You Cannot Avoid Paradise. You Can Only

Meditation Practice Is Simply Moving From A Life Of Hurting Myself And Others To A Life Of Not Hurting Myself And Others.

Most Of Our Difficulties, Our Hopes, And Our Worries Are Empty Fantasies. Nothing Has Ever Existed Except This Moment. That's All There Is. That's All We Are. Yet Most Human Beings Spend 50 To 90 Percent Or More Of Their Time In Their Imagination, Living In Fantasy. We Think About What Has Happened To Us, What Might Have Happened, How We Feel About It, How We Should Be Different, How Others Should Be Different, How It's All A Shame, And On And On; It's All Fantasy, All Imagination. Memory Is Imagination. Every Memory That We Stick To Devastates Our Life.

Practice Has To Be A Process Of Endless Disappointment. We Have To See That Everything We Demand (and Even Get) Eventually Disappoints Us. This Discovery Is Our Teacher.

All I Can Be Is Who I Am Right Now; I Can Experience That And Work With It. That's All I Can Do. The Rest Is The Dream Of The Ego.

My Dog Doesn't Worry About The Meaning Of Life. She May Worry If She Doesn't Get Her Breakfast, But She Doesn't Sit Around Worrying Whether She Will Get Fulfilled Or Liberated Or Enlightened. As Long As She Gets Some Food And A Little Affection, Her Life Is Fine. But We Human Beings Are Not Like Dogs. We Have Self-centered Minds Which Get Us Into Plenty Of Trouble. If We Do Not Come To Understand The Error In The Way We Think, Our Self-awareness, Which Is Our Greatest Blessing, Is Also Our Downfall.