strike a chord

"Human beings have a tendency to 'live in their heads'. This phrase covers several facts. First, men have a tendency to overtheorize. Some things are ruined by too much thinking on them, things which are essentially matters of experience. What is more, almost anything can be the source of immediate experience, and so almost anything is vulnerable to ruination by too much theorizing. The second fact is this; such theorizing usually presents itself phenomenologically as internal verbalization, and the internal verbalization often insinuates itself between ourselves and the thing experienced. This is how the thinking interrupts experience and how it leaves us with only our verbalizations. This leads to the third fact: when our theoretical internal verbalization is interposed between ourselves and external things, the object of our awareness becomes ourselves. It is we who are doing the theorizing, and to be aware of the theoretical verbalizing is to be aware of ourselves. This state of mind is undesirable, for it is a commonplace that our happiest moments come when we are not conscious of ourselves, and that most forms of consciousness of self are baneful. It is hard to say why this is so; perhaps the resources of a self are much more limited than the resources of the world, so only an object-directed consciousness can satisfy the human appetite for variety."
- Michael E. Levin
Comments on the Paradoxicality of Zen Koans



"The thing that blinds us and deafens us is the ceaselessly moving mind, the preoccupation we have with our thoughts. It is the incessant internal dialogue that shuts out everything else. That is the problem with trying to take a preconceived photograph. Before you even walk out of the building, you blind yourself. All day long we talk to ourselves. We preoccupy ourselves with the past, or we preoccupy ourselves with the future, and while we preoccupy ourselves, we miss the moment and miss our lives. Looking, we do not see. It is as if we were blind. Listening, we do not hear. It is as if we were deaf. Loving, we do not feel. It is as if we were dead. Preoccupied, we do not notice the reality around us. How can we be present? How can we taste and touch our lives?
The answer to these questions is not outside yourself. To see this truth requires the backward step, going very deep into yourself to find the foundation of reality and of your life. To see it is not the same as understanding it or believing it. To see it means to realize it with the whole body and mind. To realize it transforms one's life, one's way of perceiving the universe and the self, and of expressing what has been realized.
When you practice the Zen arts, practice your life - trust yourself completely. Trust the process of sitting. Know that deep within each and every one of us, under layers of conditioning, there is an enlightened being, alive and well. In order to function, it needs to be discovered. To discover this buddha is wisdom. To make it function in the world is compassion. That wisdom and compassion is the life of each one of us. It is up to you what you do with it."
- John Daido Loori



"The things we really need come to us only as gifts, and in order to receive them as gifts we have to be open. In order to be open we have to renounce ourselves, in a sense we have to die to our image of ourselves, our autonomy, our fixation upon our self-willed identity. We have to be able to relax the psychic and spiritual cramp which knots us in the painful, vulnerable, helpless "I" that is all we know as ourselves."
- Thomas Merton
Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander



"In precisely the same way, you are both what you do and what happens to you. You have a little game in which you play that you are not responsible for what happens to you, you are only responsible for what you do. This illusion allows you to compete with the two sides of yourself. It is like getting two knitting pins, one in each hand, and having a fencing match with yourself. If you sincerely try to stick one hand with the other, the first hand must really try to stick the other, just to defend itself. You will come to a sort of standstill, unless you decide that your right hand is the one that is going to win, and then you have broken the rules of the game, which is what we do all the time."
- Alan Watts

mountain sounds carry a chill wisdom
an upwelling spring whispers subtle tales
pine breezes stir the fire beneath my tea
bamboo shadows soak deep into my robe
I grind my ink: clouds scraping across the crags
copy out a verse: birds settling on branches
as the world rolls right on by
- Shih-shu



You will walk toward the mirror,
closer and closer, then flow
into the glass. You will disappear
some day like that, being
more real, more true, at the last.

You learn what you are, but slowly,
a baby, a boy, a man,
a self often shattered, and pieces
put together again till the end:
you halt, the glass opens.

A surface, an image, a past.
- William Stafford



"There are always moments when one feels empty and estranged. Such moments are most desirable, for it means the soul has cast its moorings and is sailing for distant places. This is detachment - when the old is over and the new has not yet come. If you are afraid the state may be distressing, there is really nothing to be afraid of. Remember: What ever you come across - go beyond."
- Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj



"All my life I have been contemplating a question of Heidegger's that has always struck me as strangely profound: why is there something, why not rather nothing?

Have you ever thought about that? We take our life, we take life, we take existence, for granted. We take it as a given, and then we complain that it isn't working out as we wanted it to. But why should we be here in the first place? Why should we exist at all? Why should anything exist at all? Really there's no reason for it. Why not nothing rather than something? Nothing would be simpler."
- Norman Fischer
Gratitude



The ebbing tide sees off the moon as it sinks below the water's edge
You depart, I remain; tears wet my robe
Even the birds on the beach understand men's grief at parting;
Following the boat, they fly off and scatter amidst the blue waves.
- Kosei Ryuha


<°))))><


Today's Saint
O.K., so he's crazy,
. . . . . . . . dowser, cloudbuster. But it's his goodness
makes him attempt so variously,
assuming rapports.
. . . . . . . . He's looking
not at the fragments but for
the interplay. It's your pain,
. . . . . . . . my grimace, torments him:
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . why, why
. . . . . . . . the jagged lives.
He wanted, even in his first mistakes
. . . . . . . . (the cold girl taken too often
. . . . . . . . hating him at last, escaping)
that all should flower, everyone
joyful. If his imagination
proliferates, it is for you. If not,
he gave us the sudden rain last Sunday,
the darkening. Maybe raindrops?
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . It's a
'means of grace' he's trying to
secure for us.
. . . . . . . . 'The cloud
compact of energy.' That we may
live.
- Denise Levertov



"You realize that prayer takes us beyond the law. When you are praying you are, in a certain sense, an outlaw. There is no law between the heart and God."
- Thomas Merton



" . . . supposing you were given the power to dream any dream you wanted to dream every night. Naturally, you could dream any span of time - and it could be anything you wanted - because you make up your mind before you go to sleep. "Tonight I'm going to dream of so-and-so." Naturally, you would start out by fulfilling all your wishes. You would have all the pleasures you could imagine, the most marvelous meals, the most entrancing love affairs, the most romantic journeys; you could listen to music such as no mortal has heard, and see landscapes beyond your wildest dreams.

And for several nights, oh maybe for a whole month of nights, you would go on that way, having a wonderful time. But then, after a while, you would begin to think, "Well, I've seen quite a bit, let's spice it up, let's have a little adventure." And you would dream of yourself being threatened by all sorts of dangers. You would rescue princesses from dragons, you would perhaps engage in notable battles, you would be a hero! And then as time went on, you would dare yourself to do more and more outrageous things, and at some point in the game you would say, "Tonight I am going to dream in such a way that I don't know that I'm dreaming," and by so doing you would take the experience of the drama for complete reality. What a shock when you woke up! You could really scare yourself!

And then on successive nights you might dare yourself to experience even more extraordinary things just for the contrast when you woke up. You could , for example, dream yourself in situations of extreme poverty, disease, agony. You could, as it were, live the essence of suffering to its most intense point, and then suddenly, wake up and find it was after all nothing but a dream and everything's perfectly OK.

Well, how do you know that's not what you're doing already. You reading, sitting there with all your problems, with all your whole complicated life situation, it may just be the very dream you decided to get into."
- Alan Watts
The Drama of it All
The Essential Alan Watts



Sixteen Bodhisattvas Enter the Bath
Right down
"full fathoms five"
a deep joy resides
with crustaceans
and anemones
and rocks collected
from early childhood.

Water bodhisattvas.
Aquasattvas.

On the bath-mat
a wet footprint
slowly evaporates.
- Richard von Sturmer
Blue Cliff Verses



"You could find that courses of action appear to you out of nowhere just the way the next moment does. Your navigation could unfold by itself, and the universe might provide the beauty and happiness you seek. When you forget your carefully assembled fiction of who you are, you can find a natural delight in people, in the planet, the stones, and the trees. There is no observable limit to this beauty, and no one is excluded from it. Then, if you are fighting an enemy, you may be fighting them as well as you can, but you won't be a true believer. You will know that an enemy is not truly other and that the fighting is some kind of misunderstanding. The worries that lead to quarrels may still be present, but they are not the main thing. Your problems could be a kind of dream, very powerful when you are in it, and yet a dream. You might notice that, even deep in dreaming, you are near to waking up. And the more you are awake, the kinder the world might seem."
- John Tarrant
Bring Me the Rhinoceros



My home can be anywhere, heaven or earth.
All I need is room in my heart.
And a good source of water, of course.

If I'm on a mountain, I can set my own pace.
Down here, I'm busy now putting away herbs.
But even when I'm not busy I still don't read much.

You need room in your heart . . . a big empty space
To sort out what's real from what's not.
- Hsu Yun



Your footsteps are the path, and nothing else;
there is no path, paths are made by walking.
Walking makes the path, and on looking back
We see a trail that never can be walked again.
Traveler, there is no path,
Only a wake in the sea.
- Antonio Machado
Proverbios y Cantares



"Spend the afternoon. You can't take it with you."
- Annie Dillard



"Nature is a temple where, from living pillars,
Confused words are sometimes allowed to escape;
Here man passes, through forests of symbols,
Which watch him with looks of recognition"
- Charles Baudelaire



"As a single footstep will not make a path on the earth, so a single thought will not make a pathway in the mind. To make a deep physical path, we walk again and again. To make a deep mental path, we must think over and over the kind of thoughts we wish to dominate our lives."
- Henry David Thoreau



"The richness of your life comes down to the richness of your thoughts. If you want to have a full and more meaningful life you need to better tend your field of dreams."
- Earl R. Smith

><((((º>



"I would like you to be Zorba the Greek and Gautama the Buddha together simultaneously. Less than that won't do. Zorba represents the earth with all its flowers and greenery and mountains and rivers and oceans, and Buddha represents the sky with all its stars and clouds and rainbows. But the sky without the earth will be empty, the sky cannot laugh without the earth, and the earth without the sky will be dead. Bring both together and a dance comes into existence. The earth and the sky dancing together and there is laughter, there is joy, there is celebration."
- Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh



I've decided to make up my mind
about nothing, to assume the water mask,
to finish my life disguised as a creek,
an eddy, joining at night the full,
sweet flow, to absorb the sky,
to swallow the heat and cold, the moon
and stars, to swallow myself
in ceaseless flow.
- Jim Harrison
The Theory and Practice of Rivers



Eight Minutes
Eight minutes of writing. An eternity. Eight stars of
a nameless constellation burning themselves out. The
eight songs that a mockingbird can sing. Eight blos-
soms on the ends of eight small stems that have arisen
in the eight days of spring. The eight lords of light,
who praise the eight lords of darkness, who praise the
eight lords of twilight, who praise the eight lords of
light. The eight pictures of my black and white child-
hood. Eight clear rivers that leap from eight moun-
tains to form eight sacred, calm lakes that harbor
thought and consciousness. Eight moments of doubt.
Eight moments of certainty. And between them the
eight moments of transition, the eight connections to
eight different realities, the alternate buddhas I might
have been, might be, might become, might never see.
Eight simple breaths drawn in and exhaled eight times.
Eight types of noise surrounded by the eight types of
silence, which finally engulfs all eight forms of being
and not being. This number is arbitrary, but yet it feels
true in all things and it displays impermanence. The
sum of all earthly numbers, reduced at last to the
single, wavering note of a bell, vibrating with the har-
mony of a great breathing into all the selves and all
the not selves a universe can hold.
- Mike Pfeiffer



Deep autumn -
my neighbor,
how does he live, I wonder?
- Basho



"I am trying to check my habits of seeing, to counter them for the sake of greater freshness. I am trying to be unfamiliar with what I'm doing."
- John Cage



"Far from offering a path to transcend the material world, Zen endeavors to open up to the material world by entering it fully. Once you enter the material world completely, the teachings imply, its depths will be revealed. The material world is not just the material world; it is not what we think it is. In fact, the Zen masters show us, the material world is not, as spiritual practitioners might initially imagine, in and of itself superficial: what's superficial is our habitual view of it. To see the material world as it really is is to recognize its non-difference from the highest spiritual truths. Zen training is the effort to learn to enter the material world at such a depth, and to appreciate it."
- Norman Fischer
Wash Your Bowls
an essay on Zen Materialism



"Mountains should be climbed with as little effort as possible and without desire. The reality of your own nature should determine the speed. If you become restless, speed up. If you become winded, slow down. You climb the mountain in an equilibrium between restlessness and exhaustion. Then, when you're no longer thinking ahead, each footstep isn't just a means to an end but a unique event in itself. This leaf has jagged edges. This rock looks loose. From this place the snow is less visible, even though closer. These are things you should notice anyway. To live only for some future goal is shallow. It's the sides of the mountain which sustain life, not the top. Here's where things grow."
- Robert Pirsig
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

ﮏ

"Two Chinese monks, Seppo and Ganto, while on a pilgrimage, were trapped in a snowstorm. By sheer good luck, there was an inn nearby where they were able to take shelter and wait out the storm.


Ganto, the older of the two, immediately stretched out in front of the fireplace and went to sleep. Seppo, on the other hand, immediately began doing zazen.


After a good long snooze, Ganto woke up and saw Seppo still sitting in front of him. Seppo chided him, "How can you just go to sleep? Aren't we supposed to be on a pilgrimage?"


"Why don't you give yourself a break?" Ganto asked. "It's been a long cold journey; what's wrong with taking a nap in front of the fire?"


Seppo replied, "I've never had the big enlightenment experience I've been searching for in my practice. I can't afford to waste a moment."


Ganto said, "Don't you know that a family heirloom isn't something that arrives one day through the front door - it's what you've had in your possession all along."

ﮏ

"The fearful man objects that life is merciless. It is, and rightly so, for mercy is a quality invented by the human mind to supply the deficiencies of human judgment and of man-made law. The laws of Life are perfect, and dispassionately just. Life reeks not of the individual, who either obeys its laws and moves to the ever More, or resists the flow and is smashed accordingly. If the whole of self be opened with a willingness and yearning to be filled, Life the superabundant will reply unstintingly, but if the gates of self be closed, the pressure at the gates will rise and rise until the resister yields at last to the Beauty-Wisdom-Love that seeks to enter in. Then will Life so fill the form that it will shatter it, only to build a palace more commodious, and when its gates in turn are closed with selfishness, lay siege to them anew. Not until no self remains that can be filled does the individual cease from suffering; only when the resistant self has died for ever can the true Self welcome Life with joyous heart, and ride the River of Becoming onward to the Shoreless Sea."
- Christmas Humphreys
The River of Becoming



"Once in awhile it really hits people that they don't have to experience the world in the way they have been told to."
- Alan Keightley


<°))))><


"Knowing what will happen in the future, we are faced with a simple choice: either we resolve not to become attached to people and things, or we decide to love them even more fiercely."
- Amélie Nothomb
The Character of Rain



"We must face the challenge of the future realizing that we are still problems to ourselves. Where the religious dimension enters in is not just in pious clichés but in a radical self-criticism and openness and a profound ability to trust not only in our chances of a winning gamble, but in an inner dynamism of life itself, a basic creativity, a power of life to win over entropy and death. But once again, we have to pay attention to the fact that we may formulate this in words, and our unconscious death-drive may be contradicting us in destructive undertones we don't hear.

In other words, we have all got to learn to be wide open, and not get closed up in little tight systems and cliques, little coteries of gnostic experts."
- Thomas Merton
Witness to Freedom



"Peace of mind isn't at all superficial to technical work. It's the whole thing. That which produces it is good work and that which destroys it is bad work. The specs, the measuring instruments, the quality control, the final checkout, these are all means toward the end of satisfying the peace of mind of those responsible for the work. What really counts in the end is their peace of mind, nothing else. The reason for this is that peace of mind is a prerequisite for a perception of that Quality which is beyond romantic Quality and classic Quality and which unites the two, and which must accompany the work as it proceeds. The way to see what looks gook and understand the reasons it looks good, and to be at one with this goodness as the work proceeds, is to cultivate an inner quietness, a peace of mind so that goodness can shine through. I say inner peace of mind. It has no direct relationship to external circumstances. It can occur to a monk in meditation, to a soldier in heavy combat or to a machinist taking off that last ten-thousandth of an inch. It involves unself-consciousness, which produces a complete identification with one's circumstances, and there are levels and levels of this identification and levels and levels of quietness quite as profound and difficult of attainment as the more familiar levels of activity. The mountains of achievement are quality discovered in one direction only, and are relatively meaningless and often unobtainable unless taken together with the ocean trenches of self-awareness - so different from self-consciousness - which result from inner peace of mind. This inner peace of mind occurs on three levels or understanding. Physical quietness seems the easiest to achieve, although there are levels and levels of this too, as attested by the ability of Hindu mystics to live buried alive for many days. Mental quietness, in which one has no wandering thoughts at all, seems more difficult, but can be achieved. But value quietness, in which one has no wandering desires at all but simply performs the acts of his life without desire - that seems the hardest. I've sometimes thought this inner peace of mind, this quietness is similar to if not identical with the sort of calm you sometimes get when going fishing, which accounts for much of the popularity of this sport. Just to sit with the line in the water, not moving, not really thinking about anything, not really caring about anything either, seems to draw out the inner tensions and frustrations that have prevented you from solving problems you couldn't solve before and introduced ugliness and clumsiness into your actions and thoughts."
- Robert Pirsig
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance



"Brain cells create ideas.
Stress kills brain cells.
Stress is not a good idea."
- Doug Hall



"Shall we liken Christmas to the web in a loom? There are many weavers, who work into the pattern the experience of their lives. When one generation goes, another comes to take up the weft where it has been dropped. The pattern changes as the mind changes, yet never begins quite anew. At first, we are not sure that we discern the pattern, but at last we see that, unknown to the weavers themselves, something has taken shape before our eyes, and that they have made something very beautiful, something which compels our understanding."
- Earl W. Count
4,000 Years of Christmas



"The family is one of nature's masterpieces."
- George Santayana



Christmas Eve
"I was a little lonely at the edges, so I packed myself off to do soji. It worked. Then I lopped off the top of a pine tree during the blizzard and covered it with colored ribbon, then deep-fried overiced "things." The electric power failed. Dinner was by candlelight - gruel and cabbage. Watching the snow fall, so soft and firm like a mother patting her baby to sleep, by the gentle glow of a single candle, I felt quite still and at one, in peace with the world. No Christmas Eve celebrations, and it didn't matter. The lights were out, so I settled down to meditate by the wood stove. Tachibana Sensei burst in like Santa, bearing a bag of goodies. Behind him, his boys tumbled in like elves. He brought a naggin of whiskey and the best fruit cake I've ever had, made right in dear dirty Dublin and enjoyed in Japan. Looking out the window, the candle seemed to glow inside me, but the wood fire seemed to crackle from the inside, too. Felt so happy, so simple."
- Maura O'Halloran
The Zen journal and Letters of Maura "Soshin" O'Halloran



Rest in natural great peace this exhausted mind,
Beaten helpless by karma and neurotic thoughts
Like the relentless fury of the pounding waves
In the infinite ocean of samsara.
Rest in natural great peace.
- Nyoshul Khen Rinpoche



Ring out, wild bells
Ring out, wild bells, to the wild sky,
The flying cloud, the frosty light;
The year is dying in the night;
Ring out, wild bells, and let him die.

Ring out the old, ring in the new,
Ring, happy bells, across the snow:
The year is going, let him go;
Ring out the false, ring in the true.

Ring out the grief that saps the mind,
For those that here we see no more,
Ring out the feud of rich and poor,
Ring in redress to all mankind.

Ring out a slowly dying cause,
And ancient forms of party strife;
Ring in the nobler modes of life,
With sweeter manners, purer laws.

Ring out the want, the care the sin,
The faithless coldness of the times;
Ring out, ring out my mournful rhymes,
But ring the fuller minstrel in.

Ring out false pride in place and blood,
The civic slander and the spite;
Ring in the love of truth and right,
Ring in the common love of good.

Ring out old shapes of foul disease,
Ring out the narrowing lust of gold;
Ring out the thousand wars of old,
Ring in the thousand years of peace.

Ring in the valiant man and free,
The larger heart, the kindlier hand;
Ring out the darkness of the land,
Ring in the Christ that is to be.
- Lord Alfred Tennyson