The real foundation of the teaching is to see the self as being empty. But people come to study the Dhamma to increase their self-view, so they don’t want to experience suffering or difficulty. They want everything to be cozy. They may want to transcend suffering, but if there is still a self, how can they ever do so?
Habit is also a factor to be dealt with. The Tibetan term is ‘pa cha che dipa’. Defilement is also, of course, habit, but it is a little bit different. ‘Pa cha che dipa’ is a very subtle obstacle. An example is the way we project our own thoughts, feelings, or motivations on others. This can be very difficult to see and overcome, and it takes effort to do so. When we always find ourselves making the same mistake by misunderstanding others and judging them in an inaccurate, stupid, or uncompassionate way, we are being blocked by this habitual pattern. Later we find out that we were wrong, but usually by then it’s too late, the damage is done. We can only learn from the mistake. These are subtle habitual obstacles stemming directly from the concept of “I”.
Negativities are the diseases of the heart. It begins to feel sore, and then the whole of life will become just a suffering, because you live through your own heart.
By Eckhart Tolle
Death is a great opportunity because death is one way in which the formless dimension comes into this life. It’s precisely at the moment of the fading of the form, that the formless comes into this life. But if that is not accepted, and the fading of form is denied, then it’s a missed opportunity.
As people around you pass away, you become increasingly aware of your own mortality. The body will dissolve. Many people still, in our civilization, they deny death. They don’t want to think about it, don’t want to give it any attention.
There is enormous potential there for spiritual flowering. Even in people who, up to the point of the beginning of the fading of the form, were completely identified with the form. It’s your last chance in this incarnation, as your body begins to fade – or you are becoming aware of this limited lifespan. It’s your last chance to go beyond identification with form. This is true whether it’s to do with your body, or somebody else’s body.
In the proximity of death, there is always that grace hiding underneath the seemingly negative event. Death in our civilization is seen as entirely negative, as if it shouldn’t be happening. Because it’s denied, people are so shocked when somebody dies – as if it’s not possible. We don’t live with the familiarity of death, as some more ancient cultures still do. The familiarity of death isn’t there. Everything is hidden, the dead body is hidden. In India you can see the dead bodies being carried through the streets, and being burned in public. To the Westerners, it’s terrible.
As the consciousness is changing, I feel that more and more death will become an important part of the evolutionary process, the process of the arising consciousness on our planet.
At any age, the form can dissolve. Even if you are very young, you may encounter death close to you. At any age, it is extremely helpful to become familiar with, or comfortable with, the impermanence of the physical form.
I recommend to everybody, to occasionally visit the cemetery. If it’s a nice cemetery, that makes it more pleasant. Some cemeteries are like beautiful parks, you can walk around and feel extremely peaceful. But even if it’s not nice, spiritually it is just as helpful to walk around the cemetery and contemplate the fact of death. I still do that, quite often, whenever I have a chance.
In Europe, in the villages and so on, you have a cemetery next to the church very often. I love walking around there. My favorite thing is reading the names on the gravestones. Sometimes if the gravestones are very old, you’ll see that the name is not there anymore – it got eroded by the weather.
It’s the contemplation of death and the acceptance of the impermanent nature of the human form that opens up, if you accept it. Don’t intellectualize it. Don’t come to some kind of conclusion about it. Just stay with the simple “isness” of the fact of the impermanence of the human form, and accept that for what it is without going any further. If you go further, you get into comforting beliefs, that’s very nice too. But what I am driving at is something deeper than comforting beliefs – instead of going to some kind of conclusion, stay with the fact of the impermanence of the human form, and contemplate this fact.
With the contemplation of the impermanence of the human form, something very deep and peaceful opens up inside you. That is why I enjoy going to cemeteries. When you accept the impermanence, out of that comes an opening within, which is beyond form. That which is not touched by death, the formless, comes forward as you completely accept the impermanence of all forms. That’s why it is so deeply peaceful to contemplate death.
If someone close to you dies, then there is an added dimension. You may find there is deep sadness. The form also was precious, although what you loved in the form was the formless. And yet, you weep because of the fading form. There too, you come to an acceptance – especially if you are already familiar with death, you already know that everything dies – then you can accept it more easily when it happens to somebody close to you. There is still deep sadness, but then you can have the two dimensions simultaneously – the outer you weeps, the inner and most essential is deeply at peace. It comes forward almost as if it were saying “there is no death”. It’s peace.
Buddha could send his disciples to the burning places, to cemeteries to look at dead bodies, to contemplate death, to meditate on death: The body is burning – the dead body is there – it is burning.
And Buddha would send his disciples there, to sit there and meditate on death. And meditating on death, the disciple would soon come to realize a different quality of life which never dies. Then he would come dancing, singing, to Buddha – from the dead body burning in the cemetery, he would come running, dancing – why? he should come sad, sorrowful, depressed, dead himself in a way.
But he has not accumulated the negative even from a dead body. He has accumulated something positive. He has been meditating on death, and if you meditate on death you become more and more aware of life. He comes running, dancing, grateful – grateful to Buddha, grateful to the dead man also. Why go on accumulating the negative? – we go on; that’s just a wrong habit. Change it! Always look at the positive, and soon you heart will be purified. Negativities are the diseases of the heart. It begins to feel sore, and then the whole of life will become just a suffering, because you live through your own heart. You go on accumulating negatives; then you have to live through this negativity; then everything becomes just a suffering, a long suffering – meaningless, purposeless, leading to nowhere.
When we seek happiness, it should not be just for ourselves. The self that wishes only for its own happiness is mistaken. From the Buddhist point of view, that self does not even exist in the way we think it does. Seeing ourselves as the centre of the universe is like being trapped inside a prison of our own making. It has a negative, distorting effect on all our relationships. But if we think carefully about how things really exist, we come to understand that essentially there is no difference between ourselves and others. They are a part of us, and we are a part of them.
So the whole Buddhist path on one level can be a way of understanding how to loosen and eventually drop our desperate grasping at this sense of me. Right there at the center of the universe and definitely the big spider in the middle of the web that we are all weaving. Which we imagine if we can only keep satisfied, if we can only please, if we can only keep feeling that it’s worthwhile, we will be happy. And not recognizing that that is the cause of all our suffering.
Don’t try to look outside yourself. There is no separate self, there are only the five skandhas: form, feelings, perceptions, mental formations, and conciousness. All our suffering is based in this idea of a separate self.
– Thich Nhat Hanh
“In modern life, people think that their body belongs to them and they can do anything they want to it. When they make such a determination, the law supports them. This is one of the manifestations of individualism. But, according to the teachings of emptiness, non-self, and interbeing, your body is not yours alone. It also belongs to your ancestors, your parents, future generations, and all other living beings. Everything, even the trees and the clouds, has come together to bring about the presence of your body. Keeping your body healthy is the best way to express your gratitude to the whole cosmos, to all ancestors, and also not to betray future generations. You practice this precept for everyone. If you are healthy, everyone can benefit from it. When you are able to get out of the shell of your small self, you will see that you are interrelated to everyone and everything, that your every act is linked with the whole of humankind and the whole cosmos. To keep yourself healthy in body and mind is to be kind to all beings. The Fifth Precept is about health and healing.” 🌻🌻Thich Nhat Hanh🌻🌻
In a dream at night, when “you” went from this place to another place, was there any actual movement of your dreamed identity across an actual expanse of space or distance? Did your dream character actually travel across a distance within the dreaming brain?
In neuro-science it has been proven that what we experience with the five senses is a neural movie occurring within the brain. It’s the brain’s representation of what it thinks is “out there”.
Eyes can’t see “out there” and ears can’t hear what’s out there. All the five senses are passive receptors of stimulations; but the stimulations are electro-chemical in nature, not experienced colors, shapes and sounds. The brain processes those electro-chemical stimulations and turns them into colors, shapes and sounds as our sensory experiences. The world we experience is always only a brain generated, virtual representation. We never experience what’s actually “out there”.
Just like our dreaming subconscious generates an imaginary self, who stars in our dreams as a dreamt “me”; the self as a “me” that we feel we are in daily life, is also just a virtual “me” that is generated by the brain, just like the virtual, inner movie world it lives in.
It’s this virtual “me” that seems to “move around” in its virtual world that it thinks is the actual world “out there”. There is no actual self other than the imaginary and virtual one generated in the brain.
That being logically and scientifically clear, can one then say they ever really “moved” from one city to another? Their traveling is only within changing images within a brain, by a brain generated self-image doing the traveling.
We can say “our actual physical body” traveled from New York to Paris, but our actual experience is confined 100% to being the brain’s inner virtual movie world and its inner, brain generated virtual tourist, felt as a real “me”.
It can become shockingly clear that although it seems a body traveled from one place to another, the observing “me” as the brain generated spectator, only saw the progressively changing scenery of inner brain generated movies.
And the spectator was also just a part of the inner movie whose thoughts, feelings, perceptions and actions were just part of the conditioned scripting built from memory and electro-chemical stimulations of the five senses.
The “me” has no more autonomy than the virtual trees that appear to view as the brain generates all those “tree” images.
It’s this same brain generated “me” that is programmed to feel that it can make choices, think, become enlightened, and commit actions.
When actions turn out to be troubling in result, the brain programs the self or “me” to feel regret or shame or a need to make amends, according to pre-programmed conditioning such as “morals” and “acceptable” social behaviors, for example.
There is no inner “true self” that can know and do. Just like there is no true self in a dream at night. ALL the activities of the dreamed self while sleeping, are 100% programmed by subconscious conditioning; and this is also true of the daytime self.
The “me” is just the current brain software constructed, self being projected. The characters in an old video, being watched on tv now, have no free-will to alter the script. Likewise our “me” or personal self, has no freedom to act outside of its brain generated script. You see there is no self at all other than the self generated from the neural activity of the brain. How can such an imaginary self ever “move”?
But beyond the imagined, brain generated “me”, impersonal pure awareness can’t be framed or understood by a non-existent ”me”; it’s not in the brain’s programming capacities.
“I seem, like everything else, to be a center, a sort of vortex, at which the whole energy of the universe realizes itself.. Each one of us, not only human beings but every leaf, every weed, exists in the way it does, only because everything else around it does. The individual and the universe are inseparable.”
“We need to reflect very deeply, with a strong attitude of not giving up. Then a definite impact can be made on the mind. The ability to think more skillfully and the ability to sustain one’s mind with a positive attitude are inherent capabilities.
But how do you get somebody interested in reflecting deeply enough to discover those inherent capabilities without their getting burned out from the frustrations and disappointments that arise from seeing their own minds?
Somehow, students have to gain a greater confidence in their potential than in the confusion that oppresses them. That confidence is buddhanature. We need to encourage a kind of self-esteem in the student—not ego self-esteem, but buddhanature self-esteem.
Trust in our basic goodness is very important. Teachers must do whatever they can to instill this in their students, and students must do whatever they can to instill it in themselves.”
A flower is not a flower. It is made only of non-flower elements — sunshine, clouds, time, space, earth, minerals, gardeners, and so on. A true flower contains the whole universe. If we return any one of these non-flower elements to its source, there will be no flower. That is why we can say, “A rose is not a rose. That is why it is an authentic rose.” We have to remove our concept of rose if we want to touch the real rose.
– Thich Nhat Hanh, in “The Heart of the Buddha’s Teaching”. Photo: Bastien Riu
The self is made of non-self elements; therefore, understanding ourselves is our practice. Our father is a non-self element. We say our father is not us, but without our father, we cannot exist. So, he is fully present in our body and in our mind. He is us. Thus, if you understand yourself, your whole self, you understand that you are your father, he is not outside of you.
There are so many other non-self elements that you can touch and recognize within yourself – your ancestors, the earth, the sun, water, air, all the food you eat, and much more. It may seem like these things are separate from you, but without them, you could not live.
“The ego-shell in which we live is the hardest thing to outgrow.”
By Maria Popova
Alan Watts may be credited with popularizing Eastern philosophy in the West, but he owes the entire trajectory of his life and legacy to a single encounter with the Zen Buddhist sage D.T. Suzuki (October 18, 1870–July 12, 1966) — one of humanity’s greatest and most influential stewards of Zen philosophy. At the age of twenty-one, Watts attended a lecture by Suzuki in London, which so enthralled the young man that he spent the remainder of his life studying, propagating, and building upon Suzuki’s teachings. Legendary composer John Cage had a similar encounter with Suzuki, which profoundly shaped his life and music.
In the early 1920s, spurred by the concern that Zen masters are “unable to present their understanding in the light of modern thought,” Suzuki undertook “a tentative experiment to present Zen from our common-sense point of view” — a rather humble formulation of what he actually accomplished, which was nothing less than giving ancient Eastern philosophy a second life in the West and planting the seed for a new culture of secularized spirituality.
But by 1940, all of his books had gone out of print in war-torn England, and all remaining copies in Japan were destroyed in the great fire of 1945, which consumed three quarters of Tokyo. In 1946, Christmas Humphreys, president of London’s Buddhist Society, set out to undo the damage and traveled to Tokyo, where he began working with Suzuki on translating his new manuscripts and reprinting what remained of the old. The result was the timeless classic Essays in Zen Buddhism (public library), originally published in 1927 — a collection of Suzuki’s foundational texts introducing the principles of Zen into secular life as a discipline concerned first and foremost with what he called “the reconstruction of character.” As Suzuki observed, “Our ordinary life only touches the fringe of personality, it does not cause a commotion in the deepest parts of the soul.” His essays became, and remain, a moral toolkit for modern living, delivered through a grounding yet elevating perspective on secular spirituality.
Suzuki begins at the beginning, laying out the promise of Zen in our everyday lives:
Zen in its essence is the art of seeing into the nature of one’s own being, and it points the way from bondage to freedom. By making us drink right from the fountain of life, it liberates us from all the yokes under which we finite beings are usually suffering in this world.
[…]
This body of ours is something like an electric battery in which a mysterious power latently lies. When this power is not properly brought into operation, it either grows mouldy and withers away or is warped and expresses itself abnormally. It is the object of Zen, therefore, to save us from going crazy or being crippled. This is what I mean by freedom, giving free play to all the creative and benevolent impulses inherently lying in our hearts. Generally, we are blind to this fact, that we are in possession of all the necessary faculties that will make us happy and loving towards one another. All the struggles that we see around us come from this ignorance… When the cloud of ignorance disappears… we see for the first time into the nature of our own being.
One of Suzuki’s most overlooked yet essential points — and one particularly prescient in the context of what modern developmental psychology has found in the decades since — has to do with the crucial role of adolescence as a pivotal point in moral development. The teenage years, he argues, are when we begin “deeply delving into the mysteries of life” and when we are “asked to choose between the ‘Everlasting No’ and the ‘Everlasting Yea’” — a notion young Nietzsche intuited half a century earlier when he resolved, “I wish to be at any time hereafter only a yea-sayer!” At this fork in the road of existence, Suzuki insists, mastering the principles of Zen can make the critical difference in leading us toward a meaningful and fulfilling life. He writes:
Life is after all a form of affirmation… However insistently the blind may deny the existence of the sun, they cannot annihilate it.
Much of that blindness, he admonishes, comes from our attachment to the ego. Paradoxical as it may sound to any parent or teacher of a teenager, Suzuki suggests that adolescence is the time most fruitful for the dissolution of the ego:
We are too ego-centered. The ego-shell in which we live is the hardest thing to outgrow… We are, however, given many chances to break through this shell, and the first and greatest of them is when we reach adolescence.
Illustration by Andrea Dezsö for the fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm. Click image for more.
And yet the “loss of the mental equilibrium” produced by the polar pull of “Everlasting No” and “Everlasting Yea,” which causes “so many cases of nervous prostration reported during adolescence,” can also derail and anguish us at any point in life. In a sentiment that once again calls to mind Nietzsche and his beliefs about the constructive role of suffering, Suzuki writes:
The more you suffer the deeper grows your character, and with the deepening of your character you read the more penetratingly into the secrets of life. All great artists, all great religious leaders, and all great social reformers have come out of the intensest struggles which they fought bravely, quite frequently in tears and with bleeding hearts.
Those ego-stripping struggles, Suzuki points out, can be of the intimate, most nonmaterial kind — the kind Rilke had articulated so beautifully two decades earlier in his letter on the burdens and blessings of love. Suzuki writes:
Love makes the ego lose itself in the object it loves, and yet at the same time it wants to have the object as its own… The greatest bulk of literature ever produced in this world is but the harping on the same string of love, and we never seem to grow weary of it. But… through the awakening of love we get a glimpse into the infinity of things… When the ego-shell is broken and the ‘other’ is taken into its own body, we can say that the ego has denied itself or that the ego has taken its first steps towards the infinite.
Although he takes care to note the invaluable role of the intellect in day-to-day life, Suzuki argues that the intellect is what keeps us from the infinite:
Zen proposes its solution by directly appealing to facts of personal experience and not to book-knowledge. The nature of one’s own being where apparently rages the struggle between the finite and the infinite is to be grasped by a higher faculty than the intellect… For the intellect has a peculiarly disquieting quality in it. Though it raises questions enough to disturb the serenity of the mind, it is too frequently unable to give satisfactory answers to them. It upsets the blissful peace of ignorance and yet it does not restore the former state of things by offering something else. Because it points out ignorance, it is often considered illuminating, whereas the fact is that it disturbs, not necessarily always bringing light on its path.
Illustration by Lizi Boyd from ‘Flashlight.’ Click image for more.
How poignant the latter remark is in the context of contemporary intellectual life. So much of our higher education is premised on the spirit of tearing things down rather than building things up — on how intelligently a student can criticize and counter an argument — which has, unsurprisingly, permeated the fabric of public discourse at large. We have a culture of criticism in which critics, professional and self-appointed, measure their merit by how intelligently they can eviscerate an idea, a work of art, or, increasingly and alarmingly, a person. We seem to have forgotten how to acquire what Bertrand Russell called, just a year before Suzuki’s essays were published, “a high degree of intellectual culture without emotional atrophy” in his magnificent meditation on why construction is more difficult yet more rewarding than destruction.
Similarly, Suzuki’s point is that the intellect is best at pointing out what doesn’t work, and as such can be a force of destruction, but when it comes to what does work, to the art of moral construction, we must rely on a wholly different faculty of the human spirit. He points to the lineage of philosophy — a discipline that continues to rely heavily on Descartes’s ultimate slogan for the intellect, cogito ergo sum — as evidence of the intellect’s insufficient powers in illuminating the path:
The history of thought proves that each new structure raised by a man of extraordinary intellect is sure to be pulled down by the succeeding ones. This constant pulling down and building up is all right as far as philosophy itself is concerned; for the inherent nature of the intellect, as I take it, demands it and we cannot put a stop to the progress of philosophical inquiries any more than to our breathing. But when it comes to the question of life itself we cannot wait for the ultimate solution to be offered by the intellect, even if it could do so. We cannot suspend even for a moment our life-activity for philosophy to unravel its mysteries. Let the mysteries remain as they are, but live we must… Zen therefore does not rely on the intellect for the solution of its deepest problems.
While the intellect may portend to fight illusion, Suzuki argues, it often does the opposite, creating different illusions that take us further from the truth of life rather than closer to it. He writes:
As nature abhors a vacuum, Zen abhors anything coming between the fact and ourselves. According to Zen there is no struggle in the fact itself such as between the finite and the infinite, between the flesh and the spirit. These are idle distinctions fictitiously designed by the intellect for its own interest. Those who take them too seriously or those who try to read them into the very fact of life are those who take the finger for the moon.
John Cage visits ninety-two-year-old Suzuki in 1962, from ‘Where the Heart Beats: John Cage, Zen Buddhism, and the Inner Life of Artists.’ Click image for more.
For anyone who has ever experienced the soul-squeezing sense of not-enoughness — and in a consumerist culture, most of us have, for the task of consumerism is to rob us of our sense of having enough and sell it back to us at the price of the product, over and over — Suzuki’s words resonate with particular poignancy:
Life as it is lived suffices. It is only when the disquieting intellect steps in and tries to murder it that we stop to live and imagine ourselves to be short of or in something. Let the intellect alone, it has its usefulness in its proper sphere, but let it not interfere with the flowing of the life-stream. If you are at all tempted to look into it, do so while letting it flow. The fact of flowing must under no circumstances be arrested or meddled with…
[…]
The great fact of life itself … flows altogether outside of these vain exercises of the intellect or of the imagination.
[…]
No amount of wordy explanations will ever lead us into the nature of our own selves. The more you explain, the further it runs away from you. It is like trying to get hold of your own shadow.
What Zen offers, Suzuki suggests, is a gateway into precisely that elusive nature of the self:
Zen … must be directly and personally experienced by each of us in his inner spirit. Just as two stainless mirrors reflect each other, the fact and our own spirits must stand facing each other with no intervening agents. When this is done we are able to seize upon the living, pulsating fact itself. Freedom is an empty word until then.
The ultimate standpoint of Zen, therefore, is that we have been led astray through ignorance to find a split in our own being, that there was from the very beginning no need for a struggle between the finite and the infinite, that the peace we are seeking so eagerly after has been there all the time.
Illustration by Taro Yashima from ‘Umbrella.’ Click image for more.
We are all finite, we cannot live out of time and space; inasmuch as we are earth-created, there is no way to grasp the infinite, how can we deliver ourselves from the limitations of existence? … Salvation must be sought in the finite itself, there is nothing infinite apart from finite things; if you seek something transcendental, that will cut you off from this world of relativity, which is the same thing as the annihilation of yourself. You do not want salvation at the cost of your own existence… Whether you understand or not, just the same go on living in the finite, with the finite; for you die if you stop eating and keeping yourself warm on account of your aspiration for the infinite… Therefore the finite is the infinite, and vice versa. These are not two separate things, though we are compelled to conceive them so, intellectually.
Suzuki argues that the ultimate essence of Zen lies in its promise, both practical and profound, to “deliver us from the oppression and tyranny of these intellectual accumulations” and to offer, instead, a foundation of character at once solid and transcendent:
Zen may be considered a discipline aiming at the reconstruction of character. Our ordinary life only touches the fringe of personality, it does not cause a commotion in the deepest parts of the soul… We are … made to live on the superficiality of things. We may be clever, bright, and all that, but what we produce lacks depth, sincerity, and does not appeal to the inmost feelings… A deep spiritual experience is bound to effect a change in the moral structure of one’s personality.
And yet this “reconstruction of character”” is no cosmetic tweak:
Being so long accustomed to the oppression [of the intellect], the mental inertia becomes hard to remove. In fact it has gone down deep into the roots of our own being, and the whole structure of personality is to be overturned. The process of reconstruction is stained with tears and blood… It is no pastime but the most serious task in life; no idlers will ever dare attempt it.
[…]
Zen goes straight down to the foundations of personality.
Evan Thomson, a researcher from the University of British Colombia, has confirmed that the Buddhist teaching of a constantly changing self is accurate.
According to Buddhists, change is the only constant in the universe, which means that there is no such thing as a stable self.
Neuroscience also says that the brain and body is said to be constantly in action or progressively flowing, which proves that there isn’t any stable self.
Evan Thompson, a philosophy of mind professor at the University of British Columbia, says “And from a neuroscience perspective, the brain and body is constantly in flux. There’s nothing that corresponds to the sense that there’s an unchanging self.”
Neuroplasticity, a concept coined by neuroscientists, states that our brain is malleable and able to change. This means you can change your brain in many aspects, opening up your possibilities for growth.
This concept can be incredibly liberating. Why? Because you’re not defined by your thoughts or your idea of who you are. The possibilities to change yourself are endless.
It also goes against the common thought in western society that we need to “find ourselves”. Instead, life is about change and growth. Buddha puts it best:
“Nothing is permanent. Everything is subject to change. Being is always becoming.”
Buddhist Monks have long said that the universe and ourselves are constantly changing. By training our mind, they say we can elevate our awareness and control.
This is also why they talk about the practice of non-attachment. If we attach ourselves to something, we are desiring for it to be stable, which directly goes against the forces of the universe.
Buddhist teacher Pema Chodron says:
“Impermanence is a principle of harmony. When we don’t struggle against it, we are in harmony with reality.”
What about consciousness?
Neuroscience has long been baffled by consciousness. They can’t explain why or how it exists.
Buddhists however define consciousness into three different areas:
consciousness is conditioned by mental fabrications (saṅkhāra);
consciousness and the mind-body (nāmarūpa) are interdependent; and,
consciousness acts as a “life force” by which there is a continuity across rebirths
As Neuroscience advances, perhaps Buddhism will be proven right in regards to consciousnesses.
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Surely, whatever form, past, future or present, internal or external, coarse or fine, low or lofty, far or near, all that form must be regarded with proper wisdom, according to reality, thus: ‘This is not mine, this I am not, this is not my self.’
Surely, whatever feeling, past, future or present, internal or external, coarse or fine, low or lofty, far or near, all that feeling must be regarded with proper wisdom, according to reality, thus: ‘This is not mine, this I am not, this is not my self.’
Surely, whatever perception, past, future or present, internal or external, coarse or fine, low or lofty, far or near, all that perception must be regarded with proper wisdom, according to reality, thus: ‘This is not mine, this I am not, this is not my self.’
Surely, whatever mental formations, past, future or present, internal or external, coarse or fine, low or lofty, far or near, all those mental formations must be regarded with proper wisdom, according to reality, thus: ‘These are not mine, this I am not, this is not my self.’
Surely, whatever consciousness, past, future or present, internal or external, coarse or fine, low or lofty, far or near, all that consciousness must be regarded with proper wisdom, according to reality, thus: ‘This is not mine, this I am not, this is not my self.’
To know yourself, be yourself. To be yourself, stop imagining yourself to be this or that. Just be. Let your true nature emerge. Don’t disturb your mind with seeking.
There is no such thing as a person. There are only restrictions and limitations. The sum total of these defines the person. The person merely appears to be, like the space within the pot appears to have the shape and volume and smell of the pot.
To expound and propogate concepts is simple, to drop all concepts is difficult and rare. A quiet mind is all you need. All else will happen rightly, once your mind is quiet.
As the sun on rising makes the world active, so does Self-awareness affect changes in the mind. In the light of calm and steady Self-awareness, inner energies wake up and work miracles without any effort on your part.
You may not like what you see but look at yourself.
See what you are. Then accept yourself. It may be hard to accept, you may want to be someone else, you may feel you need to change. But acceptance of yourself as you are now is the only way positive change may result in a lasting manner.
From accepting yourself and loving yourself just as you are you will grow into what nature had intended. The aim of nature is always harmony, always joyful existence. Let nature take you there, just learn to love yourself fully as is. Love will heal the deepest emotional wounds but the love must be sustained.
Buddha could send his disciples to the burning places, to cemeteries to look at dead bodies, to contemplate death, to meditate on death: The body is burning – the dead body is there – it is burning.
Surely, whatever form, past, future or present, internal or external, coarse or fine, low or lofty, far or near, all that form must be regarded with proper wisdom, according to reality, thus: ‘This is not mine, this I am not, this is not my self.’
Zen Flash 
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