If you haven't wept deeply, you haven't begun to meditate.
Interpretation
Deep emotional experiences are essential for true meditation.
This quote emphasizes that genuine meditation is not merely a practice of calming the mind, but a profound engagement with one's emotions. To truly meditate is to confront and understand our deepest feelings, including sorrow, allowing for a richer and more transformative experience in both meditation and life.
In practice
In a retreat, when discussing the role of emotions in mindfulness, this quote can be shared to illustrate the depth of experience in meditation.
Once you understand non-self, then the burden of life is gone. You'll be at peace with the world. When we see beyond self, we no longer cling to happiness and we can truly be happy. Learn to let go without struggle, simply let go, to be just as you are - no holding on, no attachment, free.
When sitting in meditation, say, "That's not my business!" with every thought that comes by.
To observe and watch one's own mind is something really interesting. The untrained mind will run and follow its old habit patterns. Because it has not been trained and taught, it will get lost in all kinds of stories and issues. Therefore we have to train our mind. The meditation practice in Buddhism is all about training one's own mind.
Meditation is like a single log of wood. Insight and investigation are one end of the log; calm and concentration are the other end. If you lift up the whole log, both sides come up at once. Which is concentration and which is insight? Just this mind.
The heart is just the heart; thoughts and feelings are just thoughts and feelings. Let things be just as they are.
Happiness and suffering do not depend on being poor or rich, they depend on having the right or wrong understanding in our mind.
The orgasm has replaced the Cross as the focus of longing and the image of fulfillment.
Modesty and conscientiousness receive their reward only in novels. In life they are exploited and then shoved aside.
I think all cats are wild. They only act tame if thereΒ΄s a saucer of milk in it for them.
Humanity at the centre of the primates, Homo sapiens, in humanity, is the end-product of a gradual work of creation, the successive sketches for which still surround us on every side.
Be neat, Philothea; let nothing be negligent about you. It is a kind of contempt of those with whom we converse, to frequent their company in uncomely apparel; but, at the same time, avoid all affectation, vanity, curiosity, or levity in your dress. Keep yourself always, as much as possible, on the side of plainness and modesty, which, without doubt, is the greatest ornament of beauty, and the best excuse for the want of it.
The gaze that the colonized subject casts at the colonist's sector is a look of lust, a look of envy. Dreams of possession. Every type of possession; of sitting at the colonist's table and sleeping in his bed, preferably with his wife. The colonized man is an envious man.
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