Become What You Are: Expanded Edition

Kena Upanishad: “Brahman is unknown to those who know It, and is known to those who do not know It at all.” This knowing of Reality by unknowing is the psychological state of the man whose ego is no longer split or dissociated from its experiences, who no longer feels himself as an isolated embodiment of logic and consciousness, separate from the “

Yet, paradoxically, this detachment from is also a harmony with, for the man who goes into the forest without disturbing a blade of grass is a man in no conflict with nature. Like the Native American scouts, he walks without a single twig cracking beneath his feet. Like the Japanese architects, he builds a house which seems to be a part of its natu

‘‘The perfect man employs his mind as a mirror; it grasps nothing; it refuses nothing; it receives, but does not keep.’’ Detachment means to have neither regrets for the past nor fears for the future; to let life take its course without attempting to interfere with its movement and change, neither trying to prolong the stay of things pleasant nor t

The part of our self that wants to change our self is the very one that needs to be changed; but it is as inaccessible as a needle to the prick of its own point.

Life exists only at this very moment, and in this moment it is infinite and eternal. For the present moment is infinitely small; before we can measure it, it has gone, and yet it persists forever. This movement and change has been called Tao by the Chinese. . . . A sage has said that if we try to accord with it, we shall get away from it. But he wa

Nothing is easier than to give up the world because one is incompetent in the affairs of the world. There is no wisdom in scorning riches simply because one is unable to obtain them, nor in despising the pleasures of the senses because one has not the means of fulfilling them. If the desire for these things exists, and if that desire is thwarted by

A pea may be as round as the world, but as far as roundness is concerned, neither is better than the other. And man is in himself a little universe; the ordering of his mind and body is as complex as the ordering of the stars. Can we say, then, that the governing of a man’s universe is less important because it is different in size?

It is simply the expression of the universal discovery that a man does not really begin to be alive until he has lost himself, until he has released the anxious grasp which he normally holds upon his life, his property, his reputation and position.

Indeed, whoever imagines he has explained Zen has in fact only explained it away; it can no more be bound by a definition than the wind can be shut in a box without ceasing to be wind.