All quotes from
Brad's book
If we try
to run away from the reality of that things are exactly as they are, even our
running away is part of the reality.
The
efforts we make right here and now will become the source of Buddha’s way for
future generations. Feeling compassion
for the future, we need to value the present.
Even
if the whole universe is nothing but a bunch of jerks doing all kinds of jerk
type things, there is still liberation in simply not being a jerk.
Subject
and object are time, practice and experience are moments of time.
Regular
people experience their own causes and conditions, but what they experience is
not really reality itself. It’s just
that reality itself has made regular people into its causes and conditions. Because you think that time and existence are
something other than what you are.
Just
stick with what’s really happening.
Don’t mistakenly say that it’s nonexistence or existence. Don’t just see how relentlessly time passes,
without seeing that it never arrives.
People
see time as leaving and coming, but nobody ever sees how it stays in one
place. If you don’t get that, how are
you gonna get anything?
Time and
existence are inseparable.
At every
moment of every day, no matter how I feel about the situation, whether it’s
mind-blowingly thrilling or completely mind-numbing, I am the totality of the
universe experiencing the fullness of itself.
Even if I don’t notice it.
We are
not entities who experience time. We are
time itself.
You
are not a person living in a time and a place. You are the person and the time
and the place all rolled into one.
The
deluded mind is just the Flower of Dharma twirling. So when we’re in delusion, we’re being
twirled by the Flower of Dharma.
We
shouldn’t await some state of awareness.
And we shouldn’t assume our current state is without awareness. Every possible state is awareness.
Try
to sit quietly within our delusion until we can see it clearly for what it is.
What
happens to us doesn’t happen so that we can respond to it. It just happens.
If we
were to divide zazen into two parts, practice and experience, we could consider
each part separately. We could say that
we practice in order to achieve enlightenment.
But your perceptions cannot be the standard of enlightenment, because
deluded human sentiment cannot reach the standard of enlightenment.
You
cannot know your own enlightenment because whatever you call enlightenment
can’t be enlightenment.
Pushing
ourselves to practice and experience stuff is delusion. When stuff actively practices and experiences
us, that’s realization.
Just as
ash doesn’t go back to being firewood, human beings, when they die, don’t come
back to life again.
What you
call “self” is the manifestation of everything.
You reflect and refract the universe around you in a unique way, and
that unique way is commonly called “self”.
But it does not belong to anyone --- certainly not to you!
The
universe/you is both complete and self-sufficient and at the same time
incomplete and fully dependent on everything else.
[Reincarnation
is] like lighting a candle with another candle and then blowing out the first
candle. The flame on the second candle
isn’t the same flame, and yet it depends on the first flame for its existence.
Focus
on this life. Live this actual day. Pay attention to just this very moment. This is where it’s all happening, not in some
future lifetime.