We have somehow conned ourselves into the notion that this moment is ordinary.

Yang means the positive, and yin, the negative. Yang is identified with the south or sunny side of a mountain; yin, with the north or shady side. And note, this moment, that you cannot have a one-sided mountain.

Intelligence is a function of the degree to which you realize that your behavior is one with the behavior of the rest of the world.

The cry, “Back to Nature!” used to be derided as unrealistic sentimentality, but I am wondering if it is not becoming an urgent necessity.

When you have accepted your own death in the midst of life, it means that you’ve let go of yourself, and you are therefore free. You are not any longer plagued by worry and anxiety. You know that you’re done for anyhow. So there’s no need constantly to fight to protect

A life full of goals or end-points is like trying to abate one’s hunger by eating merely the two precise ends of a banana.

There will always be “I”s in the world. Every “I” is, in a way, the same “I.” We all might be anyone else. And there is no escape. It goes on and on and on and on. So long as there is consciousness anywhere, there is “I.” You, then, in a way, look out through all “I”s. And that,

All society depends on our trusting each other. Now, we’re all untrustworthy. But there is no alternative than trusting each other, even though our trust may be misplaced. We must make that gamble. Because the only alternative to trusting each other is a police state—and who

When I see a man getting ready to put the world in order, I know there will be great trouble.

The moment has arrived when a really thoroughgoing spiritual materialism is the intelligent and essential attitude for the management of technology, and for helping mankind to be something better than the most predatory monster yet evolved.

The repetitious games of children go on and on because time has been forgotten and has reduced itself to a single wondrous instant.

This sensation of being a separate “I” cut off from all other “I”s is an illusion. It’s a pure hallucination, because that is not the way we are functioning physically. We are functioning physically not as separate entities, but as beings that live in such a close relationship

A person who has died to himself doesn’t take himself seriously any longer. He has a sense of life—as we say in our own slang—not being any longer a drag. He’s not in conflict with himself. He has already, as it were, given himself up to death.

The Zen way of teaching teaches one to see that you cannot be in complete control of your whole life situation. You cannot, in other words, fundamentally possess yourself.

You have to adjust to facts: you can’t have a nation, you can’t have a society, in which everyone is always occupied in intellectual and computational pursuits. A few people have to be around who know how to handle the material world in a gracious way. And for these people we

Hurrying and delaying are alike ways of trying to resist the present.

Tension against the stream is habitual, and the frustration which it engenders is chronic. If I believe that I would like to break a habit, that very wish is another form of the same tension. And this in turn is a form of the basic un-get-at-ability of it.

To be quite sure, to be set, fixed, and firm is to miss the point of life. For living and being is a perpetual abandonment of the known and fixed situation. The only true peace is the always slightly uncertain apprehension that No will imply Yes, just as much as Yes implies No.

The one way of not doing anything about a situation is feeling guilty about it. Because when people feel guilty about a situation, most usually—instead of doing something practical to change it—they resort to all sorts of symbolic methods of expiation. They go to confession. They