Quotes About Awareness

The time of our delusion does not obstruct the time of our realization. Our practice is not in order to attain realization. Practice itself is the actualization of realization.

Abandonnez les offrandes d'encens, les prosternations, le nenbutsu, la pratique du repentir et la lecture des sutras : restez simplement assis (shikantaza).

To learn the way of the Buddha is to learn about oneself. To learn about oneself is to forget oneself. To forget oneself is to be enlightened by everything in the world. To be enlightened by everything in the world is to let fall one's own body and mind.

If you can't find the truth right where you are, where do you expect to find it?

The longness and shortness of the present moment can be recognized by utilizing a big image of the moon, which is reflecting on the surface of the ocean, and a small image of the moon on the surface of a cup of water, or in another example the very wide scale of the whole sky itself, and the very narrow space of the moon, which is shining in the sky.

Enlightenment is intimacy with all things.

That the self advances and confirms the myriad things is called delusion. That the myriad things advance and confirm the self is enlightenment.

Handle a single leaf in such a way that it manifests the body of Buddha. This in turn allows Buddha to manifest through the leaf.

Maybe when we die, the first thing we'll say is, 'I know this feeling. I was here before.

Time seems to pass. The world happens, unrolling into moments, and you stop to glance at a spider pressed to its web. There is a quickness of light and a sense of things outlined precisely and streaks of running luster on the bay. You know more surely who you are on a strong bright day after a storm when the smallest falling leaf is stabbed with self-awareness. The wind makes a sound in the pines and the world comes into being, irreversibly, and the spider rides the wind-swayed web.

You have to break through the structure of your own stonework habit just to make yourself listen.

The truth of the world is exhausting.

Brilliant people never think of the lives they smash, being brilliant.

The less there was to see, the harder he looked, the more he saw.

No body knows how to feel and they're checking around for hints.

We lead more interesting lives than we think. We are characters in plots, without the compression and numinous sheen. Our lives, examined carefully in all their affinities and links, abound with suggestive meaning, with themes and involute turnings we have not allowed ourselves to see completely.

He'd come to know himself, untranslatably, through his pain.

You and I. We're here. So might as well.

It's the things we forget about that tell us who we are.

One must become a book before one can know what is inside it.

It was the kind of day in which you forget words and drop things and wonder what it is you came into the room to get because you are standing here for a reason and you have to tell yourself it is just a question of sooner or later before you remember because you always remember once you are here. The thing is communicated somehow.

People eat and sleep in the shadow of what we do

There's just so much time set aside for baffled reaction. I believe we've reached the limit.

Reality doesn't happen until you analyze the dots.