A lot of seriously insane people have managed to acquire huge followings based on the idea that their insanity is a kind of enlightenment. An obvious example would be Charles Manson or Shoko Asahara who is the person responsible for the Sarin gas attack on the Tokyo subway.

Brad Warner

Categorized in : Ideas People Insanity

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

Brad Warner

disappointment discovery reality

We always imagine that there's got to be somewhere else better than where we are right now; this is the Great Somewhere Else we all carry around in our heads. We believe Somewhere Else is out there for us if only we could find it. But there's no Somewhere Else. Everything is right here...Make this your paradise or make this your hell. The choice is entirely yours. Really.

Brad Warner

choices somewhere-else believe

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

Brad Warner

running-away situation running

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

Brad Warner

ability compassion needs

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

Brad Warner

buddhist morality wells

There are many diamonds in the world and if you lose your favorite, you can work hard, earn a lot of money and get another one to replace it. But the moments of your life aren't like that. Once they're gone, they'll never return. Each and every one is the most precious thing in existence. You can never meaningfully compare one moment with any other. You can never meaningfully compare your life with anyone else's. No matter how rich someone else may be, no matter how happy they look, no matter how enlightened they seem, they can never be you. Never, ever, ever. Only you can live your life.

Brad Warner

live-your-life hard-work matter

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.

Brad Warner

understanding games fiction

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.

Brad Warner

convenient truth self

If you want to believe in reincarnation, you have to believe that this life, what you're living through right now, is the afterlife. You're missing out on the afterlife you looked forward to in your last existence by worrying about your next life. This is what happens after you die. Take a look.

Brad Warner

afterlife worry believe

The trick to not thinking is not adding energy to the equation in an effort to forcibly stop thinking from happening. It’s more a matter of subtracting energy from the equation in order not to barf the thoughts up and start chewing them over again.

Brad Warner

effort order thinking

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

Brad Warner

perspective unique needs

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.

Brad Warner

live-your-life life-and-death understanding

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

Brad Warner

miracle real secret

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.

Brad Warner

doers rewards real

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.

Brad Warner

enlightenment powerful people

At times, Zen does get into some Buddhist Cosmology. Nishijima Roshi, my main teacher would talk about that and almost every time immediately say that it was only one way of looking at it. Whenever addressing realms of Heaven or Hell, he'd also address that it was just a psychological state.

Brad Warner

buddhist teacher heaven

So he [Shoko Asahara] was insane but managed to convince a couple thousand people that he was enlightened. Western culture, which Japan is now definitely a part of, doesn't have an understanding of what Enlightenment is.

Brad Warner

japan couple people

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

Brad Warner

problem desire way

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

Brad Warner

circumstances

Since then, my approach to all things spiritual is rather cynical you could say. When somebody present something to me as spiritual, my first instinct is to be cynical and think, "oh yeah, one of those again." You see so much of it see in "spiritual culture" and people get very excited about it. It's all very "hoo haw."

Brad Warner

spiritual people thinking