2024: Index C

Caddyshack Zen

"Be the ball."  (11/19/2023)

Cage, John - A00050

"Our intention is to affirm this life; not to bring order out of chaos, not to suggest improvements in creation, but simply to wake up to the very life we're living, which is so excellent once one gets one's mind and one's desires out of its way and lets it act of its own accord."  (03/05/2022) (11/03/2023)

Camus, Albert - A00012

"For if there is a sin against life, it consists in perhaps not so much in despairing of life as in hoping for another life and in eluding the implacable grandeur of this life." 

Carson, Rachel - A00083

"Those who contemplate the beauty of the earth find reserves of strength that will endure as long as life lasts.  There is symbolic as well as actual beauty in the migration of the birds, the ebb and flow of the tides, the folded bud ready for the spring.  There is something infinitely healing in the repeated refrains of nature -- the assurance that dawn comes after night, and spring after the winter."  (05/24/2022)

Castaneda, Carlos - A00086

"The aim is to balance the terror of being alive with the wonder of being alive."  (06/15/2022) 

Castillo, Roger - A00020

"Happiness is not to be found in love or pleasure, but in peace of mind."  (05/06/2023)

Chagdud Tulku Rinpoche - A00021

"Time is very precious.  Do not wait until you are dying to understand your spiritual nature.  If you do it now, you will discover resources of kindness and compassion you didn't know you had.  It is from this mind of intrinsic wisdom and compassion that you can truly benefit others ... Moment by moment, we should look at life as if it were a dream unfolding ... In this relaxed, more open state of being, we have the opportunity to gain the infallible means of dying well, which is recognition of our absolute nature."

Chah, Ajahn - A00001

"You are your own teacher.  Looking for teachers, can't solve your own doubts.  Investigate yourself to find the truth -- inside, not outside.  Knowing yourself is most important."

Chao-Chou - A00042

"In this life, if I meet an old person of eighty or ninety years, experienced in the Dharma, who needs to learn something from me, I will teach.  And if I meet a young girl of seven years who has something to teach me, I will sit at her feet and learn."  (10/24/2023)

Chesterton, G. K. - A00070

"One of the deepest and strangest of all human moods is the mood which will suddenly strike us perhaps in a garden at night, or deep in sloping meadows, the feeling that every glower and leaf has just uttered something stupendously direct and important, and that we have by a prodigy of imbecility not heard or understood it.  There is a certain poetic value, and that a genuine one, in this sense of having missed the full meaning of things.  There is beauty, not only in wisdom, but in this dazed and dramatic ignorance."  (03/14/2022)

Chia, Yung - A00071

"It never leaves this place and is always perfect.  

"When you look for it, you find you can't see it.

"You can't get at it, you can't be rid of it.

"When you do neither, there it is!

"When you are silent, it speaks; when you speak, it is silent."  (03/28/2022)

Chien-Chih Seng-Ts'an (Jianzhi Sengcan) - A00061

"The infinitely large is as little as the infinitely small, the infinitely small is as great as the infinitely larger."  (12/19/2023)

Chinese Proverbs - A00022 

"If we don't change the direction we are headed, we will end up where we are going."

Chinese Sage

"I pack no provisions for my long journey -- entering emptiness under the midnight moon."  (03/29/2022)

Chinese Saying

"Renew thyself completely with eachday; do it again, and again, and forever again."  (07/11/2022)

Chodron, Pema - A00062

"Meditation practice isn't about trying to throw ourselves away and becoming something better.  It's about befriending who we are already."  (01/15/2022)

"Whatever is happening, this is the path to enlightenment."  (02/15/2022)

"When the resistance is gone, so are the demons." (03/06/2022) 

 

Chuang-tzu (Zhuang Zhou) - A00023

"Flow with whatever may happen and let your mind be free.  Stay centered by accepting whatever you are doing.  This is the ultimate."

"If you have insight, you use your inner eye, your inner ear, to pierce to the heart of things, and have no need of intellectual knowledge."  (08/26/2023)

Church, Francis Pharcellus - A00024

"Nobody can conceive or imagine all the wonders there are unseen and unseeable in the world." 

Cochran, Tracy - A00063

"I used to think that compassion was a matter of allowing the heart to open (not that this is simple).  But I'm beginning to learn that this practice of compassion -- this practice of allowing the sense of connection in -- takes letting go -- moment by moment -- of all that we identify with and cling to as "me" and "mine."  We have to be willing to know nothing, to just be open and astonished by what is."

Cohen, Leonard - A00043

"Roshi said something nice to me one time.  He said that the older you get, the lonelier you become, and the deeper the love you need.  Which means that this hero that you're trying to maintain as the central figure in the drama of your life -- this hero is not enjoying the life of a hero.  You're exerting a tremendous maintenance to keep this heroic stance available to you, and the hero is suffering defeat after defeat.  And they're not heroic defeats; they're ignoble defeats.  Finally, one day you say, "Let him die -- I can't invest any more in this heroic position."  From there, you just live your life as if it's real -- as if you have to make decisions even though you have absolutely no guarantee of any of the consequences of your decisions." (10/04/2023)

Confucius - A00072

"By three methods may we learn wisdom; first, by reflection, which is noblest; second, by imitation, which is easiest; and third, by experience, which is bitterest."  (03/21/2022)

"Only the one who attains perfect sincerity under heaven may discover one's "true nature.""  (06/20/2022)

Connors, Philip - A00025

"The greatest gift of life on the mountain is time.  Time to think or not think, read or not read, scribble or not scribble -- to sleep and cook and walk in the woods, to sit and stare at the shapes of the hills, I produce nothing but words; I consume nothing but food, a little propane, a little firewood.  By being utterly useless in the calculations of the culture at large I become useful, at last, to myself."  (05/26/2023)

Crowfoot (Chief of the Siksika First Nation) - A00031

"What is life?  It is the flash of a firefly in the night.  It is the breath of a buffalo in the wintertime.  It is the little shadow which runs across the grass and loses itself in the sunset."  (08/23/2023)