In reference to another thread ('why meditate'), thought I would offer this up from Jack Kornfields "A Path With Heart". I personally think that the words apply to anyone who persists in learning an art over time, regardless whether they actually sit.

"Spiritual tranformation is a profound process that doesn't happen by accident. We need a repeated discipline, a genuine training, in order to let go of our old habits of mind and to find and sustain a new way of seeing. To mature on the spiritual path we need to commit ourselves in a systematic way. My teacher Achaan Chah described this commitment as 'taking the one seat." He said, "Just go into the room and put one chair in the center. Take the one seat in the center of the room, open the doors and windows, and see who comes to visit. You will witness all kinds of scenes and actors, all kinds of temptations and stories, everything imaginable. Your only job is to stay in your seat. You will see it all arise and pass, and out of this, wisdom and understanding will come."

Disciples and hermit Buddhas claim realization
Of a partial selflessness but do not know this exactly.
Bound up in claims from their treatises and theories,
They do not behold the clear light transparency.
Disciples and hermits are shut out by clinging to subject and object,
Centrists are shut out by extremism about the two realities,
Ritual and performance Tantrists, by extremism in service and practice,
And great Maha and pervasive Anu Tantrists,
By clinging to the duality of realm and intelligence.
They err by remaining dualistic in nonduality,
By not communing nondually, they do not awaken.
All life and liberation inseparable from their own minds,
They still roam the life-cycle on vehicles of quitting and choosing.

Attributed to Padmasambhava,
later discovered by the treasure-finder Karma Lingpa

From: Essential Tibetan Buddhism
Robert A.F/Thurman

An excerpt from "Dzogchen: Heart Essence of the Great Perfection", The Dalai Lama

(Patrul Rinpoche)

To know how to meditate,
but not how to liberate-
How does that differ from the meditation of the gods?

What this means is that those who put their trust in a meditation which lacks this vital point of the method of liberation, and is merely some state of mental quiescence, will only stray into the meditation states of the higher realms. People who claim that it is sufficient simply to recognize stillness and movements are no different from ordinary people with their deluded thinking. And as for those who give it all kinds of labels like 'emptiness' and 'dharmakaya', the basic flaw in their remedy is exposed when it fails to hold up under the first misfortune or difficulty they meet. So: "Without this, meditation is but the path of delusion."

A little something from Tang Poetry:

By Qiu Wei

AFTER MISSING THE RECLUSE
ON THE WESTERN MOUNTAIN

To your hermitage here on the top of the mountain
I have climbed, without stopping, these ten miles.
I have knocked at your door, and no one answered;
I have peeped into your room, at your seat beside the table.
Perhaps you are out riding in your canopied chair,
Or fishing, more likely, in some autumn pool.
Sorry though I am to be missing you,
You have become my meditation --
The beauty of your grasses, fresh with rain,
And close beside your window the music of your pines.
I take into my being all that I see and hear,
Soothing my senses, quieting my heart;
And though there be neither host nor guest,
Have I not reasoned a visit complete?
...After enough, I have gone down the mountain.
Why should I wait for you any longer?

I was out looking for you!

A meditation inspired by the 'meat' thread:

"For the animal shall not be measured by man. In a world older and more complete than ours, they move finished and complete, gifted with extensions of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear. They are not brethren, they are not underlings; they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendour and travail of the earth."

-Henry Beston

"Not only the Buddhists, but also the tantrikas and the Taoists, talk a lot about nonaction. This is a concept that is misunderstood if we think that it means no action at all. Nonaction does not mean striving for a sort of passivity, and trying not to act. On the contrary, it is about throwing oneself into action and forgetting completely why one is taking that action and what one wants to obtain by it. That is, it means freeing oneself from the fruits of the action. It is a little like the object of desire from which we free ourselves by experiencing energy without a goal. At that moment, say the masters - and we can verify this on our own - we experience the grace of movement. Indeed, a movement that is determined by a goal is disharmonious, whereas a completely gratuitous action reaches a different space, a grace that is impossible to find when we are constrained by the presence of the object to be obtained. What is meant here is to enter into action, liberate the objective, and find the grace, the beauty, of the everyday gesture. Then, suddenly, there is contemplation because there is grace.

Reaching an occasional state of peace in meditation is a good start, but what is wonderful is to live it within daily activities. It is important that (it)...not be a quasi-miraculous state, which we attain in a moment of grace, but that it become almost ordinary, perceived at the occurrence of any contact with things and beings. then we can say that we are in meditation, because all of reality is transformed."

-Daniel Odier

"Zen Buddhism...has a beautiful saying: honsho-myoshu, which means "original enlightenment is wondrous practice." Unity consciousness is not a future state which results from some practice, because that would imply that unity consciousness has a beginning in time, that it doesn't exist now but will exist tomorrow. That would make unity consciousness a strictly temporal state, which is not acceptable at all, for unity consciousness is present eternally.

That unity consciousness is always present is our honsho, our "original enlightenment," original not because it occurred in ancient times past, but because it is the origin and ground of this instant. Enlightenment is the origin of the present form. Myoshu, spiritual practice, is the movement or activity of this origin; it is the appropriate function of origin-al enlightenment...

...In the words of Suzuki Roshi:

If our practice is only a means to attain enlightenment, there is actually no way to attain it. Enlightenment is not some good feeling or some particular state of mind. The state of mind that exists when you sit [in zazen practice] is, itself, enlightenment. In this posture there is no need to talk about the right state of mind. You already have it."

-Ken Wilber, No Boundaries

Great thread Harlan!!