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 serv