Worlds on worlds are rolling ever
From creation to decay,
Like the bubbles on a river
Sparkling, bursting, borne away.
Percy Bysshe Shelle
In realization there is nothing to hold on to and nothing to forget.
Everything is known, nothing is remembered.
Sri Nisargadatta Maharaja
In reality, time and space exist in you. You do not exist in them.
Sri Nisargadatta Maharaja
Questioner: When someone dies, what exactly happens?
Nothing happens. Something becomes Nothing. Nothing was, Nothing remains.
Sri Nisargadatta Maharaja
It is not possible that this unity of knowledge, feeling and choice which you call your own should have sprung into being from nothingness at a given moment not so long ago; rather this knowledge, feeling and choice are essentially eternal and unchangeable and numerically one in all men, nay in all sensitive beings. But not in this sense – that you are a part, a piece, of an eternal, infinite being, an aspect or modification of it, as Spinoza’s pantheism. For we should have the same baffling question: which part, which aspect are you? What, objectively, differentiates it from the others? No, but inconceivable as it seems to ordinary reason, you – and all other conscious beings as such – are all in all. Hence this life of yours which you are living is not merely a piece of the entire existence, but is in a certain sense the whole; only this whole is not so constituted that it can be surveyed in one single glance.
Thus you can throw yourself flat on the ground, stretched out upon Mother Earth, with the certain conviction that you are one with her and she with you. You are as firmly established, as invulnerable as she, indeed a thousand times firmer and more invulnerable. As surely as she will engulf you tomorrow, so surely will she bring you forth anew to new striving and suffering. And not merely ‘some day’: now, today, every day she is bringing you forth, not once but thousands upon thousands of times, just as every day she engulfs you a thousand times over. For eternally and always there is only now, one and the same now; the present is the only thing that has no end.
Erwin Schroedinger
The best things can’t be told; the second best are misunderstood. Heinrich Zimmer
Words could be called mind parasites. Colin Wilson
The brain is a hologram interpreting a holographic universe. Karl Pribram
There is nothing you need to do first in order to be enlightened. Thaddeus Golas
A long time ago, Descartes said, ‘I think therefore I am.’ This is where philosophy begins. But if you are not thinking, what? This is where Zen begins.
Seung Sahn
You don’t see the center of the universe because it’s all center. C. S. Lewis
There are many beings, both on this plane and on other planes, that are available to guide you and help you, but they don’t come unless you want them. Your reaching elicits their help.
Ram Dass
There is one danger to the mystical search: there is no way back without doing oneself harm. Many paths appear, but once the way is taken, it must be followed to the end.
Peter Mathiessen
There may be an exterior world independent of our minds, but we can never know it
Stanislav Grof
To God all things are fair and good and right; but men hold some things wrong and some right. Good and evil are one.
Heraclitus
Not to see the unity of self and other is the fear of Life, and not to see the unity of being and nonbeing is the fear of Death.
Alan Watts
But if we watch closely we notice that pleasure doesn’t make us happy. Pleasure is a temporary gratification of desire. Happiness is a deeper satisfaction, a feeling of wholeness, of non- neediness, of desire-lessness. Seeking pleasure is our greatest cause of suffering.
Steven Levine
I am the same to all beings. My love is the same always. Nevertheless, those who meditate on me with devotion, they dwell in me, and I shine forth in them.
The Bhagavad Gita
Wherever there is other, there is fear. The Upanishads
We are here and it is now. Further than that, all human knowledge is moonshine.
H. L. Menchen
Matter rests or is enfolded upon a sea of implicate physical energy. Matter is like a small ripple on this tremendous ocean of energy.
David Bohm
If the eye never sleeps, all dreams will naturally cease.
If the mind makes no discriminations,
the ten thousand things are as they are, of single essence.
Seng-tsan the Third Zen Patriarch
Buddhism is very destructive, because it breaks down or does not believe in God. It does not believe in an immortal soul or seek any solace in any idea of life after death. It absolutely faces the fact of the transiency of life. There is nothing you can hold on to, so let go. There is no one to hold on to anything, anyway. But if you do that you discover something much better than any belief, because you have got the real thing, only you cannot say what it is.
Alan Watts
There is no God but Reality.
To seek Him elsewhere
Is the action of the Fall.
Robert Frost
In Buddhism the emphasis is on self-creation; there is no Creator. So, strictly speaking, it is not a religion. It is closer to science.
The Dalai Lama
This is really all there is to contemplative mysticism – to be aware without judgment or comment of what is actually happening at this moment, both outside ourselves and within, listening even to our involuntary thoughts as if they were no more than the sound of rain.
This is possible only when it is clear that there is nothing else to do, and no way on or back.
Alan Watts
If there was not something of mind in matter, how could matter (as LSD) change mind?
Albert Hoffman
All there is – is consciousness. Ramesh Balsekar
You are a spirit inhabiting a vast animal body with mysterious back alleys of a mind. You can explore backwards or forwards. All places and times exist in your mind simultaneously….Your mind is the same mind that’s always existed in all people at all times in all places. It is the Great Mind men call God…. Everything is alive. And everything alive is experiencing on its own level, a Suchness existence as enormous to it as your existence is to you. You’re all in this strange existence together. Your head contains all those corridors leading into dreams, memories, fantasies. If you go deep enough you ask ‘Is this all a dream-nature?’ ‘What is this existence we’re in?’ ‘Who are we?’ Then you look into the ‘clear light’ or the eyes of the Veiled Lady, looking to see who it is doing or being all this, looking to see what the self-nature of it all is. Allen Ginsberg
The seeker is that which is being sought. The Buddha
Our life and death are the same thing. When we realize this fact, we have no fear of death nor actual difficulty in our life.
Shunryu Suzuki
I am asked why I live in the green mountains; I smile but reply not, for my heart is at rest. The flowing waters carry the image of the peach blossoms far, far, away; There is an earth; there is a heaven, unknown to men.
Li-po
The psyche is an organ that already knows, it doesn’t have to learn from the universe or by reading books – it already has wisdom and it knows.
J. Perry
No one is wrong. In the eyes of love, all people are doing the best they can from their own levels of consciousness.
Deepak Chopra
Zen is not a pastime, but the most serious task in life – no empty head will ever venture near it.
D. T. Suzuki
It’s really not a question of letting go of the ego. We simply need to stop creating it, stop identifying with passing phenomena. As Wei Wu Wei said, ‘We’re like a dog barking up a tree that isn’t there.’ When we see there’s no tree, we can finally stop barking.
Joseph Goldstein
The ego is a system that protects itself by building walls around walls around nothing.
Alan Watts
Like a sward that cuts, but cannot cut itself;
Like an eye that sees, but cannot see itself.
The Zenrin
To be conscious of the original mind, the original nature;
Just this is the great disease of Zen.
The Zenrin
Time is the moving image of Eternity. Plato
What is the worst sin of all? In Buddhism the worst sin is to see God as an object. If you want to be free from evil or sin, you must stop seeing God as object. A louse is the child of God. A snake is the child of God. So if you have a snake or a louse or mosquito as object, it’s sin.
Joshu Sasaki Roshi
It’s a bit embarrassing to have been concerned with the human problem all one’s live and find at the end that one has no more to offer by way of advice than ‘Try to be a little kinder.’
Aldous Huxley upon his death.
The individual is an aperture through which the whole energy of the universe is aware of itself, a vortex of vibrations in which it realizes itself as man or beast, flower or star – not alone, but as central to all that surrounds it.
Alan Watts
…the individual is something which the whole is doing, and the whole is something which the individual is doing, both simultaneously.
Alan Watts
Know that your inner attitude will determine the outcome of every situation, confrontation, or experience. As you believe things to be – so they are. Look within and know that you are God. To react to anything in any other way is to lose the power and bliss of your true self.
William Dyer
I settled at Cold Mountain long ago,
Already it seems like years and years.
Freely drifting, I prowl the woods and streams
And linger watching things themselves.
Men don’t get this far into the mountains.
White clouds gather and billow.
Thin grass does for a mattress,
The blue sky makes a good quilt.
Happy with a stone under head,
Let heaven and earth go about their changes.
Han-shan
The death of the individual is not disconnection but simply withdrawal. The corpse is like a footprint or an echo – the dissolving trace of something which the Self has ceased to do.
Alan Watts
Nothing can bring you peace but yourself. Emerson
One can create without ever writing a word or painting a picture, by simply molding ones’ inner life. ?
If you cannot have self without other, yang without yin, front without back, then there is a conspiracy going on. There are two which appear to be different, yet they are esoterically and secretly the same. That is why one could say that being enlightened in the Buddhist sense is a sort of calamity. You find out the ruse you were playing on yourself. You find out that the universe is fundamentally a system that creeps up on itself and then says ‘Boo!’ and then laughs at itself for jumping.
Alan Watts
Bring me into the company of those who seek the truth, and deliver me for those who know it.
Anon.
Why are rivers and seas lords of the waters?
Because they afford the common level and so become lords of the waters.
The common people love a sound man because he does not talk above their head,
Because, though he lead them, he follows them, he imposes no weight on them;
And they in turn, because he does not impede them; yield to him, content:
People never tire of anyone who is not bent upon comparison.
Lao-tzu
When we realize that everything is nothing but ourselves, then we can be thoroughly ‘alone,’ In Buddhism it’s called the right thought of ‘dwelling alone.’
Alan Watts
Therefore we timeless and spaceless Beings, alone are…. What I say is that the Self is here and now, and alone.
Ramana Maharshi
The goal of our life’s effort is to reach the other shore, Nirvana. Prajna paramita, the true wisdom of life, is that in each step of the way, the other shore is actually reached. To reach the other shore with each step of the crossing is the way of true living.
Shunryu Suzuki
But in all such quests and searches, the secrete is in the seeker. Alan Watts
The ‘level’ of Mind is in no way buried or hidden in the obscure depths of our psyche - on the contrary, the level of Mind is our present and ordinary state of consciousness, for, being infinite and absolutely all-inclusive, it is compatible with every imaginable level or state of consciousness…. Our present, everyday state of consciousness, whatever it may be, sad, happy, depressed, ecstatic, agitated, calm, worried, or afraid – just that, just as it is, is the Level of Mind….realizing this confers upon one a profound center of peace that underlies and persists throughout the worst depressions, anxieties, and fears.
Ken Wilbur
Just as my sensation of ‘I-ness,’ of being alive, once came into being without conscious memory or intent, so it will arise again and again, as the ‘central’ Self – the IT – appears as the self /other situation in its myriads of pulsation forms – always the same and always new, a here in the midst of a there, a now in the midst of then, and a one in the midst of many. And if I forget how many times I have been here, and in how many shapes, this forgetting is the necessary interval of darkness between every pulsation of light. I return in every baby born.
Alan Watts
Misty rain on Mount Lu,
And waves surging on the river Che;
When you have not yet been there,
Many a regret surely you have;
But once there and homeward you went,
How matter of fact things look!
Misty rain on Mount Lu,
And waves surging on the river Che.
Su Tun-Po
If you run away from the Void, you can never be free from it; if you search for the Void, you can never reach it.
Niu-tou Fa-yung
Like the empty sky it has no boundaries,
Yet it is right HERE, ever serene and clear.
When you seek to attain it, you cannot see it.
You cannot take hold of it,
But neither can you lose it.
Yung-chia
Simple people conceive that we are to see God as if He stood on that side and we on this. It is not so; God and I are one in the act of my perceiving Him.
Meister Eckhart
That is what this life really is, being born and dying every moment, faster than we can see. This unborn nature is coming into being every instant, more than sixty-four thousand times a second. When you are really mindful, life is like a moving picture in slow motion, each frame a separate and complete moment. At normal speed the film gives the illusion of movement, making us believe that things are really happening in our life.
Dennis Genpo Merzel
Ota Dokan, a scholar of military arts and poet, was stabbed while taking a bath. Clutching the dagger that had pierced his body, he uttered the following and then died:
‘Had I not known that I was dead already, I would have mourned my loss of life.’
Yoel Hoffmann
If you are innocent, not a mind, but just a being looking at the sky, there is nothing to say, nothing to think. The sky is there, and you are also like a sky – and the inner and the outer meet. Both the spaces become one and there is no boundary. The observer becomes the observed.
Bhabwan Shree Rajneesh
The truth is never taken from another.
One carries it always by oneself.
Tetto Giko
You must get rid of the idea that you are an ignorant one and have yet to realize the Self. You are the Self. Was there ever a time when you were not aware of the Self?
Shi Ramana Maharshi
Be empty like dark sky – ready for anything. Accept knowledge as if you were hearing something you already knew. Do not echo your own opinions. Do not surprise others with your ‘wonderful treasures’. When you listen to someone, give up all preconceived ideas and opinions. See things as they are for him, and accept them.
Shunryu Susuki
Don’t be attached to the polarizing roles, even if you have to play one out. Attachment to any position makes the other side ‘them’. Don’t crate opposites.