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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

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Brad Warner
Age: 60
Born: 1964
Born: March 5
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Akron
Ohio
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If a tree falls in the forest and it hits a mime, would he make a noise?
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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.
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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.
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It may look like we're doing nothing when we sit zazen. But actually we are exposing ourselves to ourselves.
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The truth comes when you can see that your self-image is just a convenient reference point and nothing more, and that you as you had imagined yourself do not exist.
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It's crazy to me how concerned people get with what it looks like and what you can do there. People may as well be talking about JRR Tolkien or Star Trek or something.
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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.
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Real morality is based on a single criterion: right action, appropriate action, in the present moment and present situation.
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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.
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Suffering occurs when your ideas about how things ought to be don't match how they really are.
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When I first started watching Godzilla, I was a kid and a big dinosaur freak and was like, Oh my gosh, there's a big dinosaur. So I immediately got into Godzilla. What I like about it are some of the things people often think are negative aspects.
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I used to worry when I was a teenager, even into my twenties, after I'd heard something about schizophrenia and how people just suddenly become schizophrenic that I was insane.
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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.
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the only real time as far as Buddhism is concerned is right now. Right now there is no old age or death because old age and death are descriptions of things as they are now when we compare them to things as they used to be.
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I thought that deserved a book and feel like the door needs to be open so people can say, Ok, here we go, let's deal with this because we're not dealing with it. I'm waiting for somebody to write another book but it hasn't happened yet, though I guess mine's only been out for a year and a half.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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
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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