Shinzen Young Quotes

“Creating a house of cards is difficult because one has to go against entropy to do so. Eliminating a house of cards is simple: just remove any one of the base cards and the house of cards spontaneously tumbles. That’s because the tumbling of the house of cards flows with entropy. Natural events tend to flow with entropy. If enlightenment is natural, it’s reasonable to assume that it flows with entropy. It’s more like collapsing a house of cards, less like having to build one.”

“Each day is peppered with a holy glow.”

“It’s fine to sometimes use these archetypes as a conduit to get information from the depths, but I recommend that you mostly use them as a conduit to bring clarity and equanimity to the depths. Become fascinated with how they move, and less tripped out with what they mean.”

“Such a Zen dialogue is basically a contest, but it’s really an anti-contest. It’s a kind of reverse or paradoxical contest. It works like this: two people talk, and the first one who speaks from the ego loses. The one who wants to win is certainly going to lose.”

“The Tibetans have an exclamatory cry reserved just for when that window opens. The cry is Emaho! which might be loosely rendered “Oh my God! Who would have thought it’s this simple!”

“A beginning meditator can sometimes get a taste of the stage that, according to the Visuddhimagga, immediately precedes enlightenment.”

“A sensory experience is just some tiny part of the universe—the wind touching your face, an act of making love, tying your shoes, being angry with a student—yet when we experience any of these completely, it links us to the fullness of Creation and the vacuity of the Creator.”

“Because Shingon is Vajrayana, the main meditation practice involves working with visualizations, mantras, and mudra gestures. You replace your self-image with that of an archetype, you replace your usual mental talk with the mantra of that archetype, and you take on the physical and emotional body experience of that archetype through making mudras—ritual hand gestures. If your concentration is good enough, your identity briefly shifts. You become that archetype.”

“But in my experience as a teacher, enlightenment usually sneaks up on people. Sometimes they don’t quite realize how enlightened they’ve become over time because they have gradually acclimatized to it.”

“Enlightenment is not a peak from which you descend over time. It is a plateau from which you ascend, further and further as the months, years, and decades pass.”

“Five decades ago, some very kind people in Japan slipped me the secret: you can dramatically extend life—not by multiplying the number of your years, but by expanding the fullness of your moments.”

“Five decades ago, some very kind people in Japan slipped me the secret: you can dramatically extend life—not by multiplying the number of your years, but by expanding the fullness of your moments. Knowing that I have”

“Freedom should be manifested within clear ethical guidelines and an egalitarian feedback structure. Informed”

“Gone points to the Source of your own consciousness.”

“Harvard Medical School, Carnegie Mellon University, and University of Vermont. One result that I’m particularly pleased with is a breakthrough piece of research that Dr. David Vago”

“He then said something even more mind-boggling. “As a general principle, any positive state that you experience within the context of silent sitting practice, you must try to attain in the midst of ordinary life.”

“He was a rationalist, he downplayed the role of authority, and he was critical of the inequities of the caste system as it existed then. He was the only religious leader in the history of the world who asked people not to follow his teachings based on his authority. That’s a quite modern, egalitarian, and refreshing point of view.”

“I learned that impermanence is not merely something that you experience in your sensory circuits. It also informs your motor circuits. It’s a kind of effortless energy that you can “ride on” in daily life. It imparts a bounce to your step, a flow to your voice, and a vibrancy to your creative thought. I also learned about the expansion-contraction paradigm for how consciousness works.”

“I often say that my life’s passion lies in exploring what may arise from the cross-fertilization of the best of the East with the best of the West. Meditation is the systematic exploration of nature from the inside, and the East has done better than anyone else. Science is systematic exploration of nature from the outside. It’s what the West did best—at least between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries.”

“If science were to make enlightenment massively available to humanity, we should expect to see numerous and stunning positive improvements in the human situation: dramatic reduction in conflict and violence from the interpersonal level to the international level, reduction in crime and substance addiction, vast improvement in the global baseline of physical and mental health, and probably even a general elevation of human intelligence.”

“In India, there is a word that means both “cessation” and “satisfaction” as a single linked concept. The word is nirvana.”

“Is meditation really that valuable? Yes it is, because a person’s base level of concentration is, in a sense, the most valuable thing that they have. Anything a person may want will be more easily attained if they are functioning from a high level of effortless focus. The entire range of human endeavors relies on concentration, and if your base level of concentration is elevated through practice, it means that you can function from a continuous state of extraordinary focus every day.”

“It is not unreasonable that in contact with modern science, and inspired by the spirit of history, the original discoveries of Gautama, rigorized and extended, will play a large part in the direction of human destiny.”

“It may require ongoing and intensive support from teachers and other practitioners to remind you to keep applying these interventions.”

“It took me twenty years to hone my current definition of Gone.”

“It’s like you were driving from San Francisco to Los Angeles for an important meeting. But along the way, you turned here and there to entertain yourself with the scenery. Somewhere along the line, without realizing it, you’re no longer moving north to south. Instead, you’re now headed east toward Denver!
Once you go out horizontally into the intermediate realm, there is no end to the new and interesting stuff you can experience: encounters with angels or entities, psychic abilities, out-of-body experiences, bright lights or colors, past lives, weird internal sounds. The scenery is really cool, but you’re never going to make that important meeting.”

“It’s not intuitively obvious that noting Gone would bring fulfillment, but many people over the ages have discovered this, hence the Sanskrit word nirvana. Are there any other counterintuitive “Gone goodies”? Indeed, yes. There is one more major one.”

“Meditation elevates a person’s base level of focus. By focus, I mean the ability to attend to what’s relevant in a given situation.”

“Most growth modalities—from nineteenth-century psychoanalysis to twentieth-century Scientology, and just about everything in between—share a common paradigm. It goes something like this: we store influences from the past in the subconscious, those influences inappropriately affect our behavior and perception in the present, and our job is to somehow remove those distorting influences.”

“My current way of teaching mindfulness is, in part, informed by this early Shingon training. I have people observe self in terms of inner mental images, mental talk, and emotional body sensation, the three sensory elements used in the Vajrayana deity yoga practice. I’ve created a hybrid approach. What I have people observe is derived from the Japanese Vajrayana paradigm: self = mental image + mental talk + body. But how I have people observe is derived from mindfulness, which has its origin in Southeast Asian Theravada practice.”