1 FINGERS POINTING - BIRDS SIGNING

A collection compiled by Ron Flowers, co-author of the eBook What Is? (ronflowers@ suddenlink.net As was said by the ancient Chan Buddhists of China:

Words are like fingers pointing at the moon -- dont confuse the fingers for the m oon!

Words are like the chirping of birds birds do not sing because they have an answ er, they sing because they have a song!

Death itself is nothing, but we fear to be, we know not what, we know not where.

Dryden

The happiness of the drop is to die in the river.

Al-Ghazalt

2 No matter how alienated, separate, insignificant, and desperate we might feel at times, each of us represents the sum total of all existence, the universal netw ork in its entirety, the Universal Mind itself each of us has the potential to br eak through the limiting barriers, to expand his or her consciousness to encompa ss all of existence, and experience unity with the One Mind.

Stanislav Grof

The basic Hindu, Buddhist, and Taoist view of existence is that the Eternal Real ity, the root and ground of Being, is always, at the very deepest level, you. An d the feeling that you are not that; that you are a temporary individual, a skin -encapsulated ego, a mortal organism, is called Maya, or illusion.

Alan Watts

Above the heavens, Below the heavens,

Only I, alone and sacred.

Buddha, upon Enlightenment

Mans innermost consciousness is identical to the absolute and ultimate reality of the universe. Mind is what there is and all there is, spaceless and therefore i nfinite, timeless and therefore eternal, outside of which nothing exists.

Ken Wilbur

Illumination means the realization that Illumination is not something to be atta ined.

Hui Hai

When you see, see it direct! If a thought moves, it is gone!

Zen Master Dogo

A man who understands the Tao in the morning, may die, without regret, in the evening.

Confucius

If we have not found heaven within, it is a certainty we will not find it withou t. Henry Miller Unborn emptiness has let go of the extremes of being and non-being. Thus it is b oth the center itself and the central path. Emptiness is the track on which the centered person moves.

Tsongkhapa

The thought is the thought of the thoughtless, Your singing and dancing is no other than the voice of the Dharma.

Hakuin

Those who dream of a great feast may weep the next morning. Those who dream of w eeping may enjoy the hunt the next day. While they dream, they do not know they are dreaming. They may even interpret their dreams while still dreaming. Only af ter they awake do they know it was a dream. By and by, there will be a great awa kening; then we will know that this is all a great dream. All the while, the foo ls think they are awake, appearing to understand things, calling this man ruler and that man herdsman. How stupid! You and Confucius are both dreaming. When I say you are dreaming, I am dreaming too.

Chuang-tzu

All beings are flowers Blooming In a blooming universe.

3 Nakagowa Soen Roshi

We are equal beings and the universe is our relations with each other. The unive rse is made of one kind of entity; each one is alive, each determines the course of his own existence.

Thaddeus Golas

Tozan to Kassan: How are things? Just as they are.

Existence is beyond the power of words to define: Terms may be used, but are none of the absolute. In the beginning of heaven and earth there were no words, Words came out of the womb of matter; And whether a man dispassionately sees to the core of life, or passionately sees the surface, The core and the surface are essentially the same, Words making them seem different, only to express appearance.. If name be needed wonder names them both: From wonder into wonder, existence ope ns.

Lao-tzu

Life itself is a disease with a very poor prognosis it lingers on for years, and invariably ends in death.

C. C. Jung

The Gita gives two rules for the game: Do what you do, but do not be identified as the doer. Do what you do, but be not attached to the fruits of your actions.

Ram Dass

The morning glory! This too cannot be my friend.

Basho

In the beginning, which is really no beginning the will wants to know itself, an d consciousness is awakened, and with the awakening of consciousness the will is split in two. The one will, whole and complete in itself, is now at once actor and observer. Conflict is inevitable; for the actor now wants to be free from th e limitations under which he has been obliged to put himself in his desire for c onsciousness. He has in one sense been enabled to see, but at the same time ther e is something which he, as observer, cannot see.

D. T. Suzuki

Awaken out of your thinking mind. Awaken out of the illusion of your separatenes s. Go into nobody special training. And remember: you always have the choice of be ing either the victim or the creator. See the perfection of the teaching environ ment. Everything is grist for the mill.

Ram Dass

From one point of view, each moment is so elusive and so brief that we cannot ev en think about it before it has gone. From another, this moment is always here, since we know no other moment than the present moment. It is always dying, alway s becoming past more rapidly than imagination can conceive. Yet at the same time it is always being born, always new, emerging just as rapidly from that complet e unknown which we call the future.

Alan Watts

You have only to be silent. To be silent is everything. Silence does not mean ab sence of speech, it means absence of thoughts. When the mind quiets down it beco mes linked to the infinite. Dont do anything, just 4 sit and watch the flow of thoughts, just watch. This just watching dissolves tho ught by itself.

Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh

The world is not to be put in order, the world is in order. It is for us to put ourselves in unison with this order. Henry Miller

Coming, going, the waterfowl leaves not a trace, Nor does it need a guide.

Dogen

Its not that the material world obeys a higher law, but that the patterning of ma tter is the law. The beauty of the rose was not made by consciousness. The rose is consciousness.

Alan Watts

At the beginning of this and every moment, each individual is God as the Clear L ight; but by the end of this same moment in a flash, in the twinkling of an eye - he winds up as an isolated ego. And what happens In Between the beginning and ending of this moment is identical to what happened in Between death and rebirth as described in the Bardo Thotrol. The souls duty in this life is to remember.

Ken Wilbur

We are in fact Dreamers in a dream called reality, and we show up in the dream to de ny this fact and create drama and suffering, or we wake up in the dream to remember the truth of who we are and what is going on.

Dr. Gregory Tucker

The time of death is every moment.

T. S. Elliot .

Much suffering comes into the life of one who tries to be anywhere but here in t he present moment.

Sujata

Truth has no special time of its own. Its hour is now always.

Albert Schweitzer This dreaming deluded state, this ignorant state we are in, is the awakened stat e! There is no other state, no other shore, and nothing else to be realized.

Dennis Genpo Merzel

If a man gives way to all his desires, or panders to them, there will be no inne r struggle in him, no friction, no fire. But if, for the sake of attaining a definite aim, he struggles with the desires that hinder him he will than create a fire which will gradually transform his inner world into a single whole.

Ouspensky

Ego is but a worrisome product of unmindful, wandering thoughts. When powerful awareness is cultivated, we gladly learn that there is no one who thinks only thinking, no one who walks only walking, no one who sees - only seeing, and finally the great burden is dissolved.

Sujata

See the sun in the midst of rain, Scoop clear water from the heart of the fire.

5 The Zenrin

Enlightenment is intimacy with all things.

Jack Kornfield

Man always dies before he is fully born.

Erick Fromm

Student to the 6th Zen Patriarch: Is it the flag that moves, or the wind? Neither it is your mind

Reality and your perception of it are one and the same - the experience of the u niverse by the universe.

R. H. Blyth

As a sword cannot cut itself, as a finger cannot touch its own tip, Mind cannot see itself.

The Lankavatara Sutra

Whenever I look for my true Self, all I find is objects of perception. Thus the s plit, the space, between the subject in here and the object out there is a subtle il lusion. The real Self does not know the universe form a distance, it knows the u niverse by being it, without the least trace of space intervening. And that whic

h is spaceless is and must be infinite.

Ken Wilbur

Do what you do with another human being, but never put them out of your heart.

Ram Dass

Having no distinction, I am never lost.

Ikkyyu

There are tree elements of Buddhahood: Emptiness, Oneness, and Uniqueness.

Robert Aitken

The only real you is the one that comes and goes, manifest and withdraws itself et ernally in and as every conscious beings. For you is the universe looking at itsel f form billions of points of view, points that come and go so that the vision is forever new. What we see as death, empty space , or nothingness is only the tro ugh between the crests of this endlessly waving ocean. It is all part of the ill usion that there should seem to be something to be gained in the future. Yet jus t as there is no time but the present, and no one except the all-and-everything, there is never anything to be gained though the zest of the game is to pretend that there is.

Alan Watts

Spiritually there are no others to help. So the highest services you can do for others is to work on yourself. Separate forms and beings exist only as long as you identify yourself with the b ody. The Realized Being does not see the world as different form himself. The Se lf is the one and only Reality.

Ramana Maharshi

We are being dreamed. And when we awake, well find there was no others in the dream , and that there was no dreamer.

Wei Wu Wei

You awaken from the dream not by trying to get rid of the ego, but by realizing you are the dreamer. Upon awakening the ego disappears, and so also the dreamer, and only the dreaming remains.

6 Wei Wu Wei

I, Buddha, who wept with all my brothers tears, Whose heart was broken by a whole worlds woe, Laugh and am glad, for there is liberty. Ho! Ye who suffer! Know ye suffer from yourselves, none else compels, None other holds you that ye live and die And whirl upon the wheel, and hug and kiss its spokes of agony, Its tire of tear s, its nave of nothingness.

Buddhist text

In the depth of winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer.

Albert Camus

Imagine instead of God the father, God the mother, and instead of blazing light,

an unfathomable darkness Alan Watts

Our state of apparent bondage is due to identification with an imaginary objecti fication of I. I become identified with my selves, and my selves are all sentient beings. Whenever we think or speak as from the object which we are illusorily id entified we are thereby making an object of Subject. As long as we are identifie d with an object: that is bondage. As long as we think, act, live via an object, or as an object: that is bondage.

Wei Wu Wei

He quickens, but owns not. He acts, but claims not. Merit he accomplishes, but d wells not in it. Since he does not dwell in it, it will never leave him.

Lao-tzu

He who knows does not speak. He who speaks does not know.

Lao-tzu

However deep your knowledge of the scriptures, it is no more than a strand of ha ir in the vastness of space; however important seeming your worldly experience, it is but a drop of water in a deep ravine.

Tokusan

That which is not seen by the eyes, but by which the eyes see, THAT, understand truly, is Brahman and not what the world worships.

The Upanishad

Desires are fulfilled according to your level of awareness. When awareness is pu re, every desire is fulfilled completely.

Deepak Chopra

Lifes but a walking shadow, a poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage and then is heard no more: it is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound a nd fury, signifying nothing. Shakespeare

On the vast canvas of the Self, the picture of the manifold worlds is painted by the Self itself; and that Supreme Self seeing but itself, enjoys great delight.

The Sankarscarya

7 How marvelous, how wonderful! All sentient beings are perfect and without flaw. It is only due to delusive attachments that the truth cannot be seen.

Buddha

If its not good enough HERE-NOW then its never going to be good enough.

Ram Dass

This separate and subjective self, the little man inside that supposedly looks out a t the universe of objects, is obviously an illusion. Although I imagine it to be the subject which sees, knows, and feels the universe, it is in fact simply ano ther object of perception. This separate self is actually something which I can se e, know, or at least be aware of. I feel I can look at myself, and yet anything at which I can look mu st be an object of perception. The real Perceiver, the tru e Self, cannot be seen because it is doing the seeing.

Ken Wilbur

Mind is always now. There is really no before and after for Mind. There is only a now that includes memories and expectations.

Erwin Schroedinger

If we take eternity to mean not infinite temporal duration but timelessness, the n eternal life belongs to those who live in the present. Our life has no end in just the same way in which our visual field has no limits.

L.Wittgenstein

Enlightenment is the thunder and lightning discovery that the universe and onese lf are not remote and apart, but an intimate palpitating Whole.

D. T. Suzuki

There is no use for artificial and outward discipline the inner and natural disc ipline is enough. But what is the inner disciplines? In one word: acceptance total acceptance. And acceptance can be only total because partial acceptance is just a contradiction in terms. If you live live! If your die die! If you suffer suffer! And then there is no pr oblems and no anxiety and no anguish and what freedom! A Zen Master was once asked: It is terribly not, how shall we escape it? Why not go, answered the Master, to the place where it is neither hot nor cold? Where i s that place? The Master laughed and said: In summer we sweat and in winter we s hiver.

Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh

To a mind that is still, the whole universe surrenders.

Chuang-Tzu

You are pure spirit not matter. You are a very old being not the body-mind. So w hy dont we remember what we are? Because of our attachments to the physical plane of reality. Because of the power of our identification with our own body senses and thoughts.

Ram Dass

A moments awareness is sufficient to reveal to us the fact that this perpetual unc alculated life in the present is exactly the type of life that we are always lead ing anyway, whether we realize it or not. Mystical and eternal awareness of the Now-moment is in no way other than what you are already experiencing now. We miss realizing this because we imagine that we should in some way try to get in touch with the Now-moment, as if it were something different from what we are a lready doing at THIS moment.

8 Ken Wilbur

When there is no more separation between this and that, it is called the still-point of Tao. At the still-point in the center of the circle one can see the infinite in all things. Right is infinite; wrong is also infinite.

Chuang-tzu

We sit to express our Buddha nature, not to get it.

Roger Walsh

To carry yourself forward and experience myriad things is delusion. But myriad t hings coming forth and experiencing themselves is awakening.

Dogen

The mistake uppose that of life as orm what we

which we have made and this, if anything, is the fall of man is to s that extra circuit, that ability to take an attitude toward the rest a whole, is the same as actually standing aside and being separate f see.

Alan Watts

In that place where you are pure Being, there is nothing to do and no place to g o.

Ram Dass

Mounting on high I begin to realize the smallness of Mans Domain; Gazing into the distance I begin to know the vanity of the Carnal World. I turn my head and hur ry home back to the Court and Market, A single grain of rice galling in the Grea t Barn.

Po Chu-I

The universe is a self-surprising arrangement, so as to avoid the monotony and b oredom of knowing everything in advance. And you and I have conspired with ourse lves to pretend that we are not really God. But of course we are. We are all apertures through which the universe is looking at itself.

Alan Watts

We must learn to reawaken and keep ourselves awake, not by mechanical aids, but by the infinite expectation of the dawn.

Henry David Thoreau

Earth, mountains, rivers hidden in this nothingness. In this nothingness earth, mountains, rivers revealed.

Spring flowers, winter snows; Theres no being nor non-being, nor denial itself.

Saisho

The stuff of the universe is mind stuff.

Eddington

Among the tens of thousands of scriptures, the one to be most grateful for, the one where all the important points are made, is the Heart Sutra. According to th is sutra, The Lord Buddha declared, Form is emptiness, emptiness is form. Matter a nd the spirit are one, but all is void. Man is not alive, is not dead, is unborn and undying, without old age and disease, without increase, and without decreas e. Masamobu Fukuoka

Youre not watching whats happening, whats happening is watching itself. Youre standin g on the bridge, looking down, watching yourself flow by.

9 Ram Dass

To be aware is to be aware of thoughts, feelings, sensations, desires, and all o ther forms of experience. Never at any time are you aware of anything, which is not experience, not a thou ght or not a feeling, but is instead the experiencer, the thinker, or the feeler . If this is so, what makes us think that any such thing exists?

Alan Watts

I know only one thing, that I know nothing.

Socrates

Trees show the bodily form of the wind; Waves give vital energy to the moon.

The Zenrin

The wild geese do not intend to cast their reflection; The water has no mind to receive their image.

The Zenrin

Entering the forest he moves not the grass;

Entering the water he makes not a ripple.

The Zenrin

It is not just that satori comes quickly and unexpectedly, all of a sudden, for mere speed has nothing to do with it. The reason is that Zen is a liberation for m time. For if we open our eyes and see clearly, it becomes obvious that there i s no other time than this instant, and that the past and the future are abstract ions without any concrete reality.

Alan Watts

Buddhas ministry didnt try to alleviate peoples physical suffering, but rather soug ht to liberate them from the root cause of suffering - belief in a self, which l eads to greed, hatred, and dilution, and sets up the whole wheel of Karma.

Joseph Goldstein

The place where you are is the place from which you are always pretending you sh ould be somewhere else.

Alan Watts

It is the discriminating mind that nurtures such residual notions as the meaning of life. If you are fully absorbed in what you are doing at each moment, where is there room for wondering about its meaning? The mystery of life is revealed through living it, not pondering over it.

Philip Kapleau

Do whatever you want to do, but do it entirely.

Rinzai

With realization, I stand resolute and alone in the universe, but also I stand o ne with the universe.

Robert Aitken

What we seek is to forget the self in the act of uniting with something.

Yamada Roshi

Zen mind means returning to original mind. To see the world as it is.

10 Seung Sahn

It is fallacious to think that you simply move from birth to death. Birth, from the Buddhist point of view, is a temporary point between the preceding and the s ucceeding; hence it can be called birthlessness. The same holds for death and de athlessness. In life there is nothing more than life, in death nothing more than death: we are being born and are dying every moment.

Dogen

Zen is understanding myself What am I? Zen is to see into your own essential nat ure and the essential nature of all beings and things.

Seung Sahn

Buddhism is not a teaching. Its essence consists in a certain kind of experience , a transformation of consciousness, which is called awakening or enlightenment, that involves our seeing through or transcending the hoax of being a separate e go.

Alan Watts

Had I not known that I was dead already, I would have mourned my loss of life.

Ota Dokans death poem

Isness is so noble. No creature is so tiny that it lacks isness. If a caterpilla r falls off a tree, it climbs up a wall to preserve its isness. So noble is isne ss.

Meister Eckhart

Having the seed of Buddhahood is not the same as being Buddha from the beginning . We practice as Arhats or Bodhisattvas to realize what has always been true.

Robert Aitken

My mind and yours already include all beings. They are already saved. Our task i s to realize that fact.

Robert Aitken

Zen practice is of the greatest importance It requires great faith, great courage , and great questioning.

Soen-sa-nim

To study Buddhism is to study the self. To study the self is to forget the self. To forget the self is to be enlightened by all things. This traceless enlighten ment is continued endlessly.

Dogen

Without the nucleus there is no circle, without the circle, no nucleus. You are the nucleus, the circle of the universe. If you exist, the universe exists, and if you disappear, the universe likewise disappears. Everything is related and interdependent.

Yasutani-roshi

Because I am, heaven overhangs and earth is upheld. Because I am, the sun and th e moon go round. The four seasons come in succession, all things are born, becau se I am, that is, because of Mind.

Eisai-zenji

In knowing the world we humanize it.

Alan Watts

All motion is perceived in relation to time.

Dogen

11 BUDDHA is your mind and the way goes nowhere. Dont look for anything but this. If you point your cart North when you want to go South, How will you arrive?

Ryken

Our job is to participate joyfully in the sorrow of the world.

Joseph Campbell

Boredom always reflects not paying enough attention, not finding enough in each moment.

Fritz Pearl

To tread the sharp edge of a sward; To run on smooth-frozen ice, One needs no footsteps to follow. Walk over the cliffs with hands free.

Wu Men Kan

There has never been a single thing. There is absolutely nothing which can be ob tained. From first to last not even the smallest grain of anything perceptible h as ever existed, or ever will.

Huang Po

In this moment you are not born and you do not die. The you that is here now is never going to die, it will be an entirely different you who dies.

Alan Watts

I hear and behold God in every object.

Walt Whitman

The sun in its course does not move, Every time it seems to move, It is a different sun

Chinese Buddhist text

You struggle for years looking and when you finally find it youre right HERE agai n. You were HERE all the time and its such a cosmic joke, youre struggling to get HERE.

Ram Dass

Nobody is going anywhere. Nobody is coming from anywhere. Were all HERE, in etern al time and space. Nothing is happening. Were just caught in the delusion, being aware of it as illu sion, and yet are in itGo back far enough and you become one with the Godhead. Yo u are God, you are the idea that lies behind the universe. Youre literally it.

Ram Dass

In all our faculties or passions there is nothing which is absolutely good or ba d; they are only notes which are wrong when played in the wrong places.

Rabindranat Tagore

Silently a flower blooms, In silence it falls away; Yet here now, at this moment, at this place,

12 the whole of the flower, the whole of the world is blooming. This is the talk of the flower, the truth of the blossom; The glory of eternal l ife is fully shinning here.

Zenkei Shibayama

Other people are mirrors of your own love. In reality there are no others, only the Self in other forms Deepak Chopra

A cicada sings the whole day long,

But it is the silent firefly that burns itself with love.

Anonymous

The sense of I, which should have been identified with the whole universe of your experience, was instead cut off and isolated as a detached observer of that univ erse. But when you know for sure that your separate ego is a fiction, you actual ly feel yourself as the whole process and pattern of life. Experience and experi encer become one experiencing, known and knower one knowing. Alan Watts

There is no illusion, no deception when there is no desire, conscious or unconsc ious, for any experience of the kind, when ones wholly indifferent to the coming and going of all experience, when one is not asking for anything.

J. Krishnamurti

Yours is a world divided against itself, because the I in you is so divided. Yours is a world of barriers and fences, because the I in you is one of barriers and fe nces. Some things it would fence out as alien to itself. Some things it would fe nce in as kindred to itself. Yet that outside the fence is ever breaking in; and that within the fence is ever breaking out.

Mikhail Naimy

Do not believe in anything because it is spoken and rumored by many. Do not believe in traditions because they have been handed down for many generat ions. Do not believe in anything merely on the authority of your teachers and elders. But after observations and analysis, when you fund that anything agrees with rea son, and is conducive to the good and benefit of one and all, then accept it and live up to it.

The Buddha

Every view we take of the world is simply one way of looking at things, and ther e are infinite ways of looking.

Alan Watts

Nothing is greater than the Person; he is the supreme, he is the ultimate goal.

The Upanishad

Buddha did not teach Buddhism, but the Dharma the truth he had experienced, and the method for seeing it for oneself. Everyone can become a Buddha; can become th e awakened one.

Alan Watts

If you could stand back far enough and watch the whole process you would see you are a totally determined being. The very moment you will wake up is totally det ermined. How long you will sleep is totally determined. What you will hear of wh at I say is totally determined. There are no accidents in this business 13 at all. Accidents are just from where youre looking. To the ego, it all looks lik e miracles and accidents. No miracles, no accidents. Its just your vantage point that youre sort of stuck in.

Ram Dass

One who may die, but will not perish, has life everlasting. For we die when we lose our physical life, we parish when we miss our humanity. And humanity is the Dharma of human beings. Let us die, and yet not parish.

Lao-tzu

Dont you see, life is a game, an exquisite game

Herman Hess

Remember always: in love you are always wrong. You are always responsible, and n eed to change yourself. The other is always right.

Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh

There was of philosopher, Van Der Loo, who once said that the mystery of Life is not a problem to be solved but a reality to be experienced, and that mystery, t hat deep deep,ever so deep thing which is before all worlds, is you, the unrecog nized self.

Alan Watts

Everybody wants to be free. To be free you have to know the truth. Real freedom is to embrace everything and dwell in everything, but be caught by nothing.

Joshu Sasaki

Since, in truth, bondage and freedom are relative, these words are only for thos e terrified with the universe. This universe is a reflection of minds. As you see many suns in water from one s un, so see bondage and liberation.

Zen Master Rinzai

Feel the conscious of each person as your own. So, leaving aside concern for sel f, become each being.

Zen Master Rinzai

The first step on the way to freedom is to realize that the self has no reality. After that it is not hard to shed the desires the self clings to.

The Buddha

If you want to know the truth; Ill tell you the truth You dont exist!

Frank Flowers

At some point you experience an increasing awareness that part of you has been p arty to determining the way it is. (You see that we are all each others karma, a nd then you realize there is no karma, no others, no self only the one.)

Ram Dass

All that needs to be experienced for cosmic consciousness is already present, an d anything in excess of this is obstructive and redundant.

Alan Watts

14 The goal and the path are one.

Dogen

The real is near, you do not have to search for it; and a man who seeks truth wi ll never find it. Truth is in what is and that is the beauty of it. But the mome nt you conceive it, the moment you seek it, you begin to struggle; and a man who struggles cannot understand. That is why we have to be still, observant, passiv ely aware.

J. Krishnamurti

The butterfly counts not days but moments, And has time enough.

Rabindranath Tagore

When Zen masters meet each other on the road, they need no introduction. When thief meet they recognize each other instantly.

Zen Saying

Without the bitter the sweet is never as sweet.

Dana

Sooner murder an infant in its cradle than nurse un-acted desires. William Blake

You can understand reincarnation only when you have Awakened to the Infinite Par adox of your Real Existence. In one sense there is reincarnation, and in another there is no such process. Likewise, there are individual beings, all the relati ons of those beings, and the infinity of the phenomena of the world, but, on the other hand, there is nothing but an Unqualified Fullness. There is multiplicity , and there is a Oneness that is No-Thingness. Therefore, the final descriptions of your existence are full of paradoxes. Ultimately you must become speechless.

Da Avabhasa

The whole dance of my life is the training in which the universe is teaching me things which are bringing me toward the One.

Ram Dass

Who sees variety and not the unity wanders on from death to death. The Upanishads

When you stop talking to yourself and are simply aware of what is, what you sens e, you suddenly find that the past and the future have completely disappeared. S o also have the so-called differentiation between the knower and the known, the subject and the object, the feeler and the feeling. They just are not there, bec ause you have to talk to yourself to maintain those things.

Alan Watts

Around us are pseudo-events, to which we adjust with a false consciousness, adop ted to see these events as true and real, and even as beautiful.

R. D. Laing

Perfect does not mean perfect actions in a perfect world, but appropriate action s in an imperfect one.

R. H. Blyth

The epitome of the human realm is to be stuck in a huge traffic jam of discursiv e thought.

Chogyam Trungpa

15 You posses only that which will not be lost in death; all else is illusion even the possessor, because that too will not be able to stand the final shipwreck. Then find out what is left. Turn in and meditate. Discard all that is vulnerable to death. Say: Not this, not that, and go deep to the point where nothing more remains to be discarded and the illumination.

Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh

Your ego is a set of thoughts that define your universe. Its like a familiar room built of thoughts; you see the universe through its windows. You are secure in it, but to the extent that you are afraid to venture outside, it has become a pr ison.

Ram Dass

The intelligent man who is proud of his intelligence is like the condemned man w ho is proud of his large cell.

Simone Weil

Dont side with yourself.

Bankei

Enlightenment for a wave is the ocean, is the moment the wave realizes it is wat er.

Thich Nhat Hanh

When there is no place that you have decided to call your own, then no matter wh ere you go, you are always heading home.

Muso Soseki

If your mind is empty, it is always ready for anything; it is open to everything . In the beginners mind there are many possibilities; in the experts mind there ar e few.

Shunryu Suzuki

For whatever a man may do, he does it in order to annihilate time. Broch

We are symptomatic of our universe. We are what it is doing. We are the little w iggles at the outer edge of the expanding big bang. The ancient is in us. When y ou realize that all the stars in the night sky, that all the universe, is you, the n you know that you will never die.

Alan Watts

Practice has to be a process of endless disappointment. We have to see that ever ything we demand (and even get) eventually disappoints us. This discovery is our teacher.

Charlotte Joko Beck

Even death is not to be feared by those who lived wisely.

The Buddha

Each time there is a desire there is another birth. You plant wantingness, wanti ng to do something, wanting to grasp something. Then that desire to grasp also i nvites something further. Birth here means the birth of further confusion, furth er dissatisfaction, further wanting.

Chogyam Trungpa

Who was born first, you or the world? As long as you give first place to the wor ld, you are bound by it, but once you realize beyond all trace of doubt that the world is in you and not you in the world, you are out of it. Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

16 In America, you think that freedom is being able to choose, but true freedom is freedom from having to choose.

J. Krishnamurti

You live in illusion and the appearance of things. There is a Reality. You are t he Reality. When you understand this, you will see that you are noting. And bein g nothing, you are everything.

Kalu Rinpoche

Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard are sweeter.

John Keats

I maintain that the cosmic religious feeling is the strongest and noblest motive for scientific research.

Albert Einstein

God is a thought; God is an idea, but its reference is to something that transce nds all thinking.

Joseph Campbell

The mind is immaterial and immaculate, with radiant awareness. Neither coming no r going, it pervades all time; neither inside nor outside, it permeates all spac e.

Kuei-feng

All things are artificial, for nature is the art of God.

Thomas Browne

The God whom science recognizes must be a God of universal laws exclusively. A G od who does a wholesale, not a retail business. He cannot accommodate his proces ses to the convenience of individuals.

William James

What lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what li es within us.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Self-consciousness is not the subjects awareness of itself but it is the subject -objects awareness of itself. For the knower never knows himself, but only what he knows Alan Watts

Man is free to the extent that he realizes his genuine self to be the author and origin of nature.

Alan Watts

Mind itself has no form What is it, then, that hears and works and moves about?

Bassin

There is nobody inside; Eating exists, dressing exists, walking exists, ego does not.

Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh

An animal is all unconscious it has no conscious mind. A Buddha is all conscious he has no unconscious mind. Both are innocent and of one mind, but they are not the same. Man is both conscious and unconscious, divided, a split being. Suicid e and boredom are not possible with animals or Buddhas only with man and his worrying minds. Be alert, aware, non-thinking. Bring the u nconscious up until it is no more. All relationships are a sharing in which you are not there.

? J. Krishnamurti

A person is neither a thing or a process but an opening through which the Absolu te can manifest.

17 Martin Heidegger

The first step in Zen practice is to realize that you are the being who unifies the world. To unify everything is to have the possibility of dwelling in everyth ing without any exception.You are open to the possibility of loving the whole uni verse and all that dwells there in.

Joshu Sasaki Roshi

So long as we deal with the cosmic and the general, we deal only with the symbol s of reality; but as soon as we deal with private and personal phenomena as such , we deal with realities in the completest sense of the term. William James . A fish in the ocean can never know the Godliness of the ocean unless it leaves a nd returns, The journey is the goal. The means contain the end.

Bhagwan Shree Raneesh

You are a spiritual entity who has taken birth and your work on earth is to work out your Karma and awaken out of the illusion of your own separateness.

Ram Dass

All mystical writing really is instructions. It is not an attempt to describe th e universe, to describe God, to describe ultimate reality. Every mystic knows th at cannot possibly be done. The very word mysticism is from the Greek word myein which means keeping silence.

Alan Watts

Renunciation is not giving up the things of this world, it is accepting that the y go away.

? The universe begins to look more like a great thought than a great machine.

Sir James Jeans

If you can, help others. If you cannot do that, at least do not harm them.

The Dalai Lama

The purpose of life is to increase the warm heart. Think of other people. Serve other people sincerely. No cheating.

The Dalai Lama

It is the dying persons state of mind, rather than the ability to control the man ner of dying, to which importance is attached. One who dies lusting for life in this world or for salvation in the next is not enlightened.

Yoel Hoffmann

When you suffer a calamity then be it so; now is the time of calamity. When you die then be it so; now is the time to die. Thus you save yourself form calamity and death.

Yamamoto Ryokan

However deep your knowledge of the scriptures, it is no more than a strand of ha ir in the vastness of space; however important seeming your worldly experience, it is but a drop of water in a deep ravine.

Master Tokusan

18 The object to learning is to inevitably lead to presuppositions concerning the nat ure of the world, and a philosophy about the creation of others, whereas meditat ion and the pure perception which must accompany it may lead to insight into the very nature of things, the world not yet created, conceptualized, made philosoph y.

Lucien Stryk

The wind blows hard among the pines Towards the beginning Of an endless past. Listen: youve heard everything.

Shinkichi Takahashi

When you allow thinking to stop, you find you are in the eternal here and now.

Alan Watts

The tick, tick, tick, of time shuts our eternity, and we live in the field of ti me; but what is living in time is an eternal principle.

Joseph Campbell

Like living, dying has its share of sadness and joy. The sadness of letting go o f a person we love is tempered if we remember to hold everyone lightly, knowing they are just on loan. When you use a glass to drink form, see it as already broke n.

Jack Kornfield

As the bee takes the essence of a flower and flies away without destroying its b eauty and perfume, so wonder ye in this life.

The Buddha

He who knows others is wise. He who knows himself is enlightened. Lao-tzu

The opposite of love is not hate, but fear.

B. S. Rajneesh

Each one of us must realize our own power. In many religions, there is the tende ncy to surrender to a higher authority. Thats not the case in Zen. In the beginni ng of training it may seem so but, ultimately, the student needs to be free of t he teacher, free of Buddhism, free of the whole catastrophe.

John Daido Loori Roshi

From the Buddhist point of view, ego means not leaving the mind alone with just the quality of knowing or of being aware. In addition, theres a claiming of owner ship of this conscious quality. Something which is extra to just experiencing. R ather than just leaving well enough alone in any moment of experiencing, just le tting whatever is in that experience be as it naturally is, theres a sense of sep arating from that, looking at it from the outside by jumping out of the window o f this room, and then looking back and forming the notion, That is my room. That k ind of possessive attitude is what is called ego.

Tsoknyi Rinpoche

I believe that a leaf of grass is no less than the journeywork of the stars, and a pismire is equally perfect, and a grain of sand, and the egg of a wren, and a tree-toad is a chef-doeuvre for the highest, and the running blackberry would ad orn the parlors of heaven, and the narrowest hinge in my hand puts to scorn all machinery, and the cow crunching with depressd head surpasses any statue. And a m ouse is miracle enough to stagger sextillions of infidels.

19 Walt Whitman

One does not discover new worlds without first consenting to lose sight of all s hores.

Andre Gide

Any teaching becomes a false teaching when you get attached to it. You have to l earn to move back and forth from one perspective to another without any hindranc e.Even enlightenment has no value if you insist on remaining there.

Dennis Genpo Merzel

Have a mind that is open to everything and attached to nothing.

Mileropa

You do not have any problems, you only think you do.

from A Course in Miracles

Any life, no matter how long and complex it may be, is made up of a single momen t the moment in which a man finds out once and for all who he is.

Jorge Luis Borges

You must learn to be still in the midst of activity and to be vibrantly alive in repose.

Indra Gandhi

Many eyes go through the meadow, but few see the flowers in it. Ralph Waldo Emerson

Meditation might be considered theater. Think of it as a ticket to step outside yourself in order to get some distance on your own little dramas to become not o nly an actor on the world stage but a member of the audience as well.

Wes Nisker

When the soul lies down in that grass, the world is too full to talk about. Ideas, language, even the phrase each other doesnt make any sense.

Rumi

To be all one with what you are doing is to be totally alone. All Oneness equals Aloneness.

Bernard

The problem is that we tend to seek an easy and painless answer. But this kind o f solution does not apply to the spiritual path. We have committed ourselves to the pain of exposing ourselves, of taking off our clothes, our skin, nerves, hea rt, brains, until we are exposed to the universe.

Chogyam Trungpa

The kingdom of God cometh not with observation, neither shall they say, lo here or there, for lo, the kingdom of God is within you.

Luke 17:20

If all objective events are psychic processes, then what we call objective events are mental events, or forms of mind. This is the unique realization that makes g reater human endeavors possible.

Da Avabhasa

The Sage does not talk. The Talented Ones talk, and the stupid ones argue.

20 Kung Tingan

The universe is an infinite tapestry of perfectly ordered love relationships, an d when you are loving enough, you rise. Its not even a matter of waiting until yo ur lifetime is over. Your movement as a being is not horizontal through time, so to speak. All states of consciousness are available right now. Every possibilit y in the past and future exists timelessly, its always there, and you activate yo

ur level of reality by your own vibrations. Thaddeus Golas

It is when I am with people that I am lonely, and when I am alone I am no longer lonely.

Thomas Merton

Is it not written in your law, I said you are all gods?

John 10:30

What more can a person gain in life than that his God-Nature reveals itself to h im? Goethe

Ecstatic love is an ocean, and the Milky Way is a flake of foam floating on it. Rumi The first factor of enlightenment is mindfulness. Mindfulness is the qualit y of noticing, of being aware of whats happening in the moment, not allowing the mind to be forgetful. The Buddha said he knew of no other factor which was as po werful as mindfulness for the cultivation of wholesome states of mind and the di minishing of unwholesome ones. There is nothing special we have to do to elimina te unskillful states or to make skillful ones happen, except to be aware of the moment.

Joseph Goldstein

True love and prayer are learned in the hour when love becomes impossible, and t he heart has turned to stone.

Thomas Merton

Why do you fret at one man dying and care little for the millions dying every da y? Entire universes are imploding and exploding every moment am I to cry over th em? One thing is quite clear to me: all that is, lives, and moves, has its being in consciousness, and I am in and beyond that consciousness. I am in it as the Witness. I am beyond it as Being.

Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

It is what you are! That is your religion. It is not your religion which makes y ou what you are.

Confucius

All beings are primarily Buddhas. Like water and ice, There is no ice apart form water; There are no Buddhas apart form beings. Not knowing how close the Truth is to them, Beings seek for it afar what a pity! . The reason why beings transmigrate through the six worlds, Is because they are l ost in the darkness of ignorance. But if you turn your eyes within yourselves, And testify to the truth of Self-nature The Self-nature that is no-nature,

21 You will have gone beyond the ken of sophistry. The gate of the oneness of cause and effect is opened; The path of non-duality and non-trinity runs straight ahead. Your form being the form of no-form, Your going and returning takes place nowhere but where you are; Your thoughts be ing the thoughts of no-thought, At this moment what is there that you lack! Nirvana presents itself before you, Where you stand is the Land of Purity.

Your person, the body of Buddha.

Hakuin

At the moment of inner enlightenment there is a going beyond appearance and empt iness. The changes that appear to occur in the empty world we call real only because of our ignorance. Do not search for the truth; only cease to cherish opinions.

Third Zen Patriarch

Verbal definitions of Godare far more dangerous idols than stone statures.

Alan Watts

We are not human beings having a spiritual experience, We are spiritual beings having a human experience.

DeePak Chopra

do what you have to. Nobodys here by accident.

Dogen

You cannot stay on the summit forever, you have to come down again So why bother in the first place? Just this: What is above knows what is below, but what is below does not know wh at is above. One climbs, one sees. One descends, one sees no longer but one has seen. There i s an art to conducting oneself in the lower regions by the memory of what one sa

w higher up. When one can no longer see, one can at least still know. Rene Daumal

The universe is made up of experiences that are designed to burn out your reacti vity, which is your attachment, your clinging to pain, to pleasure, to fear, to all of it. And as long as there is a place where youre vulnerable, the universe w ill find a way to confront you with it.

Ram Dass

Death reveals a fact about your life. And whatsoever you have been thinking is v ery concrete and real is very flimsy. It is dream-stuff. It can be taken from yo u any moment. So dont be too much concerned with it. Remain a little aloof. This is not your home. At the most it is an overnight stay, a motel. You stay for the night and in the morning you are gone. Once death is accepted joyously, nothing can frustrate you.

Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh

It is not a question of searching and seeking. It is a question of remaining sil ent and allowing.

Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh

If you cant change you circumstances, change you attitude.

Zen saying

22

We must be diligent today. To wait until tomorrow is too late. Death comes unexp ectedly, How can we bargain with it?

The Buddha

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

The Zenrin

The fish swims in the water but is unmindful of the water; The bird flies in the wind but know not of the wind.

The Zenrin

Zenis simply this: An unquenchable thirst for truth and the sure belief that only somewhere in the inner space of self can truth be found. Zen is a do-it-yourself kit of complete understanding of who you are, who you we re, why you are, and what youll be.

Ken Noyle

Every thing is a think an abstraction from the indivisible flow of life.

R. A. Durr

Thinking is thing-ing. Its the breaking up of seamless reality into discrete part s.

Ken Wilbur

A man bound hand and foot in the endless chain of cause and effect cannot free a nother.

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 i magine 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 creat ion 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 mo ment distant, vast, known to me only!

Ryokan

23

The natural order of things includes us, and its laws are our laws. We are an en dless 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 suc h 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 he alth/illness dichotomy at all times. Thus, a movement toward health does not ent ail 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 youre 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 e mptiness, 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 n ature is vast and expansive like space itself. It is apprehended as serene, marvelo us, all-pure, brilliant and all-inclusive. Above all does it partake of the natur e 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 an d succeeding one another in time is only a conventional map of the universe it i

s not real. The map is not the territory.

Ken Wilbur

I dont have to have faith I have experience.

Joseph Campbell

24 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 beginnin g is the Unborn.In the same way, there is no ending to this present moment, and t hat 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 ma ny 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 ones 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 b e without God. Its simply impossible.

Thomas Merton

The mystery does not get clearer by repeating the question. Nor is it bought with going to amazing places. Until youve kept your eyes and your wanting still for fifty years You dont begin t o cross over from confusion.

Rumi

To see God in each other was the constant teaching of Swami Muktananda. He was onc e asked, Do you see God in the tree? He replied, No, but I see the tree as God. He t aught that everything in the universe including ourselves is composed of the sam e divine Shakti or energy.

Gulshan Khakee

We suffer from an illness of the illusion of separateness. We believe that the w orld 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 sick ness and Zen is the cure.

Timothy Freke

25 You really have no right to defend yourself against death, either your own or so meone elses. Every moment of your living should take the inevitability of death t otally into account.

Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

You do your spiritual practices because you do them and what happens, happens; a nd 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 c ant stop anyway. Once you start to awaken you cant fall off the path where are you going to fall to? You cant pretend it never happened. You cant fall back asleep.

Ram Dass

A single event can awaken within us a stranger totally unknown to us. To be aliv e is to be slowly born.

Antoine De Saint-Exupery

So long as you consciously or unconsciously think in terms of a distinction betw een 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 throu ghout 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 surrou nded by the snow. Sometimes I simply stand beside a flowing stream. Sometimes I chase a drifting c loud past another peak.

Han-shan

You may follow one stream. Know that it leads to the Ocean, but do not mistake t he stream for the Ocean.

Jan-fishan

I came to realize clearly that Mind is no other than mountains and rivers and th e 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 Rabi ndranat Tagore

Modern man is drinking and drugging himself out of awareness, or he spends his t ime shopping, which is the same thing. As awareness calls for types of heroic de dication 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 s ense 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..

26 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 St. John of the Cross

The problem with people isnt that theyre ignorant, its that they know so much that aint so.

Mark Twain

Great trees have great uses; small trees have small uses. Good and bad can all b e used in their own way.

None are to be discarded. Keep both good and bad friends. You mustnt reject anyth ing. This is true Buddhism.

Kyono Ho

Nothing comes into existence nor does anything disappear. Nothing is eternal, no r has anything any end. Nothing is identical or differentiated. Nothing moves hither and thither.

Nagarjuna

We all have the same disease; Its called wanting and not wanting, and its curable.

Steven Smith

If you are having a difficulty what you must do is face it. Go into your hut. Sh ut the doors and windows. Wrap yourself in all the robes you won. Sit there and dont 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 poets dreams and philosophical ideas is t his: 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 sorr ow, of life and death. So existence is duality, a tension of opposite poles, a m usic of contrary notes. To know it, to recognize it, to experience it as such, i s to go beyond it. This transcendence is the real sadhana [spiritual work] the r eal achievement. The key to this transcendence is the witness state. Bid goodbye to the doer, live in the witness state. Watch the dramas, dont drown in it, rath er be drowned in observing then happiness and sorrow, birth and death, remain ju st a play, they do not affect you, they cannot affect you. All error, all ignora nce, comes from identification.

Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh

27 Though one may conquer a thousand times a thousand men in battle, he who conquer s himself is the greatest warrior.

The Buddha

All senses are a touching of frequencies, ons and offs. Our thinking is always cla ssifying is it or isnt it.

There is the fear the offs will win over the ons. Black will overthrow white, Deat h will triumph over life But there is a secrete conspiracy between opposites, fo r in all explicit opposites there is an implicit unity.

Alan Watts

If youre so poor you cant afford tea it can be celebrated adequately with hot wat er.

Zen saying

If you stop searching outside yourself, happiness will find you. Seek not God, b ut 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 nothin g.

Achaan Jummen

No elementary phenomenon is a phenomenon until it is an observed phenomenon Whee ler

In life there are no survivors.

Don Juan

The miracle is that the universe created a part of itself to study the rest of i t; 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 o riginates in himself and how he continually feeds it and keeps it going. Carl Jung

From the first not a thing is.

Hui-neng

Dont dwell upon colors to bring forth the mind; dont dwell upon phenomena of sound , smell, taste or touch to bring forth the mind; dwell nowhere and bring forth t he mind.

The Diamond Sutra

So when you try hard to make your own way, you will help others.Before you make y our 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 no t earn you as much merit as one moment of complete mindfulness.

The Buddha

28 As you open your awareness, life will improve of itself, you wont even have to tr y. Its a beautiful paradox: the more you open your consciousness, the fewer unple asant events intrude themselves into your awareness.

Thaddeus Golas

When everyone recognizes beauty as beautiful, there is already ugliness; When ev eryone 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 wat ers 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 its just that I see mountai ns once again as mountains, and waters once again as waters.

Ching-yuan

The re. tom art to

big bang was about as unified an event as one could imagine, and we were the Every electron in the synapses of every human (and inhuman) thought, every a of our blood and bones, every here was thereThe unity of Nature perceived in and in our sensations of beauty in Nature is a physical unity traceable back 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 o f 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: Theres no being nor non-being, nor denial itself.

Saisho

The true basis of the universe is stillness, its real condition, for out of it c omes all activity. The ocean, when the wind ceases, is calm again, as are the tr ees and grasses. These things return to stillness, their natural way. And this i s the principle of meditation. There is night, there is day, when the sun sets t here is a hush, and then the dead of night, when all is still. This is the medit ation of nature.

Soto master Rosen Takashina

Brahman, the Self in the Hindu worldview, plays hide-and-seek with itself foreve r and ever... Each one of us is the godhead, getting lost on purpose for the fun of it.

Alan Watts

29 The crucial issue wherein Buddhism differs from Hinduism is that it doesnt say wh

o 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 b e 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 pre sence of the mutual absence of both. Neither experiencer or that experienced, on ly 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 co uld 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 ech o, a rainbow, moonlight upon water, cloud-bands, dimmers before the eyes, fog an d apparitions, These are the twelve similes of the phenomenal.

Naropa

30 The roaring waterfall is the Buddhas golden mouth. The mountains in the distance are his pure luminous body. How many thousands of poems have flowed through me t onight! And tomorrow I wont be able to repeat even one word.

Su Tung-po

There is no here, no there. Infinity is before our eyes.

Seng-tsan

Come to your sense. How did the meaning of senses get switched around to thinking ra tionally, and arrive at judgment and opinion, meaning to accept the values of th ose around you? For sensing is preverbal. As an infant. Innocent.

Barry Stevens

Awareness is without any intention. No good. No bad. (Dont 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 as pects of the same state. As long as the mind is there, your body and the world ar e there. Your world is mind-made, subjective, enclosed within the mind, fragment ary, temporary, personal, hanging on the thread of memory. I live in a world of realities, while yours is of imagining. Your world is perso nal, 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 worl d 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 t here is community, insight, love, and real quality; the individual is the totali ty. 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 ther e are no boundaries in the universe. Boundaries are illusions, products not of r eality 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 dont 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 spe ak, what we say, how we walk, what we think. You cant see what to do, you can see only what not to do. The total negation of t hat 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

31 Be content with what you have; rejoice in the way things are. When you realize t here is nothing lacking, the whole world belongs to you.

Lao-tzu

Eastern Religions are founded on what Aldous Huxley called the Perennial Philoso phy, which is based on the realization that you, even if you dont realize it, are the fundamental reality, which is beyond any limitations of time or space. In o ther words: Youre 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 cant 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 th e 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 wort h 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 m eaning. I saw people coming toward me, but all were the same man, all were mysel f! I had never know this worldI was the cosmos. Sokei-an Sasaki

Hatred comes from past lives. It is not grounded like wisdom and compassion and can therefore be uprooted and removed.

The Dalai Lama

To see truth, contemplate all phenomena as a lie.

Thaganapa

Do not cling to good, do not reject evil! Purity and defilement If you depend on neither, You will grasp the empty nature of sin.

Ma-Tsu

The One mind alone is the Buddha and there is no distinction between the Buddha and sentient beings, but sentient beings are attached to forms and so seek exter nally for Buddhahood.You have always been one with the Buddha, so do not pretend you can attain to this oneness by various practices.

Huang Po

32 Warship the Gods, if you must; but let your first duty be to find out who and wh at you are yourself.

Paul Twitchel

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

Alan Watts

There has never been such a thing as Buddha do not understand it as Buddha. Buddha i s a medicine for sentient beings. Without disease, one shouldnt take medicine. Wh en medicine and disease are both dissolved, it is like pure water.

Pai-chang Haui-hai

You are not the same entity or personality that lived in many past lifetimes. Yo u are the Transcendental Self, presently aware of a bodymind that is itself a di rect effect of many past lifetimes. Therefore, memory of past lifetimes will not necessarily characterize your experience in the present lifetime, but your expe rience in the present lifetime will necessarily reflect or express the remaining tendencies of all past lifetimes and causes that directly preceded or caused th e present lifetimes.

Heart-Master Da Free John

You cultivate choice-less awareness now, so that you can bring awareness to your choices later.

Ram Dass

Because youre an animal, certain desires are built into the system and youre not g oing to get rid of them but you see them all as they are, without pull or attachmentIts not what you do thats important, but who does it. Rather you do it or not is irrelevant, because an act done without at tachment does not create more Karma.

Ram Dass

I conceal who I am if that is needed for growth. If you already knew yourself to tally as spirit, there would be no path and no growth. Therefore some things rem ain hidden at certain times. In my role as concealer I lay out the steps of the path.

Deepak Chopra

The basic difference between an ordinary man and a warrior is that a warrior tak es everything as a challenge while an ordinary man takes everything either as a blessing or as a curse.

Don Juan

If you had a different body you would still basically feel the same I-ness but t hat is already the very same way every other person feels right now. Isnt it just as easy to say there is but one single I-ness or Self taking on different views , different memories, different feelings and sensations? Ken Wilbur

Clouds disappear and the sky is a deep blue, but as I gaze upward, that blueness , too, fades into emptiness.

Tonna

Every situation- nay, every moment- is of infinite worth for it is representativ e of whole eternity.

Johann Wolfgang Goethe

33 In my shop I handle all kinds of merchandise. If someone comes looking for rat s hit, Ill sell him rat shit. If someone comes looking for gold, Ill sell him pure g old.

Yang-shan

God has no desire or purpose in His acts of creation, maintenance, destruction, withdrawal and salvation to which beings are subjected. As the beings reap the f ruit of their actions in accordance with His laws, the responsibility is theirs, not Gods.

Ramana Maharshi

The trouble with casual sitting, only when you feel like it, is you see only the feel like it mind. Thats not the mind that causes the trouble and sadness. Its the I dont want to, I want out, and Im bored mind that causes hell and needs to be watched.

Ram Dass

Reality is neither subjective nor objective, neither mind nor matter, neither ti me nor space. These divisions need somebody to whom to happen, a conscious separ ate center. But reality is all and nothing, the totality and the exclusion, the fullness and the emptiness, fully consistent, absolutely paradoxical. You cannot speak about it, you can only lose your self in it.

Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

The entire teaching of Buddhism can be summed up in this way: Nothing is worth h olding on to. Let go of everything and all suffering will cease.

Jack Kornfield

There seem to be two kinds of searcher: those who seek to make their ego somethi ng other than it is, i.e. holy, happy, unselfish (as though you could make a fish unfish), and those who u nderstand that all such attempts are just gesticulations and play-acting, that t here is only one thing that can be done, which is to disidentify themselves with the ego, by realizing its unreality, and by becoming aware of their eternal ide ntity with pure being. Wei Wu Wei

Think of Zen, of the Void, of Good and Evil, and you are bound hand and foot. Th ink only and entirely and completely of what you are doing at the moment and you are free as a bird.

R. H. Blyth

Clearly I know, the mind is mountains, rivers, and the great earth; sun, moon, a nd stars.

Dogen

They arise spontaneously, the principles of all things. Water need not think to offer itself as a home for clear moonlight.

Sogi

The sense of there being a self comes from the mental factor of wrong view. Its the view of mind, which identifies with either the object or the knowing of the obj ect. My anger, my thought,

I am seeing, or I am hearing.. But there is only anger, seeing, or hearing, and the thought thinks itself. Mindfulness prevents wrong view.

Joseph Goldstein

34 Life is basically a gesture, but no one, no thing is making it. There is no nece ssity for it to happen, and none for it to go on happening. For it isnt being dri ven by anything; it just happens freely of itself. Its a gesture of motion, of so und, of color, and just as no one is making it, it isnt happening to anyone It is completely purposeless play.

Alan Watts

Not what the eye sees, but that which makes the eye see, that is the spirit.

The Upanishads

Weak desires can be removed by introspection and meditation, but strong, deep ro oted ones must be fulfilled and their fruits, sweet or bitter, tasted.

Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

The universe is an absolute mind, which is seeking to fulfill itself and know it self.

Hegel

In this 20th century, to stop rushing around, to sit quietly on the grass, to sw itch off the world and come back to earth, to allow the eyes to see a willow, a bush, a cloud, a leaf, is an unforgettable experience millions of people, unseeing, joyless, bluster through life in their half sleep,

hitting, kicking, killing what they have barely perceived.

Frederick Franck

Are you a Buddhist? Sometimes

Al Huang

In the presence of eternity, the mountains are as transient as the clouds. Robert Green Ingersall

If you do not get it from yourself, Where will you go for it?

The Zenrin

There is no real coming and going. For what is going but coming?

Shabistari

Concepts are concepts and concepts must t or Nirvana or of that which is beyond cept. Soul is a concept. And when I say birth in order to work out your Karma, be worked out.

go. And even the concept of enlightenmen self is just another concept.God is a con you are a spiritual entity who has taken there is no you in truth whose Karma must

Ram Dass

Ask them what happened before the Big Bang..Nobody has yet found a beginning in t ime

Most reply It was never created nor will it end, without really understanding the incredible meaning of that statement for that which has no beginning and no end in time, is and must be timeless, Eternal. That is, the universe and all things in it are being created Now, in what Boehme called an everlasting beginning.

Ken Wilbur

Wherever there is other, there is fear.

The Upanishads

35 Buddha discovered the secrete behind all this. That all this thing we call life, with all its frantic concerns, is just a big act which you in your unconscious depth are deliberately setting up. Once you get rid of the Christian idea of God - and the universe as being a boss employee relationship, everything in nature becomes perfect because there are no victims. We are it, and we do it to ourselv es. We are God playing the role of beings just little old me.

Alan Watts

The perfect man employs his mind as a mirror. It grasps nothing; it refuses noth ing. It receives but does not keep.

Chuang-tzu

Coming and going, life and death: A thousand hamlets, a million houses. Dont you get it? Moon in the water, blossom in the sky.

Gizans death poem

One of the most difficult things is to observe, or look at anything without the

image of that thing, to look at a cloud without the previous associations with r egard to that cloud, to see a flower without the image, the memories, the associ ations, concerning that flower. Because these associations, these images and mem ories, create distance between the observer and the observed. And in that distan ce, the division between the seer and the thing seen, in that division the whole conflict of man exists.

J. Kristnamurti

No amount of looking in any direction could help you to see what is looking Wei Wu Wei

Thirty spokes are made one by holes in a hub, by vacancies joining them for a wh eels use; The use of clay in molding pitchers comes form the hollow of its absenc e; Doors, windows, in a house, are used for their emptiness: Thus we are helped by what is not, to use what is.

Lao-tzu

If you will conceive of a Buddha, you will be obstructed by that Buddha!!! And w hen you conceive of sentient beings, you will be obstructed by those beings. All such dualistic concepts as ignorant and

Enlightened, pure and impure, are obstructions All things are naught but One Mind sen nt beings ARE the Buddha.

Huang Po

In relationships, the other is always right - Love does not compare.

J. Krishnamurti

If you find a path with no obstacles, it probably doesnt lead anywhere.

Rev. Sunnan Kubose

You are here to enjoy an original relationship with the universe.

Emerson

Basso to a student: When tired I sleep, when hungry I eat. Doesnt everyone do that? he was asked No; when others eat they do not eat with their whole being.

36 They talk, they plan, they think while eating, and they dream and worry while asleep.

Be Aware of the moments happening, What it is, and what it means Catch the beauty of it now, For it only happens, as it happens And no more again

Mary Alice Reid

Zen begins at the point where there is nothing further to seek, nothing to be ga ined. Zen is most emphatically not to be regarded as a system of self-improvemen t, or a way of becoming a Buddha.

Alan Watts

An old Buddhist metaphor likens their doctrine to a raft for crossing a river. W hen you have reached the opposite shore, you do not carry the raft on your back, but leave it behind Alan Watts.

Only when you have no thing in your mind and no mind in things are you vacant an d spiritual, empty and marvelous.

Te-shan

Suffering isnt caused by what happens in our lives, but how we relate to those th ings..

Joseph Goldstein

The torch of doubt and chaos, this is what the sage steers by.

Chuang-Tzu Man, in fleeing death, flees his mutable body and identifies with the seemingly undying idea of himself. Corrupt but flattering, this idea he calls his ego, his self.

Ken Wilbur

The last attachment is the sense of self or I. In the direct sensations or awarene ss of experience there is no self. It never was, it was only a concept we slippe d onto or over the experience. Momentary enlightenment is this letting go of att achments, it happens by itself thru close attention.

Joseph Goldstein

You must have the objective world to live everyday. If there is no mountain, no men, no women, then there is no human world. Yet, if you are caught by the objec tive world, you are not free. You must realize that the objective world is not o utside, it is not an object; it is yourself.

Joshu Sasaki Roshi

I embrace emerging experience. I participate in discovery. I am a butterfly. I a m not a butterfly collector. I want the experience of the butterfly.

William Stafford

Do not believe in thinking.Thinking is nothing but dust in a blind mind because y ou cannot think that which is not known and you need not think that which is alr eady known. The encounter is always with the unknown. The unknown is everywhere, within and without, and thinking is always in the known and of the known so thr ow the known and be in contact with the unknown. And this is what I call meditation.

Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh

37

Now we will all count to twelve and we will all keep still. For once on the face of the earth lets not speak in any language. Lets stop one second, and not move.

Pablo Naruda

Subject to change are all conditioned things. Be a light unto yourself. Work out your liberation with diligence.

Buddhas last words

All the Buddhas and all sentient beings are nothing but the One Mind, besides wh ich nothing exists. This mind, which has always existed is unborn and indestruct ible.

Huang Po

Thought creates things by slicing up reality into small bits that it can easily grasp. Thus, when you are think-ing you are thing-ing. Thought does not report t hings, it distorts reality to create things.

Ken Wilbur

There is no satori without tears.

R. H. Blyth

The great Way is not difficult for those who have no preferences. When love and hate are both absent everything becomes clear and undistinguished. Make the smallest distinction however and heaven and earth are set infinitely ap art. If you wish to see the truth then hold no opinions for or against anything. To set up what you like against what you dislike is the disease of the mind.

Seng-tsan the Third Zen Patriarch

Is there a difference between yes and no? Is there a difference between good and evil? Must I fear what others fear? What nonsense! Having and not having arise together Difficult and easy complement each other

Lao-tzu

Thus, those who say that they would have right without its correlate, wrong; or good government without its correlate, misrule, do not apprehend the great princ

iples of the universe, nor the nature of all creation. One might as well talk of the existence of Heaven without that of Earth, or of t he negative principle without the positive, which is clearly impossible. Yet peo ple keep on discussing it without stop; such people must be either fools or knav es.

Chung-tzu

We suffer to the degree that we hold on to models of how we think it should be.

Ram Dass

In one sense, you cannot see Mind, for it is the Seer, yet in another sense, you are never aware of anything but Mind, for it is everything that is seen.

Ken Wilbur

38 Early in the journey you wonder how long the journey will take and whether you w ill make it in this lifetime. Later you will see that where you are going is HER E and you will arrive NOW so you stop asking.

Ram Dass

If God is conceived as the superauthority who made the world at the distant begi nning of time, he is as much your own fabrication as the notion that you yoursel f are something other than your stream of experience. The idea may have been tho ught up by your remote ancestors, but you bought it.

Alan Watts

Life moves on whether we act as cowards or as heroes. Life has no other disciple to impose, if we would but realize it, than to accept life unquestioningly. Eve rything we shut our eyes to, everything we run away from, everything we deny, de nigrate or despise, serves to defeat us in the end. What seems nasty, painful, o r evil, can become a source of beauty, joy and strength, if faced with an open m ind. Every moment is a golden one for him who has the vision to recognize it as such. Life is now, every moment, no matter if the world be full of death. Death triumphs only in the service of life.

Henry Miller

The moons the same old moon, The flowers exactly as they were, Yet Ive become the thingness Of all the things I see!

Bunan

Ones everyday life, in its entirety, should be thought of as a kind of sitting in Zen.

Zen Master Bankei

Our knowledge of the world is, in one sense, self-knowledge. For knowing is a tr anslation of external events into bodily processes, and especially into states o f the nervous system and the brain.When you look out at the world you are always s eeing the inside of you own head.

Alan Watts

The spiritual path is like parachute jumping out of a plane and then part way do wn discovering you have no parachute and then discovering theres no ground. Just opening, opening.

Ram Dass

If I were to cut off my hand or my leg, the real I would not be decreased one wh

it. The essence of your True-nature is no different from that of a stick or a ta ble or any single object in the universe.

Yasutani-roshi

Belief is against doubt. Faith is absence of doubt.

Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh

When you get the message, you hang up the phone.

Alan Watts

To a mind that is still, the whole universe surrenders.

Lao-tzu

For the ego to seek enlightenment is like a person wanting to be present at thei r own funeral.

Steven Levine

39 There is only one freedom: the freedom from all goals. Dont change the objects of desire - end desire.

Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh

The world continually demands that we direct our attention outside ourselves. Me ditation teaches us to revolt and turn that awareness towards our neglected, dim ly-lit insides.

Sujata

Existence knows only one time that is now, and one space that is here. But mind either lives in the past, which is no more, or in the future, which is not yet.

Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh

Everyones life is a road to himself, to self realization.

Herman Hess

What is changeless and immortal is not individual body mind, but, rather, that M ind which is shared with all existence, that stillness, that incipience which ne ver ceases because it never becomes but simply IS.

Peter Matthiessen

All worldly pursuits have but one unavoidable and inevitable end, which is sorro w. Acquisitions end in dispersion; buildings in destruction; meetings in separat ions; births in death. Milarepa

This day will not come again. Each minute is worth a priceless gem. Takwan

You dont seem to understand You are in prison! If you are to get out of prison, t he first thing you must realize is: You are in prison! If you think you are free , you cant escape.

Georges I. Gurdjieff

The Atman or Divine Self is separate from the body. It is one without a second, pure, self-luminous, without attributes, free, all-pervading. It is the Eternal Witness. Blessed is he who knows this Atman, for, though an embodied being, he s hall be free from the changes and qualities pertaining to the body. He alone is ever united with me.

The Bhagavadam

For man rings like a cracked bell when he thinks and acts with a split mind one part standing aside to interfere with the other, to control, to condemn, or to a dmire.

Alan Watts

Push far enough into the void, hold fast enough to quietness, and of the ten tho usand things, non but can be worked on by you. I have beheld them, wither they go back. Seen all things howsoever they flourish, return to the roots form which they bre w. This return to the roots is called quietness, Quietness is called submission to fate, What has submitted to fate becomes part of the always so, To know the always so is to be illumined, Not to know it means to be blindly led to disaster.

Lao-tzu

Enlightenment is the egos ultimate disappointment.

Trunpa Rinpoche

40 Blessed are the pure in heart for they shall see God.

Jesus

One must pay dearly for immortality. One has to die several times while still al ive. Nietzsche

There is no place to seek the mind; It is like the footprints of the birds in the sky.

The Zenrin

Breathing in, I calm body and mind. Breathing out, I smile. Dwelling in the present moment, I know this is the only moment.

Thich Nhat Hanh

What you do will be insignificant, but it is significant that you do it.

Gandhi

Self knowledge, or self-realization is to realize for yourself and by yourself t hat there is no self to realize that is going to be a shattering blow.

J. Krishnamurti

You cannot teach an ego to be anything but egotistic, even though egos have the subtlest ways of pretending to be reformed. The basic thing is therefore to disp el, by experiment and experience, the illusion of oneself as a separate ego.

Alan Watts

Evolution then proceeds, transformation by transformation, remembering more and more, until each and every soul remembers Buddha, as Buddha, in Buddha, whereupo n there is then no Buddha, and no soul Ken Wilbur

In daily life the apparently other sentient beings who sensorially perceive the same phenomena that we perceive, synchronized in the same apparent time, are themsel ves also phenomena, mutually perceived or mutually not perceived, but there is n othing but the perceiv-ing, as in a dream there is nothing but the dream-ing. If the dreamer awakes the dream-ing ends, and there is no question regarding the be ings or other phenomena in the dream, as to whether they are still pursuing their d ream activities or are awake also.

Wei Wu Wei

There is no self and no other. There is no wrong desire, no anger, no hatred, no l tory, no failure. Only renounce the error of conceptual thought-processes and your natur e will exhibit its pristine purity for this alone is the way to attain enlighten ment.

Huang Po

If the fundamental energy and impulse of the universe were not blissful, the who le system would have ceased long ago, (and this has been going on for a very lon g time.) Alan Watts

41 The cosmic and comic are one. The trick is to be able to see our own persona (pe rson) as the mask that it is, the archetype that we are typecast to portray; the n to view the production we are in as the play, most often a parody; and at its be st, a musical comedy. What we seek is a way to relieve the great seriousness wit h which we take our selves. To be enlightened is to lighten up. Wes Nisker

In the deepest sense, Chan or Zen is not a school of Buddhism, but the inner mea ning of Buddhism, which is the science of enlightenment..

Thomas Cleary

What we are is not separate from what we perceive. Form being only its perceivin g, there remains no room for a perceiver as such, and no thing perceived.

Wei Wu Wei

From the Buddhist point of view, reality itself has no meaning since it is not a sign, pointing to something beyond itself. To arrive at reality at suchness is to go beyond karma, beyond consequential action, and to enter a life which is comp letely aimless. Yet to Zen and Taoism alike this is the very life of the univers e, which is complete at every moment and does not need to justify itself by aimi ng at something beyond.

Alan Watts

One word settles heaven and earth; One sword levels the whole world.

The Zenrin

When you forget all your dualistic ideas, everything becomes your teacher, and e verything can be the object of worship.

Shunryu Suzuki

The Unborn, timeless Mind is working in us. The Buddha mind and our mind are not two. Those who strive after satori, or attempt to discover the self-mind, and e xert themselves with this in view are committing a great mistake.

Bankei

Knowledge comes about in so far as the object known is within the knower.

St. Thomas Aquinas

Every moment is the last moment and every moment is rebirth.

Ippen

Mans task in the world is to remember with his conscious mind what was knowledge before the advent of consciousness.

E. Neumann

Know the truth, and the truth shall set you free.

Jesus

You use the concept of the soul to extricate yourself from the concept of body a nd personality. However, even this must be discarded, for even that duality will cause suffering because; its still in time and subject to impermanence. To exper ience going back into the One or Void requires giving up the concepts which keep you separate. But humans like the separateness because thats where all the drama is, the romance, all the coming and going, where your story line is, the trip, the rush. But its limited as separateness. Ramana Maharshi said, What can bodies d o but rub against each other? Ram Dass 42

Everything is a metaphor, there is only poetry.

Norman O. Brown

The world is within you; you are not within the world.

Zen saying

In the seen, there is just what is seen. In the heard, there is just what is heard. In the sensed, there is just what is sensed. And in the thought, there is just the thought.

Buddha

The roses under my window make no reference to former roses or to better ones; t hey are for what they are; they exist with God today. There is no time for them. There is simply the rose, it is perfect in every moment of its existence. But ma n postpones or remembers; he does not live in the present, but with reverted eye laments the past, or, heedless of the riches that surround him, stands on tipto e to foresee the future. He cannot be happy and strong until he too lives with n ature in the present, above time.

Emerson

As long as you do not know how to die and come to life again, you are but a sorr y traveler on this dark earth.

Goethe

Whatever you do, or eat, or give, or offer in adoration, let it be an offering t o me; and whatsoever you suffer, suffer it for me. Thus you shall be free form t he bonds of Karma which yield fruits that are evil and good; and with your soul

one in renunciation you shall be free and come to me.

The Bhagavad Gita

As long as one feels that he is the doer, he cannot escape from the wheel of bir ths.

The Buddha

Our existence as embodied beings is purely momentary; what are a hundred years i n eternity? But if we shatter the chains of egotism, and melt into the ocean of humanity, we share its dignity. To feel that we are something is to set up a bar rier between God and ourselves; to cease feeling that we are something is to bec ome one with God.

Gandhi

A Zen student must learn to waste time conscientiously.

Suzuki Roshi

The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ, Moves on: nor all your Piety nor Wit Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line. Nor all your Tears wash out a Word of it.

Omar Khayyam

The fly that touches honey cannot use its wings; so the soul that clings to spir itual sweetness ruins its freedom and hinders contemplation.

Aurobindo

43 Death is the epitome of the truth that in each moment we are thrust into the unk nown. Here all clinging to security is compelled to cease, and wherever the past is dropped away and safety abandoned, life is renewed. Death is the unknown in which all of us lived before birth.

Alan Watts

The essence of civilization consists not in the multiplication of wants but in t heir deliberate and voluntary renunciation.

Gandhi

The forceful activating impulse of wrong desire is the greatest enemy to the hap piness of man. Roam in the world as a lion of self control; dont let the frogs of sense weakness kick you around.

Sri Yukteswar

I realized in this place that people feared silence more than anything else, tha t our tendency to talk arises form self-defense and is always based upon a reluc tance to see something, a reluctance to confess something to oneself.

Ouspensky

To reconnect consciousness with the unconscious, to make consciousness symbolica l is to reconnect words with silence; to let the silence in. If consciousness is all worlds and no silence, the unconscious remains unconscious.

Norman O. Brown

Illusions are like mistresses. We can have many of them without tying ourselves down to responsibility.

But truth insists on marriage. Once a person embraces truth, he is in its ruthle ss, but gentle, grasp.

Rabazar Tarzs

Its the truth that liberates you, not our efforts to be free.

J Krishnamurti

A conscious being is capable of making as many discriminations among components of the Universe as anyone else (perhaps even more). However, he is not caught in them. Just because you are seeing divine light, experiencing waves of bliss, or conversing with Gods and Goddesses is no reason to not know your zip code. Keep ing it together means keeping conscious at all levels all planes of reality with no attachment to any of them.

Ram Dass

To be separate as ego is the base of all misery. To be one, to be flowing, with whatsoever life brings to you, to be in it so intensely, so totally, that you ar e no more, you are lost, and then everything is blissful. The choice is there, b ut you have even become unaware of the choice.

Bhabwan Shree Rajneesh

Theres nothing in this world I dislike.

Rinzai

True Dharma is the Dharma of as-it-isness, where not even a thought of conscious ness is working. It is it , or the Truth that transcends space and time.

Shibayama

If you have an external God (Object), you have to have an external redeemer (Chr ist). But if God is within, then redemption is mere realization of the true nature and meaning of existence. Ideas of a God as object 44 perpetuate the self-I-ego as a separate thing. And so Western religions desire t he external God. Thats why the non-dualism of experiencing God within is simply a matter of seeing thru the falseness of Ego.

Alan Watts

Because we are in time we think the future has not happened yet. Move out of the rational level of sequential thought into planes where you are one with Conscio usness and you find a universe which is lawful and deterministic it s just runni ng off. The past, present, and future, all are already, so you just listen to ho w it all came out. You surrender the illusion that you are the choice maker.

Ram Dass

At a given moment I open by eyes and exist. And before that, during all eternity , what was there? Nothing.

Ugo Betti

There is nothing but water in the holy pools. I know, I have been swimming in them. All the Gods sculpted of wood or ivory cant say a word. I know, I have been crying out to them. The Sacred Books of the East are nothing but words. I looked through their covers one day sideways. What Kabir talks of is only what he has lived through. If you have not lived through something, it is not true.

Kabir

One minute of sitting, one inch of Buddha.

Like lightning all thoughts come and pass. Just once look into your mind-depths: Nothing else has ever been.

Manzan

It is no more surprising to be born twice than it is to be born once. Voltaire Take it for a blessing, or take it for a test; whatever happens, happens for the best.

Maher Baba

He who offers to me with devotion only a leaf, or a flower, or a fruit, or even a little water, this I accept from that yearning soul, because with a pure heart it was offered with love.

The Bhagavad Gita

The highest good is like water, For the good of water is that it nourishes everything without striving. It occupies the place which all men think bad (i.e. the lowest level) It is thus that Tao in the world is like a river going down the valley to the ocean. The most gentle thing in the world overrides the most hard. How do coves and oceans become kings of a hundred rivers? Because they are good at keeping low

Lao-tzu

In Nature there are neither rewards nor punishments; there are consequences.

Robert Green Ingersall

I have always depended upon the kindness of strangers

Tennessee Williams

45 The reason suffering is grace to the person who can bring awareness to it is bec ause the only thing you suffer about is where your stash of clinging and attachm ents are. Its your model that things should be different than it is that makes pa in or horror into suffering. To the soul, your whole melodrama is a dance to be enjoyed that you created for your own learning. (Its just your own Karma lawfully running off.).

Ran Dass

Truth awaits the mind unclouded by longing.

The Third Zen Patriarch

On the day when death will knock at thy door what wilt thou offer him? I will set before my guest the full vessel of my life. I will never let him go with empty hands.

Rabindranath Tagore

Keeping conscious awareness while changing our daily roles is being the one while playing the many. You go from your separateness to being the oneness, then return to play the part o f individual separateness. You are now in the world, but not of the world. But y ou honor all of it.

Ram Dass

Recall the face of the poorest and most helpless man whom you have seen and ask yourself if the step you contemplate is going to be of any use to him. Will he b e able to gain anything by it? Will it restore him to control over his own life and destiny?

Gandhi, on his tomb

Witness the desire and the wanting, and the wanting becomes the object instead o f the thing wanted.

Steven Levine

There are ways, but the way is uncharted.

Lao-tzu

Bye and bye comes the Great Awakening, and We find that this life is really a great dream Then we are embraced in obliterating Unity, There is perfect adaptation to whatever may Happen - and so we complete our allotted span

Chuang-tzu

I am without form, without limit, beyond space, beyond time. I am in everything, everything is in me. I am the bliss of the universe, everywhere am I,

I am Sat, Chit, Ananda. [Absolute Being Absolute Knowledge Absolute Bliss]

The Bhagavad Gita

It is a good day to die, for all the things of my life are present.

Crazy Horse

What is it you want? To fulfill all desires? To become God? If you were God, and could have anything and everything, very quickly you would become bored, and yo u would want to push the button marked surprise, - and here you are!

Alan Watts

46 Friend, hope for the Guest while you are alive. Jump into experience while you a re alive! Think, and think, while you are alive. What you call salvation belongs t o the time before death. If you dont break your ropes while youre alive do you think ghosts will do it afte r? The idea that the soul will join with the ecstatic just because the body is rott en that is all fantasy. What is found now is found then. If you find nothing now , you will simply end up with an apartment in the City of Death. If you make love with the divine now, in the next life you will have the face of satisfied desire. So plunge into the truth, find out who the Teacher is, believe in the Great Soun d! Kabir says this: When the truth is being searched for, it is the intensity of th e longing for that truth that does all the work. Look at me and you will see a s lave of that intensity Kabir

Only that day dawns to which we are awake. There is more day to dawn. There is b ut the morning star.

Thoreau

We are what we think. All that we are arises with our thoughts. With our thought s we make the world.

Buddha

This consciousness exists as each being, and nothing else exists. Everything is condensed consciousness; everything is alive and conscious. Zen Master Rinzai

What is taken in by contemplation must be given out in love.

Meister Eckhart

To me every hour of the light and dark is a miracle. Every cubic inch of space i s a miracle.

Walt Whitman

The game is not to know God; the nd yet there is nothing that you merged with God, you are in the You fill the forms though there od. Ram Dass

game is to be God. To be God is to be nobody; a are not. If you come back into form from having world but not of it. You play the cosmic sport. is no one home, it is just lila, the dance of G

Dont drive by the waters edge. Throw yourself in. Become the water. Only then will your thirst end.

Jeanette Berson

If you could get rid of yourself just once, the secret of secrets would open to you.

Rumi

Death is our eternal companion, Don Juan said with a most serious air, It is always to our left, at an arms length. It has always been watching you. It always will u ntil the day it taps you.

Carlos Castaneda

The total energy of the universe expresses itself as each of us. It eyes itself through myriad Is..

Alan Watts

When Light seeks out Darkness, the only finding is the understanding that what h as been found was the absence of that which was seeking. All that a Seeker can find is his own absence; for this which is seeking is all there could have been to be found. Asking Who am I? therefore is the Light Searching for the Darkness of a me, and find ing that there is no who? but only the absence of the presence of this-which-is-asking.

47 Why does Light seek out Darkness? Because there is not else in the Cosmos which it has not found.

Wei Wu Wei

Openness to bliss and understanding is also an openness to terror, to total inco mprehension.

Aldous Huxley

Looking at the stars always makes me dream, as simply as I dream over the black

dots representing towns and villages on a map. Why, I ask myself, shouldnt the sh ining dots of the sky be as accessible as the black dots on the map of France? Vincent Van Gogh

Freezing in an ice field, stretched thousands of miles in all directions, I was alone, transparent and could not move. Hakuin

Death? Its absolutely safe; its like taking off a tight shoe.

Manuel

You could not find out the boundaries of the psyche, even by traveling along eve ry path; so deep is its measure and meaning.

Heraclitus

A myth is a mask of god, a metaphor for what lies behind the visible world. The w ay in most Oriental thinking, and I think what we call primitive thinking, is th at God is the manifestation of the energy not the source; that God is the vehicl e through which the energy shines.

Joseph Campbell

I slept and dreamt that life was joy, I awoke and saw that life was service, I acted and behold, service was joy.

Rabindranat Tagore

Buddhism is not a system of ideas, beliefs, religious doctrine or thoughts. Its n ot even a philosophy of life. Its a method for changing you state of consciousness, the sensation you have of y

our own existence, so as to enable you to experience the truths about yourself a nd the world for yourself directly.

Alan Watts

There may be no such thing as the glittering central mechanism of the universe to be seen behind a glass wall at the end of the trail. Not machinery, but magic, m ay be the better description of the treasure that is waiting.

John Wheeler

If memories define our ego/personality, but its possible to substitute one set of memories for another, as in the case of amnesia, then it seems that all we are , are points of view. So the important question is, Who is doing the looking? Who is the I now?

Tim Allen

Love is based not on how you act or feel but on your level of awareness.

Deepak Chopra

48 Remember: you come here having already understood the necessity of struggling wi th yourself only with yourself. Therefore thank everyone who gives you the oppor tunity to do that.

Gurdjieff

Western psychotherapy rearranges the furniture. Eastern techniques help you get out of the room.

Ram Dass

Therapy works with the minds content, while meditation works with the context.

Tara Goleman

The man of Tao remains unknown. Perfect virtue produces nothing, No-Self is True Se lf, and the greatest man is Nobody.

Chuang-tzu

That which comes out of awareness is right. That which comes out of unawareness is wrong. Actions are not right or wrong; it is the source from where they come.

Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh

Those who know meditation, they know something of death thats the only way to kno w before dying.

Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh

The man of awareness is unpredictable because he acts, but never reacts. Wei Wu Wei

Our practice should be based on the ideas of selflessness. Selflessness is very difficult to understand. If you try to be selfless, that is already a selfish id ea. Selflessness will be there when you do not try anything.

Shunryu Suzuki

Many features of the universe that are remarkable to ponder are inevitable prere quisites of the existence of observers or ponderers.

Borrow & Silk

When you do something, burn yourself completely, leave no trace. Do it with all your body and mind concentrated on what you do.

Ram Dass

Be a stranger to yourself. See life as a river flowing through time. Stand on th e bank, neither curious nor concerned. Glance or gaze at the driftwood of your p ast floating in memory just like the incidents one reads about in the paper. Det ached and indifferent remember that nothing matters. Only exist --

Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh

One must never despair if something is lost- a person or a joy or a happiness; e verything comes back more gloriously. What falls away, falls away; what belongs to us remains with us, for everything proceeds according to laws greater than ou r insight. One must live in oneself and think of the whole of life, of all its m illions of possibilities, expanses and futures, in the face of which there is no thing past or lost.

Rainer Maria Rilke

A world of which you are the only source and ground is fully within you power to change. What is created can always be dissolved and re-created. All will happen as you want it, provided you really want it.

Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

49 We are dancing in the hollow of nothingness. We are one flesh, but separated lik e stars.

Henry Miller

When given a choice to make, listen to the universe. Listen to your inner most b eing. Listen for what the Quakers call the still silent voice within. Quiet enou gh and you will be outside space and time, where you can see exquisitely clearly what the next move is that you made.

Ram Dass

Die into every moment Life is preparation for death.

Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh

Theres no way to tell the difference between what you do and what happens to you Theres no way to tell the difference between the world and how you act upon it.

Alan Watts

My commitment is to truth, not consistency. Truth is relative, it changes everyd ay.

Gandhi

Keep up! There is no liberation without labor and there is no freedom which is fr ee.

Yogi Bhajan

To end suffering you must end the self they rise and fall together.

Buddha

It is the denial of death that is partially responsible for people living empty, purposeless lives, for when you live as if youll live forever, it becomes too ea sy to postpone the things you know that you must do. You live your life in prepa ration for tomorrow or in remembrance of yesterday, and meanwhile, each today is lost.

Elisabeth Kubler-Ross

The Bodhisattva Vows: The many beings are numberless; I vow to save them. Greed, hatred and ignorance arise endlessly; I vow to abandon them. Dharma gates are countless, I vow to make to them, Buddhas way is unsurpassed, I vow to embody it fully.

Robert Aitken

Life is mind. Life makes mind. Life suffers mind. And life can be transcended by mind. While you live in conditioned form, you make mind, thru associations, rep etitions, reinforcements. When you die and the body drops off, mind makes you.

Sri Da Avabhasa

As unnecessary as a well is to a village on the banks of a river, so unnecessary are all scriptures to someone who has seen the truth.

The Ghagavad Gita

The robbed that smiles steals something from the thief.

William Shakespeare

50 Love is essentially self-communicative. Those who do not have it catch it from t hose who do.

Maher Baba

If you have much, give of your wealth; if you have little, give of your heart.

Arab Proverb

If the universe is seen to be the realm of the spirit, then there is nothing out side the realm of the spirit. If it is seen to be truth, then there is nothing o ther than truth.

Ma-tsu

Is the abode of God anywhere but in the earth, the sea, and sky, and air, and vi rtue? Why do we seek the heavenly ones beyond? Whatever you see, and whatever yo u touch, that is God.

Lucan

There was a door to which I found no key, There was a veil past which I could not see.

The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam

If there is any problem at all, it is to see that in this instant, you have no I t o surrender. You are completely free to do this at any moment, and nothing whats oever is stopping you.

Alan Watts

Zen meditation is a trickily simple affair, for it consists only in watching eve rything that is happening, including your own thoughts, and your breathing, with out comment.

Alan Watts

As a man thinkest, so shall he be.

St. Mark

Our life is shaped by our mind; we become what we think.

The Buddha

Time is not a line, but a series of now points.

Taisen Deshimaru

That best portion of a good mans life, his little, nameless, unremembered acts of kindness and of love.

William Wordsworth

Reincarnation, rs is the same lf improvement t can actually

like heaven, is ego grasping. A rebirth after a 100 or a 1000 yea as reincarnation from yesterday, or a minute ago. All ideas of se or accomplishment are an ego attempt to put off to the future wha only be accomplished here-now. Do it NOW. Pay attention. SEE

J. Krishnamurti

The realization of Emptiness is no more or less than seeing into the non-existen ce of a thingish ego-substance.

D. T. Suzuki

Everyone you meet, or know, is another face of God, another doorway thru, given by God to bring you to your attachments and clingings.

Ram Dass

51 At first, lack of faith causes you to surround yourself with things that get you high people, holy books, etc. Then you realize its inside and you cant lose it.

Ram Dass

You can consider all religions equal, but still dislike some more than others. A ll spirituality is seeking the same God, but some methods are longer, more painf ul, and more destructive than others.

Robert Heinlein

In order to know what God knows, you have to give up knowing you know.

Anise Flowers, at 11

Without going out my door, I can know all things on earth.

Without looking out of my window, I can know the ways of heaven. For the further one travels, the less one knows. The sage therefore arrives without traveling, Sees all without looking, Does all without doing.

Lao-tzu

The best books are those which startle you by contradicting your opinions and be liefs. You learn more form your enemies than from your friends.

St. John Ervine

The one remains, the many change and pass away.

Shelly

Eternal truth needs a human language.

C. G. Jung

There is One only, without a second. Realize that thou art that.

The Upanishad

Will power is not really power but weakness. A really powerful man has no will o f his own the whole is his will. He floats like a white cloud, one with the exis tence, in tune with it.

Bhabwan Shree Rajneesh

Ye are gods; and all of you are children on the most High.

Psalm LXXXII, 6

Ye are the temple of the living God.

II Corth. VI, 16

The great Tao flows everywhere, to the left and to the right. All things depend upon it to exist, and it does not abandon them. To its accomplishments it lays no claim, It loves and nourishes all things, but does not lord it over them The Tao, without doing anything leaves nothing undone.

Lao-tzu

In any way that men love me in that same way they find my love: for many are the paths of men, but they all in the end come to me.

The Bhagavad Gita

We are most free when we are free from ourselves.

N. Sri Ram

There is no Religion higher than truth.

Motto, the Theosophical Society

52 Most people think that we live in the actual world while we are alive, and that after we take the last breath we somehow wander into a vague realm of the spirit . It is a great mistake to see two separate realms. Instead, where we live is in fact the spiritual realm, a realm of many billion w orlds, which goes beyond three, four, or even infinite dimensions. Then the dang er is that we might think that this is a realm that is empty and boundless. Watc h out! Its all manifested right here at this moment. It is alive and kicking!

Soen Nakagawa Roshi

The present Moment, because it has no past, is newly born; and, because it has n o future, it is simultaneously dead. Birth and death, therefore, are simply two ways of talking about the same timeless Moment, and they are illusorily separate d only by those who cannot escape from the standpoint of temporal succession so as to see all things in their simultaneity. Birth and death are one in this time less Moment.

Ken Wilbur

Whatsoever you are, accept it so totally that nothing is left out of it to be ac hieved.

Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh

The mind begotten by and given to each of us by our parents is none other than B uddha-mind, birthless and immaculate, sufficient to manage all that life throws up to us.

Bankei

Hope and fear are both phantoms that arise from thinking of the self. When we do nt see the self as self, what do we have to fear?

Lao-tzu

Our life, to what shall I compare it? An echo echoing through the mountains and into empty sky.

Ryokan

When did the honeysuckle first sense its own perfume? When did smoke learn how to fly?

Pable Neruda

Differences, borders, lines, surfaces, and boundaries do not really divide thing s from each other at all; they join them together. All boundaries are held in co mmon. When you understand this, you see that the sense of being me is exactly the same sensation as being one with the whole cosmos. The secret in life is that wh at is other eventually turns out to be you. Alan Watts

For who realizes the Lord God, the Atman, the one existence, the Self of the uni verse, neither praises nor dispraises any man. Like the sun shining impartially upon all things, he looks with an equal eye upon all beings. He moves about in t he world a free soul, released form all attachment.

Srimad Bhagavatam

The way of Zen is not the way of saints or of sinners. Zen is the practice of ma nifesting yourself as emptiness. When you manifest nothingness, only in that mom ent do you experience the source of God. When you experience God, Buddha or the source of everything, you dont know what y ou are doing. When you are completely one with your lover, you dont know whether you are doing something good or bad.

Joshu Sasaki Roshi

53 The only thing that we can know is that we know nothing and that is the highest flight of reason.

Leo Tolstoy

The religious journey begins, but never ends.

Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh

You can practice mindfulness, because there is forgetfulness; but you cannot pra ctice awareness, because there is only awareness. In mindfulness, you pay attent ion to the present moment. You try to be here now. But pure awareness is the present state of awareness before you try to do anythi ng about it. Trying to be here now requires a future moment in which you will then be mindful; but pure awareness is this moment before you try anything. You are always already aware; you are always already enlightened.

Ken Wilbur

One goes through all sorts of austerities to become what one already is. All eff ort is simply to get rid of the mistaken impression that one is limited and boun d by the woes of this life.

Ramana Maharshi

Truly there is no cause for you to be miserable and unhappy. You yourself impose limitations on your true nature of infinite Being, and then weep that you are a finite creature. Hence I say know that you are really the infinite, pure Being, the Self absolute. You are always that Self and nothing but that Self. Therefor e, you can never really be ignorant of the Self, your ignorance is merely a form al ignorance.

Ramana Maharshi

Lightening flashes, sparks shower. In the blink of your eyes, you have missed seeing.

The Zenrin

Through the evening mist a lone goose is flying. Of one tone are wide waters and sky.

The Zenrin

Everything flows, and you cannot step into the same stream twice.

Heraclites

Perfect Enlightenment means spontaneous realization of your Original Nature.

The Fifth Patriarch

Yield to the willow All the loathing, All the desire of your heart.

Basho

Know all things to be like this: As a magician makes illusions

Of horses, oxen, carts, and other things, Nothing is as it appears.

The Buddha

The Way is near, but men seek it afar. It is in easy things, but men seek it in difficult things.

Mencius

54 When we open our mind-eye inwardly towards our true self, every movement and eve ry act of ours is directly the way of Zen.

Zenkei Shibayama

To know the objective world completely is impossible. But when you experience th e objective world as yourself, then your consciousness becomes perfect and you d ont need to know.

Joshu Sasaki Roshi

The body is a vehicle thru which the universal life energy is manifesting as con sciousness. The purpose of life is to transcend separateness and awaken to the m etaphysical truth of Oneness, and of Death as Life.

Joseph Campbell

Realization is not like your conception of it.

Dogen

In this moment, right now, we are always arriving at Mind, we are always arrivin g at WHAT IS NOW, whether that be suffering, seeking, pain, joy, or simple confu sion. The journey does not start NOW; it ends NOW, with whatever state of consci ousness is present at the moment.

Ken Wilbur

Learn how to listen and things speak for themselves.

Basho

When the ordinary person realizes, he is a sage. When a sage understands, he is an ordinary man.

Zen Saying

The great way of the Buddha Law is: In a grain of dust are all the scrolls of th e sutras in the universe; in a grain of dust are all the infinite Buddhas.

Dogen

And a man shell be free, and as pure as the day prior to his conception in his m others womb, when he has nothing, wants nothing and knows nothing.

Mister Eckhart

A billion stars go spinning through the night, blazing high above your head. But in you is the presence that will be, when the stars are dead.

Rainer Maria Rilke

And the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.

T. S. Eliot

If you cultivate the right attitude, your enemies are your best spiritual teache rs because their presence provides you with the opportunity to enhance and devel op tolerance, patience, and understanding.

The Dalai Lama

The soul is not some individual spook inhabiting the body, it is the whole netwo rk of relationships ranging throughout everything that there is. The here and now is like a knot in a system of strings making a fishing net, but the whole vast n etwork is the soul. Everyone has the same soul, but we all experience it from di fferent points of view, in different places, at different times.

Alan Watts.

Act as you will; go on as you feel, without second thought. This is the incompar able Way.

55 Ekai

In the landscape of spring there is no measure of worth or value; The flowering branches are naturally short and long.

The Zenrin

The realization of your bliss, your true being, comes when you have put aside wh at might be called the passing moment with its terror, and with its temptations, and with its statement of requirements about life that you should live this way I always tell my students to follow their bliss where the deep sense of being is from, and where your body and soul want to go.

Joseph Campbell

The real discipline of Zen begins only at the point where the individual has alt ogether stopped trying to improve himself.For the object of Zen is not so much to become a Buddha as to act like one.

Alan Watts

You will know in due coarse that your glory lies where you cease to exist.

J. Kristnamurti

The greatest discovery of my generation is that a human being can alter his life by altering his attitudes of mind. William James

Moonlight and the sound of pines are things we all know. Zen mind and delusion d istinguish sage and fool. Go back to the place where not one thought appears. How shall I put this into wo rds for you?

Han-shan Te-ching

In eternity there is indeed something true and sublime. But all these times and places and occasions are now and here. God himself culminates in the present mom ent, and will never be more divine in the lapse of all the ages.

Henry David Thoreau

Life we learn too late is in the living, in the tissue of every day and hour. Stephen Leacock

The thing we tell of can never be found by seeking, yet only seekers find it.

Bayazid Bistami

The present never ages. Each moment is like a snowflake, unique, unspoiled, unre peatable, and can be appreciated in its surprisingness.

Gail Sheery

Zen practice is thus not a set of operations designed to achieve an external goa l. In Zen, the effort and the result are not two different things, the means and the goal are not to be separated, the finding occurs in the very seeking itself .

Bernard Phillips

It is the energy of thought which keeps thee from thy God. John Henry Newman

The final place you end up coming to is where you complete the cycle. And you co me back into every plane of consciousness and live consciously at every plane si multaneously, because every plane is another 56 truth. You live in a Bodhisattva role, which means living in this world of illus ion at the same time that you are not in the world of illusion. Youre in the worl d but not of it.

Ram Dass

No one gets so much of God as the man who is thoroughly dead.

St. Gregory

A monk asked Yun-men; What are the teachings of a whole lifetime? Yun-men said: An appropriate statement.

Zen mondo

Our revels now are ended: these our actors, As I foretold you, were all spirits, and Are melted into air, into thin air: And, like the baseless fabric of this vision, The cloud-cappd towers, the gorgeous palaces, The solemn temples, the great globe itself, Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve, And, like this insubstantial pageant faded, Leave not a rack behind: We are such stuff As dreams are made on, and our little life Is rounded with a sleep.

Shakespeare

Stop thinking and end your problems.

Lao-tzu

You know things as thoughts, but your thoughts are not your experiences, they ar e the echo and after effect of your experience: as when your room trembles after a carriage goes past. I however am sitting in the carriage, and often am the ca rriage itself.

Friedrich Nietzsche

Awaken the mind without fixing it anywhere.

The Diamond Cutter Sutra

The time of business does not with me differ from the time of prayer, and in the noise and clatter of my kitchen, while several persons are at the same time cal ling for different things, I possess God in as great a tranquility as if I were upon my knees at the blessed sacrament.

Brother Lawrence

In every respect, everything that the Buddha ever suggested that his followers s hould do, was by the nature of an experiment. Buddhism never uttered its final t eaching. What is was actually after, all it describes are various experiments yo u can make to get on the road to it.

Alan Watts

No one who wants to be enlightened will ever be enlightened because what we are enlightened from is that someone wishing to be enlightened.

Steven Levine

Out beyond fields of wrongdoing and rightdoing, there is a field. I will meet yo u there.

Rumi

The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in havi ng new eyes.

57 Marcel Proust

Mans main task in life is to give birth to himself.

Erich Fromm

Monk: Mountains and hills arent they all forms of the body of Buddha? Master: Yes, they are, but its a pity to say so.

Zen Mondo

People wish to be settled; but only as far as they are unsettled is there any ho pe for them.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Abandon this fleeing world, abandon yourself, Then the moon and flowers will guide you along the way.

Ryokan

Silence is the essential condition of happiness.

Heinrich Heine

The blue mountain is the father of the white cloud. The white cloud is the son of the blue mountain. All day long they depend on each other, without being dependent on each other. The white cloud is always the white cloud. The blue mountain is always the blue mountain.

Dogen

You learn to honor everybody you meet as your teacher. You begin to see that eve rything in your universe becomes your teaching showing you where youre holding on to models, where youre conscious and where youre still asleep.

Ram Dass

The world is impermanent. One should constantly remember death.

Sri Ramakrishna

Each one of us must make his own true way, and when we do, that way will express the universal way. This is the mystery. When you understand one thing through and through you under stand everything. When you try to understand everything, you will not understand anything. The best way is to understand yourself, and then you will understand everything.

Shunryu Suzuki

Since everything is but an apparition, perfect in being what it is, having nothi ng to do with good or bad, acceptance or rejection, one may well burst into laug hter.

Long Chen Pa

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

Alan Watts

As one lamp serves to dispel a thousand years of darkness, so one flash of wisdo m destroys ten thousand years of ignorance.

Hui-neng

Just remain in the center, watching. And then forget that you are there.

Lao-tzu

58

Only the paradox comes anywhere near to the comprehending fullness of life.

C. G. Jung

Wherever you are is the entry point!

Kabir

We cannot see things as they really are until we let go of the idea of a separat e self.

John Daido Loori

I have discovered that all of mans unhappiness derives from only one source not b eing able to sit quietly in a room alone.

Pascal

The various forms of Buddhist meditationare experimental techniques for changing consciousness, and the thing that they are mainly concerned with is helping huma

n beings to get rid of the hallucination that each one of us is a skin-encapsula ted ego a little man inside our head located between the ears and behind the eye s who is the source of conscious attention and voluntary behavior.

Alan Watts

I have done my best. That is about all the philosophy of living that one needs.

Lin Yutang

If you continue this simple practice every day, you will obtain some wonderful p ower. Before you attain it, it is something wonderful, but after you attain it, it is nothing special.

Shunryu Suzuki

Illusion is the only reality.

Gustave Flaubert

I do not cut my life up into days but my days into lives, each hour, an entire l ife.

Juan Ramon Jimenez

The mind precedes all things, the mind dominates all things, the mind creates al l things.

The Buddha

When a bell rings it is only the bell listening to the sound of the bell, Or to put it another way, it is the sound of yourself ringing. This is the moment of e

nlightenment.

Yasutani-roshi

You cant get wisdom. You and get knowledge, but you can only be wise.

Ram Dass

The art of being wise is the art of knowing what to overlook.

William James

Anything we fully do is an alone journey.

Natalie Goldberg

When the old plum tree blooms, the entire world blooms.

Dogen

59 All of you should realize that your own mind is Buddha, that is, this mind is Bu ddhas Mind . Those who seek for the Truth should realize that there is nothing to seek. There is no Buddha but Mind, there is no Mind but Buddha.

Ma Tzu

Nothing in the voice of the cicada Intimates how soon it will die.

Basho

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 Tsao-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 o r advantageous, but with what is. Alan Watts

There is no reality except the one contained within us. That is why so many peop le live such an unreal life. They take images outside them for reality and never allow the world within to as sert 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 anythin g goes.

Timothy Leary

What can we gain by sailing to the moon if we are not able to cross the abyss th at separates us from ourselves? This is the most important of all voyages of dis covery, 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 instantan eous awakening.

J. Krishnamurti

Those on the way are almost invisible to those who are not. A man or a woman rec ognizes God and starts out. The others say he, or she, is losing faith.

Rumi

60 While living, be a dead man, be thoroughly dead and behave as you like, and alls 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 . 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. Angelus Silesius

All of us living beings belong together in as much as we are all in reality side s 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 cant get rid of ego by using ego. (Bunko said: You dont wash blood off with blo od.) So you dont meditate for a goal, for self-improvement. For the you that needs i mproving is the only you that can do any improving. There arent 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

61 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 i llusion of the independent knower or ego, and to try to get rid of what isnt ther e only prolongs confusion. On the whole, it is better to try to be aware of ones ego than to get rid of it. We can then discover that the knower is no different fr om the sensation of the known, whether the known be external objects or internal thoug hts and memories. In this way it begins to appear that instead of knowers and kn owns 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. Renounc e it and forsake lust and hatred.

The Buddha

What is the essence of Zen? Inwardly no identity; outwardly no attachment.

Hui-neng

In the beginners mind there are many possibilities, but in the experts mind there are few.

Shunryu Susukli

The nature of God is that of a circle whose center is everywhere and whose circu mference 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 dont 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 th e world are know only by the mind.

Max Frisch

Technology - The knack of so arranging the world that we dont 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 fi nd 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 yo u learn.

62 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 th at 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, Im 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 doesnt re fer back to someone. We are not someone having an experience, we are the experie nce. We are process, we are a happening.

Jack Kornfield

What connects one mind moment with the following mind moment is no different for m 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, t he 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 knowle dge 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 i s the ultimate holy truth? Bodhidharma replied: Vast emptiness, Nothing holy. Ta ken aback by this answer Wu then asked: Then who is it that stands before me now ? Bodhidharma simply said: I dont 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 dont com e-on to others as God. Zen always plays it cool.

63 Alan Watts

Man is a stream whose source is hidden. Always our being is descending into us f rom we know not whence.

Emerson

Astonishing, Everything is intelligent.

Pythagoras

There is only one thing that all people possess equally. This is their lonelines s. 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 lon eliness, 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 reali ty, 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 tra nscended, in which there is a sense of complete solidarity of the subject with o ther human beings and with the universe in general. IT S ALL ONE. Also theres a sense of the ultimate ALL RIGHTNESS of the universe. And also, theres 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 fro m 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 w e 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, theres no through trail. In summer, ice doesnt melt. The rising sun blurs in swirling fog. How did I make it? My hearts not the same as yours.

64 If your heart was like mine Youd get it and be right here.

Han-shan

Motivation determines perception. If you see God in yourself, youll see God in ot her people.

Ram Dass

Nobody dies only that somebody which people think they are. Nobody doesnt die. It wo 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 strugg le in the straitjacket of its dualism: subject / object, time / space, spirit / matter, freedom / necessity, free will / law. The truth, which must be single, i s ridden with contradiction. Man cannot think where he is, for he has created tw o 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 canno t 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 libe rating.

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 diffe rent The universe is the play of opposites. The play of Yin and Yang. But there i s always a secrete conspiracy between opposites..

Alan Watts

65 In walking, just walk. In sitting, just sit. Above all, dont wobble. Yun-men

I am in the world but not concerned with the world. I am going through the marke tplace, but not as a purchaser. Kabir

THAT which you seek and cannot find - is the Seeker. The reason why the Mind can not be found or described is that ultimately IT is the Seeker, the Describer, wh ich 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. Yo u cannot objectify THIS-WHICH-YOU-ARE, and that which you can objectify is THATWHICH-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 ou t 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 es sential 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 pro found 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 alon e 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 th

e 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 th e paper on which the works are printed will disintegrate and the words will be g one. 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.

66 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 wor ld conceives a desire, and discovers an ability, to see itself, and appears to s uffer 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 real ity, nothing to question.

G. S. Brown

O, that my monks 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 simplici ty 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 co mmunication 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 t o become free of thoughts but it is very simple. The mind seems very restless bu t 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 unchan ging self who is the owner of experience is wrong view, and the cause of so much s uffering. 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 wh atever one is doing may very well be ones 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 himse lf to play with. He gets over this difficulty by pretending that he is not himse lf.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 w hy it is so difficult for you and me to find out that we are God in disguise, pr etending 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

67 Buddhism is saying that you do not need any gizmos to be in the know. You do not need a religionthey 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 Tsan

The one way to awakening is paying attention to everything to discover the nature of the mind and of experience. Joseph Goldstein

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 kee p 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. Yo u go into somebody training. Most of us are young beings, and spend all our time f ascinated by the power of our prefrontal lobes. (You can do so much stuff) But a fter enough cycles, you start to not identify so much with the packages, with th e personalities. You start to come up for air. Ram Dass

To study Buddhism is to study ourselves. To study ourselves is to go beyond ours elves. To go beyond ourselves is to be enlightened by all things. To be enlighte ned 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 endle ssly.

Dogen

To be free we must be comfortable in being someone, anyone, or no one, at any ti me in any place.

Sujata

Mindfulness is an exquisite moment-to-moment method for being aware of the movemen ts 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 ultimat e level where youre consciousness, but you are no longer self-conscious.

68 Ram Dass

Like dew that vanishes, like a phantom that disappears, or the light cast by a f lash of lightning so should one think of oneself.

Ikkyu

Words are the fog one has to see through.

Zen saying

When we look for things there is nothing but mind, and when we look for mind the re is nothing but things.

Alan Watts

Zazen practice is the direct expression of our true nature. Strictly speaking, f or a human being there is no other practice than this practice, there is no othe r way of life than this way of life.

Shunryu Suzuki

Sitting quietly, doing nothing, Springs comes, and the grass grows by itself.

The Zenrin

Is it possible that myself, my existence, so contains being and nothing that dea th is merely the off interval in an on/off pulsation which must be eternal? Is it conceivable, then, that I am basically an eternal existence momentarily and perh aps needlessly terrified by one half of itself because it has identified all of itself with the other half?

Alan Watts

To see a World in a grain of sand, And a Heaven in a wild flower, Hold infinity in the palm of your hand, And eternity in an hour.

William Blake

Zen in its essence is the art of seeing into the nature of ones being, and it poi nts the way from bondage to freedom.

D. T. Susuki

In this moment there is nothing which comes to be. In this moment there is nothi ng which ceases to be. Thus there is no birth-anddeath to be brought to an end. Therefore the absolute t ranquility is this present moment. Though it is at this moment, there is no limi t to this moment, and herein is eternal delight.

Tan Chung

Life is what happens to you while youre busy making plans.

John Lennon

You dont have to change people just love them.

Neem Karali Baba

Thus shall ye think of all this fleeting world: A star at dawn, a bubble in a stream; A flash of lightning in a summer cloud, A flickering lamp, a phantom, and a dream.

Hui-neng 6th Zen Patriarch

69 Talking about Zen all the time is like looking for fish tracks in a dry riverbed .

Wu-tzu

Meditation is not a means to an end. It is both the means and the end. J. Krishnamurti

What is Zen? Zen is the unsymbolization of the world and all the things in it.

Frederick Franck

Meditation is the art of suspending verbal and symbolic thinking for a time, som ewhat as a courteous audience will stop talking when a concert is about to begin .

Alan Watts

You will not be punished for your anger; you will be punished by your anger.

The Buddha

Ill tell you a big secrete my friend: Dont wait for the Last Judgment. It happens every day.

Albert Camus

If you cant change your circumstances, change your attitude.

Zen saying

I am the mate and companion of people, all just as immortal and fathomless as my self, (they do not know how immortal, but I know.)

Walt Whitman

In as much as from eternity there is nothing whatsoever to be practiced, there i s no need to fall under the sway of erroneous methods.

Pradma Sambhana

Everything I have learned about life can be summed up in just 3 words: It Goes O n. Robert Frost

We are not bodies that have learned how to make consciousness, We are consciousn ess that has learned how to make bodies.

Deepak Chopra

The hallucination of separateness prevents go is to cherish misery. We do not realize or the individual is simply the other face . In his exaggerated valuation of separate off the branch on which he is sitting, and out the coming crash!

one from seeing that to cherish the e that our so-called love and concern f of our own fear of death or rejection identity, the personal ego is sawing then getting more and more anxious ab

Alan Watts

When the universe as a whole seeks to know itself, through the medium of the hum an mind, some aspects of that universe must remain unknown. With the awakening o f symbolic knowledge there seems to arise a split in the universe between the kn ower and the known, the thinker and thought, the subject and the object; and our innermost consciousness, as knower and investigator of the external world, ulti mately escapes its own grasp and remains as the Unknown, Unshown, and Ungraspabl e, much as your hand can grasp numerous objects but never itself, or your eye ca n see the world but not itself.

Ken Wilbur

If you find a path with no obstacles, it probably doesnt lead anywhere.

70

Sunnan Kubose

The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation and go to the grave with the son g still in them.

Thoreau

Split wood, I am there. Lift up the stone, and you will find me there.

Jesus, Gospel of St. Thomas

The Kingdom of the father will not come by expectation. The kingdom of the Fathe r is spread upon the earth and men do not see it.

Jesus, Gospel of St. Thomas

In seeking the actual experience of this Mystery, your image of God becomes the final obstruction. God is the ultimate barrier.

Joseph Campbell

The moment you desire God, you have made God into a commodity. Then you will be exploited by the priests because they sell that commodity. Then you will be expl oited by temples and churches and mosques because those are the shops where that commodity is sold. When you are desireless, the divine happens to you.

Bhabwan Shree Rajneesh

When I was a child, I spoke as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child; But when I became a man, I put away childish things. For now we see in a mirror darkly.

St. Paul

Good friends, how then are meditation and wisdom alike? They are like the lamp a nd the light it gives forth. If there is a lamp there is light, if there is no l amp there is no light. The lamp is the substance of light; light is the function of the lamp. Thus although they have two names, in substance they are not two. Meditation and wisdom are also like this.

Hui-neng

All that is is the result of what we have thought. We are mind spun.

The Buddha

To choose is unconsciously a wish to perpetuate oneself.

Shunryu Suzuki

When you sit you sit for all beings in the world. You sit as one already enlightened. You sit to express your true nature. You sit for the sitting itself.

Shunryu Suzuki

Where is the wisdom weve lost in knowledge, where the knowledge weve lost in infor mation?

T. S. Elliot

Eternal reoccurrence is the universal law: nothing happens for the first time.

? The only thing you can ever offer another human being, is the present state of y our own consciousness.

Ram Dass

71 You are a statement of everything you have evolved to at this moment, and you, a s that statement, are what is creating the universe in which you find yourself.

Ram Dass

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 ca ll 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 bein g, an aspect or modification of it, as Spinozas pantheism. For we should have the same baffling question: which part, which aspect are you? What, objectively, di fferentiates it from the others? No, but inconceivable as it seems to ordinary r eason, you and all other conscious beings as such are all in all. Hence this lif e of yours which you are living is not merely a piece of the entire existence, b ut is in a certain sense the whole; only this whole is not so constituted that i t 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 a nd 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: n ow, today, every day she is bringing you forth, not once but thousands upon thou sands of times, just as every day she engulfs you a thousand times over. For ete rnally and always there is only now, one and the same now; the present is the on ly thing that has no end.

Erwin Schroedinger

The best things cant 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.

72 Seung Sahn

You dont see the center of the universe because its all center.

C. S. Lewis

There are many beings, both on this plane and on other planes, that are availabl e to guide you and help you, but they dont come unless you want them. Your reachi ng elicits their help.

Ram Dass

There is one danger to the mystical search: there is no way back without doing o neself harm. Many paths appear, but once the way is taken, it must be followed t o the end.

Peter Mathiessen

There may be an exterior world independent of our minds, but we can never know i t Stanislav Grof

To God all things are fair and good and right; but men hold some things wrong an d 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 u nity of being and nonbeing is the fear of Death.

Alan Watts

But if we watch closely we notice that pleasure doesnt make us happy. Pleasure is a temporary gratification of desire. Happiness is a deeper satisfaction, a feel ing 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 l ike 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 t he 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 no thing you can hold on to, so let go. There is no one to hold on to anything, any way. But if you do that you discover something much better than any belief, beca use you have got the real thing, only you cannot say what it is.

73 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 judgm ent or comment of what is actually happening at this moment, both outside oursel ves and within, listening even to our involuntary thoughts as if they were no mo re 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 m ind?

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 thats 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 Su chness existence as enormous to it as your existence is to you. Youre 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-n ature? What is this existence were in? Who are we? Then you look into the clear light 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 fea r 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 hear t 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 doesnt have to learn from the unive rse 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 fro m their own levels of consciousness.

Deepak Chopra

74 Zen is not a pastime, but the most serious task in life no empty head will ever venture near it.

D. T. Suzuki

Its really not a question of letting go of the ego. We simply need to stop creati

ng it, stop identifying with passing phenomena. As Wei Wu Wei said, Were like a do g barking up a tree that isnt there. When we see theres no tree, we can finally sto p barking.

Joseph Goldstein

The ego is a system that protects itself by building walls around walls around n othing.

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 grea t 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 obje ct. 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 snak e or a louse or mosquito as object, its sin.

Joshu Sasaki Roshi

Its a bit embarrassing to have been concerned with the human problem all ones live

and find at the end that one has no more to offer by way of advice than Try to b e 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 be ast, 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, con frontation, 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 tru e 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.

75

Men dont 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 corp se is like a footprint or an echo the dissolving trace of something which the Se lf 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 mold ing ones inner life.

If you cannot have self without other, yang without yin, front without back, the n there is a conspiracy going on. There are two which appear to be different, ye t they are esoterically and secretly the same. That is why one could say that be ing enlightened in the Buddhist sense is a sort of calamity. You find out the ru se 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 fo r 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, Be cause, though he lead them, he follows them, he imposes no weight on them; And t hey in turn, because he does not impede them; yield to him, content: People neve r tire of anyone who is not bent upon comparison.

Lao-tzu

When we realize that everything is nothing but ourselves, then we can be thoroug hly alone, In Buddhism its called the right thought of dwelling alone.

Alan Watts

Therefore we timeless and spaceless Beings, alone are. What I say is that the Sel f is here and now, and alone.

Ramana Maharshi

The goal of our lifes effort is to reach the other shore, Nirvana. Prajna paramit a, 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

76 The level of Mind is in no way buried or hidden in the obscure depths of our psych e - on the contrary, the level of Mind is our present and ordinary state of cons ciousness, for, being infinite and absolutely all-inclusive, it is compatible wi th 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.realizin g this confers upon one a profound center of peace that underlies and persists t hroughout the worst depressions, anxieties, and fears.

Ken Wilbur

Just as my sensation of I-ness, of being alive, once came into being without consc ious memory or intent, so it will arise again and again, as the central Self the I T 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 t hen, 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 darkn ess 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 si xty-four thousand times a second. When you are really mindful, life is like a mo ving 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

77 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 th en 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 n othing 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 ob served.

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 realiz e 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 heari ng something you already knew. Do not echo your own opinions. Do not surprise ot hers with your wonderful treasures. When you listen to someone, give up all preconceived ideas and opinions. See thi ngs as they are for him, and accept them.

Shunryu Susuki

Dont be attached to the polarizing roles, even if you have to play one out. Attac hment to any position makes the other side them. Dont crate opposites.

Ram Dass

We are alone, but to die alone is not to die in loneliness Don Juan

The great way has no gates. There are a thousand paths. Once you pass the barrier. You walk the universe alone.

Zen Koan

It is not the mind (memories, ideas, knowledge), but the soul that transmigrates t hru successive lives. The soul is the repository of ones virtue; ones good and bad k arma, and it is ones strength of awareness, the ability to witness without attachme nt or aversion. Its ones wisdom. The soul equals ones Karmic Virtue plus Unattached Wisdom. The witnessing position, the soul position, begins to partake of eterni ty, of infinity. It has a timeless nature. It becomes certain that it does not d ie with the body and mind. It is absolute Spirit Buddha Mind the One and Only.

Ken Wilbur

The student learns by daily gain. The Way is acquired by daily loss. Lao-tzu

Today is the day when we work at being what we will be like tomorrow.

Ram Dass

78

If we cant stand being with ourselves, we are chancy company for anybody else.

Ram Dass

The movement of the Tao is exactly the same thing as the present moment that whi ch we call now is the same thing as the Tao. The Tao, the course of things, the eternal now, the presence of God, anything you want to call it that is now! And you cannot get out of it. There is no need to get with it because you cannot get away from it! That is beautiful. You just relax, and you are there.

Alan Watts

Old battlefield, fresh with spring flowers again All that is left of the dreams of twice ten thousand warriors slain.

Basho

To die into the next moment consciously is to be always ready for death of the b ody. Each moment is our moment of birth and our moment of death. In death you have nothing to lose, because there never was a separate you to begin with; you are the process just choice-less awareness, watching the passing show.

Ram Dass

True men of old were not afraid when they stood alone in their views. No great e xploits. No plans. If they failed, no sorrow; no self congratulation in successTh e true men of old slept without dreams, woke without worries. Their food was pla in, they breathed deep The true men of old knew no lust for life, no dread of dea th. Their entrance was without gladness, their exit yonder, without resistance; Easy come, easy go. They did not forget where from, nor ask where to. Nor drive grimly forward fighting their way through life. They took life as it came, gladl y; took death as it came, without care; and went away, yonder. They had no mind to fight Tao. They did not try, by their own contriving, to help Tao along. Thes e are the ones we call true men. Minds free, thoughts gone, brows clear, faces s erene.

Chuang-tzu

In reality nothing happens. Onto the screen of the mind destiny forever projects its pictures and memories of former projections and thus illusion constantly re news itself. The pictures come and go light intercepted by ignorance. See the li ght and disregard the picture.

Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

The absence of the desire for things produces emptiness and liberty of soul, eve n when there is an abundance of possessions.

St. John of the Cross

All forms of Buddhism have as their basis the idea that: If you have the nerve, and thats really all it amounts to, you can live the liberated life because all t errors are empty. All existence is in a way, just so much to-do about nothing. N ot said in a joyless way. But the universe is a performance. Look here: Words ha ve meaning. You sit around here and listen and understand what Im saying but what does the whole situation mean? It doesnt mean anything! Its just a form of life l ike an elephant, a tree, a mountain, - its a human game. Were doing this jazz. Its not threatening its just jazz.

Alan Watts

It isnt pain that awakens us. Pain is pain and its a drag! Pain gets our attention . And attention awakens us.

Steven Levine

79 What is there to life if one cannot hear the lovely cry of the whippoorwill or t he arguments of the frog around the pond at night?

Chief Seattle

Theres anger and hate; love and wisdom, but theres no one who has these. Only mind fulness purifies these factors of consciousness, but mindfulness also is a facto r. Theres no one being mindful. Mindfulness is being mindful. The idea of Self that people have, is created by wrong view which identifies with either the object o r the knower.

Joseph Goldstein

In Gods wilderness lies the hope of the world, the great, fresh, un-blighted, un redeemed wilderness. The galling harness of civilization drops off and the wound s heal.

John Muir

I have been as a child playing on the seashore, every now and then finding a bri ght pebble, while all around me the great ocean of truth lay undiscovered.

Sir Issic Newton

Without the awareness of death everything is ordinary, trivial. It is only becau se death is stalking us that the world is an unfathomable mystery.

Don Juan

Every existence is a flashing into the vast phenomenal world. Each existence is another expression of the quality of being itself.

Dogen

A basic way of affirming uniqueness is to gain attention of others. In this sens e, the game of being alive is the game of look at me. It is the sacrifice of uniqu eness that leads to awakening.

Albert Low

Lives based on having are less free than lives based on either doing or on being . William James In order to leave no traces when you do something, you should do it with your whole body and mind; you should be concentrated on what you do. Yo u should do it completely, like a good bonfire. You should not be a smoky fire. You should burn yourself completely.

Shunryu Suzuki

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

Alan Watts

When we sit, we are nothing; we just sit. But when we stand up, we are there! Wh en you are there, everything else is there; everything is created all at once.

Shunryu Suzuki

When the intensity of concentration allows you to see the space between two thou ghts, you see eternity. You realize that thoughts exist against the backdrop of no thought. Against the backdrop of emptiness, of nothing, we exist. And there you are at the edge of pe rceiving who you are. Then you face one of the greatest fears you will ever conf ront: the fear of your own extinction. The fear of ceasing to exist not just as a body, but even as a soul... But as youre ready for the ultimate mystic doorway, you say, I am not this 80 thought. You let go of even the great fear of non-existence. The senses are just doing their thing but theres nobody home. Thoughts are going by like a river and awareness simply is. By letting go of even the thought I, there is nowhere to stan d and no one to stand there. No separateness anywhere. Just clarity and being.

Ram Dass

To run after desires is to run after a mirage. It is a journey from one death to another. In the illusion that is life man dies this way time and time again. Bu t those willing to die to their desires discover that death itself dies for them .

Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh

Our normal waking consciousness is but one special type of consciousness, while all about it, parted from it by the filmiest of screens there lie potential form s of consciousness entirely different. We may go through life without suspecting their existence, but apply the requisite stimulus and at a touch they are there in all their completeness. No account of the universe in its totality can be final which leaves these other forms of consciousness quite disregarded. How to regard them is the question.At any rate, they forbid our premature closing of accounts with reality.

William James

Hallucinations are taboo in Western technological society.But, as LSD attains, wh en one glimpses the world from the liberated states of mind of the mystics, the notion of being born (i.e. being a separate person doomed to die) is perceived a s the ultimate hallucination. A paradox: From the so-call normal state of mind, t he liberated state that has been achieved by some mystics is seen as a hallucina tion; and from the so-called liberated state of mind, the ego is seen as a hallu cination a fictional identity thats held together by concepts such as I, me, and mine When you glimpse that place within, you ask the big questions of liberation: Who am I? Where did I come from? And where am I going? These are central to solving the mysteries and meaning of life.

Robert Leverant

When it is dark enough you can see the stars.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Think of the moment of death as a strange border zone of the mind, a no-mans land in which, on the one hand, if we do not understand the illusory nature of our b ody, we might suffer vast emotional trauma as we lose it, and on the other we ar e presented with the possibility of limitless freedom, a freedom that springs pr ecisely from the absence of that very same body. When we are at last freed from the body that has defined and dominated our understanding of ourselves for so lo ng, the karmic vision of one life is completely exhausted, but any karma that mi ght be created in the future has not yet begun to crystallize. So what happens i

n death is that there is a gap, or space, that is fertile with vast possibility; i t is a moment of tremendous, pregnant power where the only thing that matters, o r could matter, is how exactly the mind is. Stripped of a physical body, the mind stands naked, revealed startlingly for wha t it has always been: the architect of our reality

Sogyal Rinpoche

Meditate on death because there is no way to know life unless you stand face to face with death and it is everywhere; wherever life is death is also; they are r eally two aspects of one and the same phenomenon, and when one comes to know thi s, he transcends both. Only in that transcendence is the total flowering of consciousness and the ecsta sy of being.

Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh

81 In the presence of eternity, the mountains are as transient as the clouds. Robert Green Ingersoll

Nothing is more creative than death, since it is the whole secret of life. It me ans that the past must be abandoned, that the unknown cannot be avoided, that I ca nnot continue, and that nothing can be ultimately fixed. When a man knows this, he lives for the first time in his life.

Alan Watts

Recognizing this moment-to-moment birth and death of the mind allows us to penet rate the illusion of solidity which potentiates the fear of death

Steven Levine

To completely awaken to the Now, to awaken from the nightmare of history, is to suffer the death of the future-less Present.This dying to the future by seeing No w-only, is not sudden death at the end of ones life, but instant death all through it. in this moment we are always already suffering instant death and thus we are alway s already awakening to that which has no future: To that which has no future and therefore to that which has no past; to that which has no beginning in time, an d therefore to that which has no end in time; and hence to that which is Unborn, and therefore to that which is Undying. Always already suffering death Now, we are always already living eternally. The search is always already over. Ken Wilbur

The Bodhisattva, in seeing fully into his own empty momentariness, knows a despa ir beyond suicide, the absolute despair that is the literal meaning of nirvana. It is complete disillusion form every hope of safety or rest or gain; suicide it self being no escape since I would awaken once more in every being that is form. He is the same emptiness from which blazes the sun, moon, and stars.

Alan Watts

There is neither creation nor destruction, neither destiny nor free-will; Neithe r path nor achievement; This is the final truth.

Ramana Maharshi

There have been many would be saviors in the world, No one has succeeded, Save yourself.

Sujata

There is a reality even prior to heaven and earth; Indeed, it has no form, much less a name; Eyes fail to see it; it has no voice for ears to detect. To call it Mind or Buddha violates its nature.

Master Daio

All goes onward and outward, nothing collapses. And to die is different from wha t anyone supposed, and luckier. Walt Whitman

It is virtually certain now that Enlightenment is not for me in this life the hi ndrance of sloth being too great due to my evil Karma in this and many former li ves. I do not despair. May all sentient beings be happy. May I assist them to li beration. Its not form lack of belief in the realities awaiting realization, but my laziness A pilgrim may ardently long to reach the golden city and yet loiter on the way, making unnecessary night stops, because he is tired of plodding thru clinging mud or lingering at village fairs because, although their tawdry attra ctions fall far short of the jeweled splendors awaiting him, they are to be had now, whereas the golden city lies scores of leagues away.

John Blofield

82 The wind blows hard among the pines Towards the beginning Of an endless past. Listen: youve heard everything.

Shinkichi Takahashi

I look out, and snow is falling with a moon still in the sky, A new day begins. And the dream called yesterday -- no trace.

Sozen

Light from the moon of clear mind drinks up everything in the world. When mind a nd light disappear, what is this ?

Kyong Ho. A moment before his death.

The knocking on the walls of all space and consciousness is my own heart beating .

Alan Watts

Flesh is merely a lesson. We learn it and pass on.

Erica Jony

To succeed is always to fail. Arrival is death and traveling is eternal J. Kristnamurti.

He who knows enough is enough will always have enough.

Lao-tzu

Deep among ten thousand peaks I sit alone cross-legged, a solitary thought fills my empty mind. My body is the moon that lights the winter sky. In rivers and in lakes are only its reflections.

Han-shan

When we are grounded in the nature of Reality and we know that this same reality is our own nature, then we realize that we can create anything; because all of material creation has the same origin, and Nature goes to the same place to crea te a cluster of nebula, or a galaxy of stares, or a rain forest, or a human body , as it goes to create a single thought.

Deepak Chopra

Empty handed I entered the world, Barefooted I leave it. My coming, my going Two simple happenings That got entangled.

Kozan Ichikyo death poem

I asked the boy beneath the pines, He said, The masters gone alone Herb-picking somewhere on the mount, Cloud-hidden, whereabouts unknown.

Chia Tao

I pack no provisions for my long journey entering emptiness under the midnight m oon. A Chinese Sage

83 The river moves, moon travels rock, Streams unreal, clouds there among the flowers. Sails go: They cant know where.

Tu Fu

When Zen Master Fa-chang was dying, a squirrel screeched on the roof, Its just this , he said, and nothing else.

Alan Watts

To what may this world be likened? Moonlight in a dewdrop Falling from a ducks beak.

Dogens last verse

May all sentient being share with me this offering And by the power of my merit May all beings be healthy, happy, and liberated from suffering In Love, Ron