Zen is a way of liberation, concerned not with discovering what is good or bad or advantageous, but what is.
If it is true that “when the wrong man uses the right means, the right means work in the wrong way,” it is often also true that when the right man uses the wrong means, the wrong means work in the right way.
If we are to have intense pleasures, we must also be liable to intense pains. The pleasure we love, and the pain we hate, but it seems impossible to have the former without the latter. Indeed, it looks as if the two must in some way alternate, for continuous pleasure is a stimulus that must either pall or be increased. And the increase will either harden the sense buds with its friction, or turn into pain. A consistent diet of rich food either destroys the appetite or makes one sick.
Almost more common is the sensitive boy who learns in school to encrust himself for life in the shell of the “tough-guy” attitude. As an adult he plays, in self-defense, the role of the Philistine, to whom all intellectual and emotional culture is womanish and “sissy.” Carried to its final extreme, the logical end of this type of reaction to life is suicide. The hard-bitten kind of person is always, as it were, a partial suicide; some of himself is already dead.
We do not easily grasp the point that the void is creative, and that being comes from nonbeing as sound from silence and light from space.
Eyes and light arise mutually in the same way as yin and yang. The universe is not, therefore, composed of independent things, that is: as human thought ordinarily fragments it: but the universe disposes itself as things. It is one body, one field, whose parts give rise to each other as inseparably as fronts and backs, but in an endlessly complex and interconnected maze.
We see God every time we open our eyes; we inhale Him at every breath; we use His strength in every movement of our finger; we think Him in every thought, although we may not think of Him, and we taste Him in every bite of food.
This, then, is the human problem: there is a price to be paid for every increase in consciousness. We cannot be more sensitive to pleasure without being more sensitive to pain.
For while scientist and logician dissect and analyze, the mystic looks for meaning in the whole.
For God is the wholeness of life, which includes every possible aspect of man and is known in accepting the whole of our experience at each moment.
I am sure, however, that the body dies because it wants to. It finds it beyond its power to resist the disease or to mend the injury, and so, tired out with the struggle, turns to death.
Unaccepted, the universe has no meaning; it is senseless fate and chaos, but acceptance is a way of discovering meaning, not of manufacturing it.
To put it in another way, at each moment we are what we experience, and there is no real possibility of being other than what we are. Wisdom therefore consists in accepting what we are, rather than in struggling fruitlessly to be something else, as if it were possible to run away from one’s own feet.
Life is not a matter of life or death; it is a matter of life and death, and ultimately there is nothing to be dreaded. There is nothing outside the universe, against which it can crash.
Irrevocable commitment to any religion is not only intellectual suicide; it is positive unfaith because it closes the mind to any new vision of the world. Faith is, above all, open-ness – an act of trust in the unknown.
It must be obvious, from the start, that there is a contradiction in wanting to be perfectly secure in a universe whose very nature is momentariness and fluidity. But the contradiction lies a little deeper than the mere conflict between the desire for security and the fact of change. If I want to be secure, that is, protected from the flux of life, I am wanting to be separate from life. Yet it is this very sense of separateness which makes me feel insecure.
If there was a big bang at the beginning of time, you are not something that is the result of that explosion at the end of the process. You are the process.
The faster things move in circles, the sooner they become indistinguishable blurs. It is obvious that the only interesting people are interested people, and to be completely interested is to have forgotten about “I.
Void, not because there’s nothing there, but because our mind has no idea of it.
Faith is, above all, openness – an act of trust in the unknown.
In solving problems, technology creates new problems, and we seem, as in Through the Looking-Glass, to have to keep running faster and faster to stay where we are. The question is then whether technical progress actually “gets anywhere” in the sense of increasing the delight and happiness of life.