David R. Loy > Quotes

“People are "punished" or "rewarded" not for what they have done but for what they have become, and what we intentionally do is what makes us what we are.”
― David R. Loy, Money, Sex, War, Karma: Notes for a Buddhist Revolution

“All of us react to our anxiety by “partializing” our world, by restricting our consciousness within narrow bounds, to areas that we can more or less control which provide us a sense of self-confidence.”
― David R. Loy, Lack and Transcendence: The Problem of Death and Life in Psychotherapy, Existentialism, and Buddhism

“Our problem today is that we no longer believe in things but in symbols, hence our life has passed over into these symbols and their manipulation— only to find ourselves manipulated by the symbols we take so seriously, objectified in our objectifications.”
― David R. Loy, Lack and Transcendence: The Problem of Death and Life in Psychotherapy, Existentialism, and Buddhism

“You must be emptied of that with which you are full, so you may be filled with that whereof you are empty. Augustine”
― David R. Loy, The World Is Made of Stories

“To become a different kind of person is to experience the world in a different way. When your mind changes, the world changes. And when we respond differently to the world, the world responds differently to us.”
― David R Loy

“For Becker, this is literally true: Normality is our collective, protective madness, in which we repress the truth of the human condition, and those who have difficulty playing this game are the ones we call mentally ill.”
― David R. Loy, Lack and Transcendence: The Problem of Death and Life in Psychotherapy, Existentialism, and Buddhism

“Far away in the heavenly abode of the great god Indra, there is a wonderful net that has been hung by some cunning artificer in such a manner that it stretches out infinitely in all directions. In accordance with the extravagant tastes of deities, the artificer has hung a single glittering jewel in each “eye” of the net, and since the net itself is infinite in all dimensions, the jewels are infinite in number. There hang the jewels, glittering like stars of the first magnitude, a wonderful sight to behold. If we now arbitrarily select one of these jewels for inspection and look closely at it, we will discover that in its polished surface there are reflected all the other jewels in the net, infinite in number. Not only that, but each of the jewels reflected in this one jewel is also reflecting all the other jewels, so that there is an infinite reflecting process occurring…. [I]t symbolizes a cosmos in which there is an infinitely repeated interrelationship among all the members of the cosmos. This relationship is said to be one of simultaneous mutual identity and mutual inter-causality. (Francis Cook)56”
― David R. Loy, Lack and Transcendence: The Problem of Death and Life in Psychotherapy, Existentialism, and Buddhism

“Uncomfortable with our sense-of-lack today, we look forward to that day in the future when we will feel truly alive; we use that hope to rationalize the way we have to live now, a sacrifice which then increases our demands of the future.”
― David R. Loy, Lack and Transcendence: The Problem of Death and Life in Psychotherapy, Existentialism, and Buddhism

“Then growing up is not a matter of discovering who or what one really is, but joining the general amnesia whereby each of us pretends to be an autonomous person and learns how to play the social game of constantly reassuring each other that, yes, you are a person, just like me, and I’m okay, you’re okay.”
― David R. Loy, Lack & Transcendence: The Problem of Death and Life in Psychotherapy, Existentialism, and Buddhism

“Take stock of those around you and you will... hear them talk in precise terms about themselves and their surroundings, which would seem to point to them having ideas on the matter. But start to analyze those ideas and you will find that they hardly reflect in any way the reality to which they appear to refer, and if you go deeper you will discover that there is not even an attempt to adjust the ideas to this reality. Quite the contrary: through these notions, the individual is trying to cut off any personal vision of reality, of his own very life. For life is at the start a chaos in which one is lost. The individual suspects this, but he is frightened at finding himself face to face with this terrible reality, and tries to cover it over with a curtain of fantasy, where everything is clear. It does not worry him that his "ideas" are not true, he uses them as trenches for the defence of his existence, as scarecrows to frighten away reality. The man with the clear head is the man who frees himself from those fantastic "ideas" and looks life in the face, realizes that everything in it is problematic, and feels himself lost. And this is the simple truth - that to live is to feel oneself lost - he who accepts it has already begun to find himself to be on firm ground. Instinctively, as do the shipwrecked, he will look round for something to which to cling, and that tragic, ruthless glance, absolutely sincere, because it is a question of his salvation, will cause him to bring order into the chaos of his life. These are the only genuine ideas; the ideas of the shipwrecked. All the rest is rhetoric, posturing, farce. He who does not really feel himself lost is without remission; that is to say, he never finds himself, never comes up against his own reality.”
― David R. Loy, Lack and Transcendence: The Problem of Death and Life in Psychotherapy, Existentialism, and Buddhism

“Intentional actions, repeated over and over, become habits. Habitual ways of thinking, feeling, acting, and reacting construct and compose my sense of of self: the Kind of person I am. The kind of person I am does not fully determine what occurs to me but strongly affects what happens and how I respond to it.”
― David R Loy

“the sense of self is more like the surface of the sea: dependent on depths it cannot grasp because it is a manifestation of them.”
― David R. Loy, Lack & Transcendence: The Problem of Death and Life in Psychotherapy, Existentialism, and Buddhism

“Śūnyata is perhaps the most important term in Mahāyāna, but it is not easy to translate. It comes from the root śū, which means “to swell” in two senses: hollow or empty, and also full, like the womb of a pregnant woman. Both are implied in the Mahāyāna usage: the first denies any fixed self-nature to anything, the second implies that this is also fullness and limitless possibility, for lack of any fixed characteristics allows the infinite diversity of impermanent phenomena. It has been unfortunate for Anglo-American Buddhist studies that “emptiness” captures only the first sense, but I follow the tradition.67”
― David R. Loy, Nonduality: In Buddhism and Beyond

“our most problematic dualism is not life fearing death but a fragile sense-of-self dreading its own groundlessness, according to Buddhism. By accepting and yielding to that groundlessness, I can discover that I have always been grounded in Indra’s Net, not as a self-enclosed being but as one manifestation of a web of relationships which encompasses everything.”
― David R. Loy, Lack and Transcendence: The Problem of Death and Life in Psychotherapy, Existentialism, and Buddhism

“Despite the fantasies of some wealthy survivalists, who hope to ride out the apocalypse in well-stocked bunkers, worldwide ecological degradation makes it clearer than ever that human and nonhuman destinies are inextricably tied to each other in a biosphere that encompasses us all.”
― David R. Loy, Loving the World as Our Body: The Nondual Path in a Dangerous Time

“we need to stop evading the emptiness at our core and realise its true nature - lack of money, the great seduction”
― David R. Loy, Money, Sex, War, Karma: Notes for a Buddhist Revolution

“the ego-self is the center of a web spun to hide the void,”
― David R. Loy, Lack & Transcendence: The Problem of Death and Life in Psychotherapy, Existentialism, and Buddhism

“the threat today is not western religions, but psychology and consumerism. is the Dharma becoming another psychotherapy, another commodity to be bought and sold? will western Buddhism become all too compatible with our individualistic consumption patterns, with expensive retreats and initiations, catering to overstressed converts, eager to pursue their own enlightenment? let’s hope not, because Buddhism and the west need each other. despite its economic and technologic dynamism, western civilisation and its globalisation are in trouble, which means all of us are in trouble. the most obvious example is our inability to respond to accelerating climate change, as seriously as it requires. if humanity is to survive and thrive over the next few centuries, there is no need to go on at length here about the other social and ecological crisis that confront us now, which are increasingly difficult to ignore [many of those are considered in the following chapters]. it’s also becoming harder to overlook the fact that the political and economic systems we’re so proud of seem unable to address these problems. one must ask, is that because they themselves are the problem? part of the problem is leadership, or the lack of it, but we can’t simply blame our rulers. it’s not only the lack of a moral core of those who rise to the top, or the institutional defamations that massage their rise, economical and political elites, and there’s not much difference between them anymore. like the rest of us, they are in need of a new vision of possibility, what it means to be human, why we tend to get into trouble, and how we can get out go it, those who benefit the most from the present social arrangements may think of themselves as hardheaded realists, but as self-conscious human beings, we remain motivated by some such vision, weather we’re aware of it or not, as why we love war, points out. even secular modernity is based on a spiritual worldview, unfortunately a deficient one, from a Buddhist perspective.”
― David R. Loy, Money, Sex, War, Karma: Notes for a Buddhist Revolution

“language affects the ways we experience the world, and ourselves. we usually think of language, when we think of it at all, as something transparent, or like a mirror that reflects things as they really are. the most important realisation of 20th century western philosophy was that language does not simply mirror the world, in fact, it largely determines what we notice and what we do not.”
― David R. Loy, Money, Sex, War, Karma: Notes for a Buddhist Revolution

“Northrop Frye said that a poet is a myth’s way of making another myth.”
― David R. Loy, The World Is Made of Stories

“growing up is not a matter of discovering who or what one really is, but joining the general amnesia whereby each of us pretends to be an autonomous person and learns how to play the social game of constantly reassuring each other that, yes, you are a person, just like me, and I’m okay, you’re okay.”
― David R. Loy, Lack & Transcendence: The Problem of Death and Life in Psychotherapy, Existentialism, and Buddhism

“your head. Sally Kempton”
― David R. Loy, The World Is Made of Stories

“We are here to awaken from the illusion of our separateness. —THICH NHAT HANH”
― David R. Loy, A New Buddhist Path: Enlightenment, Evolution, and Ethics in the Modern World

“If there is no difference between nirvāṇa and the everyday world, the sacred can be nothing other than the true nature of the secular. To realize this is to experience our phenomenal world as holy: not because it is God’s creation or śūnyatā’s form, not because it recurs again and again, not as symbolic or symptomatic of something else, but as what it is. The question, finally, is not whether the world can be resacralized but whether we will sacralize it fetishistically, because unconsciously, or wholeheartedly, because awake.”
― David R. Loy, Lack & Transcendence: The Problem of Death and Life in Psychotherapy, Existentialism, and Buddhism

“action objectively. Then there is wu-wei: a quiet center that does not change although activity constantly occurs, as in Chuang Tzu’s tranquillity-in-disturbance. Just as in nondual hearing there is awareness of an unchanging silence as the ground from which all sounds arise, so in nondual action the act is experienced as grounded in that which is peaceful and does not act. In both these cases (and others to follow), to forget oneself and completely become something is also to realize its “emptiness” and thus to “transcend” it.”
― David R. Loy, Nonduality: In Buddhism and Beyond

“According to my interpretation of Buddhism, our dissatisfaction with life derives from a repression even more immediate than death-terror: the suspicion ‘ that “I” am not real. The sense-of-self is not self-existing but a mental construction which experiences its groundlessness as a lack. We have seen that this sense-of-lack is consistent with what psychotherapy has discovered about ontological guilt and basic anxiety. We cope with this lack by objectifying it in various ways and try to resolve it through projects which cannot succeed because they do not address the fundamental issue.”
― David R. Loy, Lack and Transcendence: The Problem of Death and Life in Psychotherapy, Existentialism, and Buddhism

“life itself is essentially appropriation, injury, overpowering of the strange and weaker, suppression, severity, imposition of one’s own forms, incorporation and, at the least and mildest, exploitation.”
― David R. Loy, Lack and Transcendence: The Problem of Death and Life in Psychotherapy, Existentialism, and Buddhism

“We too are manifestations of this earth, not exiled spirits that should be preoccupied with qualifying for eternal bliss somewhere else. Nor do we need such an otherworldly reward. The challenge is not to transcend the world but to transcend our usual ways of experiencing it.”
― David R. Loy, Loving the World as Our Body: The Nondual Path in a Dangerous Time

“they are notoriously difficult to understand, which is why they are respected more than they are actually studied”
― David R. Loy, Money, Sex, War, Karma: Notes for a Buddhist Revolution

“As with the wei-wu-wei, “in changing it is at rest” (Heraclitus, frag. 84a). In place of the apparently solid I that does them, there would be an empty and immutably serene quality to them. The experience would be not of a succession of events (winter does not turn into spring) but just-this-one-effortless-thing (tathatā) and then another just-this-one-thing.”
― David R. Loy, Nonduality: In Buddhism and Beyond