Mindfulness Zone

From the Enlightened Zen Masters:

In life, lower can exist without the higher but the higher cannot exist without the lower, that’s why it is higher. A man can live the life of a sinner because it is lower, but a man cannot live only the life of a saint. The higher needs the lower.

A man of totality allows the lower to be there because that is the only way for the higher to be there also; then he creates a harmony between the lower and the higher. In that harmony lower is lower no more, higher is higher no more, they have become one, one unity. But if such a total man is seen by you, you will think he is imperfect. In the total man you will sometimes see anger also. Of course his anger has a totally different quality but that you cannot understand. His anger has the quality of compassion. You also have anger, but your anger has not the quality of compassion at all – it is violent.

All perfectionists become escapists, they have to – but you will see perfection in them. They are not real flowers; they are plastic flowers. They can be perfect but they have no fragrance. Fragrance is always of the total and the alive. It is of one who has absorbed everything that life has given, who has transformed his whole being, without denying any part – but then he will not look perfect to you.

From the Enlightened Zen Masters:

Meditate over Murphy's maxim: Nobody notices when things go right.

People notice only when something goes wrong. If everything goes absolutely right, people are not going to notice you at all.

People take notice only when you are doing something wrong. When a dog bites a man it is not news, but when a man bites a dog it is news! So

if you want to become news, bite a dog! Do something stupid, become some kind of nuisance. Only people who are a nuisance are taken notice of.

The more you are a nuisance, the more you will be taken notice of, obviously. If you are a silent person living in deep harmony with yourself and existence, who is going to take any notice of you?

Be happy that nobody is taking notice of you. Because you must be doing everything right.

From the Enlightened Zen Masters:

If you learn how to be delighted in small things: eating food, taking a bath, going for a morning walk; if you can delight in small things – and there are no big things in life, only small things are there – if you delight in small things then small things become great.

And the total accumulated effect of small things lived, celebrated, transforms you. You become religious.

That is the magic key to open the door of religiousness, spirituality.

#zen #mindfulness

From the Enlightened Masters:

The power of peace. It is a totally different power than any other power. It does not interfere, it does not attack. It does not dominate. It attracts, it invites. It wins you over without defeating you. It is so powerful that it is capable of surrendering. It is so powerful that it is even ready to be defeated – joyously, gracefully. And that’s where its great strength is. It is the strength of the water; it is not the strength of a rock.

Become peaceful and you become powerful; power starts exuding from around you. Become more and more peaceful; as you become peaceful in the center of your being, your circumference starts becoming very powerful. But the power is non-violent; it is the power of love. It helps people, it serves people; it becomes a blessing to them.

Power without peace is dangerous; peace without power is false, a pretension. When peace and power are both together, then know that something has really happened, that you are transformed.

#Mindfulness #Zen

From the Enlightened Masters:

The whole system of education is nothing but to create prisoners. It is a very subtle mechanism to keep people unalive, to allow them only minimum of life. And it is a great conspiracy against men because it poisons their consciousness. It makes them ambitious, ambitious for money, power, prestige. And life is so short that they waste their precious life running after futile things.

The real education will not teach you ambition, cannot teach you ambition. It will teach you the beauty of being non-ambitious... because only a non-ambitious person can be loving and compassionate, and only a non-ambitious person can be really humane. Only a non-ambitious person can be non-violent, non-greedy, non-jealous.

The real education will not teach you how to move into the world of power and politics. It will teach you how to go in, how to turn in. It will teach you the inner journey. It will not teach you concentration; it will teach you meditation. But whatsoever exists in the name of education today never teaches you meditation. Certainly it teaches you concentration, because concentration is the way of the violent mind. Be focused on a target and put your whole energy into it, because life is a tug-of-war and you have to fight, and you have to be tough. You have to become an arrow moving with one-pointed concentration towards a target.

#Mindfulness #Zen

From the Enlightened Zen Masters:

If I give you a seed of a beautiful tree, and you become too much concerned with the seed, and you try to understand it, and you dissect it, and you go on and on trying to understand and dissect, and dissect more -- the chemical structure, the physical structure, the atomic structure, the electrons, the neutrons -- and you go on and on, you completely forget that the seed was meant only to become a tree.

And howsoever deep your dissection, by dissecting a seed you are never going to come to the tree. You will come to the atomic structure of the seed, you will come to the chemical structure of the seed; you may come to the electrical structure of the seed, but that has nothing to do with the tree. And the more you dissect the seed, the farther away you are from the tree. Your dissection is not going to bloom. Your dissection is not going to spread its fragrance. And one day, if you have dissected it too much, and then you put it in the soil, it won't sprout. It is already dead.

Zen also tries to understand mind -- not to understand mind itself, but to go beyond it. The understanding is to be used as a stepping-stone. So Zen is not concerned with the details of the mind. An essential understanding of the functioning of the mind will do. If you go into details there is no end to it. Zen also studies mind, but just to make you awake, that's all. 

#Mindfulness #Zen

From the Enlightened Zen Masters:

Peace is not to be practiced: it is a by-product of awareness.

Love is not to be practiced: it is a by-product of awareness.

Righteousness is not to be practiced: it is a by-product of awareness.

Awareness is the remedy for all ills, because awareness makes you healthy, whole, and of course holy.

#Mindfulness #Zen