Quotes from Jay Michaelson

The Buddha's dharma didn't teach peace and relaxation; it taught awakening—often rude awakening.

All relaxation does is allow the truth to be felt. The mind is cleared, like a dirty window wiped clean, and the magnitude of what we might ordinarily take for granted inspires tears.

There's no path to liberation that doesn't pass through the shadow.

Sometimes, sitting there on the cushion failing to watch your breath, it can feel like you're the only weirdo weird enough to be wasting your time in this way. But you're not! There are generations of weirdos, monasteries full of them, and we have the benefit of their accumulated wisdom.

It is possible to refine awareness itself so much that the emptiness of things, and the role mental construction plays, becomes a directly apprehended reality.

What a miracle, that all we have to do to be beautifully loving creatures is just relax and allow.

Yes, eros and agape are different, but the stifling of the former leads to a distortion of the latter.

To me, God is a name that humans give to all that is. Experientially, it is whatever is left over when the delusion of the self is taken away.

We are animals descended from five billion years of wanting, striving, and seeking. And life just doesn't cooperate. So we suffer. And so the solution to that problem is to upgrade our minds, in a distinctly 'unnatural' way, so that the mind clings less and lets go more.

The Buddha's dharma didn't teach peace and relaxation; it taught awakening—often rude awakening.

At the last stages of the journey, there's no journey at all.

Part of why I love these angry, straight, white punks is that they are stripping the dharma of its bullshit, and applying it to contexts and styles that, even if they aren't mine, are at least different from the norm.

Death is only the end if you assume the story is about you." This

For the Buddha of the Pali Canon, the goal is liberation: the cessation of suffering, the end of the endless hamster-wheel of dependent origination, of mental formations leading to desire leading to clinging leading to suffering and so on. Nibbana, or nirvana, was not originally conceived as some magical heavenly world, or even a permanent altered state of consciousness. It is usually described, in the early texts, negatively: as a candle being snuffed out.

For me, religion comforts the afflicted and afflicts the comfortable.

The Hindu sage Ramakrishna once said that the mind is like fabric; it takes the color of the dye it's soaked in. Soak the mind in a quiet, relaxing environment and it will become quiet and relaxed. Soak it in floods of Facebook and, well.…

Religion is for people afraid of going to hell, Spirituality is for people who have been there.

Neither the spiritual nor the material repression of sadness reflects the depth of contemplative life. The great irony is that the very effort to feel joy (or relief) prevents its fruition. Perhaps counterintuitively, it is the surrender to sadness that causes it to pass—not the suppression of it. The gestures of opening, making-space, giving-way—these enable a delicious relinquishment, a setting down of the burden, even, perhaps, a kind of wisdom.

What some folks don't understand about the closet is that it's not just a set of walls around sexual behavior. It's a net of lies that affects absolutely everything in one's life: how you dress, who you befriend, how you walk, how you talk. And how you love.

Can I really remember, over and over again, that, contrary to all indications, fulfilling my desires will not be as satisfying as lessening them? Simple, but not easy.

as Krishnamurti said, "It is no measure of health to be well-adjusted to a profoundly sick society.

Dukkha is not the self-inflicted stress of a technology executive; it's the real stuff, the kind of suffering that merits the Pali word's original meaning: brokenness, stuckness.