Ethan Nichtern Quotes & Sayings

Feeling at home is the feeling that I can just be myself. It — Ethan Nichtern

given the way companies function, this change is only possible if the principles and interests guiding corporations shift from being centered on profit to being centered on the morality of interdependence, which means benefit (profit) to all the communities we and they share. And that movement relies on each company's stockholders beginning to deepen their practices of generosity to overcome the hungry-ghost mentality, because these stockholders happen to also be consumers. Thus consumers have to demand changes in the M.O. of the companies we collectively control. So, our practices of generosity and livelihood (in other words, consumption and production) are . . . well . . . connected. — Ethan Nichtern

If we are able to take responsibility for our own mind, then we can work with whatever life throws at us without resentment or blame, and with the curiosity and self-care that are necessary for mindfulness to develop in all aspects of life. On this basis, we can also help others. — Ethan Nichtern

Spiritual bypassing often adopts a rationale based on using absolute truth to deny or disparage relative truth. — Ethan Nichtern

Even if it's just a tiny flicker of awkwardness, there will always be fear, every moment, as long as there are beings who live in a network of change and interdependence. To be a being inherently implies change and interdependence ; these are the true brands of our existence. Getting connected necessarily means experiencing fear. — Ethan Nichtern

Thinking that we have to always burn our candle at both ends in order to benefit others is perhaps the greatest idiot compassion of all. — Ethan Nichtern

When we are able to stay present with the internal discomfort created by the idea that somebody else might be mad at us, we end up becoming a bodhisattva with tremendous integrity. We end up building confidence that we can say what we think and mean what we say, more and more often. This kind of integrity and dignity become contagious, and in the end, even if somebody doesn't agree with us, that person at least respects us for our dedication to living by our principles. — Ethan Nichtern

A confused society, a deeply endangered society, is a group of people all lost in nightmarish commute. The systems, institutions, and culture of such a society discourage people from feeling the trust and belonging that come with being at home in your world. A — Ethan Nichtern

In most cases, the truth is a blade that does not need to be sharpened, and we almost never need to twist the knife. Because as a listener we can empathize with the fear that what we hear might hurt, we can also work to apply gentleness when speaking. I — Ethan Nichtern

Running for the hills is not the way to go. We live in a time where there are actually fewer and fewer places left to run away to. Therefore, it's imperative to find ways to use your energy to dive into - not run from - existing paths of livelihood. A hip-hop mogul or an oil executive are powerful already. There's no reason they couldn't be powerfully selfless and compassionate as well. — Ethan Nichtern

When we stop asking the question "Whose fault is it?" and start asking the question "How can I work with this now?" then we are truly stepping onto the path of taking responsibility for our karma. When — Ethan Nichtern

Eventually, if we are going to wake up and truly come home to our own heartmind, we have to turn the full scope of our life into a practice space. This doesn't have to start as an all-the-time endeavor, but little by little it is said that our awareness practice can become a constant companion. It — Ethan Nichtern

The Tantric view is that there is already a complete Buddha dormant within each of us, but we've individually and collectively become addicted to horror movies that we mistake for documentaries. From this perspective, our whole society is caught up in a kind of shared horror story, imagining ourselves as zombie consumers rather than empowered citizens: afraid, insecure, incapable beings who have no choice but to wander through life grasping after fleeting pleasures, needlessly competing with each other instead of collaborating, isolating ourselves from the plight of those whose stories we don't understand. Because our whole society is both constructing and watching this shared screenplay simultaneously, the physical world begins to take on the qualities of this horror movie, and it becomes more and more difficult to distinguish the theater of our experience from the screen of our own projections. — Ethan Nichtern

Within our twenty-first century modes of communication, truth can be easily manipulated and framed to get the viewer of the information to receive it in a predetermined way, to elicit a desired spin of "truth." Turning on the light doesn't guarantee the clarifying of confusion anymore. If all of the media of our societal experience make us believe that a rope is a snake, then a rope becomes a snake, either in darkness or the light of day. — Ethan Nichtern

In thinking of home, we have to move beyond considering home as a physical address. We have to start asking what home feels like. My — Ethan Nichtern

It is no measure of health to be well-adjusted to a profoundly sick society. - KRISHNAMURTI — Ethan Nichtern

Because a Buddha completely trusts her own mind, curiosity comes naturally. A Buddha is actually curious about how the old bully is doing right now! With natural curiosity, the practice of mindfulness becomes effortless. When we actually start to want to be present, we start to care for everybody, so compassion becomes increasingly panoramic. As compassion expands, the mental barbed wire between yourself and your experience dissolves. Once that wall of duality crumbles, nothing can take you away from feeling at home in the universe, and no experience needs to be rejected as unworthy. This is what it really means to feel at home wherever you are. — Ethan Nichtern

Karma is what we fabricate when we no longer trust the universe. — Ethan Nichtern

Whenever we mentally compartmentalize our work away from our more creative or more spiritual being, we construct a false dichotomy. This schism has to collapse on the level of universal interdependence. If your week and life are segregated this way, you're going to cause suffering - at the very least for yourself. You'll guiltily and resentfully acquiesce to your place in the world. — Ethan Nichtern

I often find that when I fall into the trap of speaking too harshly, it is because I don't have enough confidence in the power of my own voice to carry sufficient strength on its own. When you realize that your speech can be powerful, you don't need to amplify that power by making personal attacks that overgeneralize the specific feedback you are trying to give. — Ethan Nichtern

Thoughts aren't the problem. Problems only develop when thoughts no longer arise from or refer to actual experience. That's when thoughts start ossifying into their own bureaucratic institutions, becoming assumptions and dogma. — Ethan Nichtern

When generalizations turn into painful cultural stereotypes and biases, those biased narratives disrupt our ability to see each event as individual, which interrupts our ability to intelligently and compassionately respond to what's happening now. In many cases, our generalizations cause real harm, like somebody shooting a person who looks "suspicious" because he fits a racial profile. Generalization is what leads to oppression. Deconstructing our generalizations is the only way to overcome bias. This is where studying emptiness is intended to lead us - toward the cessation of prejudice. — Ethan Nichtern

Many psychological traditions have noticed that a given behavior pattern was originally a helpful strategy for survival, a strategy that may no longer apply in the present. If you were bullied in the seventh grade, there might be a block in your home-town or city where the bullies used to wait for you, and even as an adult your sense memories might cause you to hesitate before walking confidently down that block. This is definitely true for me, having grown up in New York City. Thus, we have to acknowledge that every habit contains a kind of protective intelligence, a wisdom that somehow got frozen in a bygone time. — Ethan Nichtern

Projecting our needs onto somebody else's disagreement is very manipulative and makes it impossible for the parties involved to come to an understanding of what they want and need for themselves. It may also lead us to draw false equivalences between people's behavior, where we just assume that both sides have equal truth because we are unwilling to accept that there might be very valid grievances at play, and that the people involved might never agree to a solution. What we should be saying instead is, "What do you really want here? Do you want to work this out, or do you want to go your separate ways? — Ethan Nichtern

To me, the view that Buddhist teachings are somehow religious, requiring some form of blind belief, and that you would have to relinquish other spiritual practices in order to pursue them fully, is neither accurate nor helpful. It's not accurate because the Buddha's central thesis was humanistic; he focused clearly on human suffering and the causes of that suffering. At the same time, viewing Buddhism as a religion is not helpful. People from all walks of life become interested in the vast array of Buddhist ethical, philosophical, and psychological teachings, and to declare that they cannot fully participate because they are also exploring another spirituality is severely confining and unnecessary. — Ethan Nichtern

One of the greatest lessons that comes from meditation is that a relaxed curiosity about life and sleepwalking through it are two radically different choices — Ethan Nichtern

The Sanskrit word samsara - which traditionally represents the summation of all our confusion and destructive patterns of behavior - literally means "wandering around." The Tibetan word for a sentient being caught up in confusion - drowa - could be translated as "always on the go." I like to think of this word as meaning "commuter. — Ethan Nichtern

Here's my personal definition of a Buddhist: someone who prioritizes cultivating her relationship to her own heartmind - and her relationship to other sentient beings - above whatever else she might achieve in life. — Ethan Nichtern

War doesn't end war any more than a heroin fix ends a heroin addiction. — Ethan Nichtern

At its heart, infotainment represents the indiscriminate combination of two mental longings, conflated by our ignorance. These two impulses are: 1. the impulse to be informed - to know what is real and what isn't, in ourselves and the world around us (the "info"); and 2. the desire to be entertained and comforted, to be reassured about the correctness of our personal and collective tendencies (the "tainment"). — Ethan Nichtern

A spiritual path based on unverifiable ideas is stripped of any real accountability to the world we live in. If our spiritual path is not held accountable to the evidence of direct experience in the world, we have no real measuring stick for how our journey is progressing. At the extreme end of this spectrum, we might pay no attention to climate change because we are convinced the Rapture is coming soon. A more subtle instance of an unscientific spirituality might involve thinking that the number of compassion mantras we recite is more important than how well we treat our romantic partner. — Ethan Nichtern

The doormat version of idiot compassion always involves allowing ourselves to feel walked all over in the name of idealizing what it means to be patient with another person's aggressive behavior. It's an unwillingness to face the uncomfortable truth that it's okay to feel angry and irritated. — Ethan Nichtern

Love requires learning to love ourselves in the mirror, and learning to look other people in the eye. Buddhism, in turn, asks us to pause and look at even the subtlest causal connections and take our appreciation of them to greater depths. — Ethan Nichtern

When we get overwhelmed by the larger moral implications of our work, we overlook the smaller, more imperceptible effects of our labor. Interdependence is about the little things you do. It's not just what you produce, but how you treat the people around you, who labor with you. And there is always something we can do that is positive - ALWAYS. — Ethan Nichtern

This is perhaps the greatest lesson that interdependence has to offer us about right livelihood (and right living in general) in the twenty-first century: no person, and no profession, comes out completely clean, ever. On the other hand, no one is inherently defiled. — Ethan Nichtern

Our personal journey is rarely easy, and our global journey is even less so. Because everything is interdependent, we have to work on both of these levels at once. Trying to change society without deeply understanding our heartmind won't work. Your own road home can never be separated from society's journey. We need a unifying theory and language that allow us to link the lessons of our personal journey with the situation facing our world. The important question then, a question laced with a gorgeous irony, is, "How do we get home from here?" Or, maybe more appropriate, "How do we get here from here? — Ethan Nichtern