The heart is just the heart; thoughts and feelings are just thoughts and feelings. Let things be just as they are.
Interpretation
Acceptance of emotions and thoughts without judgment leads to inner peace.
This quote by Ajahn Chah emphasizes the importance of accepting our feelings and thoughts as they are, without labeling them as good or bad. It conveys a profound sense of peace that comes from allowing ourselves to experience emotions fully, while recognizing that they are just aspects of our human experience, not definitive truths about our identity.
In practice
In a meditation workshop, to encourage participants to accept their thoughts.
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.
If you haven't wept deeply, you haven't begun to meditate.
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.
Happiness and suffering do not depend on being poor or rich, they depend on having the right or wrong understanding in our mind.
There's nothing that makes you so aware of the improvisation of human existence as a song unfinished. Or an old address book.
Whatever is unnamed, undepicted in images, whatever is omitted from biography, censored in collections of letters, whatever is misnamed as something else, made difficult-to-come-by, whatever is buried in the memory by the collapse of meaning under an inadequate or lying language - this will become, not merely unspoken, but unspeakable.
By means of beauty all beautiful things become beautiful.
Our characters are the result of our conduct.
Do we really think that the United States will have the protection of innocent Afghans in mind if it rains terror down on the Afghan infrastructure? We are supposedly fighting them because they immorally killed innocent civilians. That made them evil. If we do the same, are we any less immoral?
Of what use are all the codes in the world, if by means of confidential reports, if for trifling reasons, if through anonymous traitors any honest citizen may be exiled or banished without a hearing, without a trial?
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