Ego is a social institution with no physical reality. The ego is simply your symbol of yourself. Just as the word “water” is a noise that symbolizes a certain liquid without being it, so too the idea of ego symbolizes the role you play, who you are, but it is not the same as your living organism.
this present moment never comes to be and it never ceases to be, it is simply our minds that construct the continuity of thoughts we call time. In the present moment is nirvana.
The menu is not the meal.
The power of memories and expectations is such that for most human beings, the past and the future are not as real, but rather more real than the present.
Muddy water is best cleared by leaving it alone.
Meditation is the way in which we come to feel our basic inseparability from the whole universe, and what that requires is that we shut up.
We have a strange anxiety in us; that if we don't interfere then it won't happen. Now that's the root of an enormous amount of trouble.
In a certain sense, Zen is feeling life instead of feeling something about life.
Trying to define yourself is like trying to bite your own teeth.
We must be careful that the business we build does not become mere busyness.
Really, the fundamental, ultimate mystery -- the only thing you need to know to understand the deepest metaphysical secrets -- is this: that for every outside there is an inside and for every inside there is an outside, and although they are different, they go together.
Basically, there is simply nothing to worry about, because you yourself are the eternal energy of the universe.
The truth is revealed by removing things that stand in its light, an art not unlike sculpture, in which the artist creates, not by building, but by hacking away.
Yet again, the more you strive for some kind of perfection or mastery—in morals, in art or in spirituality—the more you see that you are playing a rarified and lofty form of the old ego-game, and that your attainment of any height is apparent to yourself and to others only by contrast with someone else's depth or failure.
What would you like to do if money were no object? How would you really enjoy spending your life?
Change is an illusion because we're always at the place where any future can take us.
There's an interdependence between flowers and bees. Where there are no flowers there are no bees, and where there are no bees, there are no flowers. They are really one organism. And so in the same way, everything in nature depends on everything else.
If you are afraid of death, be afraid. The point is to get with it, to let it take over - fear, ghosts, pains, transience, dissolution, and all. And then comes the hitherto unbelievable surprise; you don't die because you were never born. You had just forgotten who you are.
If you say that getting the money is the most important thing, you'll spend your life completely wasting your time. You'll be doing things you don't like doing in order to go on living, that is to go on doing thing you don't like doing, which is stupid.
The real you is not a puppet that life pushes around, the real deep down you is the whole universe.
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...
When you look out of your eyes at nature happening out there...You're looking at you.
Nirvana is where you are, provided you don't object to it.
To the Taoist mentality, the aimless, empty life does not suggest anything depressing. On the contrary, it suggests the freedom of clouds and mountain streams, wandering nowhere, of flowers in impenetrable canyons, beautiful for no one to see, and of the ocean surf forever washing the sand, to no end.
We get such a kick out of looking forward to pleasures and rushing ahead to meet them that we can’t slow down enough to enjoy them when they come.
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