Zen Stuff
Zen join the dots game
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The
Zen master steps up to the hot dog cart and says "Make me one with everything."
The hot dog vendor fixes a hot dog and hands it to the Zen master, who pays with
a $20 bill. The hot dog vendor puts the bill in the cash drawer and closes the
drawer.
"Where's my change?" asks the Zen master. The hot dog vendor responds: "Change
must come from within."
Two Zen masters were walking along. It was one of the masters' birthday. They were great friends.
"There is a present for you under that tree there."
"I find nothing there."
"Ah good, it's still there then."
"The present is thoughtless and meaningless."
"Don't mention it, it was nothing."
They walked on, laughing softly and pointing at the birds.
Is this upside down?
Zen Quotes
Look for knowledge not in books but in things themselves.
Our deeds determine us, as much as we determine our deeds.
Do every act of your life as if it were your last.
If there is to be any peace it will come through being, not having.
Possessions, outward success, publicity, luxury - to me these have always been contemptible. I believe that a simple and unassuming manner of life is best for everyone, best both for the body and the mind.
The concept, the label, is perpetually hiding from us all the nature of the real.
All
that we see or seem
Is but a dream within a dream.
Once in a while it really hits people that they don't have to experience the world in the way they have been told to.
How is it that little children are so intelligent and men so stupid? It must be education that does it.
Experience, which destroys innocence, also leads one back to it.
A child's world is fresh and new and beautiful, full of wonder and excitement. It is our misfortune that for most of us that clear-eyed vision, that true instinct for what is beautiful and awe-inspiring, is dimmed and even lost before we reach adulthood.
The true value of a human being is determined primarily by the measure and sense in which he has attained liberation from the self.
Until we lose ourselves there is no hope of finding ourselves.
The mastery of nature is vainly believed to be an adequate substitute for self-mastery.
Trying to define yourself is like trying to bite your own teeth.
When you are at sea, keep clear of the land.
It takes a long time to understand nothing.
"Did you have a happy childhood?" is a false question. As a child I did not know what happiness was, and whether I was happy or not. I was too busy being.
Keep your hands open, and all the sands of the desert can pass through them. Close them, and all you can feel is a bit of grit.
It is better to ask some of the questions than to know all the answers.
Knowledge is knowing as little as possible.
To know that you do not know is the best. To pretend to know when you do not know is disease.
Nothing is more conducive to peace of mind than not having any opinion at all.
It is the tragedy of the world that no one knows what he doesn't know; and the less a man knows, the more sure he is that he knows everything.
Dreams are real while they last. Can we say more of life?
There is no end. There is no beginning. There is only the infinite passion of life.
Life just is. You have to flow with it. Give yourself to the moment. Let it happen.
In order to be utterly happy the only thing necessary is to refrain from comparing this moment with other moments in the past.
The highest purpose is to have no purpose at all. This puts one in accord with nature, in her manner of operation.
Mindfulness is a state wherein one is totally aware in any situation and so always able to respond appropriately. Yet one is aware of being aware. Mindlessness, on the other hand, or "no-mindness" as it has been called, is a condition of such complete absorption that there is no vestige of self-awareness.
To realize the unimportance of time is the gate of wisdom.
What then is time? If no one asks me, I know what it is. If I wish to explain it to him who asks, I do not know.
Life is all memory except for the one present moment that goes by so quick you can hardly catch it going.
Zen is practice, experience, life - not explaining, interpreting, investigating, quibbling. All talk, as the Chinese masters of old say, is at best a finger pointing to the moon. The finger is not the moon and cannot pull the moon down.
Zen is like looking for the spectacles that are sitting on your nose.
Zen teaches nothing; it merely enables us to wake up and become aware. It does not teach, it points.
Mountains should be climbed with as little effort as possible and without desire. The reality of your own nature should determine the speed. If you become restless, speed up. If you become winded, slow down. You climb the mountain in an equilibrium between restlessness and exhaustion. Then, when you're no longer thinking ahead, each footstep isn't just a means to an end but a unique event in itself.
Blessed is he who has found his work. Let him ask no other blessedness.
I know nothing except the fact of my ignorance.
As we acquire more knowledge, things do not become more comprehensible, but more mysterious.
All I know about method is that when I am not working I sometimes think I know something, but when I am working, it is quite clear I know nothing.
No snowflake falls in an inappropriate place.
The world is not to be put in order, the world is order incarnate. It is for us to put ourselves in unison with this order.
My father considered a walk among the mountains as the equivalent of churchgoing.
We should tackle reality in a slightly jokey way, otherwise we miss its point.
Any experience of reality is indescribable!
Flow with whatever may happen and let your mind be free: Stay centered by accepting whatever you are doing. This is the ultimate.
If you are not happy here and now, you never will be.
The quieter you become, the more you can hear.
Knowledge is one. Its division into subjects is a concession to human weakness.
It is the familiar that usually eludes us in life. What is before our nose is what we see last.
Beware lest you lose the substance by grasping at the shadow.
Pure logic is the ruin of the spirit.
The foolish reject what they see, not what they think; the wise reject what they think, not what they see.
The
world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers.
Little we see in nature that is ours.
We have given our hearts away.
We do not err because truth is difficult to see. It is visible at a glance. We err because this is more comfortable.
To understand is almost the opposite of existing.
Many men go fishing all of their lives without knowing that it is not fish they are after.
I dread success. To have succeeded is to have finished one's business on earth, like the male spider, who is killed by the female the moment he has succeeded in his courtship. I like a state of continual becoming, with a goal in front and not behind.
Not only has one to do one's best, one must, while doing one's best, remain detached from whatever one is trying to achieve.
When you seek it, you cannot find it.
To be surprised, to wonder, is to begin to understand.
When you do something, you should burn yourself completely, like a good bonfire, leaving no trace of yourself.
No thought, no action, no movement, total stillness: only thus can one manifest the true nature and law of things from within and unconsciously, and at last become one with heaven and earth.
We are sick with fascination for the useful tools of names and numbers, of symbols, signs, conceptons and ideas. Meditation is therefore the art of suspending verbal and symbolic thinking for a time, somewhat as a courteous audience will stop talking when a concert is about to begin.
We are born princes and the civilizing process makes us frogs.
How should men know what is coming to pass within them, when there are no words to grasp it? How could the drops of water know themselves to be a river? Yet the river flows on.
We can only exist by taking our minds off the fact that we exist.
Tomorrow's life is too late. Live today.
Imagination is more important than knowledge.
If there is a sin against life, it consists perhaps not so much in despairing of life as in hoping for another life and in eluding the implacable grandeur of this life.
Life is not a problem to be solved but a reality to be experienced.
What we call reality is an agreement that people have arrived at to make life more livable.
If one is master of one thing and understands one thing well, one has at the same time, insight into and understanding of many things.
We cannot put off living until we are ready. The most salient characteristic of life is its coerciveness: it is always urgent, "here and now" without any possible postponement. Life is fired at us point-blank.
The truth of a thing is the feel of it, not the think of it.
Using words to describe magic is like using a screwdriver to cut roast beef.
It is the empty space inside the bowl which is useful.
The truth knocks on the door and you say, "Go away, I'm looking for the truth," and so it goes away. Puzzling.
It's the nothing that makes us something, it's what we miss that hits the mark.
The most important thing I learned on Tralfamadore was that when a person dies he only appears to die. He is still very much alive in the past, so it is very silly for people to cry at his funeral. All moments, past, present, and future, always have existed, always will exist. The Tralfamadorians can look at all the different moments just the way we can look at a stretch of the Rocky Mountains, for instance. They can see how permanent all the moments are, and they can look at any moment that interests them. It is just an illusion we have here on Earth that one moment follows another one, like beads on a string, and that once a moment is gone it is gone forever.
Five senses; an incurably abstract intellect; a haphazardly selective memory; a set of preconceptions and assumptions so numerous that I can never examine more than a minority of them - never become even conscious of them all. How much of total reality can such an apparatus let through?
That's it! You've reached the end of the quotes!!! (Or is it the beginning?!)
