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"life is better as described by the ridiculous than the tragic"

"the self and the endless dimension universal self"

"confronted with situations that reveal our basic ignorance, we are threatened and frightened"

"we have learned to fear what we don't know"

Mu is not an experience but seeing.  Seeing is not created by us, by our actions.

Although one can use the word insight, it is not conceptual or intellectual. IT is experiential insight.

we are blinded by the lenses of self centerness.  To see MU we must let go.

explanations of Mu are worse than useless.  Discussions of emptiness have no place in MU

"the practice is to realize the unity of everything.  But somehow we get attached to our thoughts and use it to create self-identity.  We assign all kinds of reality to them"

To realize true self you must go beyond ego and clever words.  Drop body and mind.

True self is "no self" because it doesn't depend on anything.  It does not cling to ideas and thoughts, not right or wrong, gain or loss.

The very essence of Zen is to experience, reveal, realize, manifest "no Self".  You have to RELEASE whatever you are holding onto.

"his cutting words were like an unsheathed sword that cuts through the delusions."

"but there is something to take the drama out of struggles, seeing them as mundane and pathetic rather than heroic."

"so often we think we need an explanation as to why things are--- but eventually we find that there is NOTHING behind our experience, explaining or justifying it.

"our ingrained systems of self-hate and self-improvement stand all too ready to in cooperate this new experience into their compulsive quests"

"It takes years to build a prison in the mind.  It is ok if it takes it years to tear it down"

"the empty space between moments when the world seems to exist in a timeless, changeless way" <is MU>

eg. like the empty slots in a film reel.

"if you focus your attention on anything you'll eventually bump into MU"

"sooner or later it will lead you to the space where nothing exists.  The first time you become aware of this space , it may seem like it passes within a flash.  You may wonder if anything occurred.  But gradually the empty spaces will acquire a longer duration and a type of depth, like an ocean you are swimming in at night"

experience of emptiness ends all suffering

Mu- nothingness- is also everything.

However the experience of emptiness is temporary, eventually we come back again.

becoming MU- freed of language and self-reference

Mu- no trace of embarrassment or self-consciousness

"trusting my body to find the reality free from discriminating mind"

"letting go with self-clinging and deepening one's engagement with whatever one's encountering"

"true state of nirvana is total emptiness devoid of any characteristics, duality, or differentiation."

inexpressible in words and inconceivable in thought.

"our minds obscured by attachments, desires, and erroneous thoughts of all sorts".

- Let go not only of bad things but of good things as they can become too oppressive if they keep us dead in the past"

"let go of the past, and the future".  If we live in the future we are dead to the present.  Drop our desires and ambitions as they chain us to anxiety.  Let being BEE.

FINALLY! on youtube

if you want to look at your past, look at your mind now

if you want to look at your future, look at your mind now

our original nature has been covered up by greed, hatred, and delusion

emotions are nature, not self

ignorance is the root of suffering, remove ignorance, gain wisdom, end suffering

On the fear of shame in the Japanese:

"shame expands over time"

- honor and fame more important than life

-honor in one's youth expands over time

Confucious: 

"Study without thought is vain.  Thought without study is dangerous."

Sometimes I think that whole Zen centers have been built on this particular plateau, their students forever tantalized by something once glimpsed, but forever just out of reach. Teachers themselves can collude with this mindset. When we say “not yet, not yet” we must be clear that this isn’t an expression of endless striving for self-improvement or “complete” realization. Rather, there is nothing final; that incompleteness, the tangle of wild grasses, is not separate from completeness. Someone once asked Joko whether she thought she would ever attain annutara-samyak-sambodhi (supreme, unsurpassed, perfect enlightenment) in this life. “I hope the thought never crosses my mind,” she replied.

Buddha’s awakening as “a radical shift in perspective, rather than the gaining of privileged knowledge into some higher truth.” It is not as if he saw something new, so much as he saw what we all see, this ever-changing world, in a new light

I often invoke the ambiguous image of the duck-rabbit. That image may be seen as either the head of a duck or the head of a rabbit. To only see the duck or only see the rabbit is like seeing one aspect of the buddha-body and not the others. We are not wrong, but our vision is incomplete. 

I meet someone whom I have not seen for years; I see him clearly, but fail to know him. Suddenly I know him, I see the old face in the altered one,” writes Wittgenstein. Compare this to Wu-men’s description of realization as like suddenly seeing your own father—there’s no question of whether or not you recognize him. Yet “our father” has been standing in front of us all along. Life has been presenting itself to us, and yet we have failed to recognize, failed to perceive some aspect of it that is neither hidden nor apparent.
When we go from seeing the glass as half empty to seeing it as half full, what has changed? Perhaps we might say it’s our mood that has changed, rather than our actual perception. The world feels, as well as looks, different.

Many contemporary psychoanalytic theorists, like Philip Bromberg, are increasingly becoming comfortable with a view of the self as a “multiplicity of discontinuous self-states … a set of discrete, more or less overlapping schemata that, taken together, define who one is—each schema being organized around a particular self-other configuration with a distinctive affective flavoring.”

There is a saying “Wherever you go, there you are.” We intuitively feel the truth of that statement—there’s something of ourselves, our perspective, our experience that we bring to each new situation.

We can’t let either side win exclusive title to “the real me.” Perhaps, like the three ancient witches of Greek mythology who have a single eye that they pass between them, we will have to learn to pass our “I” back and forth between a whole of crowd of “me’s,” no one of which is entitled to hold on to it indefinitely.

We can, after years of practice, make ourselves tough and unfeeling, almost if not entirely unresponsive to simple human emotion. And what have we gained? We must have been terrified by our own minds, our own feelings, our own vulnerability, to want to so thoroughly extirpate this part of ourselves. And so we have created for ourselves a practice in which we have learned to master extremes of physical pain and hardship, while never facing the risks that arise from tenderness, longing, or being in love.

there can be no real love without attachment, no feeling without vulnerability, and in the end no humanity without reciprocal need.