Brad Warner Quotes

#1. Compassion is the ability to see what needs doing right now and the willingness to do it right now.

Brad Warner

#2. You've won all creation. It's yours to do with it as you please- and you discover what pleases you most is doing the right thing for all creation in moment after moment.

Brad Warner

#3. If you want to believe in reincarnation, you have to believe that this life, what you're living through right now, is the afterlife. You're missing out on the afterlife you looked forward to in your last existence by worrying about your next life. This is what happens after you die. Take a look.

Brad Warner

#4. Everything you have, whether it's money or stuff, is an obligation. It is as much your duty to care for and nurture any object you own as it would be if that object were your child. All possessions come with responsibilities. More possessions equals greater responsibility.

Brad Warner

#5. The whole universe in all directions is the Flower of Dharma.* All Buddhas everywhere and all enlightened beings twirl and are twirled by the Flower of Dharma.

Brad Warner

#6. How many Zen masters does it take to screw in a light bulb? The plum tree in the garden!

Brad Warner

#7. People imagine enlightenment will make them incredibly powerful, And it does. It makes you the most powerful being in all the universe- but usually no one else notices.

Brad Warner

#8. When you're so committed to the future, it's real easy to let your life right now turn to shit.

Brad Warner

#9. You can master tantric yogic poly-orgasmic Wonder Sex but you're still gonna die alone.

Brad Warner

#10. When I first started watching Godzilla, I was a kid and a big dinosaur freak and was like, "Oh my gosh, there's a big dinosaur." So I immediately got into Godzilla. What I like about it are some of the things people often think are negative aspects.

Brad Warner

#11. Disappointment is just the action of your brain readjusting itself to reality after discovering things are not the way you thought they were.

Brad Warner

#12. For a very long time science and philosophy were considered part of the same continuum and it was only within the last few hundred years they've been considered different areas of inquiry, and now we're starting to go back to the idea that maybe they aren't two separate realms of inquiry.

Brad Warner

#13. The state of ambiguity - that messy, greasy, mixed-up, confused, and awful situation you're living through right now - is enlightenment itself.

Brad Warner

#14. Reality's all you've got. But here's the real secret, the real miracle: it's enough.

Brad Warner

#15. Practicing zazen is like gradually (or maybe not so gradually) getting your sight back.

Brad Warner

#16. Real morality is based on a single criterion: right action, appropriate action, in the present moment and present situation.

Brad Warner

#17. True mindfulness is the awareness that everything you encounter
is a vigorous expression of the same living universe as you.

Brad Warner

#18. The very idea of higher states of consciousness is absurd. Comparing one state of consciousness to another and saying one is "higher" and the other is "mundane" is like eating a banana and complaining it's not a very good apple.

Brad Warner

#19. I thought that deserved a book and feel like the door needs to be open so people can say, "Ok, here we go, let's deal with this" because we're not dealing with it. I'm waiting for somebody to write another book but it hasn't happened yet, though I guess mine's only been out for a year and a half.

Brad Warner

#20. What attracted me to Zen was my first teacher, Tim McCarthy. He was extremely genuine. It wasn't even really a Zen thing, that sort of came along later.

Brad Warner

#21. So I'm skeptical and cynical about the whole thing and it's only if something seems to be genuine that I would pursue it. That's why I've stuck with Zen for so long and not gone on to some other path with it.

Brad Warner

#22. Faith keeps you going, but doubt keeps you from going off the deep end.

Brad Warner

#23. As for enlightenment, that's just for people who can't face reality.

Brad Warner

#24. I mean Godzilla is eternally pissed off at everything but of course he's gonna be because every time he pops out of the water for a look around somebody is firing a missile at him. Buddha would probably have to act as a mediator between the people and Godzilla.

Brad Warner

#25. You're going to lose your life anyway. It may be now. It may be decades from now. But at some point it's going to happen, and you have no idea when or how. So it's important to be true to yourself at every moment.

Brad Warner

#26. The pain of having your dreams come true appears vividly when you realize that even if your dreams really come true, they never really come true. From birth to death it's just like this

Brad Warner

#27. You can't function in society if you don't involve yourself in the fictions society accepts about time. But you do so with the understanding that you're playing a game.

Brad Warner

#28. The truth comes when you can see that your self-image is just a convenient reference point and nothing more, and that you as you had imagined yourself do not exist.

Brad Warner

#29. I never really got around to discussing that specific topic which I think it crucially important to understand. If you were a monk in Buddhist time and you had sex, there was a good chance a child would be conceived.

Brad Warner

#30. Suffering occurs when your ideas about how things ought to be don't match how they really are.

Brad Warner

#31. I think the understanding of oneness and interconnectivity of the whole Universe is something we have innately, something we're born with. We are however very skillful at ignoring and pretending we don't have or know it.

Brad Warner

#32. I mean somebody could write another book and say Brad's idea about Buddhism and sex is wrong, and here's mine, and that would be great. Just the fact that it would exist would be good because nobody is saying it, it's like they're trying to pretend it's not there.

Brad Warner

#33. Our actions are part of who we are. It's not that we are inert things who do stuff. Rather, the stuff we do and who we are are inextricably woven together.

Brad Warner

#34. Do as well as you possibly can. That's Buddhist morality.

Brad Warner

#35. If we can all agree that none of us really knows what God actually is, maybe we can stop fighting about what we imagine God to be.

Brad Warner

#36. Just know that your expectations are only thoughts in your head, and keep on doing what you do.

Brad Warner

#37. The only real time as far as Buddhism is concerned is right now. Right now there is no old age or death because old age and death are descriptions of things as they are now when we compare them to things as they used to be.

Brad Warner

#38. Much of the hatred and fear of sexuality found in religions stems from the idea that sex is a thing of the body and that the body must be denied so that the spirit may be elevated. In Buddhism there is no notion that the body is made of inferior matter while the spirit flies free within.

Brad Warner

#39. Truly compassionate action arises spontaneously without thought and is carried out in real action with no anticipation of reward and, indeed, no concept of a doer of that action.

Brad Warner

#40. Your role is to do and say the things that need to be done and said from your unique perspective.

Brad Warner

#41. Buddhism is all about finding your own way, not imitating the ways of others or even the ways of Buddha himself.

Brad Warner

#42. Buddha might be the one thing that could settle Godzilla down. He might say, "Listen Godzilla, you don't have to do all this. Just chill out a little bit and everything will be fine".

Brad Warner

#43. At times, Zen does get into some Buddhist Cosmology. Nishijima Roshi, my main teacher would talk about that and almost every time immediately say that it was only one way of looking at it. Whenever addressing realms of Heaven or Hell, he'd also address that it was just a psychological state.

Brad Warner

#44. The problem is the way we let our desires stand in the way of our enjoyment of what we already have.

Brad Warner

#45. People will come and give you sandwiches every six hours but you're really of no use. A lot of people get excited about guys like that but I can't get too excited about it because I think he's sorta useless. He's just sitting there in India under a blanket looking beautiful, so what.

Brad Warner

#46. So I do fear death in the sense that I find the prospect of dying pretty scary. But I no longer fear that I will one day be annihilated and cease to exist.

Brad Warner

#47. As you're implying, there's a new technology that can look even deeper into that brick and we can start getting into a level where it breaks down so that the brick isn't even there, but obviously it is because Moe can hit Curly on the head with it. It's quite bizarre and all relative.

Brad Warner

#48. Morality is a personal matter.

Brad Warner

#49. It's crazy to me how concerned people get with what it looks like and what you can do there. People may as well be talking about JRR Tolkien or Star Trek or something.

Brad Warner

#50. The thing with the question of oneness or non-oneness is that you can literally discuss it forever. You can go into the philosophy section of any library and you'll see people have been discussing it forever and will continue to do so.

Brad Warner

#51. Consider this:
1. Would you ride in a car whose driver was on the consciousness-expanding "entheogenic" drug LSD?
And here's a bonus question:
2. Why does an "expanded consciousness" include the inability to operate a motor vehicle?

Brad Warner

#52. So that's Godzilla, he's ultimately going to get you regardless of what you do. Maybe the people who made the American Godzilla film were scared of that. They didn't want him to represent that, to represent something we couldn't deal with because, "We're American's, we can deal with anything".

Brad Warner

#53. Zazen isn't about blissing out or going into an alpha brain-wave trance. It's about facing who and what you really are, in every single goddamn moment. And you aren't bliss, I'll tell you that right now. You're a mess. We all are.

Brad Warner

#54. I was very attracted to the way that Zen did not go into the imagination land. And now I've forgotten what your first question was and how we were going to tie this together.

Brad Warner

#55. The only way I know of to get in touch with what God wants is to be very, very, very quiet.

Brad Warner

#56. So with science, it's original idea was to ignore the spiritual or nebulous side of reality and to strictly work on concrete things. Say there's a brick which we cut it in half and then see there's two half's of a brick. If we keep cutting we can then see there's particles and so on and so forth.

Brad Warner

#57. The fact is that there is a contradiction going on but our brains don't like contradiction. So when Moe hits Curly on the head with a sledgehammer and Curly says, "ow" and Moe says, "Serves you right Numbskull", you can say that's because they're separate beings, and that's true.

Brad Warner

#58. Real wisdom is the ability to understand the incredible extent to which you bullshit yourself every single moment of every day.

Brad Warner

#59. We ourselves are not something apart from our circumstances. What we are and where we are are one and the same.

Brad Warner

#60. I really thought Reagan was going to push the button and blow us all up. It was scary. So when they did the 1998 American Godzilla film, Hollywood didn't understand what Godzilla was.

Brad Warner

#61. I guess that all figures into my approach because once I start hearing the imagination land stuff (that's my new phrase now I guess) I tend to tune out or start laughing at it like, "Haha, you guys really believe there is a heaven."

Brad Warner

#62. It's sort of another innovation, probably a good innovation, of Western culture to separate the ideas between science and philosophy, but it's important to remember they weren't always separate realms of inquiry.

Brad Warner

#63. This world is better than Utopia because - and follow this point carefully - you can never live in Utopia. Utopia is always somewhere else. That's the very definition of Utopia.

Brad Warner

#64. He had the saffron robes, the shaved head, and that mellow spiritual way of talking that let you know here was a guy who had truly achieved a rare state of inner with-it-ness.

Brad Warner

#65. You won't understand life and death until you're ready to set aside any hope of understanding life and death and just live your life until you die.

Brad Warner

#66. In the Japanese movie's they're throwing everything they have at him, every missile, but he keeps coming, he can't be stopped and that represents death. There's nothing you can do to stop it, to keep yourself from dying. You can try every trick in the book and it still won't prevent it.

Brad Warner

#67. But people do the same thing with the Bible. They memorize all the fictional characters, the parameters and the rules of the game and think it's important, but I can't get excited about that myself.

Brad Warner

#68. So what I liked about Zen was that it never goes off into the realm of imagination land, or if it does occasionally, the good teachers will openly address it specifically as only imagination. Both of my teachers were very good at that.

Brad Warner

#69. It's interesting to see what's going on with physics these days because they're starting to come out with stuff that sounds remarkably like Buddhism and even more specifically like the ancient Hindu Vedas. Physics isn't necessarily saying the exact same thing but I think eventually it will merge.

Brad Warner

#70. Rather than face what really is, we prefer to retreat and compare what we're living through with the way we think it oughta be. Suffering comes from the comparison between the two.

Brad Warner

#71. You can always improve your situation. But you do so by facing it, not by running away.

Brad Warner

#72. Zen is the complete absence of belief. Zen is the complete lack of authority.

Brad Warner

#73. You can't life in paradise- but you are living right here. Make this your paradise or make this your hell. The choice is entirely yours. Really.

Brad Warner

#74. Same deal here. It's not "you" and "the universe." It's "universeyou.

Brad Warner

#75. The thinking brain influences the body's responses and it makes a neat little loop.

Brad Warner

#76. I mean, I can do that all day long. I can tell you the Vulcan's are not actually devoid of emotion. That they work hard to suppress their emotions. And of course, there actually are no real Vulcan's, though I know the ins and outs of them as fictional characters.

Brad Warner

#77. So I was first exposed to this guy Tim McCarthy, and he's talking about Zen, but deeper than that he was a genuine person. I thought maybe he's someone I can trust and follow this thing he's talking about all the time.

Brad Warner

#78. If a tree falls in the forest and it hits a mime, would he make a noise?

Brad Warner

#79. No matter what we predict for our futures, we're always wrong anyway. The only sensible thing to do is to live this life as it is right now. Leave what happens after you die till after you die.

Brad Warner

#80. But don't get too hung up on the future. The future's out of your control. Enjoy what's happening right now. Do what is appropriate, what is right, in the present moment and let the future be the future.

Brad Warner

#81. Nothing can be separated from everything else.

Brad Warner

#82. It may look like we're doing nothing when we sit zazen. But actually we are exposing ourselves to ourselves.

Brad Warner

#83. I used to worry when I was a teenager, even into my twenties, after I'd heard something about schizophrenia and how people just suddenly become schizophrenic that I was insane.

Brad Warner

#84. Thus a person can be a Buddha one minute and a jackass three minutes later. You don't just become Buddha at the moment of your first enlightenment experience and then stay Buddha forever.

Brad Warner

#85. If he'd [Jesus] been a little more concerned for his own safety and well being he may have toned things down a little bit and probably at best he'd be remembered as a Rabbi who said some cool things but that nobody really reads anymore. There's tons of them.

Brad Warner

#86. I remember writing the post but not what I said specifically, so I'll either repeat myself or say something completely different and baffle everybody.

Brad Warner

#87. The trick to not thinking is not adding energy to the equation in an effort to forcibly stop thinking from happening. It's more a matter of subtracting energy from the equation in order not to barf the thoughts up and start chewing them over again.

Brad Warner