Buddhism Is Not for Wimps
People come to Buddhism from many angles: wanting to learn meditation, mindfulness, or compassion. We’re drawn in through a need of self improvement. But unlike most self-help instruction, Buddhism does not cater to those who want to pamper themselves and coddle their fragile egos, their wants and desires. On the contrary, Buddhism chases those delusions right out of our heads.
In fact, Buddhism asks us to dig so deeply that we get to the very core of our being, and it’s not a pretty sight in there. It takes a lot of effort and hard work to shuck a lifetime of unskillful thinking habits, wasteful assumptions, and sources of unhappiness. We want to dispute it, to say, No, Buddha, you are so wrong. But look closely, and you’ll see the practice is spot on, sometimes painfully so.
Two of my favorite Buddhist books that spoke deeply to me, were hard-hitting, and to the point were The Buddha Said: Meeting the Difficulties of Life’s Challenges by OSHO, and Who Is My Self?: A Guide to Buddhist Meditation by Ayya Khema. Below are some of my favorite quotes from those book, quotes that really define Buddhist concepts and the work we have to do.
OSHO said . . .
“Without self love, you can not love others. All you can give is your loneliness and unhappiness.”
“Consciousness is like a lake. With waves it becomes a mind, without waves it becomes a soul. . . . The lake can be without waves, but the waves cannot be without the lake. . . . Once the waves are no longer there, you are simply consciousness.”
“Mine, you, me, I — this is a trap. And this trap creates misery, neurosis, madness.”
“God is nothing but a search for security, a search for safety, a search for shelter . . . God is a prop — it helps you, it consoles you, it comforts you.”
“God is not truth. It’s the greatest lie there is.”
“A mind full of passion is a mind full of discontent with the present . . . It postpones. It says tomorrow; it is never here and now.”
“Whenever there is desire, you have gone astray.”
“Reality is already there. You have not to think about it. . . . You have to drop all thinking so that you can see what is truth.”
“The ego exists because we go on peddling desire, because we go on striving to get something, because we go on jumping ahead of ourselves. . . If you are in the present, the ego is a mirage; it starts disappearing.”
“Wisdom cannot be found in scriptures. It is an experience, it is not knowledge.”
“Happiness is not to be sought; it the very stuff the universe is made of.”
“Just watch how desire brings hell . . . how it is hell.”
“Awareness is desirelessness. Awareness of the desire brings desirelessness. This key has to be used to open many locks.”
“Life should be based on needs, not desires.”
“The seeker has to go alone on the pilgrimage. Truth is not something outside of you, otherwise you could go in company. Only you can penetrate it; no body else can go with you. The path has to be traveled in amazing aloneness.”
Ayya said . . .
“Self comes into being when we identify with the observer, with thoughts, with reactions, feelings, sense-contacts. We take the mind to be me. We will eventually observe that there is no one there.”
“The mind is a magician. It can produce a magic show at any time.”
“Nothing that we have, or think, or do has any basic or profound importance. It simply is happening.”
“The only reason people retain their negativities is because they justify them, putting the blame on others or something in the world outside of themselves.”
“We live in this world. We live in bodies that need food, oxygen, water, and many other things. But inner fulfillment never depends on anything external. We cannot pipe it in from outside, for there is no pipeline. Fulfillment can only come from within.”
“Our minds latch onto this and that . We think of what we could do in the future and what we have done in the past. All this mental activity serves one purpose — to support the craving to be. Through using a meditation subject such as the breath, we learn to let go of discursive thinking. As we do, calm and tranquility arise.”
“The Buddha said the only road to happiness was to see the self for what it is: a wrong idea, a mental formation.”
“We do not have to get rid of the “self,” but we do have to apprehend it. Until we know it for what it is, we will never be able to lose it, for in order to let something go, it must first be truly in our grasp.”
“As long as we believe in a personal self–an entity, an identity, which is limited, and very dependent on sense-contacts–suffering will never disappear.”
“The self wants protection, wants opportunities for sensual gratification, and wants to feel safe. Yet, we all know there is no safety to be found anywhere in the world. Deep inside, we feel just as unsafe as before. Yet, if there is no self, there is nobody who needs that feeling of safety.”
“Happiness escapes us because we are in the middle of our inner mental and emotional cravings.”
“The Buddha promises that the doctrine he teaches for getting rid of the assumed self will bring about the disappearance of all defiling mental states, so that within there will only be purity and perfection of wisdom.”
“When there is no longer any kind of defilement, mindfulness and clear awareness become our natural state of being.”
“Fill your heart with the most beautiful aspects you can think of, making it a wonderful place to rest in, and then look in the beauty of your heart, enjoy and love it.”
