What the devil is the point of surviving, going on living, when it's a drag? But you see, that's what people do.

A priest once quoted to me the Roman saying that a religion is dead when the priests laugh at each other across the altar. I always laugh at the altar, be it Christian, Hindu, or Buddhist, because real religion is the transformation of anxiety into laughter.

We must see that consciousness is neither an isolated soul nor the mere function of a single nervous system, but of that totality of interrelated stars and galaxies which makes a nervous system possible.

We suffer from a hallucination, from a false and distorted sensation of our own existence as living organisms. Most of us have the sensation that "I myself" is a seperate center of feeling and action, living inside and bounded by the physical body-a center which "confronts" an "external" world of people and things, making contact through the senses with a universe both alien and strange.

But to me nothing - the negative, the empty - is exceedingly powerful.

The mundane and the sacred are one and the same.

Meditation is the way in which we come to feel our basic inseparability from the whole universe, and what that requires is that we shut up.