B. Alan Wallace famous quotes

Mindfulness was experienced as not holding onto the past, the future, or 'nowness:' but relaxing into the immediacy of whatever was happening.
-- B. Alan Wallace

#Future #Past #Mindfulness

We are persons whose bodies can be objectively studied according to the impersonal laws of physics but whose minds are subjectively experienced in ways science has not yet been able to fathom. In short, by radically seperating science from religion, we are not merely segregating two human institutions; we are fragmenting ourselves as individuals and as a society in ways that lead to deep, unresolved conflicts in terms of our view of the world, our values, and our way of life.
-- B. Alan Wallace

#Two #Views #Law

Life is a flash of lightning in the dark of night. It is a brief time of tremendous potential.
-- B. Alan Wallace

#Life Is Short #Dark #Night

Tibetans look at a person who holds himself above others, believing he is better than others and knows more, and they say that person is like someone sitting on a mountain top: it is cold there, it is hard, and nothing will grow. But if the person puts himself in a lower position, then that person is like a fertile field.
-- B. Alan Wallace

#Believe #Humility #Pride

Integrated meditation practice is like a healthy diet which is indispensable for maintaining your vitality and resistance to disease. Likewise, a balanced meditative practice in the course of a socially engaged way of life heightens your psychological immune system, so that you are less vulnerable to mental imbalances of all kinds.
-- B. Alan Wallace

#Practice #Meditation #Healthy

One of the most persistent of all delusions is the conviction that the source of our dissatisfaction lies outside ourselves.
-- B. Alan Wallace

#Lying #Conviction #Source

The point of Buddhist meditation is not to stop thinking, for cultivation of insight clearly requires intelligent use of thought and discrimination. What needs to be stopped is conceptualisation that is compulsive, mechanical and unintelligent, that is, activity that is always fatiguing, usually pointless, and at times seriously harmful.
-- B. Alan Wallace

#Buddhist #Intelligent #Thinking

If happiness always depends on something expected in the future, we are chasing a will-o'-the-wisp that ever eludes our grasp, until the future, and ourselves, vanish into the abyss of death.

A happy man is too satisfied with the present to dwell too much on the future.

Science fiction is never about the future, in the same way history is rarely about the past: they're both parable formats for examining or commenting on the present.

Any city may have one period of magnificence, like Boston or New Orleans or San Francisco, but it takes a real one to keep renewing itself until the past is perennially forgotten.

What we have done in the past is not sufficient now to prepare our youth.

Mindfulness is life. Whenever we don’t have mindfulness, when we are heedless, it’s as if we are dead.

We can’t change every little thing that happens to us in life, but we can change the way that we experience it. That’s the potential of meditation, of mindfulness. You don’t have to burn any incense, and you definitely don’t have to sit on the floor. All you need to do is to take 10 mins out a day to step back; to familiarise yourself with the present moment so that you get to experience a greater sense of focus, calm and clarity in your life.

Suchness is neither that which is existence, nor that which is nonexistence, nor that which is at once existence and nonexistence, nor that which is not at once existence and nonexistence.

It's surprising how much memory is built around things unnoticed at the time.

Sure, you need enormous amounts of technical expertise to be the best in the world. But to accomplish mindfulness, you just need something you already have: the willingness to quiet down, clear the crap and trust yourself.