Mahayana Buddhism - Emptiness
"None of this is real. All of this is an illusion and your acceptance of that fact is the beginning of the pathway to self-knowledge.
None of this exists. All important decisions in the universe occur someplace else.
Everything that you are or conceive of yourself as being is just an idea. It's an illusion. It's a hallucination.
None of this has ever been or will ever be; all is an appearance, all is an illusion. Illusions are truth. All illusions are real. We say illusion, meaning that they're shadows.
We've decided what we are. That's the dream. When the dream fades, it's not that we don't exist. How could we not exist since we never existed?
We were never there to begin with. What we are, or conceive of ourselves as, is a perception.
We are everything and we are nothing. We are a forgotten moment. We don't even exist, which is the freeing part. We just think we do. That's the illusion.
There is no self, yet we all exist. All phenomena are "empty," yet they have Buddha nature.
The way you become happy is by realizing that there is no self. No self at all, not a silly millimeter of self. You don't exist. When you know this, you will be happy.
Some types of nothing are better than other types of nothing.
Nothing is or is not unless you happen to think it so. That's what Shakespeare said, and he knew.
You are fighting against nothingness all the time by creating a series of shields that you call personality, life history, feelings, ideas, and ways of seeing.
When you visit Nirvana, there is neither existence nor nonexistence. Your baggage never arrives because there is no one there to claim it.
Qualityless simply means there is no way to discuss it. There is no way to pin it down. It could be anything at any given moment since infinity is not bound even by itself, nor the words that human beings choose to try and talk around it.
There is no evil, there's no bad; there's no good. These are human ideas. There's no creator, there's no creation; there's no God, there's no nirvana, there's no perfection. These are ideas.
The world is always ending and always beginning at every moment.
How do you know you're even here right now? Perhaps you're not. Perhaps you're far, far away and this is just a dream.
Life is a series of dreams, a series of interlocking awarenesses. I don't necessarily believe in linear time. Everything happens all at once forever.
All incarnations are lived at once, and yet there does seem to be a linear sense of time when you're in the vortex of time and space when your consciousness is fixated in a body.
There is no deterioration and there is no creation. There are projections, moments of existence. Each moment is perfect.
The world is empty -- all of the people and places, the earth, the seas, mountains, deserts, forests and cities, and the beings that inhabit them, are unchangeable.
We can only conceive of changing the self-reflection in response to our concept of self-reflection, which is predicated on our concept of self, which is a self-reflection.
We aren't anything in particular. There is no self. There are only ideas and states of mind.
The continuity of awareness is your perceptual field. Existence only occurs through the act of perception.
Step beyond your role as a perceiver, merge everything into the flux. You're going to go to stillness. When that happens, the world collapses. There is no time, no space, no viewer, no viewing…no object in view.
We are made up of nothing. There is no self. We are whatever we decide we are.
When you stop all thought, the battle is won. Everything is still and peaceful. You will come to see the eternal voidness of all things. You will see that nothing is, really.
The world wasn't created. It is created anew at every moment by mind.
Mind only comes into apparent existence through the action of perception. Mind appears to exist because it perceives.
What is incarnation? Incarnation is self-reflection. The universe that we are in is constructed, is a reflection of ourselves. We picked the dimension according to our self-reflection.
To go beyond karma you have to end the structure of self.
There is no self. There is nobody home. No forwarding address, no zip code. Address unknown.
There is no such thing as reality. Reality is what you make it.
Nirvana is something that cannot be known here. I know it seems incongruous, but it is only incongruous from the perspective of the dialectical consciousness of division, of time and space
So in the world of Enlightenment, things are just things, except they're not things. We're in nirvana. There is no debating team.
We label things through value systems that we have developed. But nothing is or is not unless we feel it is that way. We give ground to reality by creating it."
- Zen Master Rama, Dr. Frederick Lenz
www.ramaquotes.com
