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Faith keeps you going, but doubt keeps you from going off the deep end.

Brad Warner

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Brad Warner
Age: 60
Born: 1964
Born: March 5
Author
Oshō
Writer
Akron
Ohio
Deep
Doubt
Faith
Ends
Going
Keeps

More quotes by Brad Warner

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It may look like we're doing nothing when we sit zazen. But actually we are exposing ourselves to ourselves.
Brad Warner
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At times, Zen does get into some Buddhist Cosmology. Nishijima Roshi, my main teacher would talk about that and almost every time immediately say that it was only one way of looking at it. Whenever addressing realms of Heaven or Hell, he'd also address that it was just a psychological state.
Brad Warner
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Those who hope for purity and righteousness always try and destroy that which disturbs them. They think the disturbance comes from outside themselves. This is a serious problem. Wars, suicide bombings, and all sorts of other nasty things start from the premise that we can destroy 'evil' outside ourselves without dealing with the evil within.
Brad Warner
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For a very long time science and philosophy were considered part of the same continuum and it was only within the last few hundred years they've been considered different areas of inquiry, and now we're starting to go back to the idea that maybe they aren't two separate realms of inquiry.
Brad Warner
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So I was first exposed to this guy Tim McCarthy, and he's talking about Zen, but deeper than that he was a genuine person. I thought maybe he's someone I can trust and follow this thing he's talking about all the time.
Brad Warner
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Morality is a personal matter.
Brad Warner
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Real morality is based on a single criterion: right action, appropriate action, in the present moment and present situation.
Brad Warner
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Zazen isn't about blissing out or going into an alpha brain-wave trance. It's about facing who and what you really are, in every single goddamn moment. And you aren't bliss, I'll tell you that right now. You're a mess. We all are.
Brad Warner
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How many Zen masters does it take to screw in a light bulb? The plum tree in the garden!
Brad Warner
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Zen practice is about not getting high on anything and in so doing getting high on absolutely everything. We then find that everything we encounter - bliss or nonbliss - possesses a tremendous depth and beauty that we usually miss.
Brad Warner
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I remember writing the post but not what I said specifically, so I'll either repeat myself or say something completely different and baffle everybody.
Brad Warner
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Do what you do as well as you possibly can. That's Buddhist morality.
Brad Warner
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Suffering occurs when your ideas about how things ought to be don't match how they really are.
Brad Warner
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The thinking brain influences the body’s responses and it makes a neat little loop.
Brad Warner
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Truly compassionate action arises spontaneously without thought and is carried out in real action with no anticipation of reward and, indeed, no concept of a doer of that action.
Brad Warner
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No matter what we predict for our futures, we're always wrong anyway. The only sensible thing to do is to live this life as it is right now. Leave what happens after you die till after you die.
Brad Warner
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As you're implying, there's a new technology that can look even deeper into that brick and we can start getting into a level where it breaks down so that the brick isn't even there, but obviously it is because Moe can hit Curly on the head with it. It's quite bizarre and all relative.
Brad Warner
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The fact is that there is a contradiction going on but our brains don't like contradiction. So when Moe hits Curly on the head with a sledgehammer and Curly says, ow and Moe says, Serves you right Numbskull, you can say that's because they're separate beings, and that's true.
Brad Warner
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So what I liked about Zen was that it never goes off into the realm of imagination land, or if it does occasionally, the good teachers will openly address it specifically as only imagination. Both of my teachers were very good at that.
Brad Warner
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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