Quotes About Meditation

In a revealed religion, silence with God has a value in itself and for its own sake, just because God is God. Failure to recognize the value of mere being with God, as the beloved, without doing anything, is to gouge the heart out of Christianity."10 Silent solitude makes true speech possible

Silence is not simply the absence of noise or the shutdown of communication with the outside world, but rather a process of coming to stillness.

Coming to interior stillness requires waiting.

And I have learned to pray.

In the next few minutes, I prayed with her for healing. Then I asked her if she would find a quiet place every morning for the next thirty days, sit down in a chair, close her eyes, upturn her palms, and pray this one phrase over and over: ABBA, I BELONG TO YOU.

When Confucius was asked about death, he replied: "We do not yet understand life how could we possibly understand death?" Analogously, when asked questions about death, Zen masters are likely to turn the questioner's attention back to life.

In Zen, resolving the great matter of life and death requires facing up to mortality. In order to truly live, we have to come to terms with the termination of life as we know it.

In the beginning, you will likely experience meditation as a struggle. It is a very odd struggle, since it is a struggle with yourself, a struggle between different parts of yourself, between the part of you that wants to meditate and the part of you that does not.

Whereas some schools of Buddhism distinguish more sharply between the preparatory practice of concentration and the liberating practice of insight, Zen views concentration and insight as two sides of the same coin: when the mind is cleared, settled, and focused, it naturally attains insight and manifests its innate wisdom.

Don't flee from boredom. Go all the way into it; go all the way through the bottom of boredom!

In general, the problem with secularized mindfulness techniques is that when they find it convenient, they abandon—or at least put out of sight on the sidelines— the crucial ethical and religious contexts in which these Buddhist meditative practices have traditionally been embedded.

Zen meditation is meant to bring an end to the delusory and destructive ego, not to serve it as a means for achieving its ends.

I recommend that you begin with short ten-minute meditation periods, once or twice a day, and over several weeks gradually lengthen your meditation periods to twenty-five minutes, even if you can only find time to do this once a day. Even for an experienced meditator, it often takes ten or fifteen minutes to really settle into a meditative state, and so it is not surprising that the minimum length of time for a meditation period in temples and monasteries is usually twenty-five minutes.

Keep in mind that meditation is a holistic discipline, and you are rehabilitating your posture and flexibility at the same time as you are training your mind—and, moreover, you are realizing how interconnected body and mind actually are.

To properly set out on the path to Zen, we must empty our cups—in other words, we need to open our minds.

Faith does play an important role in Buddhism, including in Zen: faith as preliminary trust and ultimately faith as true self-confidence.

Zen is not, in the end, a Japanese, Chinese, Korean, Vietnamese, or Indian path. It is a path for all human beings who are sincerely interested in coming to know themselves.

Contrary to some popular opinions and partial teachings, Zen is not, in the end, opposed to rational thought. But it does teach that we need to dig down beneath discursive reasoning by means of meditation, reconnecting intellectual knowledge to a deeper, more holistic wisdom.

The Japanese word zen in fact means "meditation" or "state of meditative concentration." In Chinese, zen is pronounced chan . Chan is short for channa , which is how the CHinese pronounced dhyana , the Sanskrit word used in India for practices or rarified states of meditative concentration.

Simply sit still, with a straight back, eyes partially but not completely closed. . . . Relax all your muscles. . . . Relax your mind. . . . Let the center of your awareness drop down into your lower abdomen. . . . Now breathe–deeply yet naturally. Thoughts will come and go. Just let them be. Don't pay them any attention. Don't feed them any energy, either by grasping on to them or by trying to force them to go away. Just breathe, just be.

The cup of our mind is actually filled to the brim with swirling memories, plans, imaginings, and worries. Even without going so far as to empty the cup, a few minutes of physical stillness and calm attentiveness can allow the muddy water of the mind to stop swirling, such that the water begins to clear and the murky thoughts and emotions begin to settle.

Meditation is, to begin with, a practice of emptying the mind of this conceit that our own edited version of reality is the only unbiased and therefore valid one. It is a matter of recognizing that we are always, more or less, caught up in the reels of karmic editing.

My working habits are simple: long periods of thinking, short periods of writing.

Those who contemplate never escape the doubt.