so, the whole idea, you see, is that everything's falling apart, so don't try and stop it. when you're falling off a precipice, it doesn't do you any good to hang onto a rock that's falling with you. see? but everything is doing that. and so, again, this is another case of our completely wasting our energy in trying to prevent the world from falling apart. don't do it. and then you'll be able to do something interesting with the free energy.

Substances like LSD, which give away a secret about the nature of the social game - the human game and what underlies it - are potentially dangerous, of course, like any good thing is. Electricity is dangerous, fire is dangerous, cars are dangerous, planes are dangerous, but not so dangerous as driving on the freeway. The only way to handle danger is to face it. If you start getting frightened of it, then you make it worse. Because you project onto it all kinds of bogeys and threats which don't exist in it at all.

Of course, you can’t force your mind to be silent. That would be like trying to smooth ripples in water with a flatiron. Water becomes clear and calm only when left alone.

You will never get to the irreducible definition of anything because you will never be able to explain why you want to explain, and so on. The system will gobble itself up.

What are we saying when we say now, something is holy? That means you should take a different attitude to what you are doing than if you were, for example, doing it for kicks.

The most strongly enforced of all known taboos is the taboo against knowing who or what you really are behind the mask of your apparently separate, independent, and isolated ego.

Zen is a way of liberation, concerned not with discovering what is good or bad or advantageous, but what is.