Great Throughts Treasury

"I had a discussion with a great master in Japan... and we were talking about the various people who are working to translate the Zen books into English, and he said, "That's a waste of time. If you really understand Zen... you can use any book. You could use the Bible. You could use Alice in Wonderland. You could use the dictionary, because... the sound of the rain needs no translation.""

"I owe my solitude to other people."

"I seem to be a brief light that flashes but once in all the aeons of time ? a rare, complicated, and all-too-delicate organism on the fringe of biological evolution, where the wave of life bursts into individual, sparkling, and multicolored drops that gleam for a moment... only to vanish forever."

"I want to make one thing absolutely clear. I am not a Zen Buddhist, I am not advocating Zen Buddhism, I am not trying to convert anyone to it. I have nothing to sell. I'm an entertainer. That is to say, in the same sense, that when you go to a concert and you listen to someone play Mozart, he has nothing to sell except the sound of the music. He doesn?t want to convert you to anything. He doesn?t want you to join an organization in favor of Mozart's music as opposed to, say, Beethoven's. And I approach you in the same spirit as a musician with his piano or a violinist with his violin. I just want you to enjoy a point of view that I enjoy."

"Idolatry is not the use of images, but confusing them with what they represent, and in this respect mental images and lofty abstractions can be more insidious than bronze idols"

"If all this ends with the human race leaving no more trace of itself in the universe than a system of electronic patterns, why should that trouble us? For that is exactly what we are now! Flesh or plastic, intelligence or mechanism, nerve or wire, biology or physics-it all seems to come down to this fabulous electronic dance, which, at the macroscopic level, presents itself to itself as the whole gamut of forms and "substances.""

"I have always thought that all philosophical debates are ultimately between the partisans of structure and the partisans of goo."

"I have realized that the past and future are real illusions; that they exist in the present, which is what there is and all there is."

"I know, then, that after I die other bodies, other eyeings, will be born. But this is really the same thing as saying that after I die I will again awake as a baby?any baby, but only one?just as I did before but without remembering the previous trip. For anyone who argues that after death there will be nothingness forever is really saying that when he dies the universe will cease to be. But we know that it goes on after people die, and that because it does the eyeing it is really more my self than this particular body."

"I have suggested that behind almost all myth lies the mono-plot of the game of hide-and-seek."

"If Christianity is wine and Islam coffee, Buddhism is most certainly tea."

"If happiness always depends on something expected in the future, we are chasing a will-o?-the-wisp that ever eludes our grasp, until the future, and ourselves, vanish into the abyss of death."

"If I first see a tree in the winter, I might assume that it is not a fruit-tree. But when I return in the summer to find it covered with plums, I must exclaim, 'Excuse me! You were a fruit-tree after all.' Imagine, then, that a billion years ago some beings from another part of the galaxy made a tour through the solar system in their flying saucer and found no life. They would dismiss it as 'Just a bunch of old rocks!' But if they returned today, they would have to apologize: 'Well - you were peopling rocks after all!' You may, of course, argue that there is no analogy between the two situations. The fruit-tree was at one time a seed inside a plum, but the earth - much less the solar system or the galaxy - was never a seed inside a person. But, oddly enough, you would be wrong."

"If the earth is man's extended body, to be loved and respected as one's own body, those who do no greening of themselves will hardly bring about the greening of America. The idea of 'greening' involves color, flowering, freshness of spring, and, above all, respect for what is organic and vegetative as distinct from the mechanical and metallic."

"If the universe is meaningless, so is the statement that it is so. If this world is a vicious trap, so is its accuser, and the pot is calling the kettle black."

"If there is any problem at all, it is to see that in this instant you have no "I" to surrender. You are completely free to do this at any moment, and nothing whatever is stopping you. This is our freedom. We are not, however, free to improve ourselves, to surrender ourselves, to lay ourselves open to grace, for all such split-mindedness is the denial and postponement of our freedom. It is trying to eat your mouth instead of bread... If, still thinking that there is an isolated "I," you identify it with God, you become the insufferable ego-maniac who thinks himself successful in attaining the impossible, in dominating experience, and in pursuing all vicious circles to satisfactory conclusions. When the snake swallows his tail he has a swelled head. It is quite another thing to see that you are your "fate," and that there is no one either to master it or to be mastered, to rule or to surrender... Discovering this the mind becomes whole: the split between I and me, man and the world, the ideal and the real, comes to an end. Paranoia, the mind beside itself, becomes metanoia, the mind with itself and so free from itself. Free from clutching at themselves the hands can handle; free from looking after themselves the eyes can see; free from trying to understand itself thought can think. In such feeling, seeing, and thinking life requires no future to complete itself nor explanation to justify itself. In this moment it is finished."

"I well remember the first great hemp shop that was opened in San Francisco around 1976. It was essentially a long wooden bar with stools for the customers. On the bar itself were a few large crocks containing the basic and cheaper forms of the weed?Panama Red, Acapulco Gold, Indian Ganja, and Domestic Green. But against the wall behind the bar stood a long cabinet furnished with hundreds of small drawers that a local guitar maker had decorated with intricate ivory inlays in the Italian style. Each drawer carried a label indicating the precise field and year of the product, so that one could purchase all the different varieties from Mexico, Lebanon, Morocco, Egypt, India, and Vietnam, as well as the carefully tended plants of devout cannabinologists here at home. Business was conducted with leisure and courtesy, and the salesmen offered small samples for testing at the bar, along with sensitive and expert discussion of their special effects. I might add that the stronger psychedelics, such as LSD, were coming to be used only rarely?for psychotherapy, for retreats in religious institutions, and in our special hospitals for the dying."

"If there were a body, just one single ball, with no surrounding space, there would be no way of conceiving or feeling it as a ball or any other shape. If there were nothing outside it, it would have no outside. It might be God, but certainly not a body! So too, if there were just space alone with nothing in it, it wouldn't be space at all. For there is no space except space between things, inside things, or outside things. This is why space is the relationship between bodies."

"If therefore, the human race is to flourish we must take charge of evolution."

"If the human race develops an electronic nervous system, outside the bodies of individual people, thus giving us all one mind and one global body, this is almost precisely what has happened in the organization of cells which compose our own bodies. We have already done it... If all this ends with the human race leaving no more trace of itself in the universe than a system of electronic patterns, why should that trouble us? For that is exactly what we are now!"

"If we cling to belief in God, we cannot likewise have faith, since faith is not clinging but letting go."

"If we get rid of all wishful thinking and dubious metaphysical speculations, we can hardly doubt that ? at a time not too distant ? each one of us will simply cease to be. It won?t be like going into darkness forever, for there will be neither darkness, nor time, nor sense of futility, nor anyone to feel anything about it. Try as best you can to imagine this, and keep at it. The universe will, supposedly, be going on as usual, but for each individual it will be as if it had never happened at all; and even that is saying too much, because there won?t be anyone for whom it never happened. Make this prospect as real as possible: the one total certainty. You will be as if you had never existed, which was, however, the way you were before you did exist ? and not only you but everything else. Nevertheless, with such an improbable past, here we are. We begin from nothing and end in nothing. You can say that again. Think it over and over, trying to conceive the fact of coming to never having existed. After a while you will begin to feel rather weird, as if this very apparent something that you are is at the same time nothing at all. Indeed, you seem to be rather firmly and certainly grounded in nothingness, much as your sight seems to emerge from that total blankness behind your eyes. The weird feeling goes with the fact that you are being introduced to a new common sense, a new logic, in which you are beginning to realize the identity of ku and shiki, void and form. All of a sudden it will strike you that this nothingness is the most potent, magical, basic, and reliable thing you ever thought of, and that the reason you can?t form the slight idea of it is that it?s yourself. But not the self you thought you were."

"If we look deeply into such ways of life as Buddhism and Taoism, Vedanta and Yoga, we do not find either philosophy or religion as these are understood in the West. We find something more nearly resembling psychotherapy? The main resemblance between these Eastern ways of life and Western psychotherapy is in the concern of both with bringing about changes of consciousness, changes in our ways of feeling our own existence and our relation to human society and the natural world. The psychotherapist has, for the most part, been interested in changing the consciousness of peculiarly disturbed individuals. The disciplines of Buddhism and Taoism are, however, concerned with changing the consciousness of normal, socially adjusted people."

"If we want justice for minorities and cooled wars with our natural enemies, whether human or nonhuman, we must first come to terms with the minority wand the enemy in ourselves and in our own hearts, for the rascal is there as much as anywhere in the ?external? world ? especially when you realize that the world outside your skin is as much yourself as the world inside."

"If we live, we live; if we die, we die; if we suffer, we suffer; if we are terrified, we are terrified. There is no problem about it."

"If you ask me to show you God, I will point to the sun, or a tree, or a worm. But if you say, "You mean, then, that God is the sun, the tree, the worm, and all other things?"--I shall have to say that you have missed the point entirely. Indeed, the special disease of civilized man might be described as a block or schism between his brain (specifically, the cortex) and the rest of his body. This corresponds to the split between "I" and "me," man and nature, and to the confusion of Ouroboros, the mixed-up snake, who does not know that his tail belongs with his head. Since what we know of the future is made up of purely abstract and logical elements--inferences, guesses, deductions--it cannot be eaten, felt, smelled, seen, heard, or otherwise enjoyed. To pursue it is to pursue a constantly retreating phantom, and the faster you chase it, the faster it runs ahead. This is why all the affairs of civilization are rushed, why hardly anyone enjoys what he has, and is forever seeking more and more."

"If you awaken from this illusion, and you understand that black implies white, self implies other, life implies death ? or shall I say, death implies life ? you can conceive yourself. Not conceive, but feel yourself, not as a stranger in the world, not as someone here on sufferance, on probation, not as something that has arrived here by fluke, but you can begin to feel your own existence as absolutely fundamental. What you are basically, deep, deep down, far, far in, is simply the fabric and structure of existence itself. So, say in Hindu mythology, they say that the world is the drama of God. God is not something in Hindu mythology with a white beard that sits on a throne, that has royal prerogatives. God in Indian mythology is the self, Satcitananda. Which means sat, that which is, chit, that which is consciousness; that which is ananda is bliss. In other words, what exists, reality itself is gorgeous, it is the fullness of total joy? That would be within the infinite multiplicity of choices you would have. Of playing that you weren't god, because the whole nature of the godhead, according to this idea, is to play that he is not. So in this idea then, everybody is fundamentally the ultimate reality, not god in a politically kingly sense, but god in the sense of being the self, the deep-down basic whatever there is. And you are all that, only you are pretending you are not."

"If you study the writings of the mystics, you will always find things in them that appear to be paradoxes, as in Zen, particularly."

"If you begin to resist fear, you begin to be afraid of fear."

"If you cannot trust yourself, you cannot even trust your mistrust of yourself - so that without this underlying trust in the whole system of nature you are simply paralyzed"

"If you can't meditate in a boiler room, you can't meditate."

"If you know that "I", in the sense of the person, the front, the ego, it really doesn't exist. Then...it won't go to your head too badly, if you wake up and discover that you're God."

"If you know that I, in the sense of the person, the front, the ego, it really doesn't exist. Then...it won't go to your head too badly, if you wake up and discover that you're God."

"If you love a person, you say to that person, "Look, I love you, whatever that may be. I've seen quite a bit of it and I know there's lots that I haven't seen, but still it's you and I want you to be what you want to be. And I won't be happy if I've got you in a cage. You'd be a bird without song.""

"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 things you don?t like doing, which is stupid."

"If... you are aware of fear, you realize that, because this feeling is now yourself, escape is impossible. You see that calling it "fear" tells you little or nothing about it, for the comparison and the naming is based, not on past experience, but on memory. You have then no choice but to be aware of it with your whole being as an entirely new experience. Indeed, every experience is in this sense new, and at every moment of our lives we are in the midst of the new and unknown."

"Imagination cannot grasp simple nothingness and must therefore fill the void with fantasies, as in experiments with sensory deprivation where subjects are suspended weightlessly in sound- and light-proof rooms. When death is considered the final victory of Black over White in the deadly serious battle of "White must win," the fantasies which fill the void are largely ghoulish. Even our popular fantasies of Heaven are on the grim side, because the usual image of God is of a very serious and awesome Grandfather, enthroned in a colossal church-and, of course, in church one may decorously "rejoice" but not have real, rip-roaring fun. O what their joy and their glory must be, Those endless Sabbaths the blessed ones see. Who wants to be stuck in church, wearing a surplice, and singing "Alleluia!" forever? Of course, the images are strictly symbolic, but we all know how children feel about the old-time Protestant Sabbath, and God's Good Book bound in black with its terrible typography. Intelligent Christians outgrow this bad imagery, but in childhood it has seeped into the unconscious and it continues to contaminate our feelings about death."

"In all ages, in all lands, there have been those who seek truth. This seeking is an individual's search for something more than self, and much more than the confines of this worldly system. It is the seeker, who understands there is more than what meets the eye, who is not afraid and makes the choice to go into the unknown. The process of awaking has begun, the discovery is underway."

"In Buddhism, change is emphasized."

"In known history, nobody has had such capacity for altering the universe than the people of the United States of America. And nobody has gone about it in such an aggressive way."

"If you try to get rid of your ego with your ego you will just end up in a vicious circle. You?d be like somebody who worries because they worry because they worry."

"If, then, my awareness of the past and future makes me less aware of the present, I must begin to wonder whether I am actually living in the real world."

"In a world where there are no eyes the sun would not be light, and in a world where there would be no soft skin rocks would not be hard."

"Imagine a multidimensional spider's web in the early morning covered with dew drops. And every dew drop contains the reflection of all the other dew drops. And, in each reflected dew drop, the reflections of all the other dew drops in that reflection. And so ad infinitum. That is the Buddhist conception of the universe in an image."

"In any foreseeable future there are going to be thousands and thousands of people who detest and abominate Negroes, communists, Russians, Chinese, Jews, Catholics, beatniks, homosexuals, and "dope-fiends." These hatreds are not going to be healed, but only inflamed, by insulting those who feel them, and the abusive labels with which we plaster them?squares, fascists, rightists, know-nothings?may well become the proud badges and symbols around which they will rally and consolidate themselves. Nor will it do to confront the opposition in public with polite and nonviolent sit-ins and demonstrations, while boosting our collective ego by insulting them in private. If we want justice for minorities and cooled wars with our natural enemies, whether human or non-human, we must first come to terms with the minority and the enemy in ourselves and in our own hearts, for the rascal is there as much as anywhere in the "external" world?-especially when you realize that the world outside your skin is as much yourself as the world inside. For want of this awareness, no one can be more belligerent than a pacifist on the rampage, or more militantly nationalistic than an anti-imperialist."

"In reality there are no separate events. Life moves along like water, it's all connected to the source of the river is connected to the mouth and the ocean."

"In other words, a person who is fanatic in matters of religion, and clings to certain ideas about the nature of God and the universe, becomes a person who has no faith at all."

"In music, though, one doesn?t make the end of the composition the point of the composition. If that were so, the best conductors would be those who played fastest; and there would be composers who only wrote finales. People go to concerts only to hear one crashing chord - because that?s the end. Same way in dancing?you don?t aim at a particular spot in the room; that?s where you should arrive. The whole point of the dancing is the dance. Now, but we don?t see that as something brought by our education into our everyday conduct. We?ve got a system of schooling which gives a completely different impression. It?s all graded?and what we do is we put the child into the corridor of this grade system, with a kind of "c?mon kitty kitty kitty?" And yeah, you go to kindergarten, and that?s a great thing, because when you finish that, you?ll get into first grade. And then c?mon, first grade leads to second grade, and so on? And then you get out of grade school you go to high school?and it?s revving up, the thing is coming? Then you?re going to go to college, and by jove then you get into graduate school, and when you?re through with graduate school, you?ll go out to join the world. And then you get into some racket where you?re selling insurance. And they?ve got that quota to make. And you?re going to make that. And all the time, this thing is coming, it?s coming, it?s coming?that great thing, the success you?re working for. Then when you wake up one day about forty years old, you say "My God! I?ve arrived! I?m there!" And you don?t feel very different from what you always felt. And there's a slight letdown, because you feel there's a hoax. And there was a hoax. A dreadful hoax. They made you miss everything. By expectation. Look at the people who live to retire, and put those savings away. And then when they?re sixty-five, and they don?t have any energy left, they?re more or less impotent, they go and rot in an old people?s ?senior citizens? community. Because we?ve simply cheated ourselves, the whole way down the line. We thought of life by analogy was a journey, was a pilgrimage, which had a serious purpose at the end. And the thing was to get to that end. Success, or whatever it is, or maybe heaven after you?re dead. But we missed the point the whole way along. It was a musical thing, and you were supposed to sing, or to dance, while the music was being played."

"In looking out upon the world, we forget that the world is looking at itself."

"In practice, the technical, rational consciousness is as alien to the natural man as was the supernatural soul. For both alike, nature and the natural man is an object, studied always by a technique which makes it external and therefore different from the subjective observer. For when no knowledge is held to be respectable which is not objective knowledge, what we know will always seem to be not ourselves, not the subject. Thus we have the feeling of knowing things only from the outside, never from within, of being confronted eternally with a world of impenetrable surfaces within surfaces within surfaces."