But we try to pretend, you see, that the external world exists altogether independently of us.
Things are as they are. Looking out into it the universe at night, we make no comparisons between right and wrong stars, nor between well and badly arranged constellations.
And although our bodies are bounded with skin, and we can differentiate between outside and inside, they cannot exist except in a certain kind of natural environment.
Buddhism has in it no idea of there being a moral law laid down by somekind of cosmic lawgiver.
And the attitude of faith is the very opposite of clinging to belief, of holding on.
Zen does not confuse spirituality with thinking about God while one is peeling potatoes. Zen spirituality is just to peel the potatoes.
But I'll tell you what hermits realize. If you go off into a far, far forest and get very quiet, you'll come to understand that you're connected with everything.
You and I are all as much continuous with the physical universe as a wave is continuous with the ocean.
Some believe all that parents, tutors, and kindred believe. They take their principles by inheritance, and defend them as they would their estates, because they are born heirs to them.
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.
So the bodhisattva saves all beings, not by preaching sermons to them, but by showing them that they are delivered, they are liberated, by the act of not being able to stop changing.
Religion is not a department of life; it is something that enters into the whole of it.
Wars based on principle are far more destructive... the attacker will not destroy that which he is after.
Technology is destructive only in the hands of people who do not realize that they are one and the same process as the universe.
We identify in our experience a differentiation between what we do and what happens to us.
So what is discord at one level of your being is harmony at another level.
What the devil is the point of surviving, going on living, when it's a drag? But you see, that's what people do.
To have faith is to trust yourself to the water. When you swim you don't grab hold of the water, because if you do you will sink and drown. Instead you relax, and float.
How is it possible that a being with such sensitive jewels as the eyes, such enchanted musical instruments as the ears, and such fabulous arabesque of nerves as the brain can experience itself anything less than a god.
The moralist is the person who tells people that they ought to be unselfish, when they still feel like egos, and his efforts are always and invariably futile.
