Carried to its final extreme, the logical end of this type of reaction to life is suicide. The hard-bitten kind of person is always, as it were, a partial suicide; some of himself is already dead
Zen does not confuse spirituality with thinking about God while one is peeling potatoes. Zen spirituality is just to peel the potatoes.
The only way to make sense out of change is to plunge into it, move with it, and join the dance.
The religious idea of God cannot do full duty for the metaphysical infinity.
But at any rate, the point is that God is what nobody admits to being, and everybody really is.
Never pretend to a love which you do not actually feel for love is not ours to command.
Faith is a state of openness or trust.
The style of God venerated in the church, mosque, or synagogue seems completely different from the style of the natural universe.
You don't look out there for God, something in the sky, you look in you.
But to me nothing - the negative, the empty - is exceedingly powerful.
No valid plans for the future can be made by those who have no capacity for living now.
The difficulty for most of us in the modern world is that the old-fashioned idea of God has become incredible or implausible.
If we live we live if we die we die if we suffer we suffer if we are terrified we are terrified. There is no problem about it.
Technology is destructive only in the hands of people who do not realize that they are one and the same process as the universe.
I have realized that the past and future are real illusions, that they exist in the present, which is what there is and all there is.
No work or love will flourish out of guilt, fear, or hollowness of heart, just as no valid plans for the future can be made by those who have no capacity for living now.
But the attitude of faith is to let go, and become open to truth, whatever it might turn out to be.
And the attitude of faith is the very opposite of clinging to belief, of holding on.
You are that vast thing that you see far, far off with great telescopes.
So then, the relationship of self to other is the complete realization that loving yourself is impossible without loving everything defined as other than yourself.