Quotes from David R. Loy

People are "punished" or "rewarded" not for what they have done but for what they have become, and what we intentionally do is what makes us what we are.

You must be emptied of that with which you are full, so you may be filled with that whereof you are empty. Augustine

All of us react to our anxiety by "partializing" our world, by restricting our consciousness within narrow bounds, to areas that we can more or less control which provide us a sense of self-confidence.

Our problem today is that we no longer believe in things but in symbols, hence our life has passed over into these symbols and their manipulation— only to find ourselves manipulated by the symbols we take so seriously, objectified in our objectifications.

For Becker, this is literally true: Normality is our collective, protective madness, in which we repress the truth of the human condition, and those who have difficulty playing this game are the ones we call mentally ill.

The evolution of Homo Sapiens into self-consciousness alienated the human species from the rest of the world, which became objectified for us as we became subjects looking out at it. This original sin is passed down to every generation as a linguistically conditioned and socially maintained illusion that each of us is a consciousness existing separately from the world.

Uncomfortable with our sense-of-lack today, we look forward to that day in the future when we will feel truly alive; we use that hope to rationalize the way we have to live now, a sacrifice which then increases our demands of the future.

Then growing up is not a matter of discovering who or what one really is, but joining the general amnesia whereby each of us pretends to be an autonomous person and learns how to play the social game of constantly reassuring each other that, yes, you are a person, just like me, and I'm okay, you're okay.

our most problematic dualism is not life fearing death but a fragile sense-of-self dreading its own groundlessness, according to Buddhism. By accepting and yielding to that groundlessness, I can discover that I have always been grounded in Indra's Net, not as a self-enclosed being but as one manifestation of a web of relationships which encompasses everything.

As with the wei-wu-wei, "in changing it is at rest" (Heraclitus, frag. 84a). In place of the apparently solid I that does them, there would be an empty and immutably serene quality to them. The experience would be not of a succession of events (winter does not turn into spring) but just-this-one-effortless-thing (tathat?) and then another just-this-one-thing.

You may suppose that time is only passing-away, and do not understand that time never arrives. . . . People only see time's coming and going, and do not thoroughly understand that being-time abides in each moment. Being-time has the quality of flowing. . . . Because flowing is a quality of time, moments of past and present do not overlap or line up side by side.

Once we realize we are time, however, we experience something that sounds paradoxical when we try to express it: the now does not change (it is always now) but flows (that now never ceases to transform). While the now is immutable in the sense that it is always the same now, rather than a series of fleeting nows, nevertheless there is transformation, although experienced differently once one is the transformation rather than an observer of it.

We are here to awaken from the illusion of our separateness. —THICH NHAT HANH

life itself is essentially appropriation, injury, overpowering of the strange and weaker, suppression, severity, imposition of one's own forms, incorporation and, at the least and mildest, exploitation.

Needless to say, there is a karmic rebound. The more we value money, the more we find it used—and the more we use it ourselves—to evaluate us. Money takes on a life of its own, and we end up being manipulated by the symbol we take so seriously. In this sense, the problem is not that we are too materialistic but that we are not materialistic enough, because we are so preoccupied with the symbolism that we end up devaluing life itself.

your head. Sally Kempton

Northrop Frye said that a poet is a myth's way of making another myth.

is the basic problem the nature of this world itself, or our inability to accept it as it is? Or something else?

When meditating one dwells in the empty, silent no-thing-ness from which mental phenomena arise; when thoughts and images appear one lets them go.