Practice is just hearing, just seeing, just feeling. This is what Christians call the face of God: simply taking in this world as it manifests. We feel our body; we hear the cars and birds. That’s all there is.

Nothing is more ancient than the truth.

Go to the edge of the cliff and jump off. Build your wings on the way down.

It is in your act that you exist, not in your body. Your act is yourself, and there is no other you.

Just because something didn’t happen doesn’t mean it isn’t true.

Usually what is taught in school must be unlearned. Life is the teacher.

Our life and death are the same thing. When we realize this fact, we have no fear of death anymore nor actual difficulty in our life.

The emptiness referred to in the teachings is not a vacancy or hollowness. It is not an escape from ourselves; it is the laying bare of ourselves.

Knowledge is the reward of action. For it is by doing things that one becomes transformed. Executing a symbolic gesture, actually living through, to the very limit, a particular role, one comes to realize the truth inherent in the role.

Cease from practice based on intellectual understanding, pursuing words, and following after speech, and learn the backward step that turns your light inward to illuminate your self. Body and mind of themselves will drop away, and your original face will be manifest.

A Zen master said to a monk, “You must see the universe in your cup.” The monk looked into his cup, but he didn’t see the universe there, so he threw the cup away. The Zen master said, “Oh, poor cup.” / We think the cup is too small to hold the universe. Intellectually, we…

We must reserve a little back shop, all our own, entirely free, wherein to establish our true liberty and principal retreat and solitude.

He prayeth best, / who loveth best / All things both / great and small.

Don’t ask if I’ve ceased wanting anything—we all know the simile of the drifting clouds. Excess wouldn’t fit the precepts: take what comes and you’re never in doubt.

Learn to be internally alone. Don’t allow people and things to invade your being.

When we attain reality, it is seen to be neither personal nor impersonal.

I am always at the beginning.

Awakening begins when a person realizes that they are going nowhere and they do not know where to go.

All eternity is in the moment.

There are very few human beings who receive the truth, complete and staggering, by instant illumination. Most of them acquire it fragment by fragment, on a small scale, by successive developments, cellularly, like a laborious mosaic.

What we call “I,” is just a swinging door which moves when we inhale and when we exhale. It just moves, that is all. When your mind is pure and calm enough to follow this movement, there is nothing: no “I,” no world, no mind nor body; just this swinging door.

The important part of spiritual practice is not to try to escape your life, but to face it—exactly and completely.

You must do the thing you think you cannot do.

Each man is in his Spectre’s power / Until the arrival of that hour, / When his Humanity awake / And cast his Spectre into the Lake.

Everyone you will ever meet knows something you don’t.

I’m lazy. But it’s the lazy people who invented the wheel and the bicycle because they didn’t like walking or carrying things.

Lives based on having are less free than lives based on either doing or on being.

God may have written just a few laws down and grown tired. We do not know whether we are in a tidy universe or an untidy one.

There is nothing you need to do first in order to be enlightened.

It’s taken me all my life to learn what not to play.