Joko Beck Quotes

What pride to discover that nothing belongs to you - what a revelation.

We are awakened to the profound realization that the true path to liberation is to let go of everything.

One has to go beyond the mind to experience the spiritual bliss of desirelessness.

When you become a sannyasin, I initiate you into freedom, and into nothing else... I am destroying your ideologies, creeds, cults, dogmas, and I am not replacing them with anything else.

Seeker, empty the boat, lighten the load, be free of craving and judgment and hatred, and feel the joy of the way.

Enlightenment is the mind that is open to anything, but attached to nothing. That is freedom. No values, no resentment, no grudges. Not carrying the past along with you. Not carrying memories from the past that are hurtful and shameful and embarrassing. Just let all that go and you are living in enlightenment, and you are free for everything.

Only when the mind is still, tranquil, not expecting or grasping or resisting a single thing, is it possible to see what is true. It is the truth that liberates, not your effort to be free.

People suffer because they are caught in their views. As soon as we release those views, we are free and we don't suffer anymore.

When I look at my life, I see that I wanted to be free of the physical plane, the psychological plane, and when I got free of those I didn't want to go anywhere near them.

Every practice at some point will become a hindrance. No practice can ever take you there, to freedom, to liberation. That's important to realize.

I am already given to the power that rules my fate. And I cling to nothing, so I will have nothing to defend. I have no thoughts, so I will see. I fear nothing, so I will remember myself. Detached and at ease, I will dart past the Eagle to be free.

Late, I learned that when reason died, then Wisdom was born; before that liberation, I had only knowledge.

Zen is a way of liberation, concerned not with discovering what is good or bad or advantageous, but what is.

The real power of the Buddha was that he had so much love. He saw people trapped in their notions of small separate self, feeling guilty or proud of that self, and he offered revolutionary teachings that resounded like a lion's roar, like a great rising tide, helping people to wake up and break free from the prison of ignorance.

To find a Buddha all you have to do is see your nature.

To know yourself as the Being underneath the thinker, the stillness underneath the mental noise, the love and joy underneath the pain, is freedom, salvation, enlightenment.

To remember non-attachment is to remember what freedom is all about. If we get attached, even to a beautiful state of being, we are caught, and ultimately we will suffer. We work to observe anything that comes our way, experience it while it is here, and be able to let go of it.

By taking to the road, we free ourselves of baggage, both physical and psychological. We walk back to our original condition, to our best selves.

Meditation means keeping one mind. You must understand - what is life? What is death? If you keep one mind, there is no life, no death. Then if you die tomorrow, no problem; if you die in five minutes, no problem.

Of those beings who live in ignorance, shut up and confined, as it were, in an egg, I have first broken the eggshell of ignorance and alone in the universe obtained the most exalted, universal Buddhahood.

No one who has lived even for a fleeting moment for something other than life in its conventional sense and has experienced the exaltation that this feeling produces can then renounce his new freedom so easily.

The crown of life is neither happiness nor annihilation; it is understanding.

The spirit becomes free only when it ceases to be a support.

I used to desire many, many things, but now I have just one desire, and that's to get rid of all my other desires.