Quotes About Meditation

If you're serious about obtaining an effortless power, you must learn to take the principle of relaxing to what your brain will consider a ridiculous degree. No matter how relaxed you are, you can always relax more.

Enlightenment: Some Nothing from Which to Come

If you were to live your life like a prayer, every action a sort of prayer, it would be easy to believe that all your thoughts were the words of God. Perhaps they would be.

It is in stillness, in the silence, that the word of God is to be heard.

As Marion writes, 'The silence suitable to God requires knowing how to remain silent, not out of agnosticism (the polite surname of impossible atheism) or out of humiliation, but simply out of respect.'50 Or as Gregory Palamas writes, '[The] super-essential nature of God is not a subject for speech or thought or even contemplation, for it is far removed from all that exists … [it is] incomprehensible and ineffable to all for ever.

Solitude is the practice of being absent from people and things to attend to God.

the activity of my life ("doing" for Jesus) began to eclipse the contemplative dimension of my life ("being" with Jesus).

The essence of being in God's image is our ability, like God, to stop. We imitate God by stopping our work and resting.

Get in a comfortable position and still yourself. Recall you are in the presence of God, inviting the Holy Spirit to guide you as you review the events of your day. Walk through the events in your day (or yesterday's events if it is morning). Imagine yourself watching your day on a fast-forwarded DVD with Jesus. Let Jesus stop the DVD at any part of the day so you might reflect on it.

4. Contemplate The final quality of a biblical Sabbath is, of course, the contemplation of God. The Sabbath is always "holy to the LORD" (Exodus 31:15). Pondering the love of God remains the central focus of our Sabbaths.

most of our human problems come because we don't know how to sit still in our room for an hour. — Leighton Ford

be still, and know that [he is] God" (Psalm 46:10)

be still before the LORD and wait patiently for him" (Psalm 37:7).

As the wise, old Abbot Moses said when a brother came to him for a good word, "Go, sit in your cell [a monk's room], and your cell will teach you everything.

an open-plan cubicle kind of thing-working, doing something, writing some Lisp program. And he'd come shuffling in with his ceramic mug of beer, bare feet, and he'd just stand behind me. I'd say hi. And he'd grunt or say nothing. He'd just stand there watching me type. At some point I'd do something and he'd go, "Ptthh, wrong!" and he'd walk away. So that was kind of getting thrown in the deep end. It was like the Zen approach-the master hit me with a stick, now I must meditate.

The disciple of philosophy must present itself, first as a way of thinking and then as a way of life.

Facing a wall when you write really aids your concentration.

If you're going to be a prisoner of your own mind, the least you can do is make sure it's well furnished.

Reality went out the window the moment we started mediating sensory input through a nervous system. You want to actually perceive the universe directly, without any stupid scribbles or model-building? Become a protozoan.

It's kind of like a Zen thing. Like playing the piano, or being a centipede in Heaven.

The mind ought sometimes to be diverted, that it may return the better to thinking.

The mind ought sometimes to be diverted that it may return to better thinking.

When the mind is allowed to relax, inspiration often follows.

Suzuki had just finished giving a talk to a group of Zen students when someone in the audience said, "You've been talking about Buddhism for nearly an hour, and I haven't been able to understand a thing you said. Could you say one thing about Buddhism I can understand?" After the laughter died down, Suzuki replied calmly, "Everything changes.