Non Reaction Quotes

“Somebody becomes an enemy if you personalize the unconsciousness that is the ego. Non-reaction is not weakness but strength. Another word for non-reaction is forgiveness. To forgive is to overlook, or rather to look through. You look through the ego to the sanity that is in every human being as his or her essence.”
― Eckhart Tolle, A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose

“Once Luang Por Chah was going to visit a branch monastery down near the Cambodian border. The road through the hills down to the borderlands was very twisting and precipitous. Luang Por Chah was in the front of the little pickup truck with a young Western monk and the driver, while there were a few other monks on the benches in the back.

The Western monk soon realized that the driver was extremely reckless, and he became convinced the driver had a death wish. They were haring around the steep mountain roads, with enormous drops and blind corners, screeching
around one bend after another. The monk sat there the whole time thinking, ‘We’re gonna die! We’re gonna die! We’re gonna die!’ and he kept looking over to Ajahn Chah to see if he was reacting, and whether he was going to ask the driver to slow down. Instead Ajahn Chah sat there quite calmly looking out of the windscreen and didn’t say a thing.

To the young monk’s amazement they got through the hills safely and arrived at their destination. When they got there Ajahn Chah turned around to him with a big grin and said, ‘Scary ride, huh?”
― Ajahn Amaro, The Breakthrough