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Our lack of compassion stems from our inability to see deeply into the nature of things.

Surya Das

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Surya Das
Age: 73
Born: 1950
Born: December 26
Poet
Writer
New York City
New York
Stem
Inability
Spirituality
Deeply
Lack
Compassion
Nature
Things
Stems

More quotes by Surya Das

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Enlightenment is not about becoming divine. Instead it's about becoming more fully human. . . . It is the end of ignorance.
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The heart is an organ of perception.
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Taking the decision-making process away from people disempowers them. It also makes them much less likely to buy into the decision, however right it may be. One’s own conscience remains the ultimate arbiter.
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I realize that was becoming a contradiction in terms, especially after my friend Alison Krauss was shot and killed in Kent State in 1970 on campus by the National Guard.
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Embracing our environment is a good direction, a very spiritual direction. It's too Aristotelian to separate man from the animals and man humans from the environment.
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But you know, eventually that does kind of veneer, chemical veneers that you apply, they sink in. For better or for worse, so it's good to think about what kind of veneer you shellac yourself with. How superficial it may seep into your skin and into your blood stream and totally take over your heart, your brain, everything.
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Other people can’t cause us to be impatient unless we let them do so. In other words, others don’t make us impatient. We make ourselves impatient, through our expectations and demands, fixated attachments and stuckness.
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Everyone has values, and values their family, values their health, their sanity, their safety and security, and their families, their parents, their children, their pets, their environments, well-being in general.
Surya Das
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On the other side, is a substantial, more materialism, everything is real long to the extent we can see or measure it, and things are as real as I think they. That's way too materialistic or substantialist, because things are not really what they seem to be.
Surya Das
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Well Buddhism, 'shmoodism', I didn't go to India looking for Buddhism. I was looking for truth, or God, or a better way of life or happiness, fulfillment, meaning, purpose. And a way to become peace in the world and not just fight for peace, as we had in the 60's.
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I always thought he gave me that name because I have a kind of outgoing or sunny disposition. And in those days I was kinda blonde and bearded and had an afro and was bushy like a sun. So I don't know, he named me Surya Das but who knows.
Surya Das
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So we're all living spirit. It's not about isms and schims or religions. Religions are almost like political institutions, but the heart of it is the spirituality.
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Everything passes, nothing remains. Understand this, loosen your grip and fine serenity.
Surya Das
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We're human beings trying to understand and cultivate what it means to feel divine love. We have to start with small, realistic goals.
Surya Das
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Spirit is love, spirit is connection, inclusive, and that's what I'm interested in, and that's what moved me. That's what I got more and more into as I grew up and as I was in college in the 60's with consciousness raising and other kind of things, gestalt psychology etc.
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If we accept and internalize the fact of our own mortality, then, by definition, we have to deal with the essential questions of how we live and spend our allotted time. We have to stop procrastinating, pretending that we have forever to do what we want to do and be what we long to be.
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You have to go through the darkness to truly know the light. This may sound like a cliche, but it's true nonetheless. Often the greatest doubts occur just before a breakthrough.
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When the sunset of life arrives, and its twilight shadows fade away while dreams of the next begin to appear more vividly may the inner-light essence of the Buddha, and all the radiant awakened ones, continuously guide us onwards and upwards, on the path of spiritual enlightment.
Surya Das
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Breath by breath, let go of fear, expectation, anger, regret, cravings, frustration, fatigue. Let go of the need for approval. Let go of old judgments and opinions. Die to all that, and fly free. Soar in the freedom of desirelessness. Let go. Let Be. See through everything and be free, complete, luminous, at home -- at ease.
Surya Das
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I started to think more about becoming peace rather than fighting for peace, and the contradiction in terms, and the anger and violence that we were prey to and involved in to some extent in those days.
Surya Das