To define a thing is to substitute the definition for the thing itself. Georges Brraque
This moment contains all moments. C. S. Lewis
Life is a perfectly and absolutely meaningless happening. Alan Watts
People like us, who believe in physics, know that the distinction between past, present, and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.
Albert Einstein
“Where are you going?” asked Tung-sjam. “I go where it is changeless,” replied Ts’ao-han.
“How can you go where it is changeless?” “My going is no change.”
Zen Mondo
Zen is a way of liberation, concerned not with discovering what is good or bad or advantageous, but with what is.
Alan Watts
There is no reality except the one contained within us. That is why so many people live such an unreal life. They take images outside them for reality and never allow the world within to assert itself. Hermann Hess
It is time now for us to rise from sleep. St. Benedict
Nothing is true; everything is permitted. Hassani Sabbah
One of the truths we found in the LSD experience was the realization that ‘anything goes.’
Timothy Leary
What can we gain by sailing to the moon if we are not able to cross the abyss that separates us from ourselves? This is the most important of all voyages of discovery, and without it, all the rest are not only useless, but disastrous.
Thomas Merton
Meditation is neither a journey in space nor a journey is time, but an instantaneous awakening.
J. Krishnamurti
Those on the way are almost invisible to those who are not. A man or a woman recognizes God and starts out. The others say he, or she, is losing faith.
Rumi
While living, be a dead man, be thoroughly dead – and behave as you like, and all’s well.
Zen Master Bunan
We die so hard each time. Timothy Leary
To see is to forget the name of the thing one sees. Paul Valery
Perform every act in your life as if it were your last. Marcus Aurelius
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All that is, is consciousness. Wayne Liquorman
I know that without me
God can no moment live;
Were I to die, then He
No longer could survive.
I am as great as God,
And He is small like me;
He cannot be above, nor I below Him be.
All of us living beings belong together in as much as we are all in reality sides or aspects of one single being. Erwin Schrodinger
The real ‘you’ is the shifting and momentary totality of everything you see and feel, within and without. Alan Watts
Listen to what is hearing.
Look for what is looking.
Seek what is searching.
Think about what is cognizing….
The sought is the seeker.
What you are looking for is what is looking.
Wei Wu Wei
There are no individual selves – only the one playing at being an individual.
Deepak Chopra
Time is the movement of thought. Deepak Chopra
You can’t get rid of ego by using ego. (Bunko said: ’You don’t wash blood off with blood.’) So you don’t meditate for a goal, for self-improvement. For the ‘you’ that needs improving is the only ‘you’ that can do any improving. There aren’t two of you.
Alan Watts
We have nowhere to escape to. There are no other worlds to fall to Suzuki Roshi
There is no world to fall from.
You cannot escape from this world.
Joshu Sasaki Roshi
Zen is the unsymbolization of the world. R. H. Blyth
As waves come with water and flames with fire; so the universe waves with us.
A Tantric scripture
Every effort to change what is being felt or seen presupposes and confirms the illusion of the independent knower or ego, and to try to get rid of what isn’t there only prolongs confusion. On the whole, it is better to try to be aware of one’s ego than to get rid of it. We can then discover that the ‘knower’ is no different from the sensation of the ‘known,’ whether the known be ‘external’ objects or ‘internal’ thoughts and memories. In this way it begins to appear that instead of knowers and knowns there are simply knowings, and instead of doers and deeds simply doings.
Alan Watts
Transient is this world, like phantoms and dreams. Substance has it not. Renounce it and forsake lust and hatred.
The Buddha
What is the essence of Zen? Inwardly – no identity; outwardly – no attachment.
Hui-neng
In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert’s mind there are few.
Shunryu Susukli
The nature of God is that of a circle whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere. St. Bonaventure
For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thru narrow chinks of his cavern.
If the doors of perception were cleansed everything would appear to man as it is -- infinite.
William Blake
Bad things don’t happen to us; we bring then to us so we can learn a lesson.
Deepak Chopra
Looking in – all images in the mind are of the world. Looking out – all images of the world are know only by the mind.
Max Frisch
Technology - The knack of so arranging the world that we don’t have to experience it.
Max Frisch
No matter what, we cannot be separated. Marpa to Milarepa
The eye with which I see God is the same eye with which God sees me.
Meister Eckhart
If you cannot find the truth right where you are, where else do you expect to find it?
Dogen
There is no need to run outside for better seeing, nor to peer from a window.
Rather abide at the center of your being; for the more you leave it, the less you learn.
Search your heart and see if he is wise who takes each turn:
The way to do is to be.
Lao-tzu
Nothing in all creation is so like God as stillness. Meister Eckhart
Everybody goes into a sublime condition after death. But very few stay there for any length. It is simply that people do not have the capability to remain in that condition. Soon they are returned to conditional form.
Da Avabhasa
We dance around in a ring and suppose,
But the Secrete sits in the middle and knows.
Robert Frost
Man, by being able to think in time, and abstractly knowing the future, he dies before he is dead.
Alan Watts
My daily activities are not unusual,
I’m just naturally in harmony with them.
Grasping nothing, discarding nothing ….
Supernatural power and marvelous activity –
Drawing water and carrying firewood.
Layman Pang
Give up owning things and being somebody. Quit existing. Rumi
What we are is a sequence of knowings, which are always arising and passing away. In each experience is the object of knowing - the smells, sights, sounds, and thoughts - and the conscious knowing of that object. But the experience doesn’t refer back to someone. We are not someone having an experience, we are the experience. We are process, we are a happening.
Jack Kornfield
What connects one mind moment with the following mind moment is no different form what connects one lifetime with the next. The unconscious tendencies arise to form one state of mind, then pass away as conditions change, then re-arise as a new mind. Just as when we die that which was the force in the mind, the goals, the aspirations, the desires, continue on to once again re-arise in a new body.
Steven Levine
Meditation is beyond knowledge. You can be it but you cannot know it. All knowledge is superficial. It is never anything else but acquaintance from outside. It is always about but never the thing itself.
When the Chinese emperor Wu came to meet Bodhidhrama he asked the Master: What is the ultimate holy truth? Bodhidharma replied: Vast emptiness, Nothing holy. Taken aback by this answer Wu then asked: Then who is it that stands before me now? Bodhidharma simply said: I don’t know.
Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh
We are all the Devine, being on stage, with masks or personas, doing a role. The ego is who the actor has become through identification with the roll. But even when you see this, you still play the role for the sake of the play. You don’t come-on to others as God. Zen always plays it cool.
Alan Watts
Man is a stream whose source is hidden. Always our being is descending into us from we know not whence.
Emerson
Astonishing, Everything is intelligent. Pythagoras
There is only one thing that all people possess equally. This is their loneliness. No two people on the face of the earth are alike in any one thing except for their loneliness. Love, hate, greed and generosity are all rooted within our loneliness, within our desire to be needed and loved.
Hyemeyohsta Storm
Religion is a defense mechanism against having a religious experience. Carl Jung
Dualistic knowledge persuades me that I have my present experience, but in reality, I am my present experience.
Ken Wilbur
‘God’ equals that which Generates, Organizes, and Delivers the Universe.
Deepak Chopra
The mystical experience … is one in which the subject - object relationship is transcended, in which there is a sense of complete solidarity of the subject with other human beings and with the universe in general. IT'S ALL ONE. Also there’s a sense of the ultimate ALL RIGHTNESS of the universe. And also, there’s intense GRATITUDE. William Blake said, ‘Gratitude is Heaven itself.’
Aldus Huxley
Suffering is caused by having a model in your head of how you think it ought to be.
All models are false. Give up mind models.
Ram Dass
How would I define life? Life is a set of experiences designed to awaken you from the illusion of separateness, which you yourself have created for the sport of it.
Ram Dass
The only thing you can do with your life is give it away. William Dyer
The wise man strives to no goals but the foolish man fetters himself. Third Zen Patriarch
Nature reaches out to us with welcoming arms and bids us enjoy her beauty; but we dread her silence and rush into the crowded cities, there to huddle like sheep fleeing form a ferocious wolf.
Kahlil Gibran
Men ask the way to Cold Mountain,
Cold Mountain, there’s no through trail.
In summer, ice doesn’t melt.
The rising sun blurs in swirling fog.
How did I make it?
My heart’s not the same as yours.
If your heart was like mine
You’d get it and be right here.
Han-shan
Motivation determines perception. If you see God in yourself, you’ll see God in other people.
Ram Dass
‘Nobody’ dies – only that ‘somebody’ which people think they are. ‘Nobody’ doesn’t die. It works either way.
Ram Dass
For you ‘are’ the stream of consciousness – not an observer of it. The sense of being an observer is also part of the stream.
Alan Watts
Thus the immature mind, unable to escape its own prejudice… is condemned to struggle in the straitjacket of its dualism: subject / object, time / space, spirit / matter, freedom / necessity, free will / law. The truth, which must be single, is ridden with contradiction. Man cannot think where he is, for he has created two worlds from one.
L. L. Whyte
God is eternal – so who makes God? – you do! Alan Watts
I would rather sit on a pumpkin and have it all to myself, than be crowded on a velvet cushion.
David Thoreau
As long as you feel that you are the most important thing in the world you cannot really appreciate the world around you.
Don Juan
A morning glory at my window satisfies me more than the metaphysics of books.
Walt Whitman
Do not seek nirvana as something opposed to life, rather, turn life itself into nirvana. Those who know, do this. Dogen has these beautiful words to say: Do not strive after moksha (liberation); rather, allow all your actions to become liberating.
Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh
Where do we come from? What are we? Where are we going? Gauguin
Who am I? Where am I? Why am I here? Thoreau
God has no religion. Gandhi
If you go in deep enough, you realize you are aware of your separateness only by virtue of all that you define as not you. So the feeling of ‘not you’ and of ‘you’ are relative, they go together. They are really the same, but pretending to be different… The universe is the play of opposites. The play of Yin and Yang. But there is always a secrete conspiracy between opposites..
Alan Watts
In walking, just walk. In sitting, just sit. Above all, don’t wobble. Yun-men
I am in the world but not concerned with the world. I am going through the marketplace, but not as a purchaser. Kabir
THAT which you seek and cannot find - is the Seeker. The reason why the Mind cannot be found or described is that ultimately IT is the Seeker, the Describer, which is seeking – and so would be the Subject making an object of Itself.
Every time you try to name THIS-HERE-NOW you are an eye trying to see itself. You cannot objectify THIS-WHICH-YOU-ARE, and that which you can objectify is THAT-WHICH-YOU-ARE-NOT. THIS which is seeking is THAT which is sought, and THAT which is sought is THIS which is seeking. Wei Wu Wei
Whether I am conscious of it or not, I am one with the cause of all that exists.
Thaddeus Golas
The fundamental dilution of humanity is to suppose that I am here and you are out there.
Yasutani Roshi
Are you your personality? If you think you are – you are! Ram Dass
The nature of finite things as such is to have the seed passing away as their essential being. The hour of their birth is the hour of their death.
Sigmund Freud
There is no Devil but Ignorance and Fear. Ramacharaka
Fear neither Death nor Life. Neither fear Death nor seek it. Ramacharaka
Like the empty sky it has no boundaries; yet it is right in this place, ever profound and clear.
When you seek to know it, you cannot see it. You cannot take hold of it, but you cannot lose it.
In not being able to get it, you get it.
When you are silent, it speaks; when you speak, it is silent.
The great gate is wide open to bestow alms, and no crowd is blocking the way.
The Cheng-tao Ke
Only the naked live in the sun, only the artless ride the wild wind, and he alone who has lost his way a thousand times shall have a home coming.
Gibran
What we mean by surrender is softening and letting go of resistance, trusting the process. Many people misunderstand surrender as defeat. Surrender is actually the optimum strategy for living, including dying. Surrender really is about letting go of the last moment and opening to the next.
Steven Levine
If you take the Christian Bible and put it out in the wind and the rain, soon the paper on which the works are printed will disintegrate and the words will be gone. Our bible IS the wind and the rain.
Native America women, as told to Carol McGroth
My body lives in the city, but my essence dwells in the mountains.
The affairs of a puppet play are not to be taken too seriously.
When the polar mountain fits into a mustard seed,
All the words in the universe may as well be erased.
Wu Cailuan
It seems hard to find an acceptable answer to the question of how or why the world conceives a desire, and discovers an ability, to see itself, and appears to suffer in the process. That it does so is sometimes called the original mystery. Perhaps, in view of the form in which we presently take ourselves to exist, the mystery arises from our insistence on framing a question where there is, in reality, nothing to question.
G. S. Brown
O, that my monk’s robe were wide enough
to gather up all the suffering people in this floating world.
Ryokan
The process of communication can be beautiful, if we see it in terms of simplicity and precision. Every pause made in the process of speaking becomes a kind of punctuation. Speak, allow space, speak, allow space. Space is as important in communication to another person as talking.
Chogyam Trungpa
Meditation means: peace; emptiness. This emptiness is there but is concealed by the flow of thoughts. As thoughts cease it comes into view. It seems difficult to become free of thoughts but it is very simple. The mind seems very restless but it can easily settle. The key to this transcendence is Witnessing. One has to be a witness, an observer of the mind.
Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh
The Buddha went beyond the concept of life to the direct experience of what life actually is….He emphasized again and again that the idea of some permanent unchanging self who is the owner of experience is ‘wrong view,’ and the cause of so much suffering…. The profound realization in this is that there is no one who has taken birth, and therefore no one who will cease to take birth – just suffering and its end.
Joseph Goldstein
There is a strange consuming happiness in acting with the full knowledge that whatever one is doing may very well be one’s last act on earth.
Don Juan
Remember thou must go alone; the Buddhas only point the way. The Buddha
When children ask me those fundamental metaphysical questions I have found that they seem to be satisfied with a simple and very ancient story….God likes to play hide-and-seek, but because there is nothing outside God, he has no one but himself to play with. He gets over this difficulty by pretending that he is not himself….Now when God plays hide and pretends that he is you and I, he does it so well that it takes him a long time to remember where and how he hid himself…. That is why it is so difficult for you and me to find out that we are God in disguise, pretending not to be himself. But when the game has gone on long enough, all of us will wake up, stop pretending, and remember that we are all one single Self.
Alan Watts
We think in generalities, but we live in detail. Alfred North Whitehead
Buddhism is saying that you do not need any gizmos to be in the know. You do not need a religion…they will just tie you up in knots if you use them as methods of catching hold of something. Alan Watts
To set up what you like against what you dislike –
This is the disease of the mind:
When the deep meaning of the Way is not understood
Peace of mind is disturbed to no purpose.
Seng T’san
The ‘one way’ to awakening is paying attention to everything – to discover the nature of the mind and of experience.
Without risk, life is nothing – a dream empty of dreams. Sri Aurobindo
When you eventually see through the veils to how things really are, you will keep saying again and again, ‘This is certainly not like we thought it was.’
Rumi
What is is what Mind is, because Mind is what is. Wei Wu Wei
Every perceptible thing is a product of mind. What we are as ‘things’ is that.
Wei Wu Wei
All the world is the Veda, all creations the Koran. Why read paper scriptures, O Rajjab?
Gather ever fresh wisdom from the Universe. The eternal wisdom shines within the concourse
of the millions of Humanity.
Rajjab
An incarnation is just a package of individual differences that we are born into. The first time thru the cycle you take it seriously – you buy into the dream. You go into ‘somebody’ training. Most of us are young beings, and spend all our time fascinated by the power of our prefrontal lobes. (You can do so much stuff) But after enough cycles, you start to not identify so much with the packages, with the personalities. You start to come up for air.
To study Buddhism is to study ourselves. To study ourselves is to go beyond ourselves. To go beyond ourselves is to be enlightened by all things. To be enlightened by all things is to free our body and mind, and to free the bodies and minds of others. No trace of enlightenment remains, and this no-trace continues endlessly.
Dogen
To be free we must be comfortable in being someone, anyone, or no one, at any time in any place. Sujata
‘Mindfulness’ is an exquisite moment-to-moment method for being aware of the movements of thought and the senses. On a more social level is ‘self remembering’ as taught by Gurdjieff, and the Hindu method of ‘witnessing.’ All these forms of awareness help refine ones consciousness.
But this consciousness of something is all a stage before you become the ultimate level where you’re consciousness, but you are no longer self-conscious.
Ram Dass
Like dew that vanishes, like a phantom that disappears, or the light cast by a flash of lightning – so should one think of oneself.
Ikkyu
Words are the fog one has to see through. ?