The world is filled with love-play, from animal lust to sublime compassion.
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.
Man suffers only because he takes seriously what the gods made for fun.
You are an aperture through which the universe is looking at and exploring itself.
Problems that remain persistently insoluble should always be suspected as questions asked in the wrong way.
In reality there are no separate events. Life moves along like water, it’s all connected to the source of the river is connected to the mouth and the ocean.
Make a spurious division of one process into two, forget that you have done it, and then puzzle for centuries as to how the two get together.
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.
I have always thought that all philosophical debates are ultimately between the partisans of structure and the partisans of “goo.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
The only way to make sense out of change is to plunge into it, move with it, and join the dance.
Jesus was not the man he was as a result of making Jesus Christ his personal savior.
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.
You will never get to the irreducible definition of anything because you will never be able to explain why you want to explain, and so on. The system will gobble itself up.
We might ‘conquer’ nature if we could first, or at the same time, conquer our own nature, though we do not see that human nature and ‘outside’ nature are all of a piece.
W might ‘conquer’ nature if we could first, or at the same time, conquer our own nature, though we do not see that human nature and ‘outside’ nature are all of a piece.
People become concerned with being more humble than other people.
Money alone cannot buy pleasure, though it can help. For enjoyment is an art and a skill for which we have little talent or energy.
Normally, we do not so much look at things as overlook them.
In looking out upon the world, we forget that the world is looking at itself.
It is hard indeed to notice anything for which the languages available to us have no description.
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.
One is a great deal less anxious if one feels perfectly free to be anxious, and the same may be said of guilt.
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.
When you find out that there was never anything in the dark side to be afraid of … Nothing is left but to love.
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
To travel is to be alive, but to get somewhere is to be dead.
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.
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.
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. We are, perhaps, rather dimly aware of the immense power of our social enviornment.
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.
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.
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.
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.
You and I are all as much continuous with the physical universe as a wave is continuous with the ocean.
Technology is destructive only in the hands of people who do not realize that they are one and the same process as the universe.
Life and love generate effort, but effort will not generate them.
To “know” reality you cannot stand outside it and define it; you must enter into it, be it, and feel it.
Problems that remain persistently insoluble should always be suspected as questions asked in the wrong way
For eternally and always there is only now, one and the same now; the present is the only thing that has no end.
The realm of liberation is absolutely incommensurable with the relativities of higher and lower, better and worse, gain and loss, since these are all disadvantages of the ego.
Our pleasures are not material pleasures, but symbols of pleasure – attractively packaged but inferior in content.
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.
For there is never anything but the present, and if one cannot live there, one cannot live anywhere.
It is both dangerous and absurd for our world to be a group of communions mutually excommunicate.
Stay in the center, and you will be ready to move in any direction.
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.
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.
Hurrying and delaying are alike ways of trying to resist the present.
There are various levels above and below the human through which the individual soul may pass in the course of its reincarnations—the angelic, the titanic, the animal, the purgatories, and the realm of the frustrated ghosts.
Hospitals should be arranged in such a way as to make being sick an interesting experience. One learns a great deal sometimes from being sick.