Brad Warner Quotes

Disappointment is just the action of your brain readjusting itself to reality after discovering things are not the way you thought they were.

How many Zen masters does it take to screw in a light bulb? The plum tree in the garden!

You can always improve your situation. But you do so by facing it, not by running away.

Compassion is the ability to see what needs doing right now and the willingness to do it right now.

You can't function in society if you don't involve yourself in the fictions society accepts about time. But you do so with the understanding that you're playing a game.

The truth comes when you can see that your self-image is just a convenient reference point and nothing more, and that you as you had imagined yourself do not exist.

Do what you do as well as you possibly can. That's Buddhist morality.

Truly compassionate action arises spontaneously without thought and is carried out in real action with no anticipation of reward and, indeed, no concept of a doer of that action.

Your role is to do and say the things that need to be done and said from your unique perspective.

Reality's all you've got. But here's the real secret, the real miracle: it's enough.

The real goal of Zen is to find a way of life that's easy and undramatic. Strong attachments lead to upset and drama.

You won’t understand life and death until you’re ready to set aside any hope of understanding life and death and just live your life until you die.

Buddha might be the one thing that could settle Godzilla down. He might say, "Listen Godzilla, you don't have to do all this. Just chill out a little bit and everything will be fine".

The problem is the way we let our desires stand in the way of our enjoyment of what we already have.

People imagine enlightenment will make them incredibly powerful. And it does. It makes you the most powerful being in all the universe- but usually no one else notices.

Leaving home' to me means adopting the attitude that the pursuit of the truth is more vital than the pursuit of what society — your home — tells you is important.

You can't live in paradise—but you are living right here. Make this your paradise or make this your hell. The choice is entirely yours. Really.

Just know that your expectations are only thoughts in your head, and keep on doing what you do.

Faith keeps you going, but doubt keeps you from going off the deep end.

we ourselves are not something apart from our circumstances. What we are and where we are are one and the same.

The thinking brain influences the body’s responses and it makes a neat little loop.

I remember writing the post but not what I said specifically, so I'll either repeat myself or say something completely different and baffle everybody.

What attracted me to Zen was my first teacher, Tim McCarthy. He was extremely genuine. It wasn't even really a Zen thing, that sort of came along later.

But people do the same thing with the Bible. They memorize all the fictional characters, the parameters and the rules of the game and think it's important, but I can't get excited about that myself.

As for enlightenment, that's just for people who can't face reality.

No matter what we predict for our futures, we're always wrong anyway. The only sensible thing to do is to live this life as it is right now. Leave what happens after you die till after you die.

Morality is a personal matter.

The state of ambiguity - that messy, greasy, mixed-up, confused, and awful situation you're living through right now - is enlightenment itself.

I was very attracted to the way that Zen did not go into the imagination land. And now I've forgotten what your first question was and how we were going to tie this together.

It's crazy to me how concerned people get with what it looks like and what you can do there. People may as well be talking about JRR Tolkien or Star Trek or something.

Real morality is based on a single criterion: right action, appropriate action, in the present moment and present situation.

True mindfulness is the awareness that everything you encounter is a vigorous expression of the same living universe as you.

It may look like we're doing nothing when we sit zazen. But actually we are exposing ourselves to ourselves.

Buddhism is all about finding your own way, not imitating the ways of others or even the ways of Buddha himself.

I used to worry when I was a teenager, even into my twenties, after I'd heard something about schizophrenia and how people just suddenly become schizophrenic that I was insane.

Suffering occurs when your ideas about how things ought to be don't match how they really are.

If a tree falls in the forest and it hits a mime, would he make a noise?

So I do fear death in the sense that I find the prospect of dying pretty scary. But I no longer fear that I will one day be annihilated and cease to exist.