Quote

People imagine enlightenment will make them incredibly powerful. And it does. It makes you the most powerful being in all the universe- but usually no one else notices.

Brad Warner

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Brad Warner
Age: 60
Born: 1964
Born: March 5
Author
Oshō
Writer
Akron
Ohio
Makes
Else
Notices
Doe
Incredibly
Make
Enlightenment
People
Usually
Imagine
Powerful
Universe

More quotes by Brad Warner

Image
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
Image
The obvious example would be Jesus. Jesus is an object of fascination for me. He's an interesting historical character because we don't know much about him. He seems to be a guy who was in touch with something deeper than most people around him were and someone who was very concerned with trying to communicate that.
Brad Warner
Image
Morality is a personal matter.
Brad Warner
Image
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
Image
Faith keeps you going, but doubt keeps you from going off the deep end.
Brad Warner
Image
A lot of seriously insane people have managed to acquire huge followings based on the idea that their insanity is a kind of enlightenment. An obvious example would be Charles Manson or Shoko Asahara who is the person responsible for the Sarin gas attack on the Tokyo subway.
Brad Warner
Image
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
Image
Since then, my approach to all things spiritual is rather cynical you could say. When somebody present something to me as spiritual, my first instinct is to be cynical and think, oh yeah, one of those again. You see so much of it see in spiritual culture and people get very excited about it. It's all very hoo haw.
Brad Warner
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
Disappointment is just the action of your brain readjusting itself to reality after discovering things are not the way you thought they were.
Brad Warner
Image
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
Image
It's sort of another innovation, probably a good innovation, of Western culture to separate the ideas between science and philosophy, but it's important to remember they weren't always separate realms of inquiry.
Brad Warner
Image
Buddhists have a long-standing tradition of believing that at some level we always know what the best course of action is in any given situation. We just have to be quiet enough to let that course of action present itself to us. And we need the confidence to act when life shows us what we need to do.
Brad Warner
Image
If a tree falls in the forest and it hits a mime, would he make a noise?
Brad Warner
Image
I was very attracted to the way that Zen did not go into the imagination land. And now I've forgotten what your first question was and how we were going to tie this together.
Brad Warner
Image
You can't function in society if you don't involve yourself in the fictions society accepts about time. But you do so with the understanding that you're playing a game.
Brad Warner
Image
So with science, it's original idea was to ignore the spiritual or nebulous side of reality and to strictly work on concrete things. Say there's a brick which we cut it in half and then see there's two half's of a brick. If we keep cutting we can then see there's particles and so on and so forth.
Brad Warner
Image
Buddha might be the one thing that could settle Godzilla down. He might say, Listen Godzilla, you don't have to do all this. Just chill out a little bit and everything will be fine.
Brad Warner