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To study the Way is to study the self. To study the self is to forget the self. To forget the self is to be enlightened by all the myriad things.
The past is weird. I mean, does it really exist? It feels like it exists, but where is it? And if it did exist but doesn’t now, then where did it go?
The day the mountains move has come. Or so I say, though no one will believe me. The mountains were merely asleep for a while. But in ages past, they had moved, as if they were on fire. If you don’t b...
The cat still seemed to be somewhat there with him, but only as an absence, a cat-shaped hole.
Even the snap of a finger, he says, provides us with sixty-five opportunities to wake up and to choose actions that will produce beneficial karma and turn our lives around.
Does the half-life of information correlate with the decay of our attention?
Could Pesto be his own observer? Interesting question. He used to like to raise his leg and study his asshole. It didn't seem like this observation caused him to split into multiple cats with multiple...
But shame is not a pleasant feeling, and some Japanese politicians are always trying to change our children’s history textbooks so that these genocides and tortures are not taught to the next generati...
But maybe that was the trick—to accept the responsibility and forgo the control? To love without expectation? A paradox for sure, but such a relief.
At one point in my life, I learned how to think. I used to know how to feel. In war, these are lessons best forgotten.
Assumptions suck. They’re like expectations. Assumptions and expectations will kill any relationship
And what does it mean to waste time anyway? If you waste time is it lost forever? And if time is lost forever, what does that mean? It’s not like you get to die any sooner, right?
A free man, that is to say, a man who lives according to the dictates of reason alone, is not led by fear of death, but directly desires the good, that is to say, desires to act, and to preserve his b...
Soaking them in buckets of seawater, to which she’d add a handful of cornmeal and a rusty nail. She’d agitate the water several times a day, and change the water after twelve hours.
Whenever I think about my stupid empty life, I come to the conclusion that I’m just wasting my time, and I’m not the only one. Everybody I know is the same, except for old Jiko. Just wasting time, kil...
Think not-thinking. How do you think not-thinking? Nonthinking. This is the essential art of zazen.
Spinoza writes, A free man, that is to say, a man who lives according to the dictates of reason alone, is not led by fear of death, but directly desires the good, that is to say, desires to act, and t...
Sometimes when she told stories about the past her eyes would get teary from all the memories she had, but they weren't tears. She wasn't crying. They were just the memories, leaking out.
So when we left the apartment, it was this doomed unreal feeling I remember more than anything else, like we were bad actors in terrible costumes in a play that was guaranteed to tank, but we had to g...