a heroin addiction.

When we get overwhelmed by the larger moral implications of our work, we overlook the smaller, more imperceptible effects of our labor. Interdependence is about the little things you do. It's not just what you produce, but how you treat the people around you, who labor with you. And there is always something we can do that is positive—ALWAYS.

Running for the hills is not the way to go. We live in a time where there are actually fewer and fewer places left to run away to. Therefore, it's imperative to find ways to use your energy to dive into—not run from—existing paths of livelihood. A hip-hop mogul or an oil executive are powerful already. There's no reason they couldn't be powerfully selfless and compassionate as well.

I often find that when I fall into the trap of speaking too harshly, it is because I don't have enough confidence in the power of my own voice to carry sufficient strength on its own. When you realize that your speech can be powerful, you don't need to amplify that power by making personal attacks that overgeneralize the specific feedback you are trying to give.

instead of countering the culture, we have to transform it. We have to use existing cultural forms to peel back the layers of the blazing digital façades and reveal the beating heart underneath.

The results we are looking for, unfortunately, often include stopping our thoughts altogether, or destroying unwanted emotions. One simple reason meditation is difficult to sustain is that the principal benefits of meditation are not short-term, and it is generally hard to convince ourselves to engage in anything that has mostly long-term effects. Our

The point of dharma practice is not to try to live without any narrative. The point is to see how all narratives have a holographic nature. Because

Visualization is not just some spiritual event—it's a basic cognitive process.

When we are mindful, we experience our social presence as a series of momentary connections with one other being. These moments of interpersonal connection are like the Lego building blocks of our social awareness. The

If you are preparing for an important meeting or event, for instance, you often fantasize about everything that could possibly go wrong beforehand. This is basically just an anxious mind generating a negative, insecure, and incapable image of itself. With visualization, the very space of our imagination, often dominated by fantasies of the future and nightmares of the past, could be converted into a kind of mindfully creative space, a kind of movie studio that actually benefits sentient beings.

sacredness refers to the holistic view that our spiritual self and our worldly existence can never be isolated from each other. Thus, whatever divinity is available to human beings, whatever our highest values might be, the only place we can witness that divinity directly is within our life in society.

when an ancient text describes "worldly concerns," it is very important to understand that this is actually a geographic designation, not an existential one. The "world" really just encompassed the frenetic endeavors of life in the city, that place of hustle and bustle, lust and heartache, career and ambition, art and entertainment, government and politics. Deeply pursuing spiritual practice meant leaving the city behind.

Unless we get at the institutional structures that mold our personal and interpersonal experience, our understanding will be incomplete. If our practice is going to truly help the world, it must evolve beyond personal awareness and service work into a true sense of participation in society, of questioning the decisions that we have made together about how our society should be arranged. This

Whenever an emotion arises in the space of our awareness, it creates a powerful wind that can be either harnessed as wisdom or fixated upon and treated neurotically and destructively.

It is a mark of great spiritual laziness to take the world we inherit as a given. It is constantly in flux, and it is our own projective mind that creates it. A true visionary sees society itself as a shared projection, a kind of hologram we are all cocreating with no permanent basis, one that can always be reimagined based on the shifting views of human nature that we hold.

The basic premise of Buddhism is that there is no savior to worship: nobody is going to save you from your own mind. Nobody can get into the heart of your experience and fix anything for you. If you want to make your own internal experience more hospitable, only you can do that work. Others can always support and guide you and spark insights, but ultimately you are your own boss and the agent of understanding your mind and opening your heart. Nothing

We only have one wireless connection with the real Internet, and that's our mind. There isn't a single moment in our lives when our mind is not functioning as the basis of all our interactions—not even one. So it makes sense to train ourselves in the skilful operation of this basic interface. This is what meditation is for.

When we try to do more than one thing at a time, another deeper problem starts to develop. In the frenzy of juggling it all, we tend to shift our focus away from the things that matter and toward activities we don't really need to be doing at all. We

The moment of WANT is really the misunderstood urge to connect with the world around us.