Brad Warner - Hardcore Zen (2003)

13 Sourced Quotes

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Reality's all you've got. But here's the real secret, the real miracle: it's enough.

Brad Warner
People imagine enlightenment will make them incredibly powerful. And it does. It makes you the most powerful being in all the universe- but usually no one else notices.

Brad Warner
Consider this: 1. Would you ride in a car whose driver was on the consciousness-expanding "entheogenic" drug LSD? And here's a bonus question: 2. Why does an "expanded consciousness" include the inability to operate a motor vehicle?

Brad Warner
We always imagine that there's got to be somewhere else better than where we are right now; this is the Great Somewhere Else we all carry around in our heads. We believe Somewhere Else is out there for us if only we could find it. But there's no Somewhere Else. Everything is right here...Make this your paradise or make this your hell. The choice is entirely yours. Really.

Brad Warner
How many Zen masters does it take to screw in a light bulb? The plum tree in the garden!

Brad Warner
If you want to believe in reincarnation, you have to believe that this life, what you're living through right now, is the afterlife. You're missing out on the afterlife you looked forward to in your last existence by worrying about your next life. This is what happens after you die. Take a look.

Brad Warner
Suffering occurs when your ideas about how things ought to be don't match how they really are.

Brad Warner
Compassion is the ability to see what needs doing right now and the willingness to do it right now.

Brad Warner
The truth comes when you can see that your self-image is just a convenient reference point and nothing more, and that you as you had imagined yourself do not exist.

Brad Warner
Zazen isn't about blissing out or going into an alpha brain-wave trance. It's about facing who and what you really are, in every single goddamn moment. And you aren't bliss, I'll tell you that right now. You're a mess. We all are.

Brad Warner
The problem is the way we let our desires stand in the way of our enjoyment of what we already have.

Brad Warner
Do what you do as well as you possibly can. That's Buddhist morality.

Brad Warner
Real morality is based on a single criterion: right action, appropriate action, in the present moment and present situation.

Brad Warner