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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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Brad Warner
Age: 60
Born: 1964
Born: March 5
Author
Oshō
Writer
Akron
Ohio
Persons
Deeper
Person
Follow
Firsts
Trust
First
Maybe
Thing
Guy
Time
Talking
Mccarthy
Someone
Exposed
Thought
Genuine

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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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If a tree falls in the forest and it hits a mime, would he make a noise?
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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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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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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.
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Faith keeps you going, but doubt keeps you from going off the deep end.
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The real goal of Zen is to find a way of life that's easy and undramatic. Strong attachments lead to upset and drama.
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People will come and give you sandwiches every six hours but you're really of no use. A lot of people get excited about guys like that but I can't get too excited about it because I think he's sorta useless. He's just sitting there in India under a blanket looking beautiful, so what.
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But people do the same thing with the Bible. They memorize all the fictional characters, the parameters and the rules of the game and think it's important, but I can't get excited about that myself.
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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.
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What attracted me to Zen was my first teacher, Tim McCarthy. He was extremely genuine. It wasn't even really a Zen thing, that sort of came along later.
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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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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.
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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.
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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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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.
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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.
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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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How many Zen masters does it take to screw in a light bulb? The plum tree in the garden!
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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?
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