good quotes from girija

[ramachandran girija]

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“When you blame, you open up a world of excuses, because as long as you're looking outside, you miss the opportunity to look inside, and you continue to suffer.”
- Donna Quesada, Buddha in the classroom : Zen wisdom to inspire teachers

 

[ramachandran girija]

“The baby looks at things all day without winking; that is because his eyes are not focused on any particular object. He goes without knowing where he is going, and stops without knowing what he is doing. He merges himself within the surroundings and moves along with it. These are the principles of mental hygiene.”
- Zhuangsi

 

[ramachandran girija]

“What we can change is our perceptions, which have the effect of changing everything.”
- Donna Quesada, Buddha in the classroom : Zen wisdom to inspire teachers

 

[ramachandran girija]

“There had to be something wrong with my life. I should have been born a Yugoslavian shepherd who looked up at the Big Dipper every night.”
- HAruki Murakomi , Hard-boiled wonderland and the end of the world

 

[ramachandran girija]

“But people of the deepest understanding look within, distracted by nothing. Since a clear mind is the Buddha, they attain the understanding of a Buddha without using the mind.”
-bodhidharma, the zen teaching of bodhidharma

 

[ramachandran girija]

“He knows not where he's going,
For the ocean will decide,
Its not the destination,
It's the glory of the ride”
-Edward Monkton, Zen dog

 

[ramachandran girija]

“Pardon all runners,
All speechless, alien winds,
All mad waters.

Pardon their impulses,
Their wild attitudes,
Their young flights, their reticence.

When a message has no clothes on
How can it be spoken.”
- Thomas Merton

 

[ramachandran girija]

“When you paint Spring, do not paint willows, plums, peaches, or apricots, but just paint Spring. To paint willows, plums, peaches, or apricots is to paint willows, plums, peaches, or apricots - it is not yet painting Spring.”
- Dogen

 

[ramachandran girija]

“Who we are now is all that really matters.”
----- Amy joy, the acadmie

 

[ramachandran girija]

• “it isn't that we're alone or not alone
  whose voice do you want mine? yours?”
  - ikkyu, crow with no mouth

 

[ramachandran girija]

“What is the purpose of writing music? One is, of course, not dealing with purposes but dealing with sounds. Or the answer must take the form of a paradox: a purposeful purposeless or a purposeless play. This play, however, is an affirmation of life--not an attempt to bring order out of chaos nor to suggest improvements in creation, but simply a way of waking up to the very life we’re living, which is so excellent once one gets one’s mind and one’s desires out of its way and lets it act of its own accord.”
-john cage, silence: lectures and writings

 

[ramachandran girija]

“Consider this:

1. Would you ride in a car whose driver was on the consciousness-expanding "entheogenic" drug LSD?

And here's a bonus question:

2. Why does an "expanded consciousness" include the inability to operate a motor vehicle?”
- Brad warner, Hardcore zen : punk rock, monster movies and the truth about reality

 

[ramachandran girija]

“To deny the reality of things is to miss their reality; to assert the emptiness of things is to miss their reality. The more you talk and think about it, the further astray you wander from the truth. Stop talking and thinking and there is nothing you will not be able to know.”

• Sengcan, HSin HSin Ming

 

[ramachandran girija]

• “don't wait for the man standing in the
  snow
  to cut off his arm help him now”
  - Ikkyu, crow with no mouth

 

[ramachandran girija]

“A falcon hovers at the edge of the sky.
Two gulls drift slowly up the river.

Vulnerable while they ride the wind,
they coast and glide with ease.

Dew is heavy on the grass below,
the spider's web is ready.

Heaven's ways include the human:
among a thousand sorrows, I stand alone.”
- du fu

 

[ramachandran girija]

“Like wind-- In it, with it, of it. Of it just like a sail, so light and strong that, even when it is bent flat, it gathers all the power of the wind without hampering its course.

Like light-- In light, lit through by light, transformed into light. Like the lens which disappears in the light it focuses.

Like wind. Like light.

Just this--on these expanses, on these heights.”
Dag nammarskjold, MArkings

 

[ramachandran girija]

• “we're lost where the mind can't find us
  utterly lost”
• -ikkyu, crow with no mouth

 

[ramachandran girija]

“This will never come again”
Steve hagen

 

[ramachandran girija]

• “Earth, mountains, rivers, hidden in this nothingness.
  In this nothingness, earth, mountains, rivers revealed.
  Spring flowers, winter snows.
  There's no being or non-being, nor denial itself.”
• -saisho hiroshi

 

[ramachandran girija]

• “The dizziness in the face of les espaces infinis--only overcome if we dare to gaze into them without any protection. And accept them as the reality before which we must justify our existence. For this is the truth we must reach to live, that everything is and we just in it.”
  -dag hammarskjold, markings

 

[ramachandran girija]

“A boddhisattva is someone who is on the way to becoming a buddha. All of us become boddhisattvas as soon as we start to take our Zen work seriously and the work we do contributes to creating a world in which all good actions become more efficacious.”
David brazier

 

[ramachandran girija]

• “We are searching for the core of our lives; our culture intuits that writing, that ancient activity, might be the pathway...Awakening does not feed ego's needs and desires; it pulverizes the self. Our society couldn't knowingly bear such reduction, so we've tricked ourselves into the same path but call it writing.”
  -natalie goldberg

 

[ramachandran girija]

• “Humility before the flower at the timber line is the gate which gives access to the path up the open fell.”
  -dag hammarskjold, markings

 

[ramachandran girija]

“The point of the spiritual life is to realize Truth. But you will never understand the spiritual life, or realize Truth, if you measure it by your own yardstick.”
-dainin katagiri

 

[ramachandran girija]

“The thinking brain influences the body’s responses and it makes a neat little loop.”
-brad warner