America took me into her bosom when there was no longer a country worthy of the name, but in my heart I am German - German in my soul.
Zen approaches it from the practical side of life-that is, to work out Enlightenment in life itself.
When we start to feel anxious or depressed, instead of asking, "What do I need to get to be happy?" The question becomes, "What am I doing to disturb the inner peace that I already have?"
Zen teaches nothing; it merely enables us to wake up and become aware. It does not teach, it points.
The more you suffer the deeper grows your character, and with the deepening of your character you read the more penetratingly into the secrets of life. All great artists, all great religious leaders, and all great social reformers have come out of the intensest struggles which they fought bravely, quite frequently in tears and with bleeding hearts
Thought creates things by slicing up reality into small bits that it can easily grasp. Thus when you are think-ing you are thing-ing. Thought does not report things, it distorts reality to create things, and as Bergson noted, "In so doing it allows what is the very essence of the real to escape. " Thus to the extent we actually imagine a world of discrete and separate things, conceptions have become perceptions, and we have in this manner populated our universe with nothing but ghosts.
The truth of Zen, just a little bit of it, is what turns one's humdrum life, a life of monotonous, uninspiring commonplaceness, into one of art, full of genuine inner creativity.
I believe that every human mind feels pleasure in doing good to another.
Walk to the well. Turn as the earth and the moon turn, circling what they love. Whatever circles comes from the center.
I was a book lover from the beginning. I loved, love, words and images and ideas, the ways a book can make you feel things deeply or help you understand something you never even knew there were words for.
We are vulnerable to fear only when we leave the present. If I drift into the past, my regrets surge up, my memories of failing and forsaking. If I shift into the future, I meet with doubt and delusion, fear of what's to come, what I'm not capable of controlling. It's in the present moment that I belong.