Thinking is thing-ing. It’s the breaking up of seamless reality into discrete parts.
Ken Wilbur
A man bound hand and foot in the endless chain of cause and effect cannot free another. Ramakrishna
Awakened people, while not being enslaved by the work of serving living beings, never abandon their work of serving living beings.
Thich Nhat Hanh
All distinctions are falsely imagined. Hui-neng
He comes to the thought of those who know him beyond thought, not to those who imagine he can be attained by thought. He is unknown to the learned and known to the simple.
The Upanishads
This above all, - to thine own self be true;
And it must follow, as the night the day,
Thou canst not then be false to any man.
Shakespeare
Love is the power that moves the universe, the day of life, the night of death, and the new day after death. The radiance of this universe sends us a message of love and says that all creation came from love, that love impels evolution and that at the end of their time love returns all things to Eternity. Juan Mascaro
Wonderful – the mood of this moment – distant, vast, known to me only! Ryokan
The natural order of things includes us, and its laws are our laws. We are an endless moving stream in an endless moving stream
Jisho Warner
If you want to attain such a thing, you must be such a person. Since you are such a person, why trouble about such a thing?
Master Ungo
You can have anything you want,
All you have to do is know.
Cat Stevens
The way to make your dreams come true is to wake up. Phil Jackson
The only real philosophical question is rather or not to commit suicide. Albert Camus
If any man thinks he slays, and if another thinks he is slain, neither knows the ways of truth. The Eternal in man cannot kill: the Eternal in man cannot die.
The Bhagavad Gita
Because the essential nature of our being continues to exist behind any illusory constrictive identifications, it follows that it remains transcendent to the health/illness dichotomy at all times. Thus, a movement toward health does not entail changing what we are but rather recognizing what we are.
Roger Walsh
Lives based on having are less free than lives based on either doing or being. William James
When you’re both alive and dead,
Thoroughly dead to yourself,
How superb
The smallest pleasure.
Bunan
O Sariputra,, form here is emptiness, emptiness is form; form is no other than emptiness, emptiness is no other than form; That which is form is emptiness, that which is emptiness is form.
The Heart Sutra
The Void is not of the nature of a black abyss or a bottomless pit. Rather its nature is ‘vast and expansive like space itself.’ It is apprehended as ‘serene, marvelous, all-pure, brilliant and all-inclusive.’ Above all does it partake of the nature of light. And it is not anything. For Void is Mind Itself, and Mind Itself is Void.
Wei Wu Wei
Nothing can be right in a universe where nothing can be wrong. Alan Watts
Our ordinary conception of the world as a complex of things existing in space and succeeding one another in time is only a conventional map of the universe – it is not real. The map is not the territory.
Ken Wilbur
I don’t have to have faith – I have experience. Joseph Campbell
Buddha-nature is not some kind of changeless entity, but is none other than the eternally rising and perishing reality of the eternally present world.
Dogen
There is nothing infinite apart form finite things D. T. Suzuki
Suffering alone exists, none who suffer;
The deed there is, but no doer thereof;
Nirvana is, but no one seeking it;
The Path there is, but none who travel it.
The Buddha
For there is no beginning to this present moment, and that which has no beginning is the Unborn….In the same way, there is no ending to this present moment, and that which has no ending is the Undying. In this present moment there is neither past nor future – there is no time. And that which is timeless is eternal.
Ken Wilbur
If you want to know what eternity means, it is no further than this very moment. If you fail to catch it in this present moment, you will not get it, however many times you are reborn in hundreds of thousands of years.
Zen Master Seppo
Since we are already one with the Absolute, there is nothing for us to practice, achieve or attain. All that is necessary is to reach a sudden awareness of that oneness.
Huang Po
The finding of God is the coming to one’s own self. Meher Baba
Life is simply this: we are living in a world that is absolutely transparent and God is shining through it all the time….If we abandon ourselves to God and forget ourselves, we see it sometimes, and we see it maybe frequently. God is manifest everywhere, in everything – in people and in things and in nature and in events. It becomes very obvious that God is everywhere and in everything and we cannot be without God. It’s simply impossible.
Thomas Merton
The mystery does not get clearer by repeating the question.
Nor is it bought with going to amazing places.
Until you’ve kept your eyes and your wanting still for fifty years
You don’t begin to cross over from confusion.
Rumi
To ‘see God in each other’ was the constant teaching of Swami Muktananda. He was once asked, ‘Do you see God in the tree?’ He replied, ‘No, but I see the tree as God.” He taught that everything in the universe including ourselves is composed of the same divine Shakti or energy.
Gulshan Khakee
We suffer from an illness of the illusion of separateness. We believe that the world is full of discrete things, when in fact it is all one interconnected whole. We experience ourselves as conscious skin-bags living a transitory mortal life, when in fact we are the eternal mind of the universe. Separateness is the sickness and Zen is the cure.
Timothy Freke
You really have no right to defend yourself against death, either your own or someone else’s. Every moment of your living should take the inevitability of death totally into account.
Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj
You do your spiritual practices because you do them and what happens, happens; and rather you are enlightened or free now or ten thousand births form now is of no concern because what difference does it make. What are you going to do? You can’t stop anyway. Once you start to awaken you can’t fall off the path – where are you going to fall to? You can’t pretend it never happened. You can’t fall back asleep.
Ram Dass
A single event can awaken within us a stranger totally unknown to us. To be alive is to be slowly born.
Antoine De Saint-Exupery
So long as you consciously or unconsciously think in terms of a distinction between yourself and others, you are caught in the dualism of I and not-I. This I is not indigenous to our True-nature, being merely an illusion produced by the six senses. But because this illusory ego-I has been treated as a real entity throughout this existence and previous ones, it has come to occupy the deepest level of the subconscious mind.
Yasutani-roshi
I follow my impulsive feet wherever they might go. My body is a pine tree surrounded by the snow. Sometimes I simply stand beside a flowing stream. Sometimes I chase a drifting cloud past another peak. Han-shan
You may follow one stream. Know that it leads to the Ocean, but do not mistake the stream for the Ocean. Jan-fishan
I came to realize clearly that Mind is no other than mountains and rivers and the great wide earth, the sun and moon and the stars.
Zen Master Son-o
The small truth has works that are clear; the great truth has great silence
Rabindranat Tagore
Modern man is drinking and drugging himself out of awareness, or he spends his time shopping, which is the same thing. As awareness calls for types of heroic dedication that this culture no longer provides him, society contrives to help him forget.
Ernest Becker
The true value of a human being is determined primarily by the measure and the sense in which he has attained liberation from self.
Albert Einstein
To believe in God is to desire His existence, and what is more, to act as though He existed.
Miguel de Unamun
There is someone who looks after us..
In truth we are not here.
This is our shadow.
Rumi
In order to become that which thou are not,
Thou must go by a way which thou knowest not…
The problem with people isn’t that they’re ignorant, it’s that they know so much that ain’t so.
Mark Twain
Great trees have great uses; small trees have small uses. Good and bad can all be used in their own way. None are to be discarded. Keep both good and bad friends. You mustn’t reject anything. This is true Buddhism.
Kyono Ho
Nothing comes into existence nor does anything disappear. Nothing is eternal, nor has anything any end. Nothing is identical or differentiated. Nothing moves hither and thither.
Nagarjuna
We all have the same disease; It’s called ‘wanting’ and ‘not wanting,’ and it’s curable.
Steven Smith
If you are having a difficulty what you must do is face it. Go into your hut. Shut the doors and windows. Wrap yourself in all the robes you won. Sit there and don’t move and face it. Only then can you overcome it. Achaan Chah
Truth is One, paths are many. Swami Satchidananda
If you want God to come in, make room. Swami Satchidananda
But how should the caged bird know about the air? It supposes gloomily ‘I have no wings’.
Rumi
For the only hidden meaning things have is that they have no hidden meaning.
Stranger than all that is strange, than poet’s dreams and philosophical ideas is this: things are actually just what they appear to be and there is nothing about them to understand…
Things do not have meaning: they have existence… So with every act of man all over the world: We take nothing away, leave nothing behind. We pass and forget.
Fernando Pessoa
Existence is a play of sun and shade, of hope and despair, of happiness and sorrow, of life and death. So existence is duality, a tension of opposite poles, a music of contrary notes. To know it, to recognize it, to experience it as such, is to go beyond it. This transcendence is the real sadhana [spiritual work] the real achievement. The key to this transcendence is the witness state. Bid goodbye to the doer, live in the witness state. Watch the dramas, don’t drown in it, rather be drowned in observing – then happiness and sorrow, birth and death, remain just a play, they do not affect you, they cannot affect you. All error, all ignorance, comes from identification.
Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh
Though one may conquer a thousand times a thousand men in battle, he who conquers himself is the greatest warrior.
The Buddha
All senses are a touching of frequencies, on’s and off’s. Our thinking is always classifying – is it or isn’t it. There is the fear the off’s will win over the on’s. Black will overthrow white, Death will triumph over life But there is a secrete conspiracy between opposites, for in all explicit opposites there is an implicit unity.
Alan Watts
If you’re so poor you cant afford tea – it can be celebrated adequately with hot water.
Zen saying
If you stop searching outside yourself, happiness will find you. Seek not God, but Love. God will find you. Be Here and Love
Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh
The whole of Buddhist practice can be summed up in one sentence: Cling to nothing.
Achaan Jummen
No elementary phenomenon is a phenomenon until it is an observed phenomenon
Wheeler
In life there are no survivors. Don Juan
The miracle is that the universe created a part of itself to study the rest of it; and that this part, in studying itself, finds the rest of the universe within its own natural inner realities.
John Lilly
Nowhere is Now Here. Soen
It is often tragic to see how blatantly a man bungles his own life and the lives of others, yet remains totally incapable of seeing how much the whole tragedy originates in himself and how he continually feeds it and keeps it going.
From the first not a thing is. Hui-neng
Don’t dwell upon colors to bring forth the mind; don’t dwell upon phenomena of sound, smell, taste or touch to bring forth the mind; dwell nowhere and bring forth the mind.
The Diamond Sutra
So when you try hard to make your own way, you will help others….Before you make your own way you cannot help anyone, and no one can help you.
Shunryu Susuki
You can serve meals to all my disciples and to me for 1000 years, but it will not earn you as much merit as one moment of complete mindfulness.
The Buddha
As you open your awareness, life will improve of itself, you won’t even have to try. It’s a beautiful paradox: the more you open your consciousness, the fewer unpleasant events intrude themselves into your awareness.
Thaddeus Golas
When everyone recognizes beauty as beautiful, there is already ugliness;
When everyone recognizes goodness as good, there is already evil.
‘To be’ and ‘not to be’ arise mutually;
Difficult and easy are mutually realized;
Long and short are mutually contrasted;
High and low are mutually posited.
Lao-tzu
Before I had studied Zen for thirty years, I saw mountains as mountains, and waters as waters. When I arrived at a more intimate knowledge, I came to the point where I saw that mountains are not mountains, and waters are not waters. But now that I have got its very substance I am at rest. For it’s just that I see mountains once again as mountains, and waters once again as waters.
Ch’ing-yuan
The big bang was about as unified an event as one could imagine, and we were there. Every electron in the synapses of every human (and inhuman) thought, every atom of our blood and bones, every here was there…The unity of Nature perceived in art and in our sensations of beauty in Nature is a physical unity traceable back to the origin of the universe…
Timothy Ferris
The butterfly counts not months but moments, and has time enough. Rabindranath Tagore
If all things are constantly transforming and will eventually die, then perhaps the best way to live is not by holding on, but by letting go with all our might – letting go of our impossible craving for certainty or significance; letting go of our demand on the universe for perfect happiness and everlasting life.
Wes Nisker
Earth, mountains, rivers – hidden in this nothingness.
In this nothingness – earth, mountains, rivers revealed.
Spring flowers, winter snow:
There’s no being nor non-being, nor denial itself.
Saisho
The true basis of the universe is stillness, its real condition, for out of it comes all activity. The ocean, when the wind ceases, is calm again, as are the trees and grasses. These things return to stillness, their natural way. And this is the principle of meditation. There is night, there is day, when the sun sets there is a hush, and then the dead of night, when all is still. This is the meditation of nature.
Soto master Rosen Takashina
Brahman, the Self in the Hindu worldview, plays hide-and-seek with itself forever and ever... Each one of us is the godhead, getting lost on purpose for the fun of it.
Alan Watts
The crucial issue wherein Buddhism differs from Hinduism is that it doesn’t say who you are; it has no idea, no concept. It has no concept of God because Buddhism is not interested in concepts, it is interested in direct experience only. From the Buddhist standpoint all concepts are wrong.
Alan Watts
We create the past because we cling to memory… and we create the future because we have so many desires yet to be fulfilled, we have so many imaginations yet to be realized. And desires need a future…
Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh
We feel we are someone having experiences. But there is only experiencing going on.
We feel we are someone thinking thoughts. But there is only thinking going on.
The thought that there is a thinker having thoughts is just another thought.
Alan Watts
We are required to cease looking at objects as events apart from ourselves, and to know them at their source – which is our perceiving of them.
Wei Wu Wei
You neither exist nor not exist, you are not the object nor subject, but the presence of the mutual absence of both. Neither experiencer or that experienced, only experiencing. Not a ‘me’ but only ‘I’, I-ing or Being.
Wei Wu Wei
Ignorance and Karma come from our unconditioned surrender to the intellect; Zen revolts against this state of affairs
Zenkei Shibayama
All the universe is in this eye of mine. Seppo
What we call in the beginning is often the end. And to make our end is to make a beginning. The end is where we start from.
T. S. Elliot
It is precisely a failure to remember that drags down form the heights the soul that has walked with God and had some vision of the truths, but cannot retain it.
A. Coomaraswamy
I can only know what I am not. What I am is unknowable, for I am it, and if I could know it ‘I’ would thereby be an object.
Wei Wu Wei
This slowly drifting cloud is pitiful!
What dream-walker we all are!
Awaken the one great truth:
Black rain on the temple roof.
Dogen Zenji
A magic spell, a dream, a gleam before the eyes, a reflection, lightning, an echo, a rainbow, moonlight upon water, cloud-bands, dimmers before the eyes, fog and apparitions, These are the twelve similes of the phenomenal.
Naropa
The roaring waterfall is the Buddha’s golden mouth. The mountains in the distance are his pure luminous body. How many thousands of poems have flowed through me tonight! And tomorrow I won’t be able to repeat even one word.
Su Tung-p’o
There is no here, no there. Infinity is before our eyes. Seng-t’san
‘Come to your sense’. How did the meaning of ‘senses’ get switched around to thinking rationally, and arrive at judgment and opinion, meaning to accept the values of those around you? For sensing is preverbal. As an infant. Innocent.
Barry Stevens
Awareness is without any intention. No good. No bad.
(Don’t push the river. It flows by itself.)
Barry Stevens
To end dualism is also to end the One.
When such dualities cease to exist, oneness itself cannot exist.
To the ultimate finality, no law or description applies.
Third Zen Patriarch
Q: Is your world full of things and people as is mine?
A: No, it is full of myself.
Q: If you are the world, how can you be conscious of it?
Consciousness and the world appear and disappear together, hence they are two aspects of the same state…. As long as the mind is there, your body and the world are there. Your world is mind-made, subjective, enclosed within the mind, fragmentary, temporary, personal, hanging on the thread of memory.
I live in a world of realities, while yours is of imagining. Your world is personal, private, un-shareable, intimately your own. Nobody can enter it, see as you see, hear as you hear, feel your emotions and think your thoughts. In your world you are truly alone, enclosed in your ever-changing dream, which you take for life, My world is an open world, common to all, accessible to all. In my world there is community, insight, love, and real quality; the individual is the totality…. All are one, and the One is all.
Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj
The ultimate metaphysical secret, if we dare to state it so simply, is that there are no boundaries in the universe. Boundaries are illusions, products not of reality but of the way we map and edit reality. Ken Wilbur
To go on meeting anyone where he has been is to miss where he is now. I have to meet people now or I don’t meet them anywhere.
(Memory is meeting, memory is not me, now)
Barry Stevens
What will open the door is daily awareness and attention – awareness of how we speak, what we say, how we walk, what we think.
You can’t see what to do, you can see only what not to do. The total negation of that road is the new beginning, the other road. This other road is not on the map. Every map is a map of the wrong road, the old road.
J. Krishnamurti
Be content with what you have; rejoice in the way things are. When you realize there is nothing lacking, the whole world belongs to you.
Lao-tzu
Eastern Religions are founded on what Aldous Huxley called the Perennial Philosophy, which is based on the realization that you, even if you don’t realize it, are the fundamental reality, which is beyond any limitations of time or space. In other words: You’re it! Therefore there is an attitude towards life of complete non-fear, and a non-clinging to things.
Alan Watts
Deeply thinking of it,
I and other people,
There is no difference
As there is no mind
Beyond The Mind.
Ikkyu
The eye with which I see God is the same eye with which God sees me.
Meister Eckhart
What you are speaks so loudly, I can’t hear what you say. Emerson
Be as a mirror – Be Choiceless Awareness. J. Krishnamurti
There is no reaching the Self. If Self were to be reached, it would mean that the Self is not here and now but that it is yet to be obtained. What is got afresh will also be lost. So it will be impermanent. What is not permanent is not worth striving for. So I say that the Self is not reached. You are the Self; you are already That. Ramana Maharshi
I lost the boundary of my physical body. I had my skin, of course, but I felt I was standing in the center of the cosmos. I spoke, but my words had lost their meaning. I saw people coming toward me, but all were the same man, all were myself! I had never know this wo