As long as there is a 'you' doing or not-doing, thinking or not-thinking, 'meditating' or 'not-meditating' you are no closer to home than the day you were born.
Interpretation
True understanding lies beyond the actions and thoughts we associate with mindfulness; it is about the essence of being.
This quote emphasizes that the concepts of doing or not doing, thinking or not thinking, add layers to our experience but do not bring us closer to true awareness or enlightenment. It suggests that despite engaging in practices like meditation, without a genuine understanding of one's true nature and essence, one remains distant from a deeper sense of 'home' or truth, which is inherent since birth.
In practice
In a mindfulness workshop, to remind participants of the deeper purpose of meditation.
A man who is seeking for realization is not only going around searching for his spectacles without realizing that they are on his nose all the time, but also were he not actually looking through them he would not be able to see what he is looking for!
War has been more common than peace, and extended periods of peace have been rare in a world divided into multiple states
Realism falls short of reality. It shrinks it, attenuates it, falsifies it; it does not take into account our basic truths and our fundamental obsessions: love, death, astonishment. It presents man in a reduced and estranged perspective. Truth is in our dreams, in the imagination.
There is no partial sensitivity; either it is the state of one's whole being, total consciousness or it is not there at all
The most refined skills of color printing, the intricate techniques of wide-angle photography, provide us pictures of trivia bigger and more real than life. We forget that we see trivia and notice only that the reproduction is so good. Man fulfils his dream and by photographic magic produces a precise image of the Grand Canyon. The result is not that he adores nature or beauty the more. Instead he adores his camera - and himself.
It happened, as many things do, imperceptibly, in many ways at once. I date it - the slow crumbling of my faith, the pulverization of my fortress - from the time, about a year after I had begun to preach, when I began to read again. I justified this desire by the fact that I was still in school, and I began, fatally, with Dostoyevsky.
On religion in particular, the time appears to me to have come, when it is a duty of all who, being qualified in point of knowledge, have, on mature consideration, satisfied themselves that the current opinions are not only false, but hurtful, to make their dissent known.
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