Waking up to who you are requires letting go of who you imagine yourself to be.
The meaning of life is just to be alive. It is so plain and so obvious and so simple. And yet, everybody rushes around in a great panic as if it were necessary to achieve something beyond themselves.
A person who thinks all the time has nothing to think about except thoughts. So he loses touch with Reality, and lives in a world of illusion.
To have faith is to trust yourself to the water. When you swim you don’t grab hold of the water, because if you do you will sink and drown. Instead you relax, and float.
Hurrying and delaying are alike ways of trying to resist the present.
That’s a waste of time. If you really understand Zen. You can use any book. You could use the Bible. You could use Alice in Wonderland. You could use the dictionary, because... the sound of the rain needs no translation.
The only way to make sense out of change is to plunge into it, move with it, and join the dance.
You can’t live at all unless you can live fully now.
For there is never anything but the present, and if one cannot live there, one cannot live anywhere.
Meditation is the discovery that the point of life is always arrived at in the immediate moment.
Paradoxical as it may seem, the purposeful life has no content, no point. It hurries on and on, and misses everything. Not hurrying, the purposeless life misses nothing, for it is only when there is no goal and no rush that the human senses are fully open to receive the world.
When you get free from certain fixed concepts of the way the world is, you find it is far more subtle, and far more miraculous, than you thought it was.
Stop measuring days by degree of productivity and start experiencing them by degree of presence.
Stay in the center, and you will be ready to move in any direction.
We know that from time to time there arise among human beings people who seem to exude love as naturally as the sun gives out heat.
Moreover, there is no “unconscious” mind distinct from the conscious, for the “unconscious” mind is conscious, though not of itself, just as the eyes see but do not see themselves.
The divided mind comes to the dinner table and pecks at one dish after another, rushing on without digesting anything to find one better than the last. It finds nothing good, because there is nothing which it really tastes.
We can hardly begin to consider this problem unless it is clear that the craving for security is itself a pain and a contradiction, and that the more we pursue it, the more painful it becomes.
To define means to fix, and, when you get down to it, real life isn’t fixed.
My sense of kinship with this world is not only with its obviously sympathetic and and beautiful aspects, but also with the horrendous and strange. For I have found that the monstrous and inhuman aspects of fish and insects and reptiles are not so much in them as in me. They are external embodiments of my natural creeps and shudders at the thought of pain and death.