Jack Kornfield
Jack Kornfield
Jack Kornfieldis a bestselling American author and teacher in the vipassana movement in American Theravada Buddhism. He trained as a Buddhist monk in Thailand, Burma and India, first as a student of the Thai forest master Ajahn Chah and Mahasi Sayadaw of Burma. He has taught meditation worldwide since 1974 and is one of the key teachers to introduce Buddhist Mindfulness practice to the West. In 1975, he co-founded the Insight Meditation Society in Barre, Massachusetts, with Sharon Salzberg and...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionReligious Leader
Date of Birth16 July 1945
CountryUnited States of America
Each moment of every day is new and then it vanishes. Where is that day? Where is that moment?
Buddhism talks about the possibility of transforming greed, hatred, and delusion. But sometimes need turns into greed.
Nobody knows why they were born or where they come from.
With growing awareness, you can see where you're caught or where you suffer or where you create suffering. You can then turn toward the difficulties that arise in your life with compassion, bow, and say, these too are part of human incarnation.
When you rest in presence and pure awareness, sometimes everything is experienced as love because you're connected with all that is, and love is simply the nature of being.
No one knows how this world came into being. It is a creation of consciousness itself. It's extraordinary, a mystery.
Some other people think that awakened consciousness is really about fullness or presence, being completely present for every moment, but these experiences are only one of the dimensions of awakened consciousness. Understanding these different dimensions as facets of awakening can help with the confusion surrounding the different spiritual paths. They're not leading to different places, but rather reflect the luminous and liberated aspects of consciousness itself. These qualities are not far away; in fact, they are right here.
Use whatever has come to awaken patience, understanding, and love.
We can step out of our small sense of self and awaken to this reality. One of the reasons people get confused about freedom, enlightenment, and liberation is because this awakened consciousness has different facets or different dimensions, a bit like a crystal. If you hold this luminous crystal up to the light and turn it, it will take a beam of white light and refract it into the many colors of the spectrum.
We need a warrior’s heart that lets us face our lives directly, our pains and limitations, our joys and possibilities.
Through practice, gently and gradually we can collect ourselves and learn how to be more fully with what we do.
We must look at our life without sentimentality, exaggeration or idealism. Does what we are choosing reflect what we most deeply value?
Compassion arises naturally as the quivering of the heart in the face of pain, ours and another's. True compassion is not limited by the separateness of pity, nor by the fear of being overwhelmed. When we come to rest in the great heart of compassion, we discover a capacity to bear witness to, suffer with, and hold dear with our own vulnerable heart the sorrows and beauties of the world.
To learn to concentrate we must choose a prayer or meditation and follow this path with commitment and steadiness, a willingness to work with our practice day after day, no matter what arises.