Stephen Snyder > Quotes

“Pa Auk Sayadaw”
― Stephen Snyder, Practicing the Jhanas: Traditional Concentration Meditation as Presented by the Venerable Pa Auk Sayadaw

“One sign of a maturing spiritual practice is the deep understanding that everything happens in its own time.”
― Stephen Snyder, Demystifying Awakening: A Buddhist Path of Realization, Embodiment, and Freedom

“When the experience of absence of self arises, stay with it. Do not feel a need to solve the absence of self’s uncertainties. Stay with the not-knowing. Remain open to the flowering of Awakening of kenshō within the experience of consciousness. Awakening can and will flower in the ripeness of time.”
― Stephen Snyder, Demystifying Awakening: A Buddhist Path of Realization, Embodiment, and Freedom

“We rest in not knowing, which affords us direct, intuitive, embodied knowing based on direct experience.”
― Stephen Snyder, Trust in Awakening: A Zen Teaching on Accessing the Absolute

“I have experienced the absence of self many times in my years of meditating and spiritual practice. The first experiences were unsettling and left me anxious and uneasy. I felt the absence of the normal sense of self, yet there was nothing replacing or filling that absence.”
― Stephen Snyder, Demystifying Awakening: A Buddhist Path of Realization, Embodiment, and Freedom

“As our allegiance to ingrained concept and thought lessens and eventually falls away, we develop greater comfort in being Absence, having Absence flow and function as us.”
― Stephen Snyder, Trust in Awakening: A Zen Teaching on Accessing the Absolute

“Prior to most Awakening experiences there is a period of time where one experiences an absence of self. This is an absence of any markers, any signs, of who we are. The literal felt sense, when you check inwardly as to who you are, is a complete not-knowing. This is not an idea of not-knowing but a felt sense almost of befuddlement of not being able to discern who you are.”
― Stephen Snyder, Demystifying Awakening: A Buddhist Path of Realization, Embodiment, and Freedom