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It seems that those who go deeply into almost any of the great spiritual traditions come to the same place and find themselves talking the same language.

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If we get rid of all wishful thinking and dubious metaphysical speculations, we can hardly doubt that - at a time not too distant - each one of us will simply cease to be. It won't be like going into darkness forever, for there will be neither darkness, nor time, nor sense of futility, nor anyone to feel anything about it. Try as best you can to imagine this, and keep at it. The universe will, supposedly, be going on as usual, but for each individual it will be as if it had never happened at all; and even that is saying too much, because there won't be anyone for whom it never happened. Make this prospect as real as possible: the one total certainty. You will be as if you had never existed, which was, however, the way you were before you did exist - and not only you but everything else. Nevertheless, with such an improbable past, here we are. We begin from nothing and end in nothing. You can say that again. Think it over and over, trying to conceive the fact of coming to never having existed. After a while you will begin to feel rather weird, as if this very apparent something that you are is at the same time nothing at all. Indeed, you seem to be rather firmly and certainly grounded in nothingness, much as your sight seems to emerge from that total blankness behind your eyes. The weird feeling goes with the fact that you are being introduced to a new common sense, a new logic, in which you are beginning to realize the identity of ku and shiki, void and form. All of a sudden it will strike you that this nothingness is the most potent, magical, basic, and reliable thing you ever thought of, and that the reason you can't form the slight idea of it is that it's yourself. But not the self you thought you were.

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To 'realize Buddha in this body' is to realize that you yourself are in fact the universe. You are not, as parents and teachers are wont to imply, a mere stranger on probation in the scheme of things; you are rather a sort of nerve-ending through which the universe is taking a peek at itself, which is why, deep down inside, almost everyone has a vague sense of eternity. Few dare admit this because it would amount to believing that you are God, and God in our culture is the cosmic Boss, so that anyone imagining himself to be be God is deemed either blasphemous or insane. But for Buddhists this is no problem because they do not have this particular idea of God, and so also are not troubled by the notion of sin and everlasting damnation. Their picture of the universe is not political, not a kingdom ruled by a monarch, but rather an organism in which every part is a 'doing' of the whole, so that everything that happens to you is understood as your own karma, or 'doing.' Thus when things go wrong you have no one but yourself to blame. You are not a sinner but a fool, so try another way.

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I can have the feeling 'self' only in relation to, and by contrast with, the feeling 'other.' In the same way, I am what I am only in relation to what everything else is. The Japanese call this ji-ji-mu-ge, which means that between every thing-event (ji) and every other thing-event there is no (mu) barrier (ge). Each implies all, and all implies each.

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The heart of Zen is not an idea but an experience, and when that experience happens (and 'happens' is just the right word) you are set free from ideas altogether. Certainly, you can still use them, but you no longer take them seriously.

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Every human being is a metaphysician just as every philosopher has appetites and emotions - and by this I mean that we all have certain basic assumptions about the good life and the nature of reality. Even the typical businessman who asserts that he is a practical fellow unconcerned with higher things declares thereby that he is a pragmatist or a positivist, and not a very thoughtful one at that.

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The uninstructed adventurer with psychedelics, as with Zen or yoga or any other mystical discipline, is an easy victim of what Jung calls 'inflation,' of the messianic megalomania that comes from misunderstanding the experience of union with God.

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My retrospective attitude to LSD is that when one has received the message, one hangs up the phone.

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The enlightened one sees the world that others see, but does not conceive it in the way others do, as a collection of separate things other than himself. For when we get the actual sense of depth from a drawing in perspective, the concept is overruling the eyes, as Adelbert Ames had constructed a whole series of experiments demonstrating that we see what we believe rather than believe what we see.

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When we get heavily serious about either sex or religion there follow crimes of passion, suicides, bitter divorces, inquisitions and holy wars - all of which are signs of imbecility rather than sincere conviction.

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As in music, the point of life is its pattern at every stage of its development, and in a world where there is neither self nor other, the only identity is just This - which is all, which is energy, which is God by no name.

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The industrial system offers few jobs that any self-respecting person wants to do, and the intelligent young are sick to death of a way of life that wastes and squanders material for the production of baubles and bombs.

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The wild geese do not intend to cast their reflection;\nThe water has no mind to retain their image.

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These roses under my window make no reference to former roses or to better ones; they are for what they are; they exist with God today. There is no time for them. There is simply the rose; it is perfect in every moment of its existence...but man postpones or remembers; he does not live in the present, but with reverted eye laments the past, or, heedless of the riches that surround him, stands on tiptoe to foresee the future. He cannot be happy and strong until he too lives with nature in the present, above time.

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Cultural renewal comes about when highly differentiated cultures mix. It is as when, by triangulation, a distant point is ascertained by sighting it from two different points. Our grasp on reality is better when we look at it from the standpoints of different cultures, and the comparison brings to light aspects of one's own point of view so basic as to have been ignored.

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You would immediately feel one with all nature, and with the universe itself, if you could understand that there is no 'you' as the hardcore thinker of thoughts, feeler of feelings, and senser of sensations, and that because your body is something in the physical world, that world is not 'external' to you. Thus when you listen, you do not hear anyone listening. This has nothing to do with making an effort or not making an effort; it is simply a matter of intelligence. To find this out seems to me almost more important than understanding that the world is round, that Africans are people, and that persons with opinions other than your own will not fry forever in hell. Fully to understand that the universe is ourselves must put an end to the frantic panic about death and to our hostile exploitation of the planet Earth.

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Someone has told the story of meeting, on a train, a weird gentleman who took a bag down from the rack, opened it, extracted from his pocket a cabbage on the end of a string, and began to dangle it into the bag. Consumed with curiosity, the traveler asked what was in the bag and was told that it was a mongoose. 'Well, why do you carry a mongoose?' 'Alas,' said the gentleman, 'I am an alcoholic and suffer from delirium tremens, so that I need this mongoose to keep away the snakes.' 'But surely you realize that those snakes are only imaginary?' 'Yes, indeed,' he answered, 'but so is the mongoose.

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But then - [the 1950's] - it was not as easy to see as it is today that when you make a powerful technology available to human beings with normal form of egocentric consciousness, planetary disaster is inevitable. Moreover, the point had to be made that the egocentric predicament was not a moral fault to be corrected by willpower, but a conceptual hallucination requiring some basic alterations of common sense; a task comparable to persuading people that the earth is round rather than flat.

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I am therefore ill at ease with people who earnestly abstain from such things as smoking, drinking, and sex, to the point of making them squeamishnessly militant. Obviously, there are forms and degrees in which these pleasures can be unhygienic, as also can be driving cars, climbing mountains, and nursing the sick. There are points of view from which almost everything can be see as bad for one's health, and Jung once remarked in jest that life itself is a disease with a very bad prognosis: it lingers on for years and invariably ends with death. And in this connection I might also quote Freud, writing to Dr. Fleisch: 'As to your injunction to give up smoking, I have decided not to comply. Do you think it such a good thing to live a long and miserable life?

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If Christ is really God's search for man, God, to have effectively 'come down to Earth,' must be discoverable here in this very place and moment. But the emulation of the 'Jesus of history' obscures the truth. It concerns itself so much with what happened two thousand years ago that it misses the point, confusing the pointing finger with the truth. 'Why seek ye the living among the dead? He is not here, but is risen.' The disciples sought him at the tomb; we seek him in the tradition of the Church or the record of the Bible - or in the future, which is merely the past projected ahead. They are all tombs, and 'he is not here.

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My vision is not infallible, but we may both have the joy of knowing that, if I am right and you are wrong, or vice versa, neither of us can dim the glory of God, save by being untrue to the light as we see it. And even then it shines in spite of our darkness.

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The best Christian thought has always seen that only Pharisaism comes through trying to be good. For sanctity is less in wanting to be moral than in loving God and other men. But the moralism which condemns a man for not loving is simply adding strength to that sense of fear and insecurity which prevents him from loving.

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The word 'God' is more of an exclamation than a proper name. It expresses astonishment, reverence, and even love for our reality. If you want to put a human face on it, that will do - if you do not take it literally - since we know nothing higher or more mysterious than people, and an energy field which peoples can hardly be less intelligent than people. Certainly events happen in the field which seem absolutely horrible, but faith is the gamble that there is some way of understanding or at least accepting them.

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A flower goeswith a plant which goeswith a natural environment, and I see people as flowerings of their environments and not as separate objects...Thus if a flower had a God it would not be a transcendental flower but a field - moreover a field as discussed in physics, an integrated pattern of energy, a field which would not only be flowering, but also earthing, raining, shining, birding, worming, and beeing. A sensitive flower would, through its roots and membranes, feel out into this entire pattern and so discover itself as a particular exultation of the whole field.

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There must be some connection between the commercialization of life and the separation of religion from mysticism and magic.

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Conscience: that ambivalent faculty which is sometimes the voice of sanity but mostly the echo of parental qualms and social conditioning.

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The more we know of particular things, the more we know of God.

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At any point on the Earth, there is as much west of you as there is east. I have discovered along the way that at every position in the whole hierarchy of beings there is as much above as below, and thus that there are standpoints from which every position is as much a failure as it is a success.

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Going by a system is often, though not necessarily, an elaborate and subtle ego-trip in which people inflate their egos by trying to destroy them, stressing the superhuman difficulty of the task. It can so easily be mere postponement of realization to the tomorrow which never comes, with the mock humility of, 'I'm not ready yet. I don't deserve it. Perhaps, if I work as hard as the great sages of old, I can get it in twenty years or in my next incarnation.' But what if this is just self-punishment and spiritual masochism - lying as it were, on a bed of nails to assure oneself of 'authentic' existence? Mortification of the ego is an attempt to get rid of what doesn't exist, or - which comes to the same thing - of the feeling that it exists...My point was, and has continued to be, that the Big Realization for which all these systems strive is not a future attainment but a present fact, that this now-moment is eternity, and that one must see it now or never.

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Zen is to realize that life is simply nonsense, without meaning other than itself or future purpose beyond itself. The trick is to dig the nonsense, for - as Tibetans say - you can tell the true yogi by his laugh.

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The area of Ching-shih in the state of Sung grows fine catalpas, cypresses, and mulberries. But those of more than one or two spans in girth are cut down for monkey-perches; those of three or four for ridgepoles, and those of seven or eight for the solid sides of coffins for the wealthy. Thus they do not attain the normal term of their lives, and fall in mid-career to the axe. This is the danger of being useful.\r\n \r\nThen there was a hunchback named Su. His chin touched his navel. His shoulders were above his head. His pigtail pointed to the sky. His innards were upside-down, and his thighs were against his ribs. By tailoring and laundering he made enough to live, and by winnowing grain he produced enough to feed ten. But when the authorities conscripted soldiers he stood in the crowd waving them off, and when a work-party was pressed into service he was passed up as an invalid. Yet when they doled out grain for the needy, he got three full measures as well as ten bundles of firewood. If a weird body helps a man live out his full term, how much greater would be the use of a weird character!

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For Zen, as Suzuki exemplified it, was spontaneously intelligent living, without calculation, and without rigid conceptual distinctions between self and other, knower and known.

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Why - and again why - do you want to know whether there is a God, whether there is a life after death, or what method you should follow to become enlightened, liberated, or realized? Could it be that you identify yourself with a merely abstract ego based on nothing but memories? That therefore you are not alive and aware in the eternal present, and thus worry interminably about your future? Furthermore, don't you realized that when you accept someone as a spiritual teacher, you do so by your own authority and choice? You yourself license the Bible, the Koran, or the Gita as infallible. Wake up!...and, without putting it into words, watch what is, now. You thus realize that there is no 'feeler' apart from feelings, and no granular, billiard-ball 'self' confronting the universe.

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If we knew how to greet each moment as the manifestation of the divine will, we would find in it all the heart could desire...The present moment is always filled with infinite treasures: it contains more than you are capable of receiving...The divine will is an abyss, of which the present moment is the entrance; plunge fearlessly therein and you will find it more boundless than your desire.

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To be inevitably compelled by God is to be one with God, and in this way, determinism becomes freedom.

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I have realized that the past and the future are real illusions, that they exist only in the present, which is what there is and all that there is. From one point of view the present is shorter than a microsecond. From another, it embraces all eternity.

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A baby is put in a play pen to keep it from getting at the matches or falling downstairs, and though the intention of the pen is to keep the baby closed in, parents are naturally proud when the child grows strong enough to climb out. Likewise, a man can perform actions which are truly moral only when he is no longer motivated by the fear of hell, that is, when he grows into union with the Good that is beyond good and evil, which, in other words, does not act from the love of rewards or the fear of punishment.

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The world is love to him who treats it as such, even when it torments and destroys him.

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To become the sensations, as distinct from having them, engenders the most astonishing sense of freedom and release. For it implies that experience is not something in which one is trapped or by which one is pushed around, or against which one must fight. The conventional duality of subject and object, knower and known, feeler and feeling, is changed into a polarity: the knower and the known become the poles, terms, or phases of a single event which happens, not to me or from me, but of itself. The experiencer and the experience become a single, ever-changing, self-forming process, complete and fulfilled at every moment of its unfolding, and of infinite complexity and subtlety. It is like, not watching, but being, a coiling arabesque of smoke patterens in the air, or of ink dropped in water, or of a dancing snake which seems to move from every part of its body at once. This is to say that all our actions and experiences arise mutually from the organism and from the environment at the same time.

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Some of the chemicals known as psychedelics provide opportunities for mystical insight in much the same way that well-prepared paints and brushes provide opportunities for fine painting, or a beautifully constructed piano for great music. They make it easier, but they do not accomplish the work all by themselves.

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The man of deep spiritual wisdom is irrelevant to this society. This has not just recently come to be so; it has been so for centuries, because - for centuries - society has consisted precisely of those human beings who are so deluded by the conventions of words and ideas as to believe that there is a real choice between the opposites of life - between pleasure and pain, good and evil, God and Lucifer, spirit and nature. But what is separable in terms, in words, is not separable in reality, in the solid relationship between the terms. Whoever sees that there is no ultimate choice between these opposites is irrelevant because he cannot really participate in the politician's and the ad-man's illusion that there can be better and better without worse and worse, and that matter can yield indefinitely to the desires of mind without becoming utterly undesirable.

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To say that man is both god and devil is not to say that spiritually minded people should spend some of their time robbing banks and torturing children. Such violent excesses of passion are bred from the frustration of pursuing either aspect of our nature to the exclusion of the other. They arise when the ruthless idealism of the spirit is dehumanized by the weakness of the flesh, or when the blind desire of the flesh is unenlightened by the wisdom of the spirit.

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But are God and nature, spirit and flesh - like individual persons, mutually exclusive? 'He that is unmarried,' said St. Paul, 'careth for the things that belong to the Lord, how he may please the Lord. But he that is married careth for the things that are of the world, how he may please his wife.' Yet this is to say that the divine cannot be loved in and through the things of the this world, and to deny the saying that 'Inasmuch as you have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, you have done it unto me.' If the love of God and the love of the world are mutually exclusive, then, on the very premises of theology, God is a finite thing among things - for only finite things exclude one another. God is dethroned and un-godded by being put in opposition to nature and the world, becoming an object instead of the continuum in which we 'live and move and have our being.

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Psychologists with a slant towards materialism therefore argue that mysticism is nothing but sublimated sexuality and frustrated fleshliness, whereas the spiritists maintain that the love-imagery (of the Song of Songs) is nothing but allegory and symbolism never to be taken in its gross animal sense. But is it not possible that both parties are right and wrong, and that the love of nature and the love of spirit are paths upon a circle which meet at their extremes? Perhaps the meeting is discovered only by those who follow both at once. Such a course seems impossible and inconsistent only if it can be held that love is a matter of choosing between alternatives, if, in other words, love is an exclusive attitude of mind which cleaves to one object and rejects all others. If so, it must be quite other than what is said to be God's own love, 'who maketh his sun to shine upon the evil and the good, and sendeth his rain upon the just and the unjust.' Love is surely a disposition of the heart which radiates on all sides like light.

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Is it really any scandal, any deplorable inconsistency, for a human being to be both angel and animal with equal devotion. Is it not possible, in other words, to be mystic and sensualist without actual contradiction?

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Any statement about Zen, or about spiritual experience of any kind, will always leave some aspect, some subtlety, unexpressed. No one's mouth is big enough to utter the whole thing.

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The 'beat' mentality is a younger generation's non-participation in 'the American Way of Life,' a revolt which does not seek to change the existing order but simply turns away from it to find the significance of life in subjective experience rather than objective achievement.

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The Hebrew-Christian universe is one in which moral urgency, the anxiety to be right, embraces and penetrates everything. God, the Absolute itself, is good as against bad, and thus to be immoral or in the wrong is to feel oneself an outcast not merely from human society but also from existence itself, from the root and ground of life. To be in the wrong therefore arouses a metaphysical anxiety and sense of guilt - a state of eternal damnation - utterly disproportionate to the crime.

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At the roots of Chinese life there is a trust in the good-and-evil of one's own nature which is peculiarly foreign to those brought up with the chronic uneasy conscience of the Hebrew-Christian cultures. Yet it was always obvious to the Chinese that a man who mistrusts himself cannot even trust his mistrust, and must therefore be hopelessly confused.

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People who feel a profound need to justify themselves have difficulty in understanding the viewpoints of those who do not, and the Chinese who created Zen were the same kind of people as Lao Tzu, who, centuries before, had said, 'Those who justify themselves do not convince.' For the urge to make or prove oneself right has always jiggled the Chinese sense of the ludicrous, since as both Confucians and Taoists - however different these philosophies in other ways - they have invariably appreciated the man who can 'come off it.' To Confucius it seemed much better to be human-hearted than righteous, and to the great Taoists, Lao Tzu and Chuang Tzu, it was obvious that one could not be right without also being wrong, because the two were as inseparable as back and front. As Chuang Tzu said, 'Those who would have good government without its correlative misrule, and right without its correlative wrong do not understand the principles of the universe.

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When the dualism of thinker and thought disappears so does that of subject and object. The individual no more feels himself to be standing back from his sensations of the external world, just as he is no longer a thinker standing back from his thoughts. He therefore has a vivid sense of himself as identical with what he sees and hears, so that his subjective impression comes into accord with the physical fact that man is not so much an organism in an environment as an organism-environment relationship.

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Now it is of great interest that we cannot effectively think about self-control without making a separation between the controller and the controlled, even when - as the word 'self-control' implies - the two are one and the same. This lies behind the widespread conception of man as a double or divided being composed of a higher self and a lower, of reason and instinct, mind and body, spirit and matter, voluntary and involuntary, angel and animal. So conceived , man is never actually self-controlling...The problem is well illustrated in the Christian theory of virtue, which for centuries has put an immense double-bind on Western man. The greatest commandment is that 'Thou shalt love the Lord thy God' - and, note the addition - 'with all thy heart, and all thy soul, and all thy mind.' How can such a commandment be obeyed? The addition implies that it is not enough to think and act as if I loved God. I am not asked to pretend that I love. I am asked really to mean it, to be completely sincere. Jesus' whole condemnation of the Pharisees was that they obeyed with their lips and hands, but not with their hearts.

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The problem is this: man is a self-conscious and therefore self-controlling organism, but how is he to control the aspect of himself which does the controlling? All attempts to solve this problem seem to end in a snarl, whether at the individual level or at the social. At the individual level the snarl manifest itself in what we call acute self-consciousness, as when a public speaker frustrates himself by his very effort to speak well. At the social level it manifests itself as a loss in freedom of movement increasing with every attempt to regulate action by law. In other words, there is a point beyond which self-control becomes a form of paralysis - as if I wanted simultaneously to throw a ball and hold it to its course with my hand.

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There are two obvious escapes from this dilemma (the struggle of choosing good vs evil). One is to stop being too keenly intelligent and too acutely conscious of the facts of one's inner life, and to fall back upon an inflexibly formal, traditional, and authoritarian pattern of thought and action - as if to say, 'Just do the right thing, and don't be sophisticatedly psychological about your motives. Just obey, and don't ask questions.' This is called sacrificing the pride of the intellect. But here we find ourselves in another dilemma, for the religion of simple obedience soon totters toward empty formalism and moral legalism with no heart in it, the very Pharisaism against which Christ railed. The other escape is into a romanticism of the instincts, a glorification of mere impulse ignoring the equally natural gift of will and reason. This is actually a modern form of the old practice of selling one's soul to the Devil - always a possible release from anxiety and conflict because damnation could at least be certain.

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Christianity, even as it is understood by quite thoughtful Christians, is certainly no remedy for anxiety. In Christianity it matters not just very much but absolutely that one choose good rather than evil, for one's eternal destiny depends upon the decision. Yet to be certain that one is saved is the sin of presumption and to be certain that one is damned is the sin of despair.

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Western civilization has acquired by far the greatest measure of skill in controlling the course of events by organized intelligence. Yet this appears to have intensified rather than abated our anxiety. For to the extent that we have analyzed the natural world and the human world more thoroughly, to that extent it appears to us to be more complicated. The scope of our detailed information about the world is so vast that every individual, every responsible source of action, finds it too great to master - without depending upon the collaboration of other who are, however beyond his control. Collaborations requires faith, but faith is an instinctual attitude; speaking quite strictly, it is not intelligent to trust what you have not analyzed.

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The gains of action by intelligence are bought at a price which at times seems so heavy that we might ask whether they are worth it. For the price of intelligence as we now know it is chronic anxiety, anxiety which appears to increase - oddly enough - to the very degree that human life is subjected to intelligent organization.

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The point is simply that, if there is to be any life and movement at all, the attitude of faith must be basic - the final and fundamental attitude - and the attitude of doubt secondary and subordinate. This is another way of saying that toward the vast and all-encompassing background of human life, with which the philosopher as artist is concerned, there must be total affirmation and acceptance. Otherwise there is no basis at all for caution and control with respect to details in the foreground. But it is all too easy to become so absorbed in these details that all sense of proportion is lost, and for man to make himself mad by trying to bring everything under his control. We become insane, unsound, and without foundation when we lose consciousness of and faith in the uncontrolled and ungraspable background world which is ultimately what we ourselves are. And there is a very slight distinction, if any, between complete, conscious faith and love.

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No energy system can be completely self-controlling without ceasing to move. Control is restraint upon movement, and because complete control would be complete restraint, control must always be subordinate to motion if there is to be motion at all. In human terms, total restraint of movement is the equivalent of total doubt, of refusal to trust one's senses or feelings in any respect, and perhaps its embodiment is the extreme catatonic who refuses every motion or communication. On the other hand, movement and the release of restraint are the equivalent of faith, of committing oneself to the uncontrolled and unknown.

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There are no such things as truths by themselves: a truth is always in relations to a point of view. Fire is hot in relation to skin.

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If it becomes clear that our use of the lines and surfaces of nature to divide the world into units is only a matter of convenience, then all that I have called myself is actually inseparable from everything. It is not that the outlines and shapes which we call things and use to delineate things disappear into some sort of luminous void. It simply becomes obvious that though they may be used as divisions they do not really divide. However much I may be impressed by the difference between a star and the dark space around it, I must not forget that I can see the two only in relation to each other, and that this relation is inseparable.

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In other words, was the effect of the LSD in my nervous system the addition to my senses of some chemical screen which distorted all that I saw to preternatural loveliness? Or was its effect rather to remove certain habitual and normal inhibitions of the mind and senses, enabling us to see things as they would appear to us if we were not so chronically repressed? If [the latter is true], it is possible that the art forms of other cultures appear exotic - that is, unfamiliarly enchanting - because we are seeing the world through the eyes of artists whose repressions are not the same as ours.