Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values

There is, then, an analogy–and perhaps more than mere analogy-between central vision and conscious, one-at-a-time thinking, and between peripheral vision and the rather mysterious process which enables us to regulate the incredible complexity of our bodies without thinking at all. It should be noted, further, that we call our bodies complex as a re

“If you want to see into it, see into it directly. When you begin to think about it, it is altogether missed.”

That itself is a poisonous twentieth-century attitude. When you want to hurry something, that means you no longer care about it and want to get on to other things. I just want to get at it slowly, but carefully and thoroughly, with the same attitude I remember was present just before I found that sheared pin. It was that attitude that found it, not

capacity to observe, your own activities, your own thoughts, your own way of life. When you ask ‘how’ you really become a secondhand human being; you lose integrity and also the innate honesty to look at yourself, to be what you are and to go beyond and above what you are. Never, never ask the question ‘how.’ We are talking psychologically, of cour