Bernie Glassman Quotes

Let me give you a wonderful Zen practice. Wake up in the morning...look in the mirror, and laugh at yourself.

People get stuck a lot because they're afraid to act; in the worst case,...we get so attached to some end result that we can't function. We need help just to move on, only life doesn't wait.

The more you learn, the more you know that you're not so hot.

We freeze up because we expect a certain result or because we want things to be perfect.

Covorul ăla lumina toată camera, nu-i așa?

Îmi savurez cafeaua

Bearing witness is not something to be done only at Auschwitz. When we bear witness to the unfolding of our daily lives, not shrinking from any situation that arises, we learn. We open to what is. And in that process, a healing arises.

But how to “take the side” of the oppressed without “taking sides” against the oppressors? How to oppose without denouncing? How to “be with” without “being against?” No neat answers are possible. But I have found help from Gandhi’s example of ahimsa and from the ongoing practice of mindfulness-meditation. Gandhi’s program for non-violence was, I believe, precisely what we are talking about: he stood firmly with the colonized people of India, but he never hated, or humiliated, or spoke ill of the British colonizers. Thus, he never broke off his connections with them. They knew he opposed them, but they did not feel he was against them. Indeed, they knew he respected and cared for them. Gandhi opposed, but he also embraced. To do that, one must be acting from a well-nurtured spiritual center. This is another reason why all our liberating action must arise out of our uniting contemplation – why, as Roshi Bernie Glassman told me, I’ll never stop the death squads unless I realize my oneness with them.

Zazen is the elimination of distance between subject and object.

Koan study is traditionally practiced in face-to-face encounters between student and teacher and requires an experiential, rather than an intellectual, grasp of the material.

Three Treasures: the Buddha, which refers to the world of oneness; the Dharma, which is the world of form; and the Sangha, or the relationship that says the two are really the same thing. We begin such study the simple way, by seeing the world of oneness, of emptiness.

There are many ways to express a broken heart: tears, laughter, silence, dance, and even German lullabies. You don't find wholeness till you're ready to be broken. Evening after evening we found new ways to express our brokenness. Each time we did this, a healing arose.

We often think that to be spiritual or enlightened we need to have some special experiences, just as we think that in order to make a great meal or become a master chef we need special ingredients and a fancy kitchen. But all we have to do to make a meal is put all the pots and pans and ingredients in their proper places. And all we have to do to be in touch with our spirituality is to let the mind settle itself, like a cloudy glass of city tap water.

As soon as you create something you create a boundary.

In honoring our diversity, we discovered our oneness. By accepting our differences, we came together as one people.

The thing we have in common is our diversity.

We yearn to find things that are common to all human beings, around which we can come together. But underlying that yearning is the desire for people to be the same, to be the same as us, to affirm our way of seeing things. And that’s the trap.

Adolf Hitler had also wanted a one-people event. His way of doing it was to eliminate diversity. He created hundreds of places like Auschwitz and Birkenau where he could destroy diversity and create one people who looked the same, thought the same, lived the same. But he couldn’t do it. Because the one thing we ultimately have in common is that we’re all different.

Our actions—whether they make peace or war—reverberate throughout this universe.