Noah Levine Quotes

Waking up is not a selfish pursuit of happiness, it is a revolutionary stance, from the inside out, for the benefit of all beings in existence.

It's easy to hate and point out everything that is wrong with the world; it is the hardest and most important work in one's life to free oneself from the bonds of fear and attachment.

Sitting still is a pain in the ass.

Quoting son, Noah Levine: Once you see what the heart really needs, it doesn’t matter if you’re going to live or die, the work is always the same. (25)

The truth is, going against the internal stream of ignorance is way more rebellious than trying to start some sort of cultural revolution.

The inner revolution will not be televised or sold on the Internet. It must take place within one's own mind and heart.

God has abandoned you. Fear does not serve you. Your heart has betrayed you. Only the music can guide you.

...I didn't feel like there was anything incompatible with my love of gangster rap and my spiritual aspirations.

Happiness is closer to the experience of acceptance and contentment than it is to pleasure. True happiness exists as the spacious and compassionate heart's willingness to feel whatever is present.

We are born into a realm of constant change. Everything is decaying. We are continually losing all that we come in contact with. Our tendency to get attached to impermanent experiences causes sorrow, lamentation and grief, because eventually we are separated from everything and everyone we love. Our lack of acceptance and understanding of this fact makes life unsatisfactory.

The greatest satisfaction comes not from chasing pleasure and avoiding pain, but from the radical acceptance of life as it is, without fighting and clinging to passing desires.

Everything is impermanent. Every physical and mental experience arises and passes. Everything in existence is endlessly arising out of causes and conditions. We all create suffering for ourselves through our resistance, through our desire to have things different than the way they are - that is, our clinging or aversion.

The body breathes by itself. The mind thinks by itself. Awareness simply observes the process without getting lost in the content.

While we are in recovery we need to be able to strike a balance between not allowing our ego to do all the talking and not letting our low self-esteem to only present what is wrong with us.

Spiritual revolutionaries must be committed not to what is easiest, but to what is most beneficial to themselves and the world.

We must do away with any shred of denial, minimization, justification, or rationalization. To recover, we must completely and totally understand and accept the truth that addiction creates suffering.

Religion, which was obviously created to give meaning and purpose to people, has become part of the oppression. This is true in both Eastern and Western religious traditions. The Buddha, Jesus and Muhammad were all revolutionaries who critiqued and attempted to dismantle the corrupt societal traditions of their time. Yet their teachings, like most things in human society, have been distorted and co-opted by the confused and power-hungry patriarchal tradition. What were wonce the creation myths of ancient cultures, have become doctrines of oppression. More blood has been spilled and more people oppressed in the name of religion than for any other reason in history.

Everything is unfolding based on causes and conditions. Our happiness or suffering is dependent on how we relate to the present moment. If we cling now, we suffer later. If we let go and respond with compassion or friendliness, we create happiness and well-being for the future.

With mindfulness we have the choice of responding with compassion to the pain of craving, anger, fear and confusion. Without mindfulness we are stuck in the reactive pattern and identification that will inevitably create more suffering and confusion.

We must not confuse letting go of past injuries with feeling an obligation to let the injurers back into our life. The freedom of forgiveness often includes a firm boundary and loving distance from those who have harmed us. As my father likes to say, "We can let them back into our hearts without ever letting them back into our house.

Renunciation is not about pushing something away, it is about letting go. It's facing the fact that certain things cause us pain, and they cause other people pain. Renunciation is a commitment to let go of things that create suffering. It is the intention to stop hurting ourselves and others.

Finally we are being told the truth: life isn’t always easy and pleasant. We already know this to be true, but somehow we tend to go through life thinking that there is something wrong with us when we experience sadness, grief, and physical and emotional pain. The first truth points out that this is just the way it is. There is nothing wrong with you: you have just been born into a realm where pain is a given.

When we pay attention to life, it is easy to recognize that every action has a consequence: when we cling, we suffer; when we act selfishly or violently, we cause suffering for ourselves or others. This is the teaching of karma: positive actions have positive outcomes; negative actions have negative outcomes.

Forgiveness is not just a selfish pursuit of personal satisfaction or righteousness. It actually alleviates the amount of suffering in the world. As each one of us frees ourselves from clinging to resentments that cause suffering, we relieve our friends, family, and community of the burden of our unhappiness. This is not a philosophical proposal; it is a verifiable and practical truth. Through our suffering and lack of forgiveness, we tend to do all kinds of unskillful things that hurt others. We close ourselves off from love, for example, out of fear of further pains or betrayals. This alone—a lack of openness to the love shown to us—is a way that we cause harm to our loved ones. The closed heart lets no one in or out.

The cause of our suffering has always been our reaction to the thoughts, feelings, cravings, and circumstances of our lives. The cause of our addictions has always been the indulgence in the behaviors or substances.

Like most people who decide to get sober, I was brought to Alcoholics Anonymous. While AA certainly works for others, its core propositions felt irreconcilable with my own experiences. I couldn't, for example, rectify the assertion that "alcoholism is a disease" with the facts of my own life. The idea that by simply attending an AA meeting, without any consultation, one is expected to take on a blanket diagnosis of "diseased addict" was to me, at best, patronizing. At worst, irresponsible. Irresponsible because it doesn't encourage people to turn toward and heal the actual underlying causes of their abuse of substances. I drank for thirteen years for REALLY good reasons. Among them were unprocessed grief, parental abandonment, isolation, violent trauma, anxiety and panic, social oppression, a general lack of safety, deep existential discord, and a tremendous diet and lifestyle imbalance. None of which constitute a disease, and all of which manifest as profound internal, mental, emotional and physical discomfort, which I sought to escape by taking external substances. It is only through one's own efforts to turn toward life on its own terms and to develop a wiser relationship to what's there through mindfulness and compassion that make freedom from addictive patterns possible. My sobriety has been sustained by facing life, processing grief, healing family relationships, accepting radically the fact of social oppression, working with my abandonment conditioning, coming into community, renegotiating trauma, making drastic diet and lifestyle changes, forgiving, and practicing mindfulness, to name just a few. Through these things, I began to relieve the very real pressure that compulsive behaviors are an attempt to resolve.

The Dalai Lama is rumored to have said that being able to have sex without any attachment would take the level of attainment of being able to eat either chocolate cake or dog shit without any preference between the two.

We become attached to each pleasant thought, feeling, taste, smell, and sound. But because everything is impermanent, we’re craving and clinging to fleeting experiences. Pleasure never lasts long enough; we can never sustain enough pleasure to satisfy the cravings. Suffering is the inevitable outcome of clinging to experiences that are unsustainable. Each moment of attachment or clinging creates some level of suffering in our lives as we grieve the loss of pleasure. What we often forget is that we have the power and ability simply to let go, and each moment of letting go is an act of mercy. The subversive act of nonclinging is an internal coup d’état.

We would all say that deep down, all we want is to be happy. Yet we don’t have a realistic understanding of what happiness really is. Happiness is closer to the experience of acceptance and contentment than it is to pleasure.

We could search the whole world and never find another being more worthy of our love than ourselves.

Difficult personalities are a mirror for the places where we get stuck in judgment, fear, and confusion.

The more my mind began to quiet, the more I found myself wanting to be surrounded by natural beauty.

The more I practiced kindness and humility, the more the world seemed to appear friendly and manageable.

Recovery is also the ability to inhabit the conditions of the present reality, whether pleasant or unpleasant.

Those who understand the way it is, rather than the way they wish it were, are on the path to freedom.

Pain and suffering are two completely difference experiences. Pain is unavoidable. Suffering is self-created.

To recover we must understand and accept impermanence. We must replace the reactive survival instinct of clinging, grasping, and attachment with the wise response of nonclinging, nonattachment, and compassion. In a world where everything is constantly being pulled beyond our grasp, clinging and grasping always result in the rope burns and unnecessary suffering that accompanies it.

The point of the spiritual revolution is not to become a good Buddhist, but to become a wise and compassionate human being, to awaken from our life of complacency and ignorance and to be a buddha.

The practice of celibacy alone was opening me up to a deeper sense of the way the mind-body connection works. I saw over and over that my mind and body could be filled with desire and that no matter how intense the craving was it would always pass. I didn't have to satisfy every desire that arose in my mind. I began to understand impermanence through direct experience rather than just intellectual theory.

The most important thing to remember is that we must live in the present, and if in the present moment we are still holding on to old wounds and betrayals, it is in this moment that forgiveness is called for.

When we really keep in the forefront of our thoughts that our intention in this life is to recover and be free, then being of service, practicing meditation, and doing what we need to do to get free becomes the only rational decision. This takes discipline, effort, and a deep commitment. It takes a form of rebellion, both inwardly and outwardly, because we not only subvert our own conditioning, we also walk a path that is totally countercultural. The status quo in our world is to be attached to pleasure and to avoid all unpleasant experiences. Our path leads upstream, against the normal human confusions and sufferings.

We all know that rainbows are temporary optical illusions based on the factors of sunlight, moisture, and heat. The environment creates each rainbow like the mind creates a self. Both creations are relatively real, in that we can genuinely experience them temporarily; but just as the factors that created the illusion (whether rainbow or self) arose, so will they also pass. There is no permanent self; there is no permanent rainbow. It is not true to say that there is no self at all or that everything is empty or illusory, but it is true that everything is constantly changing and that there is no solid, permanent, unchanging self within the process that is life. Everything and everyone is an unfolding process.

An action from a confused and suffering being in the past doesn't represent what that being is forever; it is only an expression of that being's suffering. And if we cling to resentment over past hurts, we simply increase our own suffering.

Active addiction is a kind of hell. It is like being a hungry ghost, wandering through life in constant craving and suffering. Refuge Recovery, the Buddhist-inspired approach to treating addiction, offers a plan to end the suffering of addiction.

The path of the spiritual revolutionary is a long-term and gradual journey toward awakening. If you are looking for a quick fix or easy salvation, turn back now, plug back into the matrix, and enjoy your delusional existence. This is a path for rebels, malcontents, and truth seekers. The wisdom and compassion of the Buddha is available to us all, but the journey to freedom is arduous. It will take a steadfast commitment to truth and, at times, counterinstinctual action. You have at your disposal

We come to understand the law of casuality - that is, we see that all beings are experiencing what they're experiencing based on their own actions and not by what we wish for them - and therefore we relax in a deep understanding and acceptance of the way things are.

When we commit to waking up and revolting against the ignorance and oppression of classism, racism, sexism, and all forms of greed, hatred, and delusion in the world, the first step we must take in that revolt is a personal dedication to purify our actions from these things that cause harm.

our survival instinct, which influences the body and mind, is really just the unrealistic expectation that life is always pleasurable and never painful. Our bodies naturally crave pleasure, which we think equals happiness, safety, and survival. We hate pain, which we think equals unhappiness and death.

We commit to the daily disciplined practices of meditation, yoga, exercise, wise actions, kindness, forgiveness, generosity, compassion, appreciation, and moment-to-moment mindfulness of feelings, emotions, thoughts, and sensations. We are developing the skillful means of knowing how to apply the appropriate meditation or action to the given circumstance.

It is not a lack of morality or any deep character flaw that creates addiction; it is almost always just a lot of pain and a lack of tolerance or compassion for this pain that get us stuck in the repetitive and habitual patterns of drinking, drugging, overeating, or whatever actions our addictions take. In some cases the underlying causes are not as clear, but the suffering that addiction creates is always obvious and undeniable.

The truth is, the experience of forgiveness is a momentary release. We don’t and can’t forgive forever. Instead, we forgive only for the present moment. This is both good news and bad. The good part is that you can stop judging yourself for your inability to completely and absolutely let go of resentments once and for all. We forgive in one moment and get resentful again in the next. It is not a failure to forgive; it is just a failure to understand impermanence.

The Buddha isn’t a god or deity to be worshipped. He was a rebel and an overthrower, the destroyer of ignorance, the great physician who discovered the path to freedom from suffering. The Buddha left a legacy of truth for us to experience for ourselves. The practices and principles of his teachings lead to the direct experience of liberation. This is not a faith-based philosophy, but an experiential one. The point of the spiritual revolution is not to become a good Buddhist, but to become a wise and compassionate human being, to awaken from our life of complacency and ignorance and to be a buddha.

The process of recovery will slowly transform us, stirring up all our impurities, bringing all the muck to the surface, where it can finally be healed. This is a path that heals the heart and transforms the mind, leaving us with an “awakened heart and mind.” We have always had good hearts. They were just so badly covered and obscured they were lost to us. By returning to this lost aspect of ourselves, we recover. Many would call this a spiritual awakening, enlightenment, or liberation. Although it may be all these things, it is also just a simple psychologically based process of seeing clearly what is true and, then, learning how to respond appropriately. The appropriate response ends suffering. The appropriate response allows us to recover our freedom.

To start the process of healing and recovery from addiction, the first thing we must do is accept how our addictions cause suffering in us and in the ones we love. We begin by understanding that addiction always creates suffering. Suffering is greed, hatred, and delusion. For the addict it may manifest as: Suffering is the stress created by craving for more. Suffering is never having enough to feel satisfied. Suffering is stealing to support your addiction. Suffering is lying to hide your addiction. Suffering is feeling ashamed of one’s actions. Suffering is feeling unworthy. Suffering is living in fear of the consequences of one’s actions. Suffering is the feelings of anger and resentment. Suffering is hurting other people. Suffering is hurting yourself. Suffering is the feeling of being isolated and alone. Suffering is the feeling of hatred toward oneself or others. Suffering is jealousy and envy. Suffering is feeling less than, inferior, or beneath others. Suffering is feeling superior, better than, or above others. Suffering is greedy, needy, and selfish. Suffering is the thought that I cannot be happy until I get. . . . Suffering is the anguish and misery of being addicted. All these feelings are unnecessary suffering caused by an imbalance between our instinctual drive for happiness and our instinctual need for survival. It is also very important to remember that the end of suffering does not mean the end of pain or difficulties, just the end of creating unnecessary suffering in our lives.

Loving-kindness is the experience of having a friendly and loving relationship toward ourselves as well as all others. The experience of sending loving-kindness toward ourselves is perhaps as simple as bringing a friendly attitude to our minds and bodies. Typically, we tend to judge ourselves and be quite critical and harsh in our self-assessments, identifying with the negative thoughts and feelings that arise in our minds. Being loving and kind isn’t our normal habit, so training the heart/mind to be kind is a great task. Mindfulness brings the mind’s negative habits into awareness.

Actually a solution & a path to personal freedom. My own life's experience w/ both Dharma practice & punk rock inspired me to try to bridge the gap between the two. I've tried to help point out the similarities, while also acknowledging the differences, & to show those of my generation who are interested that they can practice meditation & find there the freedom we have been seeking in our rebellion against the system.

The next step in the process of liberation is to break this chain reaction of suffering whenever life is unpleasant and feeling content only when life is pleasurable.

What we must recognize is that the self-centeredness of the addict is just an extreme example of a universal human condition. Everyone is self-centered; we are born that way. Our minds and bodies have evolved over thousands of years with a built-in survival instinct that is both inwardly and outwardly focused.

Renunciation is a commitment to let go of the things that create suffering. It is founded on the intention to stop hurting ourselves and others.

Eventually, we will look back on our previous life of indulgence as adults look back on the ignorance of their youth, without judgment or condemnation but with a healthy sense of regret and compassion for the previous delusions.

As we walk the path of Refuge Recovery, we gradually uncover a loving heart.

True happiness exists as the spacious and compassionate heart’s willingness to feel whatever is present.

If we cling now, we suffer later. If

Rather than reacting with our usual attachment or aversion, taking everything personally and feeling the need to do something about it, we relax into the experience, seeing it clearly and letting it be as it is.

True happiness exists as the spacious and compassionate heart's willingness to feel whatever is present.

Experience each moment as if it were the first sensation of its kind ever. Bring childlike interest and curiosity to your present-time experience.

Everything is impermanent—every pleasure, every pain, every body. But the survival instincts crave permanence and control. The body wants pleasure to stay forever and pain to go away forever.

It is not true to say that there is no self at all or that everything is empty or illusory, but it is true that everything is constantly changing and that there is no solid, permanent, unchanging self within the process that is life.

We agreed that at least to some extent the whole punk movement is based on the Buddha's 1st noble truth of suffering & the dissatisfactory nature of the material world. The punks see through the lies of society & the oppressive dictates of modern consumer culture. Very few punks though seem to take it further & attempt to understand the causes & conditions of the suffering & falsehoods, unfortunately punks rarely come around to seeing that there is actually a solution & a path to personal freedom. My own life's experience w/ both Dharma practice & punk rock inspired me to try to bridge the gap between the two. I've tried to help point out the similarities, while also acknowledging the differences, & to show those of my generation who are interested that they can practice meditation & find there the freedom we have been seeking in our rebellion against the system.

Wise and careful action, from a foundation of sober awareness, is the way of the revolutionary.

A good basic guideline for our speech is to reflect on whether what we are saying is both true and useful. There may be times when we are honest in what we say, but our words are too brutal or harsh. And there may be other times when we are deliberately being kind with the words we choose, but what we are saying is not totally true.

It’s amazing what people will believe based on their desire for it to be true. You find what you look for.

Present-time awareness is the experience of knowing what is happening as it happens. Our recovery depends on us being present in mind as well as in body. That is the only way to heal the wounds that led to our addictions and to change our relationship to craving and the repetitive habituations. Mindfulness is defined as nonjudgmental, investigative, kind, and responsive awareness. This sort of awareness takes intentional training of the mind. Our attention is naturally scattered, the mind constantly swinging from present, to future, to past, to fantasy.

We cannot find freedom by thinking about it with an untrained mind.

All these feelings are unnecessary suffering caused by an imbalance between our instinctual drive for happiness and our instinctual need for survival. It is also very important to remember that the end of suffering does not mean the end of pain or difficulties, just the end of creating unnecessary suffering in our lives.

We will eventually come to realize that acting out our hatred only causes more hatred. Picking up the burning ember of ill will to throw at our enemy burns us before it burns them. Likewise, when we pick up the substance or behavior that allows us to temporarily avoid the pain, we play with fire. It may feel warm and fuzzy at first, but it will inevitably burn us to the core.

The truth is, the experience of forgiveness is a momentary release. We don't and can't forgive forever. Instead, we forgive only for the present moment. This is both good news and bad. The good part is that you can stop judging yourself for your inability to completely and absolutely let go of resentments once and for all. We forgive one moment and get resentful in the next. It is not a failure to forgive; it is just a failure to understand impermanence. The bad news is that forgiveness is not something that will ever be done with; it is an ongoing aspect of our lives and it necessitates a vigilant practice of learning to let go and living in the present.

The Buddha likened humans to the lotus flowers. Out of the deluded mud of human existence, filled with greed, hatred, and delusion, in a world where wars, oppression, and lust rule the masses, there are those who can and will rise above the muck and emerge victorious against suffering.

In the beginning we are all floating downstream. At some point we become aware that the currents are dragging us down and that we are no longer satisfied with the status quo of human

Against The Stream is more than just another book about meditation. It is a manifesto and field guide for the front lines of the revolution. It is the culmination of almost two decades of meditative dissonance from the next generation of Buddhists in the West, It is a call to awakening for the sleeping masses.

As we observe the way our minds and bodies react to pleasure and pain, we begin to clearly understand how ultimately impersonal this human experience is, and how through our delusions and self-centeredness we are constantly making it personal and taking it personally

Our future experiences will be colored by the choices we make in the present.

In the beginning we are all floating downstream. At some point we become aware that the currents are dragging us down and that we are no longer satisfied with the status quo of human existence.

We have the ability to effect a great positive change in the world, starting with the training of our own minds and the overcoming of our deluded conditioning. Waking up is not a selfish pursuit of happiness; it is a revolutionary stance from the inside out, for the benefits of all beings in existence.

Does our lack of forgiveness really punish them, or does it just make our hearts hard and our lives unpleasent.

Serving the truth comes down simply to living life from the place of positive intentions. It means doing the right thing even when everything and everyone in society is telling you to ignore, supress, or abandon the path of nonviolence, understanding and care.

A good basic guideline for our speech (in relation to Ethical Conduct) is to reflect whether what we are saying is both true and useful. There may be times when we are honest in what we say, but our words are too brutal or harsh. And there may be other times when we are deliberately being kind with the words we choose, but what we are saying is not totally true.

Mindfulness is defined as nonjudgmental, investigative, kind, and responsive awareness. This sort of awareness takes intentional training of the mind.

if our definition of happiness is “experiencing that which is pleasurable,” we are going to be disappointed a lot of the time.

Most of our parents were too busy to pay attention to us as they tried to survive the aftermath of the sixties or succeed in the race for riches in the seventies and eighties.

I really wanted to tattoo my forearms but decided that it would be a good idea to wait until I was older for that, just in case I wanted to work somewhere that having visible tattoos would be a problem, so I decided to start getting my legs tattooed.

A couple of beers couldn’t hurt me. After all it was the harder drugs that were the real problem anyway. So I cracked open a nice cold can of Schaefer beer and drank the whole thing in one long slow chug. The booze felt great in my system after having been sober for so many months. So I just opened another and drank that one down. With two beers in my belly I was feeling pretty good and it seemed like a fine idea to have another and another and another until all of the beer was gone. At that point the only logical thing to do was to get some more.