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We are always doing something to cover up our basic existential anxiety. Some people live that way until the day they die.

Joko Beck

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Joko Beck
Age: 94 †
Born: 1917
Born: March 27
Died: 2011
Died: June 15
Author
Writer
New Jersey
United States
Charlotte Joko Beck
People
Cover
Basic
Anxiety
Dies
Live
Something
Way
Always
Existential

More quotes by Joko Beck

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Whenever we say a person's name, notice whether we have stated more than a fact. For example, the judgment, 'She's thoughtless' goes beyond the facts 'She said she'd call me and she didn't.
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Practice has to be a process of endless disappointment. We have to see that everything we demand (and even get) eventually disappoints us. This discovery is our teacher.
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It's of no use to look back and say, I should have been different. At any given moment, we are the way we are, and we see what we're able to see. For that reason, guilt is always inappropriate.
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Meditation is not about doing something
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With unfailing kindness, your life always presents what you need to learn. Whether you stay home or work in an office or whatever, the next teacher is going to pop right up.
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To some degree we all find life difficult, perplexing, and oppressive. Even when it goes well, as it may for a time, we worry that it probably won't keep on that way.
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Joy is being willing for things to be as they are.
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We are just living this moment we don't have to live 150,000 moments at once. We are only living one. That's why I say you might as well practice with each moment.
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Awareness is our true self it's what we are. So we don't have to try to develop awareness we simply need to notice how we block awareness with our thoughts, our fantasies, our opinions, and our judgments. We're either in awareness, which is our natural state, or we're doing something else.
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Meditation practice is simply moving from a life of hurting myself and others to a life of not hurting myself and others.
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You cannot avoid paradise. You can only avoid seeking it.
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All I can be is who I am right now I can experience that and work with it. That's all I can do. The rest is the dream of the ego.
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We learn in our guts, not just in our brain, that a life of joy is not in seeking happiness, but in experiencing and simply being the circumstances of our life as they are not in fulfilling personal wants, but in fulfilling the needs of life.
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Underneath our nice, friendly facades there is great unease. If I were to scratch below the surface of anyone I would find fear, pain, and anxiety running amok. We all have ways to cover them up. We overeat, over-drink, overwork we watch too much television.
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We have self-centered minds which get us into plenty of trouble. If we do not come to understand the error in the way we think, our self-awareness, which is our greatest blessing, is also our downfall.
Joko Beck
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We tend to run our whole life trying to avoid all that hurts or displeases us, noticing the objects, people, or situations that we think will give us pain or pleasure, avoiding one and pursuing the other.
Joko Beck
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We 'rid ourselves of conceptual thought' when, by persistent observation, we recognize the unreality of our self-centered thoughts. Then we can remain dispassionate and fundamentally unaffected by them. That does not mean to be a cold person. Rather, it means not to be caught and dragged around by circumstances.
Joko Beck
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But opinions, judgments, memories, dreaming about the future—ninety percent of the thoughts spinning around in our heads have no essential reality.
Joko Beck
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We're constantly waking up to what we're about, what we're really doing in our lives. And the fact is, that's painful. But there's no possibility of freedom without this pain.
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Life is a second-by-second miracle.
Joko Beck