#sm

In the process of burning out these confusions, we discover enlightenment. If the process were otherwise, the awakened state of mind would be a product dependent upon cause and effect and therefore liable to dissolution. Anything which is created must, sooner or later, die. If enlightenment were created in such a way, there would always be a possibility of ego reasserting itself, causing a return to the confused state. Enlightenment is permanent because we have not produced it; we have merely discovered it. ↗

— Chögyam Trungpa

#confusion #discovery #enlightenment #philosophy #self-discovery

Limitations gone: Since my mind fixed on the moon, Clarity and serenity Make something for which There's no end in sight. ↗

— Saigyō

#buddhism

Tightly held by rocks Through winter, the ice today Begins to come undone: A way-seeker also is the water, Melting, murmuring from the moss. ↗

— Saigyō

#buddhism

Why are you unhappy? Because 99.9 percent of everything you think, and of everything you do, is for yourself—and there isn’t one. ↗

— Wei Wu Wei

#happiness #buddhism

Mindfulness has never met a cognition it didn't like. ↗

— Daniel J. Siegel

#mindfulness #psychology #buddhism

Our culture has filled our heads but emptied our hearts, stuffed our wallets but starved our wonder. It has fed our thirst for facts but not for meaning or mystery. It produces "nice" people, not heroes. ↗

— Peter Kreeft

#christianity #culture #culture-critique #heroes #jesus-shock

Don’t misunderstand me. The terrorist actions of Al-Qaeda were and are unmitigatedly evil. But the astonishing naivety which decreed that America as a whole was a pure, innocent victim, so that the world could be neatly divided up into evil people (particularly Arabs) and good people (particularly Americans and Israelis), and that the latter had a responsibility now to punish the former, is a large-scale example of what I’m talking about - just as it is immature and naive to suggest the mirror image of this view, namely that the western world is guilty in all respects and that all protestors and terrorists are therefore completely justified in what they do. In the same way, to suggest that all who possess guns should be locked up, or (the American mirror-image of this view) that everyone should carry guns so that good people can shoot bad ones before they can get up to their tricks, is simply a failure to think into the depths of what’s going on. ↗

— N.T. Wright

#evil #god #justice #theology #respect

It is to the Cross that the Christian is challenged to follow his Master: no path of redemption can make a detour around it. ↗

— Hans Urs von Balthasar

#christ #christianity #cross #crucifixion #jesus

I for one believe that if you give people a thorough understanding of what confronts them and the basic causes that produce it, they'll create their own program, and when the people create a program, you get action. ↗

— Malcolm X

#activism

Heroes are people who face down their fears. It is that simple. A child afraid of the dark who one day blows out the candle; a women terrified of the pain of childbirth who says, 'It is time to become a mother'. Heroism does not always live on the battlefield. ↗

— David Gemmell

#fear #heroism #heroism