Quotes from Shinzen Young

Ultimately, meditation can allow us to have happiness independent of conditions and that is one heck of an awesome claim

you can dramatically extend life—not by multiplying the number of your years, but by expanding the fullness of your moments.

It took me twenty years to hone my current definition of Gone.

Five decades ago, some very kind people in Japan slipped me the secret: you can dramatically extend life—not by multiplying the number of your years, but by expanding the fullness of your moments.

It's fine to sometimes use these archetypes as a conduit to get information from the depths, but I recommend that you mostly use them as a conduit to bring clarity and equanimity to the depths. Become fascinated with how they move, and less tripped out with what they mean.

Such a Zen dialogue is basically a contest, but it's really an anti-contest. It's a kind of reverse or paradoxical contest. It works like this: two people talk, and the first one who speaks from the ego loses. The one who wants to win is certainly going to lose.

There are two reasons why I currently teach within the framework of mindfulness. The first is that mindfulness is the least culture-bound of the three Buddhist practice traditions. It is relatively easy to extract it from the cultural and doctrinal matrix within which it arose and to present it as an evidence-based, secular, and culturally neutral process. The second reason is that the general method of mindfulness shares some features with the general method of modern science. I

Most growth modalities—from nineteenth-century psychoanalysis to twentieth-century Scientology, and just about everything in between—share a common paradigm. It goes something like this: we store influences from the past in the subconscious, those influences inappropriately affect our behavior and perception in the present, and our job is to somehow remove those distorting influences.

In India, there is a word that means both "cessation" and "satisfaction" as a single linked concept. The word is nirvana.

The relative rest states—a blank mental screen, a defocused external gaze, physical relaxation, emotional neutrality, physical silence, mental quiet—may begin to pervade your sensory experience as the result of noticing vanishings.

You forget about all those things—you're just dominated by the vanishing-ness of things. It's just Gone, Gone, Gone. That, once again, leads to a figure-ground reversal. You are about to become Gone. Good, go with that.

There is one possible negative effect from working with vanishing and the related themes of emptiness and no self. In extreme cases, the sense of Goneness, emptiness, and no self may be so intense that it creates disorientation, terror, paralysis, aversion, or hopelessness. Unpleasant reactions such as these are well documented

You simply notice which part of your void-triggered bum-out is emotional body sensation, which part is mental images, and which part is mental talk. Keep those clearly delineated.

it may require ongoing and intensive support from teachers and other practitioners to remind you to keep applying these interventions.

The medicine for that is to remember that the main goal in meditation is not to get to certain good states, but rather to eliminate what gets in the way of those good states. If you do that, those good states will be available any time you wish.

The Tibetans have an exclamatory cry reserved just for when that window opens. The cry is Emaho! which might be loosely rendered "Oh my God! Who would have thought it's this simple!

Each day is peppered with a holy glow.

They made a profound impression on me. I sensed that they knew about some sort of "secret sauce," a way to be deeply happy regardless of conditions. And I sensed that they would willingly share it with me but would never force it upon me. I would have to take the initiative if I wanted to experience it for myself.

Prior to that, the things I had read about in my Buddhist studies seemed to me to be nothing but mythological ruminations and philosophical conjectures, elaborated by scholars with too much time on their hands. Now, for the first time, I realized that they were not just concocting speculations. They were trying to describe something that human beings actually experience. After a couple of weeks, the experience faded into a pleasant memory, but it left me with a permanent intellectual shift.

He then said something even more mind-boggling. "As a general principle, any positive state that you experience within the context of silent sitting practice, you must try to attain in the midst of ordinary life.

meditation elevates a person's base level of focus. By focus, I mean the ability to attend to what's relevant in a given situation.

I learned that impermanence is not merely something that you experience in your sensory circuits. It also informs your motor circuits. It's a kind of effortless energy that you can "ride on" in daily life. It imparts a bounce to your step, a flow to your voice, and a vibrancy to your creative thought. I also learned about the expansion-contraction paradigm for how consciousness works.

Sometimes a person can become stunningly proficient with regard to certain dimensions of spiritual empowerment while under-emphasizing other aspects. In my way of thinking, the ultimate reason to experience liberation is to better serve others. And a sine qua non for effectively serving others is to be a decent person by the ordinary canons of society, or as my father would have put it, a mensch. Freedom should be manifested within clear ethical guidelines and an egalitarian feedback structure.

Often meditation works this way: we measure its value in terms of the suffering that would have happened but didn't—thanks to the fact that we have a practice.