Faith is a state of openness or trust.To have faith is like when you trust yourself to the water. You don’t grab hold of the water when you swim, because if you do you will...

So then, the relationship of self to other is the complete realization that loving yourself is impossible without loving everything defined as other than yourself.

Like love, the light or guidance of truth that influences us exists only in living form, not in principles or rules or expectations or advice, however widely circulated

The answer to the problem of suffering is not away from the problem but in it. The inevitability of pain will not be met by deadening sensitivity but by increasing it, by exploring and feeling...

The knowledge of the past stays with us. To let go is simply to release any images and emotions.

When it comes down to it, government is simply an abandonment of responsibility on the assumption that there are people, other than ourselves, who really know how to manage things. But the government, run ostensibly...

Normally, we do not so much look at things as overlook them.

The only way to make sense out of change is to plunge into it, move with it, and join the dance.

Other people teach us who we are. Their attitudes to us are the mirror in which we learn to see ourselves, but the mirror is distorted. We are, perhaps, rather dimly aware of the immense...

Man suffers only because he takes seriously what the gods made for fun.

I owe my solitude to other people.

For eternally and always there is only now, one and the same now; the present is the only thing that has no end.

We seldom realize, for example that our most private thoughts and emotions are not actually our own. For we think in terms of languages and images which we did not invent, but which were given...

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

We fail so easily to see the difference between fear of the unknown and respect for the unknown, thinking that those who do not hasten in with bright lights and knives are deterred by a...

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 feel yourself – not as a stranger...

You are an aperture through which the universe is looking at and exploring itself.

No work or love will flourish out of guilt, fear, or hollowness of heart, just as no valid plans for the future can be made by those who have no capacity for living now.

Here is the vicious circle: if you feel separate from your organic life, you feel driven to survive; survival -going on living- thus becomes a duty and also a drag because you are not fully...

Every intelligent individual wants to know what makes him tick, and yet is at once fascinated and frustrated by the fact that oneself is the most difficult of all things to know.

We are living in a culture entirely hypnotized by the illusion of time, in which the so-called present moment is felt as nothing but an infintesimal hairline between an all-powerfully causative past and an absorbingly...

Since opposed principles, or ideologies, are irreconcilable, wars fought over principle will be wars of mutual annihilation. But wars fought for simple greed will be far less destructive, because the aggressor will be careful not...

You and I are all as much continuous with the physical universe as a wave is continuous with the ocean.

The menu is not the meal.

It is hard indeed to notice anything for which the languages available to us have no description.

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...

For there is no joy in continuity, in the perpetual. We desire it only because the present is empty. A person who is trying to eat money is always hungry. When someone says, “Time to...

People become concerned with being more humble than other people.

The brush must draw by itself. This cannot happen if one does not practice constantly. But neither can it happen if one makes an effort.

Technology is destructive only in the hands of people who do not realize that they are one and the same process as the universe.

What we have forgotten is that thoughts and words are conventions, and that it is fatal to take conventions too seriously. A convention is a social convenience, as, for example, money … but it is...

The art of meditation is a way of getting into touch with reality, and the reason for it is that most civilized people are out of touch with reality because they confuse the world as...

Stay in the center, and you will be ready to move in any direction.

Jesus Christ knew he was God. So wake up and find out eventually who you really are. In our culture, of course, they’ll say you’re crazy and you’re blasphemous, and they’ll either put you in...

We must abandon completely the notion of blaming the past for any kind of situation we’re in and reverse our thinking and see that the past always flows back form the present. That now is...

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...

There was a young man who said though, it seems that I know that I know, but what I would like to see is the I that knows me when I know that I know...

Problems that remain persistently insoluble should always be suspected as questions asked in the wrong way.

Zen is a liberation from time. For if we open our eyes and see clearly, it becomes obvious that there is no other time than this instant, and that the past and the future are...

To practice with an end in view is to have one eye on the practice and the other on the end, which is lack of concentration, lack of sincerity.

It is interesting that Hindus, when they speak of the creation of the universe do not call it the work of God, they call it the play of God, the Vishnu lila, lila meaning play....

To travel is to be alive, but to get somewhere is to be dead.

The common mistake of the religious celibate has been to suppose that the highest spiritual life absolutely demands the renunciation of sexuality, as if the knowledge of God were an alternative to the knowledge of...

when somebody plays music, you listen. you just follow those sounds, and eventually you understand the music. the point can’t be explained in words because music is not words, but after listening for a while,...

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

Trying to define yourself is like trying to bite your own teeth.

Advice? I don’t have advice. Stop aspiring and start writing. If you’re writing, you’re a writer. Write like you’re a goddamn death row inmate and the governor is out of the country and there’s no...

Like too much alcohol,self-consciousness makes us see ourselves double, and we make the double image for two selves – mental and material, controlling and controlled, reflective and spontaneous. Thus instead of suffering we suffer about...

To have faith is to trust yourself to the water. When you swim you don’t grab hold of the water, because if you do you will sink and drown. Instead you relax, and float.