When we attempt to exercise power or control over someone else, we cannot avoid giving that person the very same power or control over us.
Catalog
Book
The Way of Zen
A collection of lectures presented during the 1960s explores the roots of the American counter-cultural movement
Characters
Paradoxical as it may seem, the purposeful life has no content, no point. It hurries on and on, and misses everything. Not hurrying, the purposeless life misses nothing, for it is only when there is no goal and no rush that the human senses are fully open to receive the world.
And people get all fouled up because they want the world to have meaning as if it were words... As if you had a meaning, as if you were a mere word, as if you were something that could be looked up in a dictionary. You are meaning.
When we attempt to exercise power or control over someone else, we cannot avoid giving that person the very same power or control over us.
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 beg…
Muddy water is best cleared by leaving it alone.
But I'll tell you what hermits realize. If you go off into a far, far forest and get very quiet, you'll come to understand that you're connected with everything.
Zen does not confuse spirituality with thinking about God while one is peeling potatoes. Zen spirituality is just to peel the potatoes.
Things are as they are. Looking out into the universe at night, we make no comparisons between right and wrong stars, nor between well and badly arranged constellations.
You are a function of what the whole universe is doing in the same way that a wave is a function of what the whole ocean is doing.
You are an aperture through which the universe is looking at and exploring itself.