Subhuti > Quotes

“a sensitive mind eventually starts to feel humiliated by its own craving.”
― Subhuti, Mind in Harmony

“You never enjoy the world aright, till the Sea itself floweth in your veins, till you are clothed with the heavens, and crowned with the stars…”
― Subhuti, Mind in Harmony

“the poisoned flowers of views; and the stench of vagueness.”
― Subhuti, Mind in Harmony

“We don’t have to run forever in the trench cut by habit. We can always strike out in a new”
― Subhuti, Mind in Harmony

“Without this wisdom, the practice of mind watching might become an ineffectual struggle or a self-destructive inner war.”
― Subhuti, Mind in Harmony

“the remaining four intensifiers are, in a sense, no more than emotional engagement focused, sustained, intensified, and applied.”
― Subhuti, Mind in Harmony

“one can, one might say, be ‘hungry’ for the Dharma, ‘hungry’ for truth or virtue: this is called Dharmachanda in Buddhist tradition.”
― Subhuti, Mind in Harmony

“The mental event we are calling resolve is therefore necessary in order to do anything at all, as opposed to just toying with the idea of doing it.”
― Subhuti, Mind in Harmony

“the Buddha mentioned how he took care not to allow the pleasure of dhyāna to ‘gain power over [his] mind’ – an apparent hint at the danger of addiction to such states.”
― Subhuti, Mind in Harmony

“Distraction is not merely something that happens to us; it is something we do. We seek it out, as a strategy for avoiding an uncomfortable confrontation with the way things are.”
― Subhuti, Mind in Harmony

“Wise attention is the kind that keeps the mind in harmony with reality and leads on to happiness.”
― Subhuti, Mind in Harmony

“We should never deny ourselves pleasure at a lower level until we have some genuine experience of pleasure at a somewhat higher level.”
― Subhuti, Mind in Harmony

“Most of what the world calls ‘love’ is really craving, in which the lover identifies the beloved as the solution to his or her inner emptiness and insecurity.”
― Subhuti, Mind in Harmony

“Lucid faith brings a growing relaxation and happiness. This is not a smug pride in knowing a secret that others don’t possess, but a humble confidence that we know the real purpose of life – know where we want to go, and how to get there.”
― Subhuti, Mind in Harmony

“If we want to develop the intensifiers, we must remember that they form a progressive sequence. We therefore need to develop the earlier ones before we can get very far with the later ones.”
― Subhuti, Mind in Harmony

“we all cherish and cling to certain notions about who we are, and what the world is like.”
― Subhuti, Mind in Harmony

“we can resist the impulse to distract ourselves from boredom by embarking on a greedy quest for pleasure. We can refrain, too, from getting addicted to pleasures. Likewise, when someone hurts us, the choice is ours whether to respond with rage or with patience.”
― Subhuti, Mind in Harmony

“It is ultimately about liberation from all suffering and ignorance, which comes about when we recognize that what we call ‘I’ is simply a conditioned phenomenon, constructed in the evolution of consciousness as a means of the organism’s survival, but that now must be seen for what it is if we are to be truly at peace.”
― Subhuti, Mind in Harmony

“Only a fully Enlightened mind experiences feelings that are purely suprapersonal, but this does not mean that we have to wait until Enlightenment to have any glimpse of suprapersonal feeling. Nor does it oblige us to dismiss all our ordinary human feelings as irredeemably ‘egoistic’. Each of us moves towards suprapersonal feeling whenever we experience something of that calm sympathy with other people’s suffering that is called ‘compassion’.”
― Subhuti, Mind in Harmony

“You only have to walk around a shopping mall or watch an evening’s television to realize how little interest most people have in a higher dimension to life.”
― Subhuti, Mind in Harmony

“Seeing people who have the courage to point out the truth about an oppressive regime, for instance, even at the cost of their personal safety, is very inspiring, and one’s response of admiration is a form of faith in this Buddhist sense.”
― Subhuti, Mind in Harmony

“You need the capacity to keep a single resolve in view until it is accomplished,”
― Subhuti, Mind in Harmony

“friend defends your reputation, and so protects your position in society: he ‘stops others who speak against you’ and ‘commends others who speak in praise of you’. To do that, a friend must identify with you even in your absence.”
― Subhuti, Buddhism and Friendship

“physical well-being has a strong emotional effect, supporting those happier and more relaxed states from which meditation generally takes off.”
― Subhuti, Mind in Harmony

“If we have no friends who share our interest in the Dharma, our understanding of it is likely to develop slowly and perhaps lopsidedly, affected by the subjective biases that we inevitably bring to it. We need people with whom we can chew over what we have heard or read, and explore what it all means in practice – people who share our enthusiasm, and with whom we can relax and speak freely.”
― Subhuti, Buddhism and Friendship

“The true resolution of doubt often involves finding the courage to stay with the doubt until one is able to resolve it at a deep enough level, even if that takes a long time.”
― Subhuti, Mind in Harmony

“We are the habit of misinterpreting our world by attributing to it a permanence, substantiality, and potential for satisfaction that it cannot have – and, of course, by imputing a real and permanent self as the owner of experience. That habit is ignorance.”
― Subhuti, Mind in Harmony

“When a bhikkhu [monk] has a good friend, a good companion, a good comrade, it is to be expected that he will develop and cultivate the Noble Eightfold Path.6”
― Subhuti, Buddhism and Friendship

“we experience deep faith when we ‘see’, at least to some degree, that reality is as described in the Dharma, and that the appropriate response to that reality is to emulate the Buddha and participate in the sangha.”
― Subhuti, Mind in Harmony