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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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Brad Warner
Age: 60
Born: 1964
Born: March 5
Author
OshÅ
Writer
Akron
Ohio
Looks
Like
Exposing
Actually
May
Look
Nothing
More quotes by Brad Warner
The problem is the way we let our desires stand in the way of our enjoyment of what we already have.
Brad Warner
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
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.
Brad Warner
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
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.
Brad Warner
How many Zen masters does it take to screw in a light bulb? The plum tree in the garden!
Brad Warner
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
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
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
The real goal of Zen is to find a way of life that's easy and undramatic. Strong attachments lead to upset and drama.
Brad Warner
I mean, I can do that all day long. I can tell you the Vulcan's are not actually devoid of emotion. That they work hard to suppress their emotions. And of course, there actually are no real Vulcan's, though I know the ins and outs of them as fictional characters.
Brad Warner
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
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
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
If a tree falls in the forest and it hits a mime, would he make a noise?
Brad Warner
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
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
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
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
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