Quotes About Reality

The very first noble truth of the Buddha points out that suffering is inevitable for human beings as long as we believe that things last—that they don't disintegrate, that they can be counted on to satisfy our hunger for security.

Things are as bad and as good as they seem. There's no need to add anything extra.

What causes misery is always trying to get away from the facts of life, always trying to avoid pain and seek happiness—this sense of ours that there could be lasting security and happiness available to us if we could only do the right thing.

One of the main discoveries of meditation is seeing how we continually run away from the present moment, how we avoid being here just as we are.

Impermanence is a principle of harmony. When we don't struggle against it, we are in harmony with reality.

We all have tremendous potential and yet we stay closed in a very small, fearful world, based on wanting to avoid the unpleasant, the painful, the insecure, the unpredictable. There is vast, limitless richness and wonder we could experience if we fully accustomed our nervous systems to the open-ended, uncertain reality of how things are.

The root of these fundamentalist tendencies, these dogmatic tendencies, is a fixed identity—a fixed view we have of ourselves as good or bad, worthy or unworthy, this or that. With a fixed identity, we have to busy ourselves with trying to rearrange reality, because reality doesn't always conform to our view.

We're all addicted to hope—hope that the doubt and mystery will go away. This addiction has a painful effect on society: a society based on lots of people addicted to getting ground under their feet is not a very compassionate place.

Chaos is part of our home ground. Instead of looking for something higher or purer, work with it just as it is.

The essence of samsara is this tendency that we have to seek pleasure and avoid pain, to seek security and avoid groundlessness, to seek comfort and avoid discomfort. The basic teaching is that that is how we keep ourselves miserable, unhappy, and stuck in a very small, limited view of reality.

To think that we can finally get it all together is unrealistic.

The most heartbreaking thing of all is how we cheat ourselves of the present moment.

a psychotic person is drowning in the very same things that a mystic swims in.

The rain in the morning isn't good or bad, comforting or threatening. It's not even "rain." It's just what it is.

Those who go in bliss naturally includes the buddhas, but it also refers to our own potential. We, too, can free ourselves from the hopes and fears of self-centeredness. The bliss of perceiving reality without these limitations is our birthright. Thus Shantideva doesn't bow down to something outside himself, but to his own capacity for enlightenment.

Whether the reality of change is a source of freedom for us or a source of horrific anxiety makes a significant difference. Do the days of our lives add up to further suffering or to increased capacity for joy? That's an important question.

The Buddha spoke a lot about the importance of working with one's ego. But what did he mean by "ego"? There are various ways to talk about this word, but one definition I particularly like is "that which resists what is." Ego struggles against reality, against the open-endedness and natural movement of life. It is very uncomfortable with vulnerability and ambiguity, with not being quite sure how to pin things down.

What a predicament! We seem doomed to suffer simply because we have a deep-seated fear of how things really are. Our attempts to find lasting pleasure, lasting security, are at odds with the fact that we're part of a dynamic system in which everything and everyone is in process.

Even if you were the Buddha himself, if you were a fully enlightened person, you would experience death, illness, aging, and sorrow at losing what you love. All of these things would happen to you. If you got burned or cut, it would hurt.

La impermanencia es la bondad de la realidad. Todo evoluciona constantemente, como las cuatro estaciones que están en continuo flujo: del invierno pasamos a la primavera, al verano y después al otoño; como el día que se convierte en noche: la luz que se convierte en oscuridad y pasa a ser nuevamente luz. La impermanencia es la esencia de todo:

You are never going to get it all together, you're never going to get your act together, fully, completely. You're never going to get all the little loose ends tied up.

To think that we can finally get it all together is unrealistic. To seek for some lasting security is futile.

Whether we experience what happens to us as obstacle and enemy or as teacher and friend depends entirely on our perception of reality. It depends on our relationship with ourselves.

It's not a terrible thing that we feel fear when faced with the unknown. It is part of being alive, something we all share. We react against the possibility of loneliness, of death, of not having anything to hold on to. Fear is a natural reaction to moving closer to the truth.