Quotes from Stephen Batchelor

To meditate is not to empty the mind and gape at things in a trancelike stupor. Nothing significant will ever be revealed by just staring blankly at an object long and hard enough. To meditate is to probe with intense sensitivity each glimmer of color, each cadence of sound, each touch of another's hand, each fumbling word that tries to utter what cannnot be said. The

Nowadays, the tendency to be preoccupied with having, at the expense of losing touch with the dimension of being, is becoming ever more pronounced. In times such as ours, when secular and material values dominate social and cultural life to an extreme degree, the intensity of the urge to have creates an ever widening gulf from the awareness of who and what we are.

Learning and education have frequently degenerated into the systematic accumulation of facts and information.

I cannot help but see the void in which I am standing as a metaphor for emptiness: the absence of compulsive reactivity, a precondition for the unimpeded space of paths that allow human flourishing. The unadorned simplicity of this rock-cut shrine evokes the Buddha's dharma before it mutated into dogma. This is nirvana inscribed in stone. Until the idea of emptiness was hijacked by metaphysicians, it was just another way of talking about solitude.

Anxiety, alienation, loneliness, emptiness, and meaninglessness are the fruits of living as an isolated subject admist a multitude of lifeless objects. Although our scope of involvement may extend to numerous and diverse fields of interest and concern, as long as the notion of having predominates, our being remains empty and superficial.

A lack of being remains unaffected by a plenitude of having.

Our religion, with its beliefs, rituals, and dogmas becomes another segment among all the other segments that constitute our linear and fragmented existence. It offers us another set of possible acquisitions, even more tempting than all the others: a meaning to life, immortality, enlightenment, the kingdom of heaven.

For me, Buddhism is like a living organism. If it is to flourish outside self-enclosed ghettos of believers, it will have to meet the challenge of understanding, interacting with, and adapting to an environment that is strikingly different from those in which it has evolved.

What lies ahead is revealed to us through our being confronted with possibilities. Our possibilities, however, are not unconditional and infinite but are limited by the structure of our actual existence.

It is only when the question ceases to be identified with the subject-verb-predicate structure of grammar, and is recognized within its original ground, within existence itself, that we can start looking for an answer. But such an answer will not be restricted to the confinements of language; it too must be revealed within an existential structure.

A] person is formed from a continuum of words and actions over time and cannot be reduced to a fixed "self" that is either "enlightened" or "unenlightened.

First and foremost the Buddha taught a method ("dharma practice") rather than another "-ism." The dharma is not something to believe in but something to do.

By emphasizing doubt rather than belief, perplexity rather than certainty, and questions rather than answers, Zen practice granted me the freedom to imagine.

For pragmatist philosophers such as these, a belief is valued as true because it is useful, because it works, because it brings tangible benefits to human beings and other creatures. Siddhattha Gotama's Four Noble Truths are "true" not because they correspond to something real somewhere, but because, when put into practice, they can enhance the quality of your life. In

The practice of mindfulness aims for a still and lucid engagement with the open field of contingent events in which one's life is embedded. All events are ontologically equivalent: mind is not more "real" than matter, nor matter more "real" than mind.

Not only are we inescapably alone in the realms of our private thoughts, perceptions and feelings, but we are also, paradoxically, inescapably together in a world with others.

Loneliness is not only positively characterized by a certain degree of isolation, but is negatively characterized by a deficiency of participation.

Within the last hundred years the teachings of the Buddha have confirmed the views of theosophists, fascists, environmentalists, and quantum physicists alike.

I am empty only in the sense that there is nothing fixed or intrinsically real at the core of my identity as a person. Recognition of such emptiness therefore liberates one to change and transform oneself. And this, it seems, is precisely what the Jungian theory of individuation describes, yet in a language that is affirmative rather than negative.

Human beings like us may never have evolved before and may never evolve again in this or any other universe. As far as anyone knows, we are alone in an inconceivably vast cosmos that has no interest at all in our fate. I do not believe that I existed in any meaningful sense before my birth or will exist again after my death either here on earth or in a heaven, a hell, or any other realm.

The collapsing of an empire. This changing word moves inexorably on. Thoughts bubble and the stiller the mind the more palpable the dazzling torrent of life becomes.

A secular approach to Buddhism is thus concerned with how the dharma can enable humans and other living beings to flourish in this biosphere, not in a hypothetical afterlife. Rather than emphasizing personal enlightenment and liberation, it is grounded in a deeply felt concern and compassion for the suffering of all those with whom we share this earth.

As a way of life, a middle path is an ongoing task of responsiveness and risk, grounded on a groundless ground. Its twists and turns are as turbulent and unpredictable as life itself.

We do not receive wisdom, we must discover it for ourselves, after a journey through the wilderness, which no one else can make for us, which no one can spare us, for our wisdom is the point of view from which we come at last to regard the world. —Marcel Proust