“Water your plants and your job is done for today.”
“Any mundane activity can offer divine satisfaction.”
“Belief is at best an educated, informed conjecture about Reality.”
“He knows not where he s going, For the ocean will decide, Its not the destination, It s the glory of the ride”
“To escape from the world means that one s mind is not concerned with the opinions of the world.”
“Who we are now is all that really matters.”
“Stay in the center, and you will be ready to move in any direction.”
“The changeless is what knows the change, the changeless is unconditioned”
“Life is a journey. Time is a river. The door is ajar”
“The truth knocks on the door and you say, Go away, I m looking for the truth, and so it goes away. Puzzling.”
“The way out is through the door. Why is it that no one will use this method?”
“Life is more or less a lie, but then again, that s exactly the way we want it to be.”
“If you are unable to find the truth right where you are, where else do you expect to find it?”
“that stone Buddha deserves all the birdshit it gets I wave my skinny arms like a tall flower in the wind”
“...it s like this. Sometimes, when you ve a very long street ahead of you, you think how terribly long it is and feel sure you ll never get it swept. And then you start to hurry. You work faster and faster and every time you look up there seems to be just as much left to sweep as before, and you try even harder, and you panic, and in the end you re out of breath and have to stop--and still the street stretches away in front of you. That s not the way to do it. You must never think of the whole street at once, understand? You must only concentrate on the next step, the next breath, the next stroke of the broom, and the next, and the next. Nothing else. That way you enjoy your work, which is important, because then you make a good job of it. And that s how it ought to be. And all at once, before you know it, you find you ve swept the whole street clean, bit by bit. what s more, you aren t out of breath. That s important, too...”
“Not being tense but ready. Not thinking but not dreaming. Not being set but flexible. Liberation from the uneasy sense of confinement. It is being wholly and quietly alive, aware and alert, ready for whatever may come.”
“It s like you took a bottle of ink and you threw it at a wall. Smash! And all that ink spread. And in the middle, it s dense, isn t it? And as it gets out on the edge, the little droplets get finer and finer and make more complicated patterns, see? So in the same way, there was a big bang at the beginning of things and it spread. And you and I, sitting here in this room, as complicated human beings, are way, way out on the fringe of that bang. We are the complicated little patterns on the end of it. Very interesting. But so we define ourselves as being only that. If you think that you are only inside your skin, you define yourself as one very complicated little curlique, way out on the edge of that explosion. Way out in space, and way out in time. Billions of years ago, you were a big bang, but now you re a complicated human being. And then we cut ourselves off, and don t feel that we re still the big bang. But you are. Depends how you define yourself. You are actually--if this is the way things started, if there was a big bang in the beginning-- you re not something that s a result of the big bang. You re not something that is a sort of puppet on the end of the process. You are still the process. You are the big bang, the original force of the universe, coming on as whoever you are. When I meet you, I see not just what you define yourself as--Mr so-and- so, Ms so-and-so, Mrs so-and-so--I see every one of you as the primordial energy of the universe coming on at me in this particular way. I know I m that, too. But we ve learned to define ourselves as separate from it. ”