Quotes from Ethan Nichtern

It is no measure of health to be well-adjusted to a profoundly sick society. —KRISHNAMURTI

The study of our habitual conditioning and how habit leads us to react is the study of karma. On

Karma becomes most relevant if we simply examine it as a psychology of habit. Karma is about beginning to see the general script we act from, the strategies we employ when confronted with familiar obstacles along our commute. This

Eventually, if we are going to wake up and truly come home to our own heartmind, we have to turn the full scope of our life into a practice space. This doesn't have to start as an all-the-time endeavor, but little by little it is said that our awareness practice can become a constant companion. It

When we stop asking the question "Whose fault is it?" and start asking the question "How can I work with this now?" then we are truly stepping onto the path of taking responsibility for our karma. When

If we are able to take responsibility for our own mind, then we can work with whatever life throws at us without resentment or blame, and with the curiosity and self-care that are necessary for mindfulness to develop in all aspects of life. On this basis, we can also help others.

This is perhaps the greatest lesson that interdependence has to offer us about right livelihood (and right living in general) in the twenty-first century: no person, and no profession, comes out completely clean, ever. On the other hand, no one is inherently defiled.

Whenever we mentally compartmentalize our work away from our more creative or more spiritual being, we construct a false dichotomy. This schism has to collapse on the level of universal interdependence. If your week and life are segregated this way, you're going to cause suffering—at the very least for yourself. You'll guiltily and resentfully acquiesce to your place in the world.

In thinking of home, we have to move beyond considering home as a physical address. We have to start asking what home feels like. My

Feeling at home is the feeling that I can just be myself. It

At its heart, infotainment represents the indiscriminate combination of two mental longings, conflated by our ignorance. These two impulses are: 1. the impulse to be informed—to know what is real and what isn't, in ourselves and the world around us (the "info"); and 2. the desire to be entertained and comforted, to be reassured about the correctness of our personal and collective tendencies (the "tainment").

The doormat version of idiot compassion always involves allowing ourselves to feel walked all over in the name of idealizing what it means to be patient with another person's aggressive behavior. It's an unwillingness to face the uncomfortable truth that it's okay to feel angry and irritated.

A confused society, a deeply endangered society, is a group of people all lost in nightmarish commute. The systems, institutions, and culture of such a society discourage people from feeling the trust and belonging that come with being at home in your world. A

When we are able to stay present with the internal discomfort created by the idea that somebody else might be mad at us, we end up becoming a bodhisattva with tremendous integrity. We end up building confidence that we can say what we think and mean what we say, more and more often. This kind of integrity and dignity become contagious, and in the end, even if somebody doesn't agree with us, that person at least respects us for our dedication to living by our principles.

An enlightened society is one where the culture encourages time for self-awareness, belonging, and connection. An enlightened society would actually foster cultural and social relationships to help commuters find their way home. It

Thinking that we have to always burn our candle at both ends in order to benefit others is perhaps the greatest idiot compassion of all.

Within our twenty-first century modes of communication, truth can be easily manipulated and framed to get the viewer of the information to receive it in a predetermined way, to elicit a desired spin of "truth." Turning on the light doesn't guarantee the clarifying of confusion anymore. If all of the media of our societal experience make us believe that a rope is a snake, then a rope becomes a snake, either in darkness or the light of day.

With natural curiosity, the practice of mindfulness becomes effortless.

Love requires learning to love ourselves in the mirror, and learning to look other people in the eye. Buddhism, in turn, asks us to pause and look at even the subtlest causal connections and take our appreciation of them to greater depths.

every habit contains a kind of protective intelligence, a wisdom that somehow got frozen in a bygone time.

If we fully embrace the apparent contradiction that we are distinct from others yet interdependent with them, then we realize that in order to fully awaken ourselves, we need to heal our relationship to others.

When our goals become comparative, we end up with the constant paranoia of an existence of always being weighed on hidden scales, living with the stress of keeping our elbows out in anticipation of others trying to get ahead of us. All of this is a distortion of the wisdom of achievement, which lies hidden within the emotional energy of jealousy and envy.

Sometimes, the most compassionate thing we can do is say no. Every once in a while, the best way to help another person is to yell at him. This is called an act of wrathful compassion, and it's why many traditional bodhisattvas are depicted carrying iconographic weaponry in Himalayan art, displaying a force that is not caught up within hatred, but that sets firm boundaries which a confused mind cannot cross.

Moving from a more focused approach to self-awareness and our own personal karma to a more relational approach to how we interact with others is referred to as the transition from the Hinayana7 (narrow vehicle) to the Mahayana (expansive vehicle) within the historically Tibetan tradition. The journey of relationships is not a better path—it's just a natural broadening of the scope of our practice.