Bodhidharma Quotes

To ask the mind to kill itself is like making the thief the policeman. He will go with you and pretend to catch the thief, but nothing will be gained. So you must turn inward and see where the mind rises from, and then it will cease to exist.

it is in our minds that we live much of our life.

As you think, so you become.....Our busy minds are forever jumping to conclusions, manufacturing and interpreting signs that aren't there.

Mind concentrates: it acts out of the past. Meditation acts in the present, out of the present.

We deal with our mind from morning till evening, and it can be our best friend or our worst enemy.

Every neurotic is partly in the right.

Becoming conscious is of course a sacrilege against nature; it is as though you had robbed the unconscious of something.

Truth comes when your mind and heart are purged of all sense of striving and you are no longer trying to become somebody; it is there when the mind is very quiet, listening timelessly to everything.

There is no Final Resting Place of the Mind.

You live your life between your ears.

Your unhappiness ultimately arises not from the circumstances of your life but from the conditioning of your mind.

Unless you come out of your mind and become a no-mind you will not know what life is all about, you will live in vain. You will not have your honeymoon, it is impossible. You will not know the sweetness that existence is full of and the ecstasy.

When your alarm goes off and you jump out of bed, what is the nature of the mind in that moment? Are you already like, "oh my God," your calendar pops into your mind and you're driven already, or can you take a moment and just lie in bed and just feel your body breathing. And remember, "oh yeah, brand new day and I'm still alive." So, I get out of bed with awareness, brush my teeth with awareness. When you're in the shower next time check and see if you're in the shower.

Because of Christianity the West has missed many things, and one of them is meditation, the rarest flowering of a human being, because they have made it equivalent to contemplation. Contemplation is thinking. Meditation is no-thinking.

You can't think about presence, and the mind can't understand it. Understanding presence is being present.

Everything is based on mind, is led by mind, is fashioned by mind. If you speak and act with a pure mind, happiness will follow you, as a shadow clings to a form.

The state of presence is the only state in which creative energy is available to you.

To stay close and intimate with experience is to stay close to the mind; the nitty gritty mind of the way things really are.

It seems to me that the real problem is the mind itself and not the problem which the mind has created and tries to solve.

Waiting is a state of mind that says we want what we don't have. Therefore, with every kind of waiting we produce an inner conflict between now and the projected future. This greatly reduces the quality of our life. Are you a 'habitual waiter'?

Waiting is a state of mind. Basically, it means that you want the future; you don't want the present. You don't want what you've got, and you want what you haven't got. With every kind of waiting, you unconsciously create inner conflict between your here and now, where you don't want to be, and the projected future, where you want to be. This greatly reduces the quality of your life by making you lose the present.

I can no longer be sure whether the psyche is in me or whether I'm in the psyche.

It's cute how I used to think this 'barely holding it together' feeling was temporary.

The quality of your consciousness at this moment is what shapes the future — which, of course, can only be experienced as the Now