Quotes About Meditation

To see the false as the false, you need to lay aside all the search-oriented teachings, and focus on (contemplate) the reality that your presence and the Absolute presence cannot be other than the same presence.

Talks With Ramana alone,

thoughts have their origin in this stillness.

The Buddha said anger has a "poisoned root and honeyed tip.

If you accept the idea that many of our most troublesome feelings are in one sense or another illusions, then meditation can be seen as, among other things, a process of dispelling illusions.

If you put these two fundamental Buddhist ideas together—the idea of not-self and the idea of emptiness—you have a radical proposition: neither the world inside you nor the world outside you is anything like it seems.

This is something that can happen again and again via meditation: accepting, even embracing, an unpleasant feeling can give you a critical distance

Zen is for poets, Tibetan is for artists, and Vipassana is for psychologists.

This is something that can happen again and again via meditation: accepting, even embracing, an unpleasant feeling can give you a critical distance from it that winds up diminishing the unpleasantness.

too with the case of the snoring yogi in the previous chapter. As long as I identified with my dislike of him, I was obeying natural selection's instructions to consider myself special (certainly more special than a guy who wants to catch up on his sleep when I'm trying to meditate!).

the problems that meditation can help you overcome often make it hard to meditate in the first place.

There's no doubt that meditation training has allowed some people to become essentially indifferent to what otherwise would have been unbearable pain.

RAIN. First you Recognize the feeling. Then you Accept the feeling (rather than try to drive it away). Then you Investigate the feeling and its relationship to your body. Finally, the N stands for Nonidentification, or, equivalently, Nonattachment

According to Buddhist philosophy, both the problems we call therapeutic and the problems we call spiritual are a product of not seeing things clearly. What's more, in both cases this failure to see things clearly is in part a product of being misled by feelings. And the first step toward seeing through these feelings is seeing them in the first place—becoming aware of how pervasively and subtly feelings influence our thought and behavior.

meditation as a process that takes a conscious mind that gets to do a little nudging and turns it into something that can do a lot of

If we accepted their arising and subsiding as part of life, rather than reacting to them as if they were deeply meaningful, we'd often be better off. Learning to do that is a big part of what mindfulness meditation is about.

Robert Wright

He once recounted a time when he was trying to meditate and kept getting interrupted by sounds from a festival in a nearby village. Then, as he recalls it, he had a realization: "The sound is just the sound. It's me who is going out to annoy it. If I leave the sound alone, it won't annoy me. . . . If I don't go out and bother the sound, it's not going to bother me.

In sum: you can best achieve success at meditation by not pursuing success, and achieving this success may mean caring less about success, at least as success is conventionally defined.

the thoughts are arising, and there's a strong habit of mind to be identified with them. So it's not so much they have the intent to reach out and capture us, but rather there's this very strong habitual identification. This is how we've lived our lives, and it takes practice to try and break this conditioning- to be mindful of the thought, rather than be lost in it.

Mindfulness meditation, the main vehicle of Vipassana, is a good way to study the human mind. At least, it's a good way to study one human's mind: yours. You sit down, let the mental dust settle, and then watch your mind work.

So too with the case of the snoring yogi in the previous chapter. As long as I identified with my dislike of him, I was obeying natural selection's instructions to consider myself special (certainly more special than a guy who wants to catch up on his sleep when I'm trying to meditate!).

And don't feel like you're committing a felony-level violation of Buddhist dogma just because you think of yourself as being a self.

Bhikkhu Bodhi