ZEN THINKING

 

NISARGADATTA MAHARAJ

Actions through the four elements (earth, water, fire, wind) do not affect the fifth, i.e. space. I am pure consciousness, pure life force. I’ve no shape, no form. Therefore, I have no birth, no death and no karma

Hazrat Inayat Khan

 

All the disharmony of the world caused by religious differences is the result of man’s failure to understand that religion is One, truth is One, God is One…

The Tibetan Book of the Dead)

 

"These forty-two perfectly endowed deities, issuing from within thy heart, being the product of thine own pure love, will come to shine.  Know them.

O nobly-born, these realms are not come from somewhere outside [thyself].  They come from within the four divisions of thy heart, which, including its centre, make five directions.  They issue from within there, and shine upon thee.  The deities, too, are not come from somewhere else: they exist from eternity within the faculties of thine own intellect.  Know them to be of that nature."

Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

"When the body is born, all kinds of things happen to it, and you take part in them - because you take yourself to be the body. You are like the man in the cinema house, laughing and crying with the picture, though knowing fully well that he is all the time in his seat and the picture is but the play of light. It is enough to shift attention from the screen to oneself to break the spell. When the body dies, the kind of life you live now - succession of physical and mental events - comes to an end. It can end even now, without waiting for the death of the body. It is enough to shift attention to the Self and keep it there. All just happens; there is a mysterious power that creates and moves everything. Realize that you are not the mover, only the observer, and you will be at peace."

Sri Ramana Maharshi

“ The `I' is always there –

in deep sleep, in dream and in wakefulness.

The one in sleep is the same as that who now speaks.

There is always the feeling of `I'.

Otherwise do you deny your existence?

You do not.

You say `I am'.

Find out who is.”

“ If you hold this feeling of ‘I’

long enough and strongly enough,

the false ‘I’ will vanish

leaving only the unbroken awareness of the real,

immanent ‘I’, consciousness itself.”

Sri Adi Shankaracharya

There is something your own,

unchanging , the “I’

the substratum , the basis ,

which is the triple observer,

distinct from the five sheaths.

The awareness that knows everything

whether waking, dreaming or in deep sleep ,

and whether or not there is movement

in the mind , that is the “I”.

Alan Watts

The source of all light is in the eye. If there were no eyes in this world, the sun would not be light. So if I hit as hard as I can on a drum which has no skin, it makes no noise. So if a sun shines on a world with no eyes, it's like a hand beating on a skinless drum. No light. YOU evoke light out of the universe, in the same way you, by nature of having a soft skin, evoke hardness out of wood. Wood is only hard in relation to a soft skin. It's your eardrum that evokes noise out of the air. You, by being this organism, call into being this whole universe of light and color and hardness and heaviness and everything.

Bhagavad Gita ( Chapter 6, slokas 19-22).

When meditation is mastered, the mind is unwavering like the flame of a lamp in a windless place.

In the still mind, in the depths of meditation, the Self reveals itself. Beholding the Self by means of the Self, an aspirant knows the joy and peace of complete fulfillment.

Having attained that abiding joy beyond the senses, revealed in the stilled mind, he never swerves from the eternal truth.

He desires nothing else, and cannot be shaken by the heaviest burden of sorrow.

Ram Dass

“The witness is actually another level of consciousness. The witness coexists alongside your normal consciousness as another layer of awareness, as the part of you that is awakening. Humans have this unique ability to be in two states of consciousness at once. Witnessing yourself is like directing the beam of a flashlight back at itself. In any experience — sensory, emotional, or conceptual — there’s the experience, the sensory or emotional or thought data, and there’s your awareness of it. That’s the witness, the awareness, and you can cultivate that awareness in the garden of your being.”