Quotes About Self

Dogen's teaching: We practice because we do not yet know who or what we are. But as a result of many causes, including the suffering we experience and the longing engendered by that suffering, we aspire to know. That aspiration leads many people to begin the practice of zazen. Dogen expressed this beautifully when he said, "Wisdom is seeking wisdom." Perhaps we might paraphrase and say that wholeness is seeking wholeness, self is seeking self.

When I have to struggle seeking after something, When I feel loneliness in helpless solitude, When I am in despair of myself —These are all thoughts of ourselves. Leave everything to zazen, letting go of thought, Or to single-minded chanting of the sound that sees the -world. At this time, even though we don't know it consciously Suddenly, whatever has happened The living reality of the self that is only the self is there, Just as the big sky is always the big sky.

Uchiyama R?shi helped me a great deal in not allowing me to use zazen as an escape. He said, "You must know that behind zazen are the teachings of Buddhism, and behind them, your own life experience." These words went a long way in clarifying for me a passage in the Sh?b?-genz?: Genj? K?an (Actualizing the Koan): "To study Buddhism is to study the Self.

D?gen says here that to study Buddhism means to study one's Self; to learn Buddhism is to learn one's Self.

As overwhelming is caused by you, there is no overwhelming that is separate from you. Thus you go out and meet someone. Someone meets someone. You meet yourself. Going out meets going out.

To know yourself is to forget yourself.

Simply being in a context of awe leads to a "small self." We can quiet that nagging voice of the interfering neurotic simply by locating ourselves in contexts of more awe.

if you want to make a vivid statement about yourself, say you are kiya—arising only!

Life is painful. It has thorns, like the stem of a rose. Culture and art are the roses that bloom on the stem. The flower is yourself, your humanity. Art is the liberation of the humanity inside yourself.

Nobody is so miserable as he who longs to be somebody and something other than the person he is in body and mind.

the average person is more interested in his or her own name than in all the other names on earth put together.

William Winter señaló una vez que la expresión del yo es la necesidad dominante en el carácter humano.

The history of the American Negro is the history of this strife,—this longing to attain self-conscious manhood, to merge his double self into a better and truer self.

For the world is broken, sundered, busted down the middle, self ripped from self and man pasted back together as mythical monster, half angel, half beast, but no man...Some day a man will walk into my office as a ghost or beast or ghost-beast and walk out as a man, which is to say sovereign wanderer, lordly exile, worker and waiter and watcher.

One of the peculiar ironies of being a human self in the Cosmos: A stranger approaching you in the street will in a second's glance see you whole, size you up, place you in a way in which you cannot and never will, even though you have spent a lifetime with yourself, live in the Century of the Self, and therefore ought to know yourself best of all.

Why do people often feel bad in good environments and good in bad environments? Why did Mother Teresa think that affluent Westerners often seemed poorer than the Calcutta poor, the poorest of the poor? The paradox comes to pass because the impoverishments and enrichments of a self in a world are not necessarily the same as the impoverishments and enrichments of an organism in an environment.

At that time the only treatment of angelism, that is, excessive abstraction of the self from itself, was recovery of the self through ordeal.

the self in the twentieth century is a voracious nought which expands like the feeding vacuole of an amoeba seeking to nourish and inform its own nothingness by ingesting new objects in the world but, like a vacuole, only succeeds in emptying them out.

But the expectation of the self, to be informed in its nothingness--if only I can get out of this old place and into the right new place, I can become a new person--places a heavy burden on travel.

The self has no sign of itself... For me, certain signifiers fit you, and not others. For me, all signifiers fit me, one as well as another. I am rascal, hero, craven, brave, treacherous, loyal, at once the secret hero and asshole of the Cosmos.

What Descartes did not know: no such isolated individual as he described can be conscious.

Much of current speculation about the nature of ETIs--what level of technology have you achieved?, etc.--is misguided. The first question an earthling should ask of an ETI is not: What is the level of your science? but rather: Did it also happen to you? Do you have a self? If so, how do you handle it? Did you suffer a catastrophe.

the self can be as desperately stranded in the transcendence of theory as in the immanence of consumption.

The earth-self observing the Cosmos and trying to understand the Cosmos by scientific principles from which its self is excluded is, beyond doubt, the strangest phenomenon in all of the Cosmos, far stranger than the Ring Nebula in Lyra. It, the self, is in fact the only alien in the entire Cosmos.