Transcribed Talks
Stepping into the Beautiful Project: Uncertainty, Grace, and Being Human
Baccalaureate Address, Colorado College
"What does it mean to be alive in a universe that's like a vast sea, and everything we know and experience is no more than the sunlit foam on the surface of the waves of that sea? And how is it that that sunlit foam--the world as we experience it--is so terribly lovely and so awesomely difficult, all at the same time?"
"What does it mean to be alive in a universe that's like a vast sea, and everything we know and experience is no more than the sunlit foam on the surface of the waves of that sea? And how is it that that sunlit foam--the world as we experience it--is so terribly lovely and so awesomely difficult, all at the same time?"
Koans as Art
"These paintings gave me the light of my childhood, which I knew in my cells but wasn't aware of. So I had the world, and my own life, in a way I didn't before, because I became conscious of something, and could articulate something, which had until then been immensely important but unconscious. And this is how koans can work: They illuminate the essential nature we already are but lose touch with. They too can give us the world, and our own lives, in ways we didn't have them before."
Entering the Dream of All Beings
"Between the world of form and the world of emptiness there is another world, the world of the dreaming of all things. It is the place we are never alone, where all beings interpenetrate and transform each other, where life dreams itself into existence moment by moment, over and over again."
Delusions and the Transforming of Them
"If the prerequisite for happiness and sanity is to have this ideal life, all of us are doomed, because no one, not a single one of us, does...This is exactly the kind of delusion our practice is about letting go of. Not so we can come into some kind of perfect life, but so we can come into relationship with what is actually true about life...This is human life. Exactly this. The vastness throws up redwoods and skyscrapers and killer whales and human beings who are exactly like this, and it is not a mistake."
Enlightenment
"So what is your enlightenment? it is the place you came from when you were born and it is the place you will return when you die. It is home. The particular wave that is you rises and falls for such a brief moment from that great ocean of essential nature, and that wave is entirely ocean, is home itself. As children the taste of salt water still lingers in our mouths, but as we grow older the memory of ocean recedes, leaving a feeling of longing, of inexplicable exile, in its wake."
