Sublime

The important point is that, according to both Taoism and Zen, the center of the mind’s activity is not in the conscious thinking process, not in the ego.

The reader who would dig to the philosophical foundations of this is advised to read Hegel and Emerson for himself.

The art of living . . . is neither careless drifting on the one hand nor fearful clinging to the past . . . on the other. It consists in being sensitive to each moment, in regarding it as utterly new and unique, in having the mind open and wholly receptive. —Alan Watts, The Wisdom of Insecurity: A Message for an Age of Anxiety

In practice it is simply impossible to decide, intentionally, to stop seeking for nirvana and to lead an ordinary life, for as soon as one’s “ordinary” life is intentional it is not natural.

The verse says a teacher is always at hand—that sounds like good news. The bad news is that the teacher is life-as-it-is and that is the only teacher. Life as it is means the stream itself. It is always there to remind us that time’s arrow flies in one direction only. Our self-centeredness is, at bottom, our desire to stop time in its tracks, to ma

Nature, Man, and God and the volume of his collected letters knows

With the “eye of prajna” the human situation is seen for what it is–a quenching of thirst with salt water, a pursuit of goals which simply require the pursuit of other goals, a clutching of objects which the swift course of time renders as insubstantial as mist. The very one who pursues, who sees and knows and desires, the inner subject, has his ex

Music is a delight because of its rhythm and flow. Yet the moment you arrest the flow and prolong a note or chord beyond its time, the rhythm is destroyed. Because life is likewise a flowing process, change and death are its necessary parts. To work for their exclusion is to work against life.

we would understand the sense of life if we would sing more and say less.