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“The true purpose [of Zen] is to see things as they are, to observe things as they are, and to let everything go as it goes.”
— Shunryu Suzuki
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“The meaning of life is just to be alive. It is so plain and so obvious and so simple. And yet, everybody rushes around in a great panic as if it were necessary to achieve something beyond themselves.”
— Alan Watts
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“We are living in a culture entirely hypnotized by the illusion of time, in which the so-called present moment is felt as nothing but an infinitesimal hairline between a causative past and an absorbingly important future. We have no present. Our consciousness is almost completely preoccupied with memory and expectation. We do not realize that there never was, is, nor will be any other experience than present experience. We are therefore out of touch with reality.”
— Alan Watts
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“The meaning of life is just to be alive. It is so plain and so obvious and so simple. And yet, everybody rushes around in a great panic as if it were necessary to achieve something beyond themselves.”
— Alan Watts
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Texts and Pretexts (1932), p. 270.
“It is man’s intelligence that makes him so often behave more stupidly
than the beasts. … Man is impelled to invent theories to account for
what happens in the world. Unfortunately, he is not quite intelligent
enough, in most cases, to find correct explanations. So that when he
acts on his theories, he behaves very often like a lunatic. Thus, no
animal is clever enough, when there is a drought, to imagine that the
rain is being withheld by evil spirits, or as punishment for its
transgressions. Therefore you never see animals going through the absurd
and often horrible fooleries of magic and religion. No horse, for
example would kill one of its foals to make the wind change direction.
Dogs do not ritually urinate in the hope of persuading heaven to do the
same and send down rain. Asses do not bray a liturgy to cloudless skies.
Nor do cats attempt, by abstinence from cat’s meat, to wheedle the
feline spirits into benevolence. Only man behaves with such gratuitous
folly. It is the price he has to pay for being intelligent but not, as
yet, intelligent enough.”—Aldous Huxley
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The sun and moon had always shone; the rivers had always flowed and
the bees had hummed, but in previous times all this had been nothing to
Siddhartha but a fleeting and illusive veil before his eyes, regarded
with distrust, condemned to be disregarded and ostracized from the
thoughts, because it was not reality, because reality lay on the other
side of the visible. But now his thoughts lingered on this side; he saw
and recognized the visible and he sought his place in this world. He did
not seek reality; his goal was not on any other side. The world was
beautiful when looked at in this way—without any seeking, so simple, so
childlike. The moon and the stars were beautiful, the brook, the shore,
the forest and the rock, the goat and the golden beetle, the flower and
the butterfly were beautiful. It was beautiful and pleasant to go
through the world like that, so childlike, so awakened, so concerned
with the immediate, without any distrust. …All this had always been and he had never seen it; he was never
present. Now he was present and belonged to it. Through his eyes he saw
light and shadows; through his mind he was aware of moon and stars.—Siddhartha (novel) pp. 45-46 by Hermann Hesse