/tag/ji-ji-mu-ge

0

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.

0

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.

0

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.

0

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.

0

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.

0

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.

0

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.

0

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.

9 quotes tagged 'ji-ji-mu-ge'