Quotes About Reality

Life is real; it's not a dream when mindfulness is there.

We have to nourish our insight into impermanence every day. If we do, we will live more deeply, suffer less, and enjoy life much more. Living deeply, we will touch the foundation of reality, nirvana, the world of no birth and no death. Touching impermanence deeply, we touch the world beyond permanence and impermanence. We touch the ground of being and see that which we have called being and nonbeing are just notions. Nothing is ever lost. Nothing is ever gained.

Your concept or perception of reality is not reality. When you are caught in your perceptions and ideas, you lose reality.

No view can ever be the truth. It is just from one point; that is why it is called a "point of view." If we go to another point, we will see things differently and realize that our first view was not entirely right. Buddhism is not a collection of views. It is a practice to help us eliminate wrong views. The quality of our views can always be improved. From the viewpoint of ultimate reality, Right View is the absence of all views.

In this very moment all of us are dying. Some of us are dying more slowly and some of us more quickly. If we can be alive now, it is because we're dying at every moment. We might think that someone else is dying and we're not. But we shouldn't be fooled by appearances.

When you get free from views and words, reality reveals itself to you and that is Nirvana.

Concentration is not wholesome in itself. A thief needs concentration to break into a house. The object of our concentration is what makes it beneficial or not. If you use meditative concentration to run away from reality, that is not beneficial.

They did not know that when the mind divides reality up, when it judges and discriminates, it kills paradise. Please do not scold the sunlight. Do not chastise the clear stream or the little birds of spring.

Only the present moment is real.

It is not words or concepts that are important. What is important is our insight into the nature of reality and our way of responding to reality.

To bring wisdom into bloom? Yes, because the ultimate aim of Zen is the vision of reality, acquired by the power of concentration. This wisdom is Enlightenment, the perception of the truth of being and of life. This is what all practitioners of Zen wish to attain.

With nonattachment, we see both being and nonbeing as creations of our mind, and we ride the wave of birth and death. We don't mind birth. We don't mind death. [...] Reality transcends both birth and death.

The awakened man lives in the world of things like everyone else. When he sees a rose he knows that it is a rose, like everyone else, But the difference is that he is neither conditioned nor imprisoned by concepts. Concepts now become marvelous skillful means in his possession.

Zen Wisdom cannot be obtained by the intellect: study, hypothesis, analysis, synthesis. The practitioner of Zen must use all of his entire being as an instrument of realization; the intellect is only one part of his being, and a part that often pulls him away from living reality, the very object of Zen.

The first thing we can do in these situations is to acknowledge internally that the pictures we have in our head, what we think happened, may not be accurate. Our practice is to breathe and walk until we are more calm and relaxed.

There is no enlightenment outside daily life.

We tend to focus on the object and call it reality. We don't notice how our mind intervenes in our perception.

We are life without limit. We are not caught in birth, we are not caught in death, we are not caught in being, and we are not caught in non-being. This is the truth of reality.

The negative attitude toward the description of ultimate reality by words is common to all Buddhist doctrine. The dictum used by Bodhidharma is only a drastic way of bringing people to this original attitude which underlines the importance of direct spiritual experience and discredits intellectual speculation.

When we recognize that our suffering is based on images instead of current reality, then living happily in the present moment becomes possible right away.

The mind is like a sharp knife that cuts reality into separate pieces.

As practitioners of meditation, we should never accept anything on blind faith, regarding it as absolute, unchanging truth. We should investigate and observe reality with mindfulness and concentration, so our understanding and faith can deepen day by day.

I urge you to write this phrase down on a card and put it up on the wall of your room: "Are you sure of your perceptions?

What we lack is not an ideology or a doctrine that will save the world. What we lack is awareness of what we are, of what our true situation really is.