reductio ad absurdum
"A lifetime of exposure to existing things has up until now made them safe from our metaphysical scrutiny. Who would think of meditating on a tree or a butterfly in order to unravel the mystery of existence? Our eyes have been conditioned to name and classify things, to discover their chemical makeup and to find ways of utilizing them. But now all this must be put aside in order for us to confront them at a deeper level. What, then, are the most fundamental facts that are waiting to be recognized?
We may scoff at Zen for spouting nonsense, but since we do not understand, there is always a latent uneasiness that we are missing the real point, and this uneasiness can draw us back for a more careful consideration.
If ego-consciousness is not the center of the soul, then the possibility exists for a radical shift and transformation of our awareness. From the perspective of ordinary consciousness there must be some sign or doorway to this deeper dimension of the human spirit.
We constantly say, "I am going to do this" or "I know that," but we do not reflect on the foundation of all these statements, which is simply, "I am." How simple this "I am" appears, but who really is this ''I"? We are convinced we know, since we live with our "I" on such intimate terms, but the foundation for the true meaning of the "I" is not simply the "I" itself but it is the "am". The "I" is an expression, a contraction, of the "am", but do we know what this "am" is? All the attributes we can give to the "I" when we say, "I am wealthy" or "I am famous" or "I am powerful" or "I am intelligent" or "I am strong", all these attributes are secondary to the fact that "I am." If we do not know this "am" we do not really know this "I". If we question the "I" in the light of "am", it can lead us to an abyss where the very meaning of our "I" seems to crumble and we grow afraid that our "I" is dissolving and there is nothing beyond it. The Zen master would advise courage. The abyss is not the abyss of mere nothingness."
- James Arraj
God, Zen and the Intuition of Being
there will be great awakening;
small doubt, small awakening,
no doubt, no awakening."
- Zen saying
- Wu-Tzu
even to say the word 'zen' is a total embarrassment
"Heaven and earth are narrow. Sun, moon and stars all at once go dark. Even if blows of the staff fall like rain and shouts roll like thunder, you still haven't lived up to the task of the fundamental vehicle of transcendence. Even the buddhas of all ages can only know it for themselves. The successive generations of ancestors have not been able to bring it up in its entirety. The treasury of teachings of the whole age cannot explain it thoroughly. Clear-eyed students cannot save themselves completely. When you get here, how will you ask for more instruction? To say the word, 'Buddha', is trailing mud and dripping water; to say the word, 'zen', is a face full of shame. Superior people who have studied it for a long time do not wait for it to be said. The incoming beginners simply must investigate it and understand it."
- Blue Cliff Record, Case #2
Why not swim down the river of life with the multitude
experiencing pleasure and pain passing?"
- Christmas Humphreys
"You have to return to the stillness often to balance yourself out and to keep from becoming as extreme as the jumpy little symbols that pulse through your mind. Return again and again until you come to see that you are really there all the time anyway. Until you listen to the sound of your own voice as if it were small and far away, and the sound gives you no real pleasure anymore, but the listening does, the listening contains all the richness that you used to seek.
Return over and over until you watch the movements of your mind and find that your thoughts have lost their cleverness somewhere down the line. They still ring, but ring hollow. You're no longer so easily convinced as before, and the brilliance is now in the watching. The brilliance that you sought has remained hidden behind each movement of your mind, hidden in the twisted branches of the continual seeking."
- G. Bluestone
Journeys on Mind Mountain
The meadow was large and almost flat with islands of grey snags near the center and along two edges. A hundred years ago it was a swamp; a hundred years before that a watercourse of many small streams, streams that were just beginning to become clogged with reeds and dead grasses. Today it was a beautiful meadow filled with countless pink shooting stars. Someday it would be a fir forest.
Today it was a meadow, and its thick grass was a green that only can be seen at high altitudes on a clear day beneath an azure sky. The early evening light washed the meadow and the treetops in an orange glow. The roar of the rushing stream seemed both softened and broadened by that luminescence.
The stream was large enough that it was better crossed in the morning before the midday sun would wake and thaw the sleeping snowfields above. Then the melting snows of the warm afternoon would send forth torrents that coursed wildly down the mountainside. Then the falls just below the ford would literally boom. The booming resounded in the mountain valley, echoing, filling it like water fills a vessel.
Everything within that refreshing vessel of dark green forest was immersed in that steady reverberation. Immersed in a divine roar whose endless layers echoed off transparent walls. It's not the sort of sound you can hear solely with your ears. Even to bathe in it won't be enough, because there'll still be someone there to interfere, to interpret and create details.
It has to be felt deeper, below the surface, at the very point where all senses merge. Merge with them right there like a fleck of foam falling into a stream. Just by listening with your eyes you can fold back on yourself and merge into that primal stream of awareness like a river is swallowed by the immensity of the ocean. Only then will you know what point to live from. Only then will you be sure."
- G. Bluestone
Journeys on Mind Mountain
"You must know that there is nothing higher and stronger and more wholesome and good for life in the future than some good memory, especially a memory of childhood, of home. People talk to you a great deal about your education, but some good, sacred memory, preserved from childhood, is perhaps the best education. If a man carries many such memories with him into life, he is safe to the end of his days, and if one has only one good memory left in one's heart, even that may sometime be the means of saving us."
- Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky
The Brothers Karamazov
Forget your perfect offering.
There is a crack in everything.
That's how the light gets in."
- Leonard Cohen
"Your True Nature is deep, like still, clear water in a lake.
If you allow the bottom to be stirred by love and hate,
Waves of passion will arise.
What was clear will become murky.
With your vision obstructed, you will not notice
How your troubles are increasing.
If you look with desire upon people or things,
You throw mud into the clear water.
If you allow yourself to become another's desire.
You are like oil poured on passion's fire.
When the clamoring ego sinks to silence,
Burning hells will turn to ice.
Let your ego slip gently towards a muted death.
When the ego's eyes are closed, in vain does harm appear.
This death does not come easy.
Be on guard against old habits
That, haunting, come to quicken it.
Be steadfast and endure.
Alertness brings awareness and awareness is a light that in a
Searing flash obliterates all traces of the ghost.
Let your True Nature shine forth in perfect clarity.
Rest easy in the pure, serene stillness of the One.
Alone, you are a sovereign.
Yourself, a precious kingdom.
Reign with peace and harmony!
What external force can possibly invade?
Life and death, day and night;
Water flows and flowers fall.
Only today, I know that
My nose points downward!
In an instant of thought, this chaotic mind is put to rest.
Internally and externally, the sense faculties and objects
Became empty and clear.
Overturning the body - emptiness is now shattered.
The myriad forms and appearances arise and extinguish
in their own accord.
From a clear sky the bright moon shimmers
On the stilled sea and snow draped shore.
In that holy light I cannot find the water's edge.
I've watched smoke spiral into the void of space.
In that bright mirror, I've seen a myriad things.
But last night a dragon gulped the shining moon
and in the blackness, I saw what I had missed.
Birth and Death. Day and Night.
Running water, stagnant pool.
Bud and fading flower.
Can I find the point at which they change
From one into the other?
Can my nostrils turn upwards?
When the mind keeps tumbling
How can vision be anything but blurred?
Stop the mind even for a moment
And all becomes transparently clear!
The moving mind is polishing mud bricks.
In stillness find the mirror!"
- Han Shan
Cold Mountain
"The true mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible."
- Oscar Wilde
"The greater danger for most of us is not that our aim is too high and we miss it, but that it is too low and we reach it."
- Michelangelo
"Books are like imprisoned souls till someone takes them down from a shelf and frees them."
- Samuel Butler
"Life is like stepping onto a boat that is about to sail out to sea and sink."
- Shunryu Suzuki
"A casual stroll through the lunatic asylum shows that faith does not prove anything."
- Friedrich Nietzsche
"The trouble with most of us is that we know too much that ain't so."
- Mark Twain
or in the dark moonless night there is a light.
Can you see it?
And, by the way, who are you?"
- Shunryu Suzuki
Why is this day different from
yesterday and why am I
I and not you or her or it?
Why does the pond ripple with
the wind and why does the dog
bark at nearly everything and why
is that annoying to me? Why is it
music moves me and why do I nearly
cry when someone's selfless for a moment
even in a movie? Why was I
born, why do I live another day,
where did I come from and where
am I going? Why do flies
appear suddenly from nowhere
and what do flies think about,
or grasshoppers, or fish, say
trout, large ones, that hover
gracefully, facing upstream, and why is it
the water ouzel twitches like that
or for that matter what about the
several things in this world that don't
speak or see or decide or taste anything
like bacteria, fidoplankton, amoeba, mites?
What's the measure of this world?
Is small smaller than large or
is it larger and is there any small or large
outside mathematics and does it make any difference
and to whom? You? Me? What
does language do after all? Is it
another organ, like a nose? And did
everything that's ever happened happen
by chance or is there a design?
What's a design anyway?
Is there anything but design?
Can anyone anyway ask a single serious
meaningful question?
Can I?"
- Norman Fischer
"Don't ask yourself what the world needs; ask yourself what makes you come alive. And then go and do that. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive."
- Harold Whitman
"As subjects, we all live in suspense, from day to day, from hour to hour. In other words, we are the hero of our own story. We cannot believe that it is finished, that we are 'finished', even though we may say so; we expect another chapter, another installment, tomorrow or next week."
- Mary McCarthy
"Generosity is that palpable extra that comes along with the gift, motiveless as a good wind. Best is the extra that comes unencumbered: pure generosity of spirit, always replenishing itself. We the less generous are quick to suspect it, remembering what we've given and why. But those who have it irradiate the day. They redefine the meaning of wealth. We fall in love with them, we try to shine that brightly, yet before long they've mostly instructed us about what it is we want to keep. Blessed are the generous who keep enough for themselves so we can live with them without guilt. Blessed, too, are those who receive well, so the generous get their reward. A cold heart is not generosity's natural enemy. Scarcity is, and its crucible as well. Blessed are the poor who give to the poor. In our world of plenty when our daughter was three, at first we laughed at her mistake: "Share, share, and like." Then we praised it."
- Stephen Dunn
log on, choose a religion and get blessed
"I too think the intellectual should constantly disturb, should bear witness to the misery of the world, should be provocative by being independent, should rebel against all hidden and open pressure and manipulations, should be the chief doubter of systems, of power and its incantations, should be witness to their mendacity. For this reason, an intellectual cannot fit into any role that may be assigned to him . . . An intellectual essentially doesn't belong anywhere; he stands out as an irritant wherever he is; he does not fit into any pigeonhole completely . . . To a certain extent an intellectual is always condemned to defeat. He is like Sisyphus in that regard . . . And yet in another, more profound sense the intellectual remains, despite all his defeats, undefeated - again like Sisyphus. He is in fact victorious through his defeats."
- Vaclav Havel
"You need to be serious. If you are able to be serious you will be quiet and still and you will see the way things really are. You will realize that nothing you think makes any difference. You will see how nothing you ever thought makes any difference, and you will see how nothing you ever could think could ever make any difference. Let this in. If you let this in, you will be able to see clearly. You will be able to discriminate. You will be able to extricate yourself from the endless confusion and chaos of thought and memory, fear and desire.
Face the complete illusory nature of your existence. Face it stoically, silently, without moving a muscle. Face it and see the truth."
- Andrew Cohen
"Many people suffer with their thoughts, not knowing that revealing them on paper, continuously over a two hour period, removes the stinging bitterness which they are tightly wrapped within."
- Asmos
"It is so fatally easy to confuse an aesthetic appreciation of the spiritual life with the life itself - to dream that you have waked, washed, and dressed and then to find yourself still in bed."
- C.S. Lewis
"Happiness is dependent on duration: it can only appear to exist in the sequence of time. Moreover nobody can know that he is happy - an animal doesn't, a child doesn't; a man may know it afterwards. Therefore happiness can only be an effect of memory.
You look at an animal, a child, a man, and you say he is happy? It is you who sees it: he doesn't. You may be right, but it is you who recognizes whatever you mean by happiness: what you recognize exists in you, and nowhere else wherever. Moreover in you also it only appears to exist in relation to memory - memories of memories of something you never knew otherwise at all.
You say that you can train yourself to recognize it almost at once? Almost - but not quite, for even then it belongs to the past. In order to know what it is you cannot any longer be subject to the passage of time, which means that you can no longer be you, and that it cannot any longer be happiness - for then, what it is - you must be.
It never existed at all: it is merely your interpretation from memory of your own intemporal nature.
I am: it is you who supply the details - and they are whatever your reactions may imagine, but they belong to you and not to me - for there is none such, other than in your mind."
- Wei Wu Wei
One must have a mind of winter
To regard the frost and the boughs
Of the pine trees crusted with snow;
And have been cold a long time
To behold the junipers shagged with ice,
The Spruces rough in the distant glitter
Of the January sun; and not to think
Of any misery in the sound of the wind,
In the sound of a few leaves,
Which is the sound of the land
Full of the same wind
That is blowing in the same bare place
For the listener, who listens in the snow,
And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and
The nothing that is.
- Wallace Stevens
what we come round to
in the end
is that all our thinking
has brought us nowhere
that the trail-blazing journey
has ended where it began
that thought is at best
a protection against further thought
that the heathens we sought to save
the masses to educate
need neither our salvation
nor our education
that we therefore
serve no particular purpose
perform no particular function
have no particular place to go
& we roll to the ground
& we cry out like children
& we bark like dogs
& we learn to wag our tails
- Jennifer Rankin
The Sea and other stories
wild raging wind from ten thousand hollows
when I first awake deep beneath my blanket
I forget my body is in a silent void."
- Han Shan Te'-Ch'ing
that Zen is the reductio ad absurdum of Buddhism?
If not, why not?
"Are we not wasps who spend all day in a fruitless attempt to traverse a window-pane - while the other half of the window is wide open?
Were not the Zen Masters eternally pointing with their finger to the open window, a gesture which we wasps do not seem able to follow?
Wasps seem to lack the sense of one dimension. And we?"
- Wei Wu Wei
Out of nothing, I
become nothing and will
leave again for it,
the nothing out of which
the stars boil up each
night, I know, out of nowhere,
the nothing out of which,
magically, I take my breath
and then quietly return
my old breath to sink in it.
And so it goes, this
meeting of my heart's knock
on nothing's door that
is never answered at all.
And the river of my words
flowing out to nothing's sea
and drowning there so that
everywhere I run into
it and down every road.
Who says that the sunlight
here can make a difference,
that the world we see
is real? I know that
the world dissolves before
this simple idea of nothing.
And bows before it as I do.
Soon my bones will bow before
it, and my teeth and hair.
- Sue Owen
"I learned that it is the weak who are cruel, and that gentleness is to be expected only from the strong."
- Leo Rosten
"Beginning today, treat everyone you meet as if he or she were going to be dead by midnight. Extend to them all the care, kindness, and understanding you can muster, and do so with no thought of any reward. Your life will never be the same again."
- Og Mandino
"Say to yourself at daybreak: I shall come across the busybody, the thankless, the overbearing, the treacherous, the envious, the unneighborly. All this has befallen them because they know not good from evil."
- Marcus Aurelius
"You see everyone through your fog of opinions and conclusions - your viewpoint. So you can't see them clearly. Thus your reactions to others are simply statements of your viewpoint and may have little to do with what is. The same is true of the way others view you, so don't take any compliments or criticisms too seriously."
- Dick Sutphen
"We experience ourselves, our thoughts and feelings as something separate from the rest. A kind of optical delusion of consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us."
- Einstein
"People do not live in the present always, at one with it. They live at all kinds of and manners of distance from it, as difficult to measure as the course of planets. Fears and traumas make their journeys slanted, peripheral, uneven, evasive.''
- Anais Nin
"You can reach me if you but considered what I am, and you can reach me still whenever you wish if you are content to find me as I am and not as you wish me to be."
- Bernard of Clairvaux
"How strange and terrible to approach a human being through the envelope of flesh and find a soul."
- Isadora Duncan
menial and unimportant things
that you have no time to accept a real challenge when it comes along.
This applies to play as well as work.
A day merely survived is no cause for celebration.
You are not here to fritter away your precious hours
when you have the ability to accomplish so much
by making a slight change in your routine.
No more busy work. No more hiding from success.
Leave time, leave space, to grow. Now. Now! Not tomorrow!"
- Og Mandino
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