Quotes About Meditation

As Tam had taught him long ago, he formed a single flame in his mind and fed his fears into it, seeking emptiness, the stillness of the void. The flame seemed to grow until it enveloped everything, until it was too large to contain or imagine any longer. With that it was gone, leaving in its place a sense of peace. At its edges, emotions still flickered, fear and anger like black blotches, but the void held. Thought skimmed across its surface like pebbles across ice.

The flame and the void are about center," Tam said. "And about peace. I would teach it to each and every person in this land, soldier or not, if I could.

Lan had begun an intense study of the contents of his pipe's bowl.

Concentrate on a single flame and feed all your passions into it—fear, hate, anger—until your mind became empty.

unexplained pauses

So often we read through the scriptures—day in and day out, week after week and month after month, from start to finish—and seldom take the time to step back, ponder and reflect on the larger themes and doctrinal refrains that work their way through the scriptures and the history of the Church.

Summer nights held a special kind of loneliness that gave rise to strange imaginings. One walked the beach alone and thought too much.

Zen is the spirit of the valley, not the mountaintop. The only Zen you find on the tops of mountains is the Zen you bring up there.

martinis, steak, and red wine, a proven formula for deep thinking

When cleaning I do it the way people go to church—not so much to discover anything new, although I'm alert for new things, but mainly to reacquaint myself with the familiar. It's nice to go over familiar paths.

When you've got a Chautauqua in your head, it's extremely hard not to inflict it on innocent people.

Unless you're fond of hollering you don't make great conversations on a running cycle. Instead you spend your time being aware of things and meditating on them. On sights and sounds, on the mood of the weather and things remembered, on the machine and the countryside you're in, thinking about things at great leisure and length without being hurried and without feeling you're losing time.

I turn my head from side to side.

To all appearances he was just drifting. In actuality he was just drifting. Drifting is what one does when looking at lateral truth.

You can't really think hard about what you're doing and listen to the radio at the same time. Maybe they didn't see their job as having anything to do with hard thought, just wrench twiddling.

You can't really think hard about what you're doing and listen to the radio at the same time.

You just sit and stare and think, and search randomly for new information, and go away and come back again, and after a while the unseen factors start to emerge.

He speculated that the other pilgrims, the ones who reached the mountain, probably sensed the holiness of the mountain so intensely that each footstep was an act of devotion, an act of submission to this holiness.

Mu means "no thing." Like "Quality" it points outside the process of dualistic discrimination. Mu simply says, "No class; not one, not zero, not yes, not no." It states that the context of the question is such that a yes or no answer is in error and should not be given. "Unask the question" is what it says.

I always feel like I'm in church when I do this…The

Sometimes just the act of writing down the problems straightens out your head as to what they really are. The

Whenever you inhale, you turn on the sympathetic nervous system slightly, minutely speeding up your heart. And when you exhale, the parasympathetic half turns on, activating your vagus nerve in order to slow things down (this is why many forms of meditation are built around extended exhalations).

I was once at a conference of neuroscientists and all-star Buddhist monk meditators, the former studying what the brains of the latter did during meditation. One scientist asked one of the monks whether he ever stops meditating because his knees hurt from all that cross-leggedness. He answered, "Sometimes I'll stop sooner than I planned, but not because it hurts; it's not something I notice. It's as an act of kindness to my knees.

Visualizing God's presence not only bestows comfort, but it restrains sinful tendencies.