Best 13 quotes of Polly Young-eisendrath on MyQuotes

Metaphor is our mental root of imagination and language. Arnold Kozak offers fertile metaphors for growing your knowledge of the Buddhadharma. If you contemplate these brief stories, your emotional intelligence and mindfulness will develop effortlessly from the insights they provide.

What does it mean to feel "in control" of your life? What I mean by control is the ability to make a choice. Personal sovereignty means that you choose from what is available in order to be intentional about your life...When you feel in control of your life, you know yourself to be the author of your own actions and know that you always have choices.

Asian philosophy and culture never endured an intellectual upheaval like the Cartesian split of mind and body that brought the so-called Enlightenment to the West. The consequent achievements of scientific method and the less fortunate by-products of secular self-interest together laid the groundwork, in Europe and America, for the personal psychology of psychoanalysis and psychotherapy.

At a first glance, medical psychology seems to have nothing to do with religion. But at its depth it provides a new, though at the same time primordial, perspective on what should be the subject matter of religion. It is both a criticism and an approval of religion. It is in and through the soul that problems of the world reveal themselves as world problems.

Awareness of the existence of oneself leads to a crisis in which one’s being-in-the-world is fundamentally questioned. One’s existence, however, is not simply denied. Instead, one faces the basic fact that one is responsible for one’s relations to all humans and other beings through one’s acts.

Everything in the cosmos now proves to be relative. Nothing is autonomous in itself. All things in the world betray their interdependence with each other. Metaphysics ceases to be an abstract system of thought and becomes an experiential reality. Not beings in the world but the world itself comes to be questioned.

In our normal, everyday forms of consciousness, we suffer form what [William] James calls a 'lifelong habit of inferiority to our full self.' Insofar as the self that encases the seed of a wider consciousness like a husk is seen as 'conventionally healthy,' cracking it open to uncover the higher part leaves the individual exposed to neurosis; but then, as James reminds us and as Jung himself knew, this may well be the chief condition for receptivity to these higher realms.

Is suffering in a dream real? Within the dream it sure as hell is! Dukkha is real, seemingly the only reality, while I am dreaming. Once I wake up, however, where is dukkha? What happens when I wake up? I awaken to the fact that the whole complex—for example, in a nightmare, the scary figure chasing me and myself scared—was all just a dream. Everything in the dream, including myself in the dream, was just a dream. The entire dream world was just a dream, including rivers and mountains, space-time, life-death, health-illness. Now awake, it is all gone without remainder.

Scientism proposes that scientific investigation is nothing more than the accumulation of ‘facts’. The question thus arises: what actually are ‘facts’? They are not simply existing there, waiting for scientific investigation. Only a little phenomenological reflection reveals that they show themselves as facts because of the construction of, or at least the correlation with, what is usually called mind. Mind thus is a fundamental fact. It is psychology that reveals this truth.

[S]urely the mysterious inner world of the psyche as such still offers an important forum where religions can meet, leaving their dogmas at the door, and pursue together the elusive quest for a common humanity that transcends religious differences.

[T]he formless self is free from all suffering even as it compassionately ‘takes on’ the suffering of all.

[T]here are more and more Western scholars who [...] strive to experience Buddhism directly in the Eastern countries where it has long been a central element of cultural tradition. They must be clearly distinguished from those Westerners who, unable or unwilling to confront themselves with their own Western tradition, frivolously escape to any different world.

[W]hat would be more reliable than the East and the West? Perhaps a concept of the world, the universe, or the cosmos. Our age can be characterized by the growing consciousness of the world as a whole. Our historical era is in essence cosmological.