Mountains like these and travelers in the mountains and events that happen to them here are found not only in Zen literature but in the tales of every major religion. This allegory of a physical mount...
I don’t know why—it’s just that—I don’t know—they’re not kin.—Surprising word, I think to myself never used it before. Not of kin—sounds like hillbilly talk—not of a kind—same root—kindness, too—they...
Dad?What? A small bird rises from a tree in front of us.What should I be when I grow up?The bird disappears over a far ridge. I don't know what to say. Honest, I finally say.
But the ones who go posing as moralists are the worst. Cost-free morals. Full of great ways for others to improve without any expense to themselves. There's an ego thing in there, too. They use the mo...
Or winters when the sloughs were frozen over and dead and i could walk across the ice and snow between the dead cattails and see nothing but grey skies and dead things and cold
When you have mountains in the distance or even hills, you have space.
When analytic thought, the knife, is applied to experience, something is always killed in the process.
Newton invented a new form of reason. He expanded reason to handle infinitesimal changes and I think what is needed now is a similar expansion of reason to handle technological ugliness. The trouble i...
DeWeese asks, 'Does this tie in with what you were doing on Quality?''It's the direct result of it,' I say.I remember something and look at DeWeese. 'Didn't you advise me to drop it?''I said no one ha...
One of the most moral acts is to create a space in which life can move forward.
Care and Quality are internal and external aspects of the same thing. A person who sees Quality and feels it as he works is a person who cares. A person who cares about what he sees and does is a pers...
Traditional scientific method has always been at the very best, 20 - 20 hindsight. It's good for seeing where you've been. It's good for testing the truth of what you think you know, but it can't tell...
You look at these mountains now, and they look so permanent and peaceful, but they're changing all the time and the changes aren't always peaceful. Underneath us, beneath us here right now, there are...
Who really can face the future? All you can do is project from the past, even when the past shows that such projections are often wrong.
To doubt the literal meaning of the words of Jesus or Moses incurs hostility from most people, but it’s just a fact that if Jesus or Moses were to appear today, unidentified, with the same message he...
This larger goal wouldn’t be the imitation of education in Universities today, glossed over and concealed by grades and degrees that give the appearance of something happening when, in fact, almost no...
So we navigate mostly by dead reckoning, and deduction from what clues we find. I keep a compass in one pocket for overcast days when the sun doesn't show directions and have the map mounted in a spec...
The study of the art of motorcycle maintenance is really a miniature study of the art of rationality itself. Working on a motorcycle, working well, caring, is to become part of a process, to achieve a...
The only Zen you find on the tops of mountains is the Zen you bring up there.
His early failure had released him from any felt obligation to think along institutional lines and his thoughts were already independent to a degree few people are familiar with. He felt that institut...