Jay Michaelson Quotes

I thought that coming out was going to be the end of my religious life but actually it was the beginning. Because it only afterwards that I could be honest about who I was, what I wanted, how I understood spirituality.

Part of why I love these angry, straight, white punks is that they are stripping the dharma of its bullshit, and applying it to contexts and styles that, even if they aren't mine, are at least different from the norm.

The Buddha's dharma didn't teach peace and relaxation; it taught awakening - often rude awakening.

What a miracle, that all we have to do to be beautifully loving creatures is just relax and allow.

People should support equality because of their religion not despite it. These are the values that openness, inclusion, diversity promote. And they're directly opposed to the kind of enforced closet of certain interpretations of religion.

To me, God is a name that humans give to all that is. Experientially, it is whatever is left over when the delusion of the self is taken away.

Yes, eros and agape are different, but the stifling of the former leads to a distortion of the latter.

We in the Jewish community are comparatively lucky. All of traditions have anti-gay pieces but the Jewish tradition doesn't have as many anti-sexuality and anti-body teachings. It's a lot easier to fit affirmation of sexuality and gender.

Sometimes, sitting there on the cushion failing to watch your breath, it can feel like you're the only weirdo weird enough to be wasting your time in this way. But you're not! There are generations of weirdos, monasteries full of them, and we have the benefit of their accumulated wisdom.

It is possible to refine awareness itself so much that the emptiness of things, and the role mental construction plays, becomes a directly apprehended reality.

For me, religion comforts the afflicted and afflicts the comfortable.

I was raised a nice Jewish boy in a Conservative household. Went to Camp Ramah. It's funny actually. I think I enacted my queerness there unconsciously. I was kind of one of the weirdos. I was on staff and definitely interested in alternatives to what that social structure was supposed to be.

There's no path to liberation that doesn't pass through the shadow.

For the Buddha of the Pali Canon, the goal is liberation: the cessation of suffering, the end of the endless hamster-wheel of dependent origination, of mental formations leading to desire leading to clinging leading to suffering and so on. Nibbana, or nirvana, was not originally conceived as some magical heavenly world, or even a permanent altered state of consciousness. It is usually described, in the early texts, negatively: as a candle being snuffed out.

All relaxation does is allow the truth to be felt. The mind is cleared, like a dirty window wiped clean, and the magnitude of what we might ordinarily take for granted inspires tears.