Quotes by Alan Watts

"Peace can be made only by those who are peaceful, and love can be shown only by those who love."

"Conscious attention is not really the effective controlling force in your life, it’s merely the lookout. It's merely an information source which warns the organism as a whole of unusual features of the environment. […] It is the trouble-shooter - and if you identify yourself with your trouble-shooter, well then, you become one-sided and you become a perpetually anxious person."

"The basic assumption of unionism was not the dignity but the drudgery of labor, and the strategy was, therefore, to do as little as possible for as much pay as possible. Thus, as automation eliminates drudgery, it eliminates the necessity for the unions, a truth that is already extending up to such "high-class" unions as the musicians'. The piper who hates to play is replaced by a tape, which does not object when the payer calls the tune. If, then, the unions are to have any further usefulness, they must use their political pressure, not for a greater share of profits (based on rising prices to pay for rising wages) but for total revision of the concept and function of money."

"What you are basically, deep, deep down, far, far inn, is simply the fabric and structure of existence itself."

"When you die, you're not going to have to put up with everlasting non-existance, because that's not an experience. A lot of people are afraid that when they die, they're going to be locked up in a dark room forever, - Try and imagine what it would be like to go to sleep and never wake up. And if you think long enough about that...it will pose the next question. What was it like to wake up after never having gone to sleep? That was when you were born...you see...you...you can't have an experience of nothing so after you're dead the only thing that can happen is the same experience or the same sort of experience as when you were born."

"The meaning of being alive is just being alive."

"When you get the message, it's time to hang up the phone."

"All this will involve a curious reversal of the Protestant ethic, which, at least in the United States, is one of the big obstacles to a future of wealth and leisure for all. The Devil, it is said, finds work for idle hands to do, and human energy cannot be trusted unless most of it is absorbed in hard, productive work—so that, on coming home, we are too tired to get into mischief. It is feared that affluence plus leisure will, as in times past, lead to routs and orgies and all the perversities that flow therefrom, and then on to satiation, debilitation, and decay—as in Hogarth's depiction of A Rake's Progress."

"You can, indeed, refuse to admit this, but only at the cost of the immense and futile effort of spending your whole life resisting the inevitable."

"If we seek the meaning in the past, the chain of cause and effect vanishes like the wake of a ship. If we seek it in the future, it fades out like the beam of a searchlight in the night sky. If we seek it in the present, it is as elusive as flying spray, and there is nothing to grasp. But when only the seeking remains and we seek to know what this is, it suddenly turns into the mountains and waters, the sky and the stars, sufficient to themselves with no one left to seek anything from them."

"This may sound feckless and undisciplined, as if young people (especially hippies) had become incapable of postponing gratification. Thus, it might seem that the worldwide rebellions of students are a sign that the adolescent is no longer willing to work through the period of training that it takes to become an adult. "Elders and betters" do not understand that today's students do not want to become their kind of adult, which is what the available training is intended to produce."

"Everyone has a religion, whether admitted or not, because it is impossible to be human without having some basic assumptions (or intuitions) about existence and the good life."

"Omul perfect folosește mintea ca pe o oglindă. Nu apucă nimic; nu refuză nimic. Primește, dar nu păstrează."

"The free man walks straight ahead; he has no hesitations and never looks behind, for he knows that there is nothing in the future and nothing in the past that can shake his freedom."

"Indeed, the world is not unlike a vast Rorschach blot which we read according to our inner disposition, in such a way that our interpretations say far more about ourselves than about the blot."

"I had a long talk with Jung back in 1958 and I was enormously impressed with a man who was obviously very great but, at the same time, with whom everybody could be completely at ease. There are so many great people, great in knowledge or great in what is called holiness with whom the ordinary individual feels rather embarrassed. He feels inclined to sit on the edge of his chair and to feel immediately judged by this person’s wisdom or sanctity. Jung managed to have wisdom and I think also sanctity in such a way that when other people came into its presence they didn’t feel judged, they felt enhanced, encouraged and invited to share in a common life. And there was a sort of twinkle in Jung’s eye that gave me the impression that he knew himself to be just as much a villain as everybody else. There’s a nice German word - ‘hintergedanke’, which means a thought in the very far far back of your mind. Jung had a hintergedanke in the back of his mind which showed, it showed in the twinkle in his eyes, it showed that he knew and recognized what i have sometimes called ‘the element of irreducible rascality’ in himself."

"There may be wrong actions in the sense of actions contrary to the rules of human communication. But the way you feel towards other people: loving, hating, et cetera, et cetera; there aren’t any wrong feelings. And so, to try and force one’s feelings to be other than what they are is absurd. And furthermore: dishonest. But you see: the idea that there are no wrong feelings is an immensely threatening one to people who are afraid to feel. This is one of the peculiar problems of our culture: we are terrified of our feelings. We think that if we give them any scope and if we don’t immediately beat them down, they will lead us down into all kinds of chaotic and destructive actions. But if, for a change, we would allow our feelings and look upon their comings and goings as something as beautiful and necessary as changes in the weather, the going of night and day and the four seasons, we would be at peace with ourselves."

"The startling truth is that our best efforts for civil rights, international peace, population control, conservation of natural resources, and assistance to the starving of the earth—urgent as they are—will destroy rather than help if made in the present spirit. For, as things stand, we have nothing to give. If our own riches and our own way of life are not enjoyed here, they will not be enjoyed anywhere else."

"As an apple tree apples the solar system in which we live peoples and therefore we are an expression of its energy and of its nature."

"He comes back because he sees the two worlds are the same, the transcendental world and the every day world."

"Reality in itself is neither permanent nor impermanent; it cannot be categorized. But when one tries to hold on to it, change is everywhere apparent, since, like one's own shadow, the faster one pursues it, the faster it flees."

"To begin with, this world has a different kind of time. It is the time of biological rhythm, not of the clock and all that goes with the clock. There is no hurry. Our sense of time is notoriously subjective and thus dependent upon the quality of our attention, whether of interest or boredom, and upon the alignment of our behavior in terms of routines, goals, and deadlines. Here the present is self-sufficient, but it is not a static present. It is a dancing presentóthe unfolding of a pattern which has no specific destination in the future but is simply its own point. It leaves and arrives simultaneously, and the seed is as much the goal as the flower. There is therefore time to perceive every detail of the movement with infinitely greater richness of articulation. Normally we do not so much look at things as overlook them."

"We are belatedly realizing that the ill-treatment of the environment is damage to ourselves - for the simple reason that the subject and object cannot be separated, and that we and our surroundings are the process of a unified field."

"No valid plans for the future can be made by those who have no capacity for living fully now."

"When a fish swims, he swims on and on, and there is no end to the water. When a bird flies, he flies on and on, and there is no end to the sky. From the most ancient times, there was never a fish who swam out of the water or a bird that flew out of the sky. Yet when the fish needs just a little water, he uses just a little, when he needs a lot, he uses lots. Thus the tips of their heads are always at the outer edge (of their space). Yet if there were a bird who first wanted to examine the extent of the sky, or a fish who first wanted to examine the extent of the water — and then tried to fly or to swim, they will never find their own ways in the sky or the water."

"Wars based on principle are far more destructive...the attacker will not destroy that which he is after."

"Listen, there’s something I must tell. I’ve never, never seen it so clearly. But it doesn’t matter a bit if you don’t understand, because each one of you is quite perfect as you are, even if you don’t know it. Life is basically a gesture, but no one, no thing, is making it. There is no necessity for it to happen, and none for it to go on happening. For it isn’t being driven by anything; it just happens freely of itself. It’s a gesture of motion, of sound, of color, and just as no one is making it, it isn’t happening to anyone. There is simply no problem of life; it is completely purposeless play – exuberance which is its own end. Basically there is the gesture. Time, space, and multiplicity are complications of it. There is no reason whatever to explain it, for explanations are just another form of complexity, a new manifestation of life on top of life, of gestures gesturing. Pain and suffering are simply extreme forms of play, and there isn’t anything in the whole universe to be afraid of because it doesn’t happen to anyone! There isn’t any substantial ego at all. The ego is a kind of flip, a knowing of knowing, a fearing of fearing. It’s a curlicue, an extra jazz to experience, a sort of double-take or reverberation, a dithering of consciousness which is the same as anxiety."

"When I leave the Church and the city behind and go out under the sky, when I am with the birds, [...] with the clouds, [...] and with the oceans, [...] I cannot feel Christianity because I am in a world which grows from within. I am simply incapable of feeling its life as coming from above. More exactly, I cannot feel that its life comes from Another, from one who is qualitatively and spiritually external to all that lives and grows. On the contrary, I feel this whole world to be moved from the inside, and from an inside so deep that it is my inside as well, more truly I than my surface consciousness."

"To succeed is always to fail-in the sense that the more one succeeds in anything, the greater is the need to go on succeeding. To eat is to survive to be hungry."

"Earth is in heaven. It spins, falls, and floats in a spiral nebula. Earth is not opposed to heaven: it belongs in it as a member of the whole company of the stars."

"Thus in using myth one must take care not to confuse image with fact, which would be like climbing up the signpost instead of following the road."

"Nature appears to be a hierarchy of many grades, corresponding to what the scientist calls ''levels of magnification." Thus when we adjust our lenses to watch the individual cells of an organism we see only particular successes and failures, victories and defeats in what appears to be a ruthless ''dog-eat-dog'' battle. But when we change the level of magnification to observe the organism as a whole, we see that what was conflict at the lower level is harmony at the higher: that the health, the ongoing life of the organism is precisely the outcome of this microscopic turmoil."

"As is so often the way, what we have suppressed and overlooked is something startlingly obvious. The difficulty is that it is so obvious and basic that one can hardly find the words for it. The Germans call it a Hintergedanke, an apprehension lying tacitly in the back of our minds which we cannot easily admit, even to ourselves. The sensation of "I" as a lonely and isolated center of being is so powerful and commonsensical, and so fundamental to our modes of speech and thought, to our laws and social institutions, that we cannot experience selfhood except as something superficial in the scheme of the universe. I seem to be a brief light that flashes but once in all the aeons of time — a rare, complicated, and all-too-delicate organism on the fringe of biological evolution, where the wave of life bursts into individual, sparkling, and multicolored drops that gleam for a moment only to vanish forever. Under such conditioning it seems impossible and even absurd to realize that myself does not reside in the drop alone, but in the whole surge of energy which ranges from the galaxies to the nuclear fields in my body. At this level of existence "I" am immeasurably old; my forms are infinite and their comings and goings are simply the pulses or vibrations of a single and eternal flow of energy."

"Taoism, Confucianism, and Zen are expressions of a mentality which feels completely at home in this universe, and which sees man as an integral part of his environment. Human intelligence is not an imprisoned spirit from afar but an aspect of the whole intricately balanced organism of the natural world [...]."

"Sanctity or sagehood as an exclusive vocation is [...] symptomatic of an exclusive mode of consciousness in particular. Its basic assumption is that God and nature are in competition and that man must choose between them. Its standpoint is radically dualistic."

"Now—unless some zoologist can dig up a weird exception—humans are the only living beings who wear clothes. They are also the only beings who laugh, for humor is the property of humanity and consists, essentially, in not taking oneself seriously. (Consider the situation of someone chasing a hat blown off by the wind.) People can laugh at themselves because they know, deep down, that their lives are a big act, a put-on."

"From the pragmatic standpoint of our culture, such an attitude is very bad for business. It might lead to improvidence, lack of foresight, diminished sales of insurance policies, and abandoned savings accounts. Yet this is just the corrective that our culture needs. No one is more fatuously impractical than the "successful" executive who spends his whole life absorbed in frantic paperwork with the objective of retiring in comfort at sixty-five, when it will be all too late."

"Our problem is that the power of thought allows us to construct symbols of things, separate from the things themselves. This includes our ability to create a symbol, an idea of ​​ourselves, outside of ourselves. Because idea is much easier to grasp than reality, and symbol is much more stable than fact, we learn to identify with our idea of ​​ourselves. Hence the subjective feeling of an "I" that "has" a mind, of an isolated inner subject that goes through its experiences involuntarily. With its characteristic emphasis on the concrete, Zen shows us that our precious self is only an idea, useful and quite legitimate if taken only for what it is, but disastrous if identified with our true nature. The unnatural awkwardness of a certain kind of self-consciousness occurs when we are aware of a conflict or contrast between the idea of ​​ourselves on the one hand and the concrete, immediate sense of self on the other."

"There is never anything but the present, and if one cannot live in it, one cannot live anywhere."

"Strictly speaking, these drugs do not impart wisdom at all, any more than the microscope alone gives knowledge. They provide the raw materials of wisdom, and are useful to the extent that the individual can integrate what they reveal into the whole pattern of his behavior and the whole system of his knowledge."

"The whole situation in and around at this instant is a harmony with which you have to find your own union if you are able to be in accord with Tao. When you have discovered your own union with it, you will be in the state of Te, sometimes rendered as "virue" or "grace" or "power”, but best understood as Tao realized in man."

"1/7 of your life should be madness."

"Why do we love nonsense? Why do we love Lewis Carroll with his „Twas brillig, and the slithy toves did gyre and gimble in the wabe, all mimsy were the borogoves, and the mome raths outgrabe...”? Why is it that all those old English songs are full of “Fal-de-riddle-eye-do” and „Hey-nonny-nonny” and all those babbling choruses? Why is it that when we get „hep” with jazz we just go „Boody-boody-boop-de-boo” and so on, and enjoy ourselves swinging with it? It is this participation in the essential glorious nonsense that is at the heart of the world, not necessarily going anywhere. It seems that only in moments of unusual insight and illumination that we get the point of this, and find that the true meaning of life is no meaning, that its purpose is no purpose, and that its sense is non-sense. Still, we want to use the word “significant.” Is this significant nonsense? Is this a kind of nonsense that is not just chaos, that is not just blathering balderdash, but rather has in it rhythm, fascinating complexity, and a kind of artistry? It is in this kind of meaninglessness that we come to the profoundest meaning."

"By contrast, hell or "everlasting damnation" is not the everlastingness of time going on forever, but of the unbroken circle, the continuity and frustration of going round and round in pursuit of something which can never be attained. Hell is the fatuity, the everlasting impossibility, of self-love, self-consciousness, and seld-possession. It is trying to see one´s own eyes, hear one´s own ears, and kiss one´s own lips."

"For there is no joy in continuity, in the perpetual. We desire it only because the present is empty. A person who is trying to eat money is always hungry. When someone says, "Time to stop now!" he is in a panic because he has had nothing to eat yet, and wants more and more time to go on eating money, ever hopeful of satisfaction around the corner. We do not really want continuity, but rather a present experience of total happiness. The though of wanting such an experience to go on and on is a result of being self-conscious in the experience, and thsu incompletely aware of it. So long as there is the feeling of an "I" having this experience, the moment is not all. Eternal life is realized when the last trace of difference between "I" and "now" has vanished - when there is just this "now" and nothing else."

"All perfect accomplishment in art or life is accompanied by the curious sensation that it is happening of itself - that it is not forced, studied, or contrived. Thos is not to say that everything which is felt to happen of itself is a perfect accomplishment; the marvel of human spontaneity is that it has developed the means of self-discipline - which becomes repressive only when it is felt that the controlling agent is separate from the action. But the sensation that the action is happening of itself, neither from an agent nor to a witness, is the authentic sensation of life as pure process, in which there is neither mover nor moved. Process without source or destination, verb without subject or object - this is not deprivation, a the word "without" suggests, but the "musical" sensation of arriving at every moment in which the melody and rhythm unfold."

"Although the rhythm of the waves beats a kind of time, it is not clock or calendar time. It has no urgency. It happens to be timeless time. It harmonizes with our very breathing. It does not count our days. Its pulse is not in the stingy spirit of measuring, it is the breathing of eternity."

"The brush must draw by itself. This cannot happen if one does not practice constantly. But neither can it happen if one makes an effort."

"Human experience is determined as much by the nature of the mind and the structure of its senses as by the external objects whose presence the mind reveals."

"In having a flawed sense of identity, we act in a way that is inappropriate to our natural environment."

"Because the world is not going anywhere there is no hurry."

"You are something that the whole universe is doing in the same way that a wave is something that the whole ocean is doing."

"You don’t understand the basic assumptions of your own culture if your own culture is the only culture you know."

"Therefore, at about the age of twenty-one, I made to myself the solemn vow that I would never be an employee or put up with a "regular job." I have not always been able to fulfill this vow. I have had to work (in a reasonably independent manner) for the Church and for a graduate school, but since the age of forty-two I have been a free lance, a rolling stone, and a shaman..."

"There is no place in Buddhism for the use of effort. Just be ordinary and nothing more. Ease your bowels, expel the water, put on your clothes, eat your food. When you are tired, go and lie down. Ignorant people will laugh at you, but wise people will understand... As you go from place to place, if you look upon each one as your home, they will all be so indeed, for when circumstances occur, you should not try to change them. Thus your feeling habits, which produce the karma for the Five Hells, will of themselves become the Great Ocean of Liberation."

"This is the Daoist philosophy of naturalness, according to which a person is not truly free, detached, or pure when his state is the result of an artificial (crafted, unnatural, affected) discipline. That person only imitates purity, "pretends" to have clear consciousness. Hence the unpleasant complacency of those who are deliberately and methodically religious."

"Taoism is a way of liberation, which never comes by means of revolution, since it is notorious that most revolutions establish worse tyrannies than they destroy."

"The self-conscious feedback mechanism of the cortex allows us the hallucination that we are two souls in one body -a rational soul and an animal soul, a rider and a horse, a good guy with better instincts and finer feelings and a rascal with rapacious lusts and untruly passions. Hence the marvelously involved hypocrisies of guilt and penitence, and the frightful cruelties of punishment, warfare, and even self-torment in the name of taking the side of the good soul against the evil. The more it sides with itself, the more the good soul reveals its inseparable shadow, and the more it disowns its shadow, the more it becomes it."

"You think there's a real difference between 'self' and 'other.' But 'self,' what you call yourself, and what you call 'other' are mutually necessary to each other like back and front. They're really one. But just as a magnet polarizes itself at north and south, but it's all one magnet, so experience polarizes itself as self and other, but it's all one. If you try to make the south pole defeat the north pole, or get the mastery of it, you show you don't know what's going on."

"Doctors try to get rid of their patients - clergymen try to get them hooked on the medicine so that they will become addicts to the church."

"The result of feeling that we are separate minds in an alien, and mostly stupid, universe is that we have no common sense, no way of making sense of the world upon which we are agreed in common. It's just my opinion against yours, and therefore the most aggressive and violent (and thus insensitive) propagandist makes the decisions. A muddle of conflicting opinions united by force of propaganda."

"To notice is to select, to regard some bits of perception, or some features of the world, as more noteworthy, more significant, than others. To these we attend, and the rest we ignore—for which reason conscious attention is at the same time ignorance despite the fact that it gives us a vividly clear picture of whatever we choose to notice."

"Carried to its final extreme, the logical end of this type of reaction to life is suicide. The hard-bitten kind of person is always, as it were, a partial suicide; some of himself is already dead."

"The mark of an intelligent and educated man is one who does not really accept the idea of "work". That is to say; he does not accept the process of doing chores every day, that aren't in the least bit interesting to him, just in order to go on living."

"Every explicit duality is an implicit unity."

"Aesthetics is really a much better approach to ethics than theology is."

"The measuring of worth and success in the terms of time, and the insistent demand for assurances of a promising future, make it impossible to live freely both in the present and in the "promising" future when it arrives. For there is never anything but the present, and if one cannot live there, one cannot live anywhere."

"Other people teach us who we are. Their attitudes to us are the mirror in which we learn to see ourselves, but the mirror is distorted!"

"To begin with, this world has a different kind of time. It is the time of biological rhythm, not of the clock and all that goes with the clock. There is no hurry. Our sense of time is notoriously subjective and thus dependent upon the quality of our attention, whether of interest or boredom, and upon the alignment of our behavior in terms of routines, goals, and deadlines. Here the present is self-sufficient, but it is not a static present. It is a dancing present, the unfolding of a pattern which has no specific destination in the future but is simply its own point. It leaves and arrives simultaneously, and the seed is as much the goal as the flower. There is therefore time to perceive every detail of the movement with infinitely greater richness of articulation. Normally we do not so much look at things as overlook them."

"Actually, the world is not complex. It is the task of trying to figure it out with words or numbers which is complex."

"It is both dangerous and absurd for our world to be a group of communions mutually excommunicate."

"Myth, then, is the form in which I try to answer when children ask me those fundamental metaphysical questions which come so readily to their minds: "Where did the world come from?" "Why did God make the world?" "Where was I before I was born?" "Where do people go when they die?" Again and again I have found that they seem to be satisfied with a simple and very ancient story, which goes something like this: "There was never a time when the world began, because it goes round and round like a circle, and there is no place on a circle where it begins. Look at my watch, which tells the time; it goes round, and so the world repeats itself again and again. But just as the hour-hand of the watch goes up to twelve and down to six, so, too, there is day and night, waking and sleeping, living and dying, summer and winter. You can't have any one of these without the other, because you wouldn't be able to know what black is unless you had seen it side-by-side with white, or white unless side-by-side with black."

"I assume that maybe you are not serious, but sincere."

"For unless one is able to live fully in the present, the future is a hoax."

"...all saints need sinners."

"When our love for others is based simply on mutual need it becomes strangling - a kind of vampirism in which we say, all too expressively, „I love you so much I could eat you!” It is from such desiring that parental devotion becomes smother-love and marriage holy deadlock."

"You don’t listen to a song to get to the end of it, you listen to enjoy the song as a whole."

"Action without wisdom, without clear awareness of the world as it really is, can never improve anything."

"Trying to pretend to oneself that a life of constant self frustration was in fact a great spiritual attainment."

"There is an interdependence of flowers and bees. Where there are no flowers there are no bees, and where there are no bees there are no flowers. They’re really one organism. And so in the same way, everything in nature depends on everything else. So it’s interconnected! And so the many many patterns of interconnections lock it in together into a unity, which is, however, much too complicated for us to think about."

"Every in group distinguishes itself from the outgroup by some process of „going through the mill" or enduring sufferings which are subsequently worn as the proud badge of graduation."

"It seems obvious that the universe is a system which, by means of living bodies, becomes aware of itself—up to a point."

"What governs what we choose to notice? The first (which we shall have to qualify later) is whatever seems advantageous or disadvantageous for our survival, our social status, and the security of our egos. The second, again working simultaneously with the first, is the pattern and the logic of all the notation symbols which we have learned from others, from our society and our culture. It is hard indeed to notice anything for which the languages available to us (whether verbal, mathematical, or musical) have no description. This is why we borrow words from foreign languages."

"If to enjoy even an enjoyable present we must have the assurance of a happy future, we are “crying for the moon.” We have no such assurance. The best predictions are still matters of probability rather than certainty, and to the best of our knowledge every one of us is going to suffer and die."

"One obtains the knowledge of God by discarding concepts."

"Listen, there's something I must tell. I've never, never seen it so clearly. But it doesn't matter a bit if you don't understand, because each one of you is quite perfect as you are, even if you don't know it. Life is basically a gesture, but no one, no thing, is making it. There is no necessity for it to happen, and none for it to go on happening. For it isn't being driven by anything; it just happens freely of itself. It's a gesture of motion, of sound, of color, and just as no one is making it, it isn't happening to anyone. There is simply no problem of life; it is completely purposeless play - exuberance which is its own end. Basically, there is the gesture. Time, space and multiplicity are complications of it. There is no reason whatsoever to explain it, for explanations are just another form of complexity, a new manifestation of life on top of life, of gestures gesturing. Pain and suffering are simply extreme forms of play, and there isn't anything in the whole universe to be afraid of because it doesn't happen to anyone! There isn't any substantial ego at all. The ego is a kind of flip, a knowing of knowing, a fearing of fearing. It's a curlicue, an extra jazz to experience, a sort of double-take or reverberation, a dithering of consciousness which is the same as anxiety."

"One of the special delights of my childhood was to go and see the cases of illuminated manuscripts in the British Museum, and to walk, as every child can, right into their pages--losing myself in an enchanted world of gold, landscapes and skies whose colours were indwelt with light as if their sun shone not above but in them. Most marvelous of all were the many manuscripts mysteriously entitled "Book of Hours", since I did not know how one kept hours in a book. Their title-pages and richly ornamented initials showed scenes of times and seasons--ploughing in springtime, formal gardens bright in summer with heraldic roses, autumn harvesting, and logging in winter snow under clear, cold skies seen through a filigree screen of black trees. I could only assume that these books were some ancient device for marking the passage of time and they associated themselves in my mind with sundials in old country yards upon hot afternoons, with the whirring and booming of clocks in towers, with astrolabes engraved with the mysterious signs of the Zodiac, and-above all-with the slow, cyclic sweep of the sun, moon and stars over my head."

"And remember, that it takes as long, to view it or, to listen to it, as it does to do it."

"The real you is not a puppet which life pushes around."

"The anxiety-laden problem of what will happen to me when I die is, after all, like asking what happens to my fist when I open my hand, or where my lap goes when I stand up."

"Know yourself as Nothing. Feel yourself as Everything."

"But the attitude of faith is to let go, and become open to truth, whatever it might turn out to be."

"The possession of a strong will and a clever head makes some things very difficult to see."

"The person who is constantly anxious is the person who is resisting the flip-flopability of things."

"A myth is an image in terms of which we try to make sense of the world."

"Every one of us is an aperture through which the whole cosmos looks out."

"...behind the scene, under the surface of reality, you are all actors, marvelously skilled at playing parts and in getting lost in the mazes of your own minds and the entanglements of your own affairs, as if this were the most urgent thing going on. But behind the scenes, in the green room - in the very back of your mind and the very depth of your soul - you always have a sneaking suspicion that you might not be the you that you think you are."

"The British and the Western Europeans in general, as well as the North Americans, waste the space of their homes with these rooms for ludicrously vast sleeping-machines--some with four pillars and a roof, some with iron fences at each end, topped with brass balls, and some with mahogany headboards whose function I have never yet understood. I would rather follow the Turkish proverb that "he who sleeps on the floor will not fall out of bed." In sum, I despise all furniture as monstrous, heavy, space-greedy, expensive, and pretentious."

"Because all is lost, there is nothing to lose."

"Actually, the world is not complex. It is the task of trying to figure it out with words or numbers that is complex."

"The only way to make sense of change is to plunge into it, move with it, and join the dance."

"Death seems simply to be a return to that unknown inwardness out of which we were born...the truly inward source of one's life was never born...Outwardly I am one apple among many. Inwardly I am the tree."

"Now as you plumb out into the universe and explore it astronomically, it gets very strange. You begin to see things in the depths that at first sight seem utterly remote. How could they have anything to do with us. They are so far off and so unlikely. And in the same way, when you start probing into the inner workings of the human body you come across all kinds of funny little monsters and wiggly things that bear no resemblance to what we recognize as the human image. Look at a spermatozoon under a microscope. That little tadpole! And how can that have any connection with a grown human being. It’s so unlike, you see. It’s foreign feeling. And you get the creeps, a foreign feeling, about yourself...But what we will always find out in the end when we meet the very strange thing, there will one day be the dawning recognition: Why that’s me."

"Like words, memories never really succeed in “catching” reality."

"Kindly let me help you or you will drown said the monkey putting the fish safely up a tree."

"Trying not to grasp is the same thing as to grasp since it's motivation is the same, my urgent desire to save my self from a difficulty. I can not get rid of this desire since it is one and the same desire as the desire to get rid of it."

"The world of “suchness” is void and empty because it teases the mind out of thought, dumbfounding the chatter of definition so that there is nothing left to be said. Yet it is obvious that we are not confronted with literal nothingness. It is true that, when pressed, every attempt to catch hold of our world leaves us empty-handed. Furthermore, when we try to be sure at least of ourselves, the knowing, catching subjects, we disappear. We cannot find any self apart from the mind, and we cannot find any mind apart from those very experiences which the mind – now vanished – was trying to grasp."

"Is a long life such a good thing if it is lived in daily dread of death or in constant search for satisfaction in a tomorrow which never comes?"

"The most real state, is the state of nothing."

"To practice with an end in view is to have one eye on the practice and the other on the end, which is lack of concentration, lack of sincerity."

"As muddy water is best cleared by leaving it alone, it could be argued that those who sit quietly and do nothing are making one of the best possible contributions to a world in turmoil."

"We have arbitrarily agreed to define the sun by the limit of its visible fire."

"What I am really saying is that you don’t need to do anything, because if you see yourself in the correct way, you are all as much extraordinary phenomena of nature as trees, clouds, the patterns in running water, the flickering of fire, the arrangement of the stars, and the form of a galaxy. You are all just like that, and there is nothing wrong with you at all."

"My conscious mind must have its roots and origins in the most unfathomable depths of being, yet it feels as if it lived all by itself in this tight little skull."

"The difference between having a job and having a vocation is that a job is some unpleasant work you do in order to make money, with the sole purpose of making money. There are plenty of jobs because there is still a certain amount of dirty work that nobody wants to do, and that therefore they will pay someone to do it. There is essentially less and less of that kind of work because of mechanization. If you do a job with the sole purpose of making money, you are absurd, because if money becomes the goal–and it does if you work that way–you begin increasingly to confuse it with happiness or with pleasure. Yes, one can take a handful of crisp one dollar bills and practically water your mouth over it, but this is a kind of person who is confused like a Pavlov dog, who salivates on the wrong bell."

"What do you desire? What makes you itch? What sort of a situation would you like?"

"Part of man's frustration is that he has become accustomed to expect language and thought to offer explanations which they cannot give. To want life to be intelligible in this sense is to want it to be something other than life."

"We cannot be more sensitive to pleasure without being more sensitive to pain."

"We have been accustomed to make this existence worth-while by the belief that there is more than the outward appearance--that we live for a future beyond this life here. For the outward appearance does not seem to make sense. if living is to end in pain, incompleteness, and nothingness, it seems a cruel and futile experience for being who are born to reason, hope, create, and love. man, as a being of sense, wants his life to make sense, and he has found it hard to believe that it does so unless there is more that what he see-- unless there is an eternal order and an eternal life behind the uncertain and momentary experience of life-and-death."

"To be detached from the world, (in the sense that Buddhist and Taoists and Hindus often talk about detachment), does not mean to be non-participative. By that I don't mean that you just go through doing everything mechanically and have your thoughts elsewhere. I mean a complete participation, but still detached. And the difference between the two attitudes is this... On the one hand, there is a way of being so anxious about physical pleasure, so afraid that you won't make it, that you grab it too hard..that you just have to have that thing, and if you do that, you destroy it completely.. and therefore after every attempt to get it, you feel disappointed, you feel empty, you feel something was lost..and so you want it again, you have to keep repeating, repeating, repeating, repeating..because you never really got that. And it is this that's the hang up, this is what is meant by attachment to this world... But on the other hand, pleasure in its fullness cannot be experienced, when one is grasping it... I knew a little girl to whom someone gave a bunny rabbit. She was so delighted with the bunny rabbit and so afraid of losing it, that taking it home in the car, she squeezed it to death with love. And lots of parents do that to their children. And lots of spouses do it to each other. They hold on too hard, and so take the life out of this transient, beautifully fragile thing that life is. To have it, to have life, and to have its pleasure, you must at the same time let go of it."

"The knowledge of the past stays with us. To let go is simply to release any images and emotions."

"Is it only when you’re in love with another person that you see them as they really are? And in the ordinary way, when you’re not in love, you see only a fragmented version of that being? Because when you’re in love with someone, you do indeed see them as a divine being. And suppose that’s what they are, truly. And your eyes have, by your beloved, been opened. If you should be so fortunate as to encounter this spiritual experience, it seems to me to be a total denial of life to refuse it."

"If you awaken from this illusion and you understand that black implies white, self implies other, life implies death (or shall I say death implies life?), you can feel yourself – not as a stranger in the world, not as something here on probation, not as something that has arrived here by fluke - but you can begin to feel your own existence as absolutely fundamental."

"Discord on one level is harmony on another."

"No one is more dangerously insane than one who is sane all the time: he is like a steel bridge without flexibility, and the order of his life is rigid and brittle."

"I owe my solitude to other people."

"Normally, we do not so much look at things as overlook them."

"Philosophers, for example, often fail to recognize that their remarks about the universe apply also to themselves and their remarks. If the universe is meaningless, so is the statement that it is so."

"We know that from time to time, there arise among human beings, people who seem to exude love as naturally as the sun gives out heat."

"We thought of life by analogy with a journey, a pilgrimage, which had a serious purpose at the end, and the thing was to get to that end, success or whatever it is, maybe heaven after you’re dead. But we missed the point the whole way along. It was a musical thing and you were supposed to sing or to dance while the music was being played."

"The morning glory which blooms for an hour differs not at heart from the giant pine, which lives for a thousand years."

"Inability to accept the mystic experience is more than an intellectual handicap. Lack of awareness of the basic unity of organism and environment is a serious and dangerous hallucination. For in a civilization equipped with immense technological power, the sense of alienation between man and nature leads to the use of technology in a hostile spirit—-to the “conquest” of nature instead of intelligent co-operation with nature."

"Most of us assume as a matter of common sense that space is nothing, that it's not important and has no energy. But as a matter of fact, space is the basis of existence. How could you have stars without space? Stars shine out of space and something comes out of nothing just in the same way as when you listen, in an unprejudiced way, you hear all sounds coming out of silence. It is amazing. Silence is the origin of sound just as space is the origin of stars, and woman is the origin of man. If you listen and pay close attention to what is, you will discover that there is no past, no future, and no one listening. You cannot hear yourself listening. You live in the eternal now and you are that. It is rally extremely simple, and that is the way it is."

"In looking out upon the world, we forget that the world is looking at itself."

"Like love, the light or guidance of truth that influences us exists only in living form, not in principles or rules or expectations or advice, however widely circulated."

"The art of meditation is a way of getting into touch with reality, and the reason for it is that most civilized people are out of touch with reality because they confuse the world as it with the world as they think about it and talk about it and describe it. For on the one hand there is the real world and on the other there is a whole system of symbols about that world which we have in our minds. These are very very useful symbols, all civilization depends on them, but like all good things they have their disadvantages, and the principle disadvantage of symbols is that we confuse them with reality, just as we confuse money with actual wealth."

"Our pleasures are not material pleasures, but symbols of pleasure – attractively packaged but inferior in content."

"The future is a concept — it doesn’t exist. There is no such thing as tomorrow. There never will be because time is always now. That’s one of the things we discover when we stop talking to ourselves and stop thinking. We find there is only present, only an eternal now."

"When we dance, the journey itself is the point, as when we play music the playing itself is the point. And exactly the same thing is true in meditation. Meditation is the discovery that the point of life is always arrived at in the immediate moment."

"But my dear man, reality is only a Rorschach ink-blot, you know."

"Zen is a liberation from time. For if we open our eyes and see clearly, it becomes obvious that there is no other time than this instant, and that the past and the future are abstractions without any concrete reality."

"Technology is destructive only in the hands of people who do not realize that they are one and the same process as the universe."

"It’s better to have a short life that is full of what you like doing, than a long life spent in a miserable way."

"I find that the sensation of myself as an ego inside a bag of skin is really a hallucination."

"If you get the message, hang up the phone. For psychedelic drugs are simply instruments, like microscopes, telescopes, and telephones. The biologist does not sit with eye permanently glued to the microscope, he goes away and works on what he has seen."

"We must abandon completely the notion of blaming the past for any kind of situation we're in and reverse our thinking and see that the past always flows back form the present. That now is the creative point of life. So you see its like the idea of forgiving somebody, you change the meaning of the past by doing that...Also watch the flow of music. The melody as its expressed is changed by notes that come later. Just as the meaning of a sentence...you wait till later to find out what the sentence means...The present is always changing the past."

"This state of affairs is known technically as the "double-bind." A person is put in a double-bind by a command or request which contains a concealed contradiction... This is a damned-if-you-do and damned-if-you-don't situation which arises constantly in human (and especially family) relations... The social doublebind game can be phrased in several ways:The first rule of this game is that it is not a game. Everyone must play."

"Although the rhythm of the waves beats a kind of time, it is not clock or calendar time. It has no urgency. It happens to be timeless time. I know that I am listening to a rhythm which has been just the same for millions of years, and it takes me out of a world of relentlessly ticking clocks. Clocks for some reason or other always seem to be marching, and, as with armies, marching is never to anything but doom. But in the motion of waves there is no marching rhythm. It harmonizes with our very breathing. It does not count our days. Its pulse is not in the stingy spirit of measuring, of marking out how much still remains. It is the breathing of eternity, like the God Brahma of Indian mythology inhaling and exhaling, manifesting and dissolving the worlds, forever. As a mere conception this might sound appallingly monotonous, until you come to listen to the breaking and washing of waves."

"The source of all light is in the eye."

"Jesus was not the man he was as a result of making Jesus Christ his personal savior."

"You are that vast thing that you see far, far off with great telescopes."

"It is hard indeed to notice anything for which the languages available to us have no description."

"No one imagines that a symphony is supposed to improve as it goes along, or that the whole object of playing is to reach the finale. The point of music is discovered in every moment of playing and listening to it. It is the same, I feel, with the greater part of our lives, and if we are unduly absorbed in improving them we may forget altogether to live them."

"But just exactly what is the “good” to which we aspire through doing and eating things that are supposed to be good for us? This question is strictly taboo, for if it were seriously investigated the whole economy and social order would fall apart and have to be reorganized. It would be like the donkey finding out that the carrot dangled before him, to make him run, is hitched by a stick to his own collar."

"If we get rid of all wishful thinking and dubious metaphysical speculations, we can hardly doubt that – at a time not too distant – each one of us will simply cease to be. It won’t be like going into darkness forever, for there will be neither darkness, nor time, nor sense of futility, nor anyone to feel anything about it. Try as best you can to imagine this, and keep at it. The universe will, supposedly, be going on as usual, but for each individual it will be as if it had never happened at all; and even that is saying too much, because there won’t be anyone for whom it never happened. Make this prospect as real as possible: the one total certainty. You will be as if you had never existed, which was, however, the way you were before you did exist – and not only you but everything else. Nevertheless, with such an improbable past, here we are. We begin from nothing and end in nothing. You can say that again. Think it over and over, trying to conceive the fact of coming to never having existed. After a while you will begin to feel rather weird, as if this very apparent something that you are is at the same time nothing at all. Indeed, you seem to be rather firmly and certainly grounded in nothingness, much as your sight seems to emerge from that total blankness behind your eyes. The weird feeling goes with the fact that you are being introduced to a new common sense, a new logic, in which you are beginning to realize the identity of ku and shiki, void and form. All of a sudden it will strike you that this nothingness is the most potent, magical, basic, and reliable thing you ever thought of, and that the reason you can’t form the slight idea of it is that it’s yourself. But not the self you thought you were."

"Hurrying and delaying are alike ways of trying to resist the present."

"As you make more and more powerful microscopic instruments, the universe has to get smaller and smaller in order to escape the investigation. Just as when the telescopes become more and more powerful, the galaxies have to recede in order to get away from the telescopes. Because what is happening in all these investigations is this: Through us and through our eyes and senses, the universe is looking at itself. And when you try to turn around to see your own head, what happens? It runs away. You can't get at it. This is the principle. Shankara explains it beautifully in his commentary on the Kenopanishad where he says 'That which is the Knower, the ground of all knowledge, is never itself an object of knowledge."

"So you see, if you become aware of the fact that you are all of your own body, and that the beating of your heart is not just something that happens to you, but something you're doing, then you become aware also in the same moment and at the same time that you're not only beating your heart, but that you are shining the sun. Why? Because the process of your bodily existence and its rhythms is a process, an energy system which is continuous with the shining of the sun, just like the East River, here, is a continuous energy system, and all the waves in it are activities of the whole East River, and that's continuous with the Atlantic Ocean, and that's all one energy system and finally the Atlantic ocean gets around to being the Pacific Ocean and the Indian Ocean, etc., and so all the waters of the Earth are a continuous energy system. It isn't just that the East River is part of it. You can't draw any line and say 'Look, this is where the East River ends and the rest of it begins,' as if you can in the parts of an automobile, where you can say 'This is definitely part of the generator,here, and over here is a spark plug.' There's not that kind of isolation between the elements of nature."

"Faith is a state of openness or trust. To have faith is like when you trust yourself to the water. You don’t grab hold of the water when you swim, because if you do you will become stiff and tight in the water, and sink. You have to relax, and the attitude of faith is the very opposite of clinging, and holding on. In other words, a person who is fanatic in matters of religion, and clings to certain ideas about the nature of God and the universe becomes a person who has no faith at all. Instead they are holding tight. But the attitude of faith is to let go, and become open to truth, whatever it might turn out to be."

"The common error of ordinary religious practice is to mistake the symbol for the reality, to look at the finger pointing the way and then to suck it for comfort rather than follow it."

"To the philosophers of India, however, Relativity is no new discovery, just as the concept of light years is no matter for astonishment to people used to thinking of time in millions of kalpas, (A kalpa is about 4,320,000 years). The fact that the wise men of India have not been concerned with technological applications of this knowledge arises from the circumstance that technology is but one of innumerable ways of applying it."

"When it comes down to it, government is simply an abandonment of responsibility on the assumption that there are people, other than ourselves, who really know how to manage things. But the government, run ostensibly for the good of the people, becomes a self-serving corporation. To keep things under control, it proliferates law of ever-increasing complexity and unintelligibility, and hinders productive work by demanding so much accounting on paper that the record of what has been done becomes more important than what has actually been done. [...] The Taoist moral is that people who mistrust themselves and one another are doomed."

"To travel is to be alive, but to get somewhere is to be dead."

"Herein lies the crux of the matter. To stand face to face with insecurity is still not to understand it. To understand it, you must not face it but be it."

"Imagine a multidimensional spider's web in the early morning covered with dew drops. And every dew drop contains the reflection of all the other dew drops. And, in each reflected dew drop, the reflections of all the other dew drops in that reflection. And so ad infinitum. That is the Buddhist conception of the universe in an image."

"Today we hear a lot of songs about love, and the mention of the big love thing on the way. You know what I would do? I would buy a gun and bar my door because I would know there is a storm of hypocrisy brewing."

"People can't be talked out of illusions. If a person believes that the earth is flat, you can't talk him out of that, he knows that it's flat. He'll go down to the window and see that its obvious, it looks flat. So the only way to convince him that it isn't is to say, "Well let's go and find the edge."

"Belief… is the insistence that the truth is what one would ‘lief’ or (will or) wish to be…Faith is an unreserved opening of the mind to the truth, whatever it may turn out to be. Faith has no preconceptions; it is a plunge into the unknown. Belief clings, but faith let’s go…faith is the essential virtue of science, and likewise of any religion that is not self-deceptio."

"Just as money is not real, consumable wealth, books are not life. To idolize scriptures is like eating paper currency."

"There is only this now. It does not come from anywhere; it is not going anywhere. It is not permanent, but it is not impermanent. Though moving, it is always still. When we try to catch it, it seems to run away, and yet it is always here and there is no escape from it. And when we turn around to find the self which knows this moment, we find that it has vanished like the past."

"For there is a growing apprehension that existence is a rat-race in a trap: living organisms, including people,are merely tubes which put things in at one end and let them out at the other, which both keeps them doing it and in the long run wears them out. So to keep the farce going, the tubes find ways of making new tubes, which also put things in at one end and let them out at the other. At the input end they even develop ganglia of nerves called brains, with eyes and ears, so that they can more easily scrounge around for things to swallow. As and when they get enough to eat, they use up their surplus energy by wiggling in complicated patterns, making all sorts of noises by blowing air in and out of the input hole, and gathering together in groups to fight with other groups. In time, the tubes grow such an abundance of attached appliances that they are hardly recognizable as mere tubes, and they manage to do this in a staggering variety of forms. There is a vague rule not to eat tubes of your own form, but in general there is serious competition as to who is going to be the top type of tube. All this seems marvelously futile, and yet, when you begin to think about it, it begins to be more marvelous than futile. Indeed, it seems extremely odd."

"No work or love will flourish out of guilt, fear, or hollowness of heart, just as no valid plans for the future can be made by those who have no capacity for living now."

"The religious idea of God cannot do full duty for the metaphysical infinity."

"For every individual is a unique manifestation of the Whole, as every branch is a particular outreaching of the tree. To manifest individuality, every branch must have a sensitive connection with the tree, just as our independently moving and differentiated fingers must have a sensitive connection with the whole body. The point, which can hardly be repeated too often, is that differentiation is not separation."

"Here is the vicious circle: if you feel separate from your organic life, you feel driven to survive; survival -going on living- thus becomes a duty and also a drag because you are not fully with it; because it does not quite come up to expectations, you continue to hope that it will, to crave for more time, to feel driven all the more to go on."

"When you find out that there was never anything in the dark side to be afraid of … Nothing is left but to love."

"Look, here is a tree in the garden and every summer is produces apples, and we call it an apple tree because the tree "apples." That's what it does. Alright, now here is a solar system inside a galaxy, and one of the peculiarities of this solar system is that at least on the planet earth, the thing peoples! In just the same way that an apple tree apples!"

"Stay in the center, and you will be ready to move in any direction."

"To Taoism that which is absolutely still or absolutely perfect is absolutely dead, for without the possibility of growth and change there can be no Tao. In reality there is nothing in the universe which is completely perfect or completely still; it is only in the minds of men that such concepts exist."

"We are living in a culture entirely hypnotized by the illusion of time, in which the so-called present moment is felt as nothing but an infinitesimal hairline between an all-powerfully causative past and an absorbingly important future. We have no present. Our consciousness is almost completely preoccupied with memory and expectation. We do not realize that there never was, is, nor will be any other experience than present experience. We are therefore out of touch with reality. We confuse the world as talked about, described, and measured with the world which actually is. We are sick with a fascination for the useful tools of names and numbers, of symbols, signs, conceptions and ideas."

"Naturally, for a person who finds his identity in something other than his full organism is less than half a man. He is cut off from complete participation in nature. Instead of being a body, he 'has' a body. Instead of living and loving he 'has' instincts for survival and copulation."

"Through our eyes, the universe is perceiving itself. Through our ears, the universe is listening to its harmonies. We are the witnesses through which the universe becomes conscious of its glory, of its magnificence."

"I have realized that the past and future are real illusions, that they exist in the present, which is what there is and all there is."

"The more a thing tends to be permanent, the more it tends to be lifeless."

"We are living in a culture entirely hypnotized by the illusion of time, in which the so-called present moment is felt as nothing but an infintesimal hairline between an all-powerfully causative past and an absorbingly important future. We have no present. Our consciousness is almost completely preoccupied with memory and expectation. We do not realize that there never was, is, nor will be any other experience than present experience. We are therefore out of touch with reality. We confuse the world as talked about, described, and measured with the world which actually is. We are sick with a fascination for the useful tools of names and numbers, of symbols, signs, conceptions and ideas."

"The art of living... is neither careless drifting on the one hand nor fearful clinging to the past on the other. It consists in being sensitive to each moment, in regarding it as utterly new and unique, in having the mind open and wholly receptive."

"Try to imagine what it will be like to go to sleep and never wake up... now try to imagine what it was like to wake up having never gone to sleep."

"Things are as they are. Looking out into the universe at night, we make no comparisons between right and wrong stars, nor between well and badly arranged constellations."

"A scholar tries to learn something everyday; a student of Buddhism tries to unlearn something daily."

"Every intelligent individual wants to know what makes him tick, and yet is at once fascinated and frustrated by the fact that oneself is the most difficult of all things to know."

"We do not "come into" this world; we come out of it, as leaves from a tree. As the ocean "waves," the universe "peoples." Every individual is an expression of the whole realm of nature, a unique action of the total universe."

"You are a function of what the whole universe is doing in the same way that a wave is a function of what the whole ocean is doing."

"The menu is not the meal."

"Paradoxical as it may seem, the purposeful life has no content, no point. It hurries on and on, and misses everything. Not hurrying, the purposeless life misses nothing, for it is only when there is no goal and no rush that the human senses are fully open to receive the world."

"Trying to define yourself is like trying to bite your own teeth."

"Man suffers only because he takes seriously what the gods made for fun."

"We seldom realize, for example that our most private thoughts and emotions are not actually our own. For we think in terms of languages and images which we did not invent, but which were given to us by our society."

"This is the real secret of life -- to be completely engaged with what you are doing in the here and now. And instead of calling it work, realize it is play."

"Muddy water is best cleared by leaving it alone."

"To have faith is to trust yourself to the water. When you swim you don't grab hold of the water, because if you do you will sink and drown. Instead you relax, and float."

"Advice? I don’t have advice. Stop aspiring and start writing. If you’re writing, you’re a writer. Write like you’re a goddamn death row inmate and the governor is out of the country and there’s no chance for a pardon. Write like you’re clinging to the edge of a cliff, white knuckles, on your last breath, and you’ve got just one last thing to say, like you’re a bird flying over us and you can see everything, and please, for God’s sake, tell us something that will save us from ourselves. Take a deep breath and tell us your deepest, darkest secret, so we can wipe our brow and know that we’re not alone. Write like you have a message from the king. Or don’t. Who knows, maybe you’re one of the lucky ones who doesn’t have to."

"The only way to make sense out of change is to plunge into it, move with it, and join the dance."

"You are an aperture through which the universe is looking at and exploring itself."

"It's like you took a bottle of ink and you threw it at a wall. Smash! And all that ink spread. And in the middle, it's dense, isn't it? And as it gets out on the edge, the little droplets get finer and finer and make more complicated patterns, see? So in the same way, there was a big bang at the beginning of things and it spread. And you and I, sitting here in this room, as complicated human beings, are way, way out on the fringe of that bang. We are the complicated little patterns on the end of it. Very interesting. But so we define ourselves as being only that. If you think that you are only inside your skin, you define yourself as one very complicated little curlique, way out on the edge of that explosion. Way out in space, and way out in time. Billions of years ago, you were a big bang, but now you're a complicated human being. And then we cut ourselves off, and don't feel that we're still the big bang. But you are. Depends how you define yourself. You are actually--if this is the way things started, if there was a big bang in the beginning-- you're not something that's a result of the big bang. You're not something that is a sort of puppet on the end of the process. You are still the process. You are the big bang, the original force of the universe, coming on as whoever you are. When I meet you, I see not just what you define yourself as--Mr so-and- so, Ms so-and-so, Mrs so-and-so--I see every one of you as the primordial energy of the universe coming on at me in this particular way. I know I'm that, too. But we've learned to define ourselves as separate from it."

"Like too much alcohol,self-consciousness makes us see ourselves double, and we make the double image for two selves - mental and material, controlling and controlled, reflective and spontaneous. Thus instead of suffering we suffer about suffering, and suffer about suffering about suffering."

"We could say that meditation doesn't have a reason or doesn't have a purpose. In this respect it's unlike almost all other things we do except perhaps making music and dancing. When we make music we don't do it in order to reach a certain point, such as the end of the composition. If that were the purpose of music then obviously the fastest players would be the best. Also, when we are dancing we are not aiming to arrive at a particular place on the floor as in a journey. When we dance, the journey itself is the point, as when we play music the playing itself is the point. And exactly the same thing is true in meditation. Meditation is the discovery that the point of life is always arrived at in the immediate moment."

"There is nothing at all that can be talked about adequately, and the whole art of poetry is to say what can't be said."

"Really, the fundamental, ultimate mystery -- the only thing you need to know to understand the deepest metaphysical secrets -- is this: that for every outside there is an inside and for every inside there is an outside, and although they are different, they go together."

"You're under no obligation to be the same person you were 5 minutes ago."

"For unless one is able to live fully in the present, the future is a hoax. There is no point whatever in making plans for a future which you will never be able to enjoy. When your plans mature, you will still be living for some other future beyond. You will never, never be able to sit back with full contentment and say, "Now, I've arrived!" Your entire education has deprived you of this capacity because it was preparing you for the future, instead of showing you how to be alive now."

"If you cannot trust yourself, you cannot even trust your mistrust of yourself - so that without this underlying trust in the whole system of nature you are simply paralyzed."

"...[W]ords can be communicative only between those who share similar experiences."

"I am what happens between the maternity ward and the Crematorium."

"There was a young man who said though, it seems that I know that I know, but what I would like to see is the I that knows me when I know that I know that I know."

"So then, the relationship of self to other is the complete realization that loving yourself is impossible without loving everything defined as other than yourself."

"The world is filled with love-play, from animal lust to sublime compassion."

"Life is like music for its own sake. We are living in an eternal now, and when we listen to music we are not listening to the past, we are not listening to the future, we are listening to an expanded present."

"Never pretend to a love which you do not actually feel, for love is not ours to command."

"Zen does not confuse spirituality with thinking about God while one is peeling potatoes. Zen spirituality is just to peel the potatoes."

"If you say that getting the money is the most important thing, you'll spend your life completely wasting your time. You'll be doing things you don't like doing in order to go on living, that is to go on doing thing you don't like doing, which is stupid."

"Let's suppose that you were able every night to dream any dream that you wanted to dream. And that you could, for example, have the power within one night to dream 75 years of time. Or any length of time you wanted to have. And you would, naturally as you began on this adventure of dreams, you would fulfill all your wishes. You would have every kind of pleasure you could conceive. And after several nights of 75 years of total pleasure each, you would say "Well, that was pretty great." But now let's have a surprise. Let's have a dream which isn't under control. Where something is gonna happen to me that I don't know what it's going to be. And you would dig that and come out of that and say "Wow, that was a close shave, wasn't it?" And then you would get more and more adventurous, and you would make further and further out gambles as to what you would dream. And finally, you would dream ... where you are now. You would dream the dream of living the life that you are actually living today."

"And people get all fouled up because they want the world to have meaning as if it were words... As if you had a meaning, as if you were a mere word, as if you were something that could be looked up in a dictionary. You are meaning."

"You and I are all as much continuous with the physical universe as a wave is continuous with the ocean."

"A priest once quoted to me the Roman saying that a religion is dead when the priests laugh at each other across the altar. I always laugh at the altar, be it Christian, Hindu, or Buddhist, because real religion is the transformation of anxiety into laughter."

"What I am really saying is that you don’t need to do anything, because if you see yourself in the correct way, you are all as much extraordinary phenomenon of nature as trees, clouds, the patterns in running water, the flickering of fire, the arrangement of the stars, and the form of a galaxy. You are all just like that, and there is nothing wrong with you at all."

"But I'll tell you what hermits realize. If you go off into a far, far forest and get very quiet, you'll come to understand that you're connected with everything."

"

When the body wears out and the mind gets tired, the body rejoices in death. But it is difficult to understand how one can rejoice in death when one is still young and strong: so people generally regard passing away as some kind of threatening horror. The reason, in its materialistic way, turns towards the future and believes that it is a good thing to go further and further, even to infinity, but in the meantime it does not see that your material nature will ultimately find the whole process unbearably exhausting.

"

One of our biggest superstitions is the separation of the mind from the body. This does not mean that we should admit that we are just a body, nothing more; means that we have to create a completely new idea about the body. Because if the body is separate from the mind, then it is nothing more than a kind of dust pod. However, if it is inseparable from the mind, the body already means something completely different, and we do not yet have a suitable word to name a spiritual and material world at the same time.

"

If we try to understand the present by comparing it with our memories, we cannot understand it as deeply as if we were to "merely" experience it without comparison.

"

The concept of security is based on the feeling that there is something constant within us that will survive all time and all the changes of life. We do everything in order to know this permanent seed, this center and essence of our being - called self - as permanent, continuous and safe. We believe that the real man - the thinker of our thoughts, the feeler of our feelings and the knower of our knowledge - exists for this very reason. We cannot understand that there is no security until we realize that this core, this self, does not actually exist.

"

In order to understand something, you don't have to face it, you have to identify with it.

"

The desire for courage is nothing more than fear wanting to escape from itself.

"

This kind of question: - What do I have to do for this? - only someone who doesn't understand anything about it all puts it up. If a problem can be solved at all, understanding the problem and knowing what to do about it are actually one and the same.

"

Love is an organizing and unifying principle that transforms the world into a whole and a chaotic mass into a community.

"

The moment (...) is the gate of heaven, the straight and narrow road leading to life.

"

The physical world is a million vibrations - but what is it that vibrates, pulsates? Color for the eye, sound for the ear, smell for the nose, touch for the fingers. They are just different languages ​​for describing one thing, different qualities of perception, different dimensions of awareness. "What are these different forms of?" - the question seems pointless. What light is to the eye, sound is to the ear. It seems to me that the senses are not expressions, forms, dimensions of a common thing, but of each other, as if forming a circle. If we observe more closely, shape turns into color, color into vibration, vibration into sound, sound into scent, scent into taste, taste into touch, touch into shape again.

"

Pain and the response to pain are the same.

"

To understand, we have to listen to the music. But as soon as we think, "I'm listening to music," we're not listening to anything anymore.

"

Life is a game with the number one rule of the game: it's not a game, it's dead serious.

"

It is slowly becoming apparent that one of our biggest superstitions is the separation of the mind from the body.

"

If you wake up from this illusion and understand that white is in black, you are in me, death is in life, or I could say that death is life, then you wouldn't feel like a stranger in this world. As someone who is serving his probationary period here, brought here by lucky chance, you would begin to feel that your own existence is more important than anything else.

"

The best way to clean muddy water is to let it settle.

"

Trying to define yourself is like biting your own teeth.

"

This is the real secret of life - to get completely lost in what you are doing, here and now. And instead of calling it work, realize that it's actually a game.

"

We are forever "conquering" nature, space, mountains, deserts, bacteria and insects, instead of learning how to cooperate with them in a harmonious system.

"

Idolatry of holy documents is like eating paper money.

"

Zen does not confuse spirituality with thinking about God while peeling potatoes. Zen spirituality is just peeling potatoes.