Ben O'Hare

“Where everything is bad it must be good to know the worst.”
― Francis H. Bradley

“The Way has never known boundaries; speech has no constancy. But because of [the recognition of a] “this,” there came to be boundaries.... There is left, there is right, there are theories, there are debates.... The sage embraces things. Ordinary men discriminate among them and parade their discrimination before others. So I say, “those who discriminate fail to see.”30”
― Mark Unno, Shingon Refractions: Myoe and the Mantra of Light

“The man who is ready to prove that metaphysical knowledge is wholly impossible has no right here to any answer. He must be referred for conviction to the body of this treatise. And he can hardly refuse to go there, since he himself has, perhaps unknowingly, entered the arena. He is a brother metaphysician with a rival theory of first principles.”
― F.H. Bradley, Appearance and Reality

“The essential point about meditation is this: to get anywhere in meditation you need to be able to really steady the mind and be present. That’s just all there is to it and it is largely a question of just doing it. There is an important shift that happens in people’s practice when they really make the commitment to developing concentration and follow through with it. Until one does this, not much is likely to happen in one’s meditative practice! If you decide to do a concentration practice, stay on that object like a rabid dog until you have enough stability and skill to let the mind rest on it naturally. The first formal goal when training in concentration is to attain something called “access concentration,” meaning the ability to stay consistently with your chosen object with relative ease to the general exclusion of distractions. This is the basic attainment that allows you to access the higher stages of concentration and also to begin the path of insight (the third training), so make attaining access concentration your first goal in your meditative practice. You will know when you have it.”
― Daniel M. Ingram, Mastering the Core Teachings of the Buddha: An Unusually Hardcore Dharma Book - Revised and Expanded Edition