Bruce Lee Wisdom for the Way by Shannon Lee

All quotes from Shannon's book

Be pliable.  When a man is living, he is soft and pliable; when he is dead, he becomes rigid. Pliability is life; rigidity is death, whether one speaks of man’s body, mind or his spirit.

You have to create your own luck. You have to be aware of the opportunities around you and take advantage of them.

Once I slow down because I think I have reached my peak, then my skills will go nowhere but down.

Learning is definitely not mere imitation, nor is it the ability to accumulate and regurgitate fixed knowledge.  Learning is a constant process of discovery – a process without end.

In building a statue, a sculptor doesn’t keep adding clay to his subject.  Actually, he keeps chiseling away at the nonessential until the truth of his creation is revealed without obstruction.

You must accept the fact that there is no help but self-help.  I cannot tell you how to gain freedom since freedom exists within you.

Self-actualization is the important thing.  And my personal message to people is that I hope they will go toward self-actualization rather than self-image actualization.  I hope that they will search within themselves for honest self-expression. 

Independent inquiry is needed in your search for truth, not dependence on anyone else’s view or a mere book.

What we are after is the root and not the branches.  The root is the real knowledge; the branches are surface knowledge. 

It is not a shame to be knocked down by other people.  The important thing is to ask when you’re being knocked down, “Why am I being knocked down?”  If a person can reflect in this way, then there is hope for the person.

A goal is not always meant to be reached.  It often serves simply as something to aim at.

You will never get any more out of life than you expect.

Every man today is the result of his thoughts of yesterday.

With every adversity comes a blessing because a shock acts as a reminder to oneself that we must not get stale in routine.  Look at a rainstorm; after its departure, everything grows!

The Path to Bliss by The 14th Dalai Lama

All quotes from The Dalai Lama's book

It is very important that we do not waste the great opportunity afforded by our being human, because time is a phenomenon that is momentary and does not wait. 

All living beings survive in dependence upon others; even one's experiences of happiness and suffering come about in relation to one's interaction with others.

Any practice that can give you more courage when you are undergoing a very difficult time and that can provide you with some kind of solace and calmness of mind is a true practice of the dharma.

What you know should be put into practice immediately; you can thus derive the benefit of having some transformation within your mind.  Even though it may be a very minor effort, a very small practice just leaving imprints within your mind, still you must think that it was worthwhile to do.  Otherwise, your knowledge of dharma will be quite fruitless, and like merely playing something on a tape.

Initially it is very important to end the session when you are not tired, so that your practice of dharma will be steady like a stream, not momentary like water gushing out of a broken tank, emptying the tank in a few minutes.

Request the spiritual master at your crown to grant you the inspiration to overcome the obstacles to your realization.

Some people, when they subdue the active forces of the gross levels of mind as a result of their meditations, are able to increase the force of the subtle levels of consciousness through the experience of Clear Light.  As a result of such experiences, they are able to recall their past lives vividly. 

What is meant by dharma is the spiritual realization that you can achieve as a result of your practice.  Any factor that can enable you to achieve total liberation from delusions and sufferings and bring about the realization of a true cessation is the true dharma.

The presentation of the law of causality is the presentation of a natural fact.  It can be explained briefly in this way: if you do positive actions, you will face desirable consequences and if you engage in negative actions, you will have to face undesirable consequences.  There is a connection of commensuration between cause and effect.  Any action that produces happiness is positive. The distinction between negative and positive can be made only by judging the fruits.

It is in fact the delusions within the enemies and not the enemies themselves that actually cause harm.

When you are able to perceive enemies as being kind to you, you will have overcome a great stumbling block, because the enemy is the greatest stumbling block for the cultivation of the thought cherishing the welfare of others.

It is the self-cherishing attitude that is the source of all miseries and therefore is the only object to be blamed for all misfortune. 

The practice of generosity should be undertaken by giving away what you can afford.  You should enhance and develop your thought of generosity to such an extent that eventually you will be able to part with even your own body.

Surfing with Sartre: An Aquatic Inquiry into a Life of Meaning by Aaron James

All quotes from Aaron's book

Freedom, for the surfer, isn't radical self-determination but a kind of achievement, in adaptive attunement.  It's a way of being efficacious without control, precisely by giving up any need for it. 

Surfers go along with the flow of a wave by intuitive sensing, by attuning to their surroundings with their whole bodies and not simply their brains or eyeballs.  This turns out to be the highest expression of human perceptual capacity, the human's way of at once being and doing. … This is a relatively easy route to self-transcendence, thank goodness.  Attunement comes by faithful practice, but without the Buddhist's hard road to enlightenment, the abnegation of desire, any radical loss of the self, and without all the effort in constant "mindfulness", or in striving for personal perfection.  The surfer just goes surfing and with relative ease transcends him-or-herself in a dynamic, attuned bodily relationship to the world outside.

Surfing is less a matter of asserting one's will than of transcending it, by standing ready to revise one's best-laid plans, according to what the ocean is offering.  And unless one surfs from a sense of one's relative powerlessness, one simply can't attunedly adapt to each coming moment of wave.

"Power surfing" comes not from will power, or mere force, but from perception, intuition, and anticipation -- from one's sense that the ocean and its waves are to be not controlled but respected, and so read and answered, in an adaptive relationship.

The surfer wisdom for success as a person is this: Take it easier.  Accept. Persist.  Focus.  Leave time.  Don't compare.  And mix things up.

There will be good luck and bad luck, and the thing to do, in either case, is accept what has happened and flow through the different moments, in each case doing the next right thing.  This is how to "create your own luck" -- with no magic, no powers to control the future through "intention" in some more mystical sense.  Simply persist in attuned adaptation.  Focus on something worthy, and stick to a rough plan for its realization, while staying open to its gradual refinement or its deeper reconceptualization.  Trust your noticing.

Success comes precisely by giving up the aim of control and staying attuned, even in wait.

The thing to do when a frustrated desire persists -- "the middle way"-- is to simply accept that much unhappiness: to be as happy as you can be by being willing to be as unhappy as you are.

If a complete book of surfing's rules could be written, it wouldn't necessarily help unless you could also learn the "know-how" that comes in faithful practice.  You could read and understand all of its instructions, grasp them intellectually, and still not know how to put any rule into action.  As a new wave situation presents itself, you have to know how to go on in the next moment.

The attuned surfer and the attuned jazz player both mix passive waiting with active, present sensing, in a spontaneously adaptive activity founded on good timing.

Surfers often wonder in completely earnest puzzlement what in the world non-surfers are doing with their time.

With each new habit that I "hand over to the effortless custody of automatism" by practicing often, my thoughts are further freed fro the next level of attainment.  I can now pay even more exquisite attention.  The more I practice, the freer I am to take in new facets of my wave situation, and I become ever more attuned.  This is the ordinary basis of self-transcendence.

Surfer self-transcendence has a mundane foundation, in showing up to surf, day after day, in the routine of everyday practice.  The extraordinary thus depends on the ordinary, and if one loves the ecstatic, one also must honor its sturdier basis. 

All sensing, all perceptual awareness, is a matter of being embodied in a particular situation and knowing how to attunedly adapt one's body to one's environment.  That is, seeing wouldn't always come first, with action following.  Action would also shape seeing, or rather seeing would be action.

Consciousness is always consciousness of or about something else.

Being lost in a moment, ideally with no thought of ourselves, is anguish's medicine.

Being and staying present, especially while waiting, is improvisation's active motion, the very action of attunement. 

Because we see ourselves through the eyes of others, they have power to deny us the identity we'd like for ourselves.

Goodness and beauty come above everything, except for justice.

A flow is only as permanent as its underlying structure, and so may or may not be lasting or dependable.

The meaning of life is actually easy to answer, because mis-framed.  It only seems difficult because we mistakenly assume that there has to be one meaning that explains all the rest.

The Storm Before the Calm by Neale Donald Walsch

All quotes from Neale's book

Beingness produces consciousness. Consciousness produces awareness.  Awareness produces perspective.  Perspective produces perception.  Perception produces belief.  Belief produces behavior.  Behavior produces experience, and one’s whole life changes walking the pathway of the soul.

This is the planet we’re living on today.  We are requiring people to pay for their survival – and if they can’t do it, we let them die.

We must choose not what we will do, but what we will be.  For all “doingness” proceeds from “beingness”.

When action is experience of “being”, it becomes a powerful demonstration of who we are.

Politics are spirituality, demonstrated.

Need—perceived and unmet need – is what causes violence.

People who aren’t suffering do not attack others.

In life, nothing happens by chance.  Life proceeds out of your intentions for it.

We must decide: is life something that is happening to us or something that is happening through us?

The trick then, if we are not happy in life, is not to leave the body, but to join the soul.

Death is not a process that takes a life, it is a process that changes a life.

The space [within] by Michael Neill

All quotes from Michael's book

When I say “God”, I’m not talking religion.  I’m simply pointing as best I can to the impersonal energy and intelligence behind life that causes grass to grow, cuts to heal, rain to fall, and inspiration to strike.

Look past the illusion of our own thinking.

If we want to achieve great things in life, it is necessary to spend at least as much time, if not more, attending to our base camp as we actually do in climbing mountains.

We live in a world of unrecognized thought.

Your thinking doesn’t matter as much as you think.

The harder we work to get rid of our thinking, the more thinking there is to get rid of.

We are not our thinking, we are the space where thoughts arise.

Feelings are no more (or less) than the shadows of the thoughts that pass through our mind from moment to moment.

There is no such thing as a solution to a feeling.

When it’s okay to feel good when you feel good and bad when you feel bad, recognizing that as thoughts change, the feelings change with them, there’s no need to prefer one feeling over another, let alone attempt to fix it.

No matter how “spiritually enlightened” I might get, I’m always going to have to deal with my very human psychology.

We live in the feeling of our thinking, not the feeling of our circumstances.

Peace of mind is both the path and the goal of the spiritual journey.

When and if I need to know, I’ll know; if I don’t need to know, I probably won’t.

Peace is our natural state.

In order to forgive, you have to already have judged.

True forgiveness is when you can feel the same way about the person as you did before anything ever happened.

The less you have on your mind, the higher your level of performance.

Resilience, wellbeing, confidence, learning and creativity are already built into the human system.

Our experience of life is really an experience of thought.

Understanding Our Mind by Thich Nhat Hanh

All quotes from Thich's book

Perceiver, perceived, and thing-in-itself are together called “the self-revealing aspects” and they depend on each other.

In Buddhism, there are no external enemies – there is only ourselves.

We compare, struggle, and wonder how to let go of our personal, subjective view and arrive at an objective recognition of things.  We want to be directly in touch with the reality of the world.  Yet the objective reality we think exists independently of our sense perceptions is itself and creation of collective consciousness.

The perfuming of our consciousness affects our patterns of seeing, feeling, and behaving.  The seeds of our consciousness manifest not only in a psychological form but also as the objects of our perception – mountains, rivers, other people.  Because of habit energies, we are not able to perceive things as they truly are.  We interpret everything we see or hear in terms of our habit energy…. When we meet a person, what we really meet is our own habit energy, and it prevents us from seeing anything else…. Our habit energies keep us from being able to perceive the reality of the present moment.  

Realize that looking after ourselves is also looking after our loved ones.

Our negative habits always push us to do and say things that bring suffering to ourselves and others.

All the objects of sensation we perceive are transformed into representations, conditioned by the seeds of delusion in our store consciousness.  This is why we must train the mind consciousness to look deeply and perceive deeply.

When our seeds of thinking, comparing, and judging manifest as mental formations in our mind consciousness, the image that results is not the true nature of the perceived object.  Because our perception is “stained” by our emotions, memories, views, and knowledge, we cannot touch the true nature of what we observe.

Consciousness is always consciousness of something.  Thinking is always thinking of something. Anger is always being angry at someone or something.  There cannot be object without subject or subject without object.

Self and other, inside and outside, are concepts.  Concepts are produced by our consciousness.

You and I are one, and we are also not two.  One is an idea; two is also an idea.  Neither idea accords exactly with reality.

The way we perceive reality has everything to do with our happiness and suffering.

We already existed before our birth, although in a different form.  Clouds are the past life of rain.  Rain is a continuation of the clouds.  When energy becomes matter, that is just a continuation.

Our consciousness rarely touches reality.

The sense organs – the eyes, ears, nose, tongue, body and mind – are also called gates because all that we perceive enters through them.

When we burn a piece of paper, the paper does not cease to exist; it becomes heat, ashes, and smoke.  

We have to learn how to touch reality without using our usual patterns of thinking.

The objects of mind are thinking, imagination, and ideas.  The result is mind consciousness.

Our habit energies, delusions, and craving come together and create a tremendous source of energy that conditions our actions, speech, and thinking.  This energy is called manas.

Our body is a manifestation of our store of consciousness.

We build a world full of illusion for ourselves because of the distorted way we perceive reality.

 [The] function of manas is an instinctual defense mechanism that does not operate on wisdom.  But by always trying to defend the self, it can end up destroying the self.

Meditation is to look deeply in order to arrive at reality – first the reality of ourselves and then the reality of the world.  To get to the reality, we have to let go of the images we create in our consciousness and our notions of self and other, inside and outside.

Mental formations that are based in seeing ourselves as separate – all arise from manas.

In our ordinary discriminatory world, we see a teapot as a single, independent object.  But if we look deeply enough into the teapot, we will see that it contains many phenomena –earth, water, fire, air, space, and time – and we will realize that in fact the entire universe has come together to make this teapot.  That is the interdependent nature of the teapot.

Our society, country, and the whole universe are also manifestations of seeds in our collective consciousness.

Consciousness records and is impregnated wall of experience and perceptions that come to us through seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, and touching.

We continue to believe that consciousness is one thing, and that there is an outer “objective” reality, apart from consciousness, upon which the image of [reality] is formed. 

Clothed-In-Fur and Other Tales by J Baird Callicott and Thomas W Overholt

All quotes from Thomas & J Baird's book

The uninitiated can sink or swim – theirs is not to ask questions or to receive explanations, but just to hear more storytellings until things finally fall into place.

The Law of Divine Compensation by Marianne Williamson

All quotes from Marianne's book

If you feel ashamed about celebrating money, don’t expect money to celebrate you. 

Prayer doesn’t change a situation for you so much as it changes you for the situation. 

We are given the power to turn any situation that is not love back into love, starting with thinking about it differently.  We do this by identifying our own lovelessness and being willing to let it go.

Starving children in Africa are not poor because their consciousness is unaligned with love; they’re poor because ours is. … It is a collective lovelessness on the part of advanced nations of the world that allows us to accept the reality of deep poverty.

No matter what is happening in our lives, we choose how we wish to think about it.

It is not our circumstances, then, but rather our thoughts about our circumstances, that determine our power to transform them.

You are not lacking just because your circumstances are.

Think of the universe itself as a personal love note form God to you.

We increase a thing’s power by increasing our belief in its power.

Faith isn’t blind; it’s visionary. Having faith in a positive outcome doesn’t mean you’re denying a problem or ignoring obstacles; it simply means you’re affirming a solution.

A miracle is: a shift in thinking which then shifts your experience. This shift in perception – your willingness to look beyond appearances -- enables you to invoke a different set of probabilities going forward.  It enables you to see beyond what’s happening to what could be happening, thus creating the space for something new.

Everything seen begins in a place that was first unseen.

When a pilot cannot see the horizon because of low visibility, he or she doesn’t assume that the horizon has disappeared.  At a time of low visibility, the pilot flies on instruments that can actually gauge a situation more clearly than he can.  Faith is like flying on instruments: it’s acting out the assumption that just because you can’t see a possibility at the moment doesn’t mean that it’s not there.

Your power to invoke ultimate truth lies in your clarity about what is truth and what is illusion.

With every thought we think, we display either faith in love or faith in fear.

In any instant, regardless of what has happened in the past, the universe has arranged and is continuing to arrange infinite possibilities for you to prosper.

Putting love first means knowing who you are and that you’re entitled to miracles. Putting love first means knowing that the universe supports you in creating the good, the holy, and the beautiful. It means knowing that you’re on the earth for a purpose, and that the purpose itself will create opportunities for its accomplishment.

Our internal abundance is ultimately the source of our external abundance. Who we are, not just the services we provide, creates money.

Love leads us to act with impeccability, integrity, and excellence.

The seeker isn’t looking to “get money”, but to exchange energy.  And when the energy we’re putting out is filled with the consciousness of love, then the energy flowing back to us comes in whatever form more serves our good.

Releasing negative self-concepts is important not simply because they hurt you; it’s important because they’re not true.

Painful thoughts arise from over-identification with the material plane.

Identifying with your material self rather than your spiritual self will always leave you vulnerable to self-hating projections.

To self-identify according to your spiritual rather than material reality is enlightenment.  From this perspective, you see that you are the light.  No thought or condition of darkness – that is, lovelessness in your mind or in any one else’s – has any bearing whatsoever on the truth of who you are or what the universe has planned for you.

As long as we think we’re separate from the rest of the universe, we’re bound to compare ourselves to others.

Spiritual understanding is a corrective to any false programming you might have received as a child.

A story, no matter how factually true, is still just a story.  Spiritual growth involves giving up the stories of your past so the universe can write you a new one.

Every loving thing that ever happened to you was real, and everything else was an illusion.

It matters only where you place your consciousness now.

Feel your feelings, yes, but be self-aware enough to know the difference between processing and spewing.

Feeling your feelings is healthy; holding on to them longer than you need to is self-indulgent.

What happens now is up to you.  You can respond from ego, ensuring pain; or you can respond from spirit, ensuring a miracle.

The level of woundedness is the level of illusion.

Moral outrage does not have to include personal anger.

Nonviolence didn’t mean they looked away from the problem; it meant they looked though it to a realm of possibility that lay beyond the conditions that angered them.

By forgiving, we do not grant victory to those who wronged us; instead, we surrender the aspect of mind that is blocking divine correction.

Forgiveness is the most powerful key to new beginnings.

We can be bitter or we can be better…. Bitterness is hardly the personality trait that someone out there is looking to hire, partner with, promote, or invest in.

The ego is that which both sets you up to do the wrong thing and then punishes you viciously for having done so.  

Guilt is savage, and it never lets you off the hook.  It leads to obsession, self-hatred, self-punishment, and a shattered sense of self.

A failure remains a failure only if we refuse to learn from it.

Great people are not those who have never fallen down.  Great people are those who, when they do fall down, dig deep within themselves and find the strength to get back up.

No deviation from love – on your part or on anyone else’s –can keep the universe from its divine intention that your life be one of fullness and joy.

If your mind is in a loving place – if your thoughts are of a high, divine vibration – your experience will reflect that.  If your mind is in a fearful place – if your thoughts are of a lower, dense vibration – your experience will reflect that.  The way to change the nature of your experience is to change the nature of your thoughts.

The ego is the mind of fear. It is our own mental power turned against ourselves. It is the part of us that thinks that we have to struggle to get ahead, that we must compete with everyone else, that there is only so much success to go around.

The ego consists of – and perpetuates – the chronic, self-destructive patterns by which we sabotage ourselves, blow opportunities, destroy relationships, and undermine ourselves in a myriad of ways.

There are four rules for miraculous work creation: be positive. Send love. Have fun. Kick ass.

In almost every moment, we’re at the right place at the right time if we step fully into the moment at hand.

All meditation is relaxation, but not all relaxation is meditation.

Greater insight, deeper understanding, expanded perspective, more whole-system knowing, and deeper peace, forgiveness, and love – all of these arise more easily from the meditative mind.

Just as we wash to remove yesterday’s dirt from our bodies, we meditate to remove yesterday’s stress from our minds.

While I can’t say that the practice [of meditation] guarantees I’ll be the best version of myself all day, it absolutely keeps me from being the worst version of myself.

The universe is like a house wired for electricity, but too often we’re like unplugged lamps.

Prayer expands our consciousness, thus expanding the set of possibilities that we experience.

That’s how the universe operates: whatever already is, is the platform for what could be.

Seeking to solve a problem merely on the level of effect is not a true solution but only a temporary fix. Only when we address the level of cause – the thoughts that caused the original deviation from love – do we produce miraculous and fundamental results.

God will do his part when we do ours.

Gift from the Sea by Anne Morrow Lindbergh

All quotes from Anne's book

Intermittency -- an impossible lesson for human beings to learn.  How can one learn to live through the ebb-tides of one's existence?

The Compassion Book by Pema Chodron

All quotes from Pema's book

We can use everything we encounter in our lives -- pleasant or painful -- to awaken genuine, uncontrived compassion.

Obsessing about what you want and avoiding what you don't want does not result in happiness.

Whatever you experience in your life -- pain, pleasure, heat, cold, or anything else -- is like something happening in a dream.  Although you might think things are very solid, they are like passing memory.

Everyone is looking for someone to blame and therefore aggression and neurosis keep expanding.  Instead, pause and look at what's happening with you.  When you hold on so tightly to your view of what they did; you get hooked.

Others will always show you exactly where you are stuck.  They say or do something and you automatically get hooked into a familiar way of reacting -- shutting down, speeding up, or getting all worked up. 

The unexpected will stop your mind: rest in that space.

Realizing that this limited identity isn't solid and is dissolving, do not indulge in trying to keep it from falling apart.

It is important to include everyone and everything that you meet as part of your practice.

The Secret Oral Teachings in Tibetan Buddhist Sects by Alexandra David-Neel and Lama Yongden

All quotes from Alexandra & Lama Yongden's book

What, then, was that something that wanted to be agreeably caressed, satisfied? -- it was the collection of false notions, of unreasonable propensities, of feelings of a rudimentary sensuality which is disguised under the appearance of a puppet named "I". 

We are led to contemplate the co-existence of two worlds:  that of pure contact not coloured by the screen of "memories", and that created by the mental formations (the samskaras): the interpretation.

Every action, either physical or mental, every movement occurring either on the plane of gross matter or on the plane of the mind, causes an emission of energy.  To use the established expression, it produces a "seed".  This seed, in the same way as all material seeds, tends -- given favourable circumstances -- to produce a being of the same species as that of the parent who has transmitted the seed.

Dislike is only a form of attachment upside down.

To believe that one knows is the greatest of the barriers which prevent knowledge. 

Nothing that exists is motionless, and that phenomena, whatever that may be, consist in a succession of changes following each other with a speed which is far beyond our facilities of perception and understanding.

In every case it is a question of the meeting of two aggregates in motion, and also, in every case, it is a matter of a sensation followed by an interpretation which brings it into the realm of consciousness while distorting it.

We must beware of ideas and judgments based on our human mentality, on our human senses and of relating and gauging according to our measure that which exists in the infinity of space.

If from a man you take away the physical form, sensation, perception, mental activity and consciousness, what remains?

There is no real production, only interdependence.

Every action, either physical or mental, every moment occurring on the plane of gross matter or on the plane of the mind, causes an emission of energy…. This seed, in the same way as all material seeds, tends – given favorable circumstances – to produce a being – the same species as of the parent who has transmitted the seed.

The effect is never the product of a single cause, but always of several causes of unequal potency.

It would be better to consider the body as a “ego” than to consider the mind as such, for the body seems to last for a year, two years or a hundred years, but that which is called mind, thought, or knowledge, appears or disappears in a perpetual state of change.

Whether we are aware of it or not, the thought, the desires, the needs which we feel for life, our thirst for it – nothing of all this is completely ours, for all of it is collective, it is the flowing river of incalculable moments of consciousness having its source in the impenetrable depths of eternity.

Consciousness exists depends, for its existence, on the existence of other things which produce it or support it.

Understand that it is all a game.