Without birth and death, and without the perpetual transmutation of all the forms of life, the world would be static, rhythm-less, undancing, mummified.

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.

In a certain sense, Zen is feeling life instead of feeling something about life.

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.

When a man no longer confuses himself with the definition of himself that others have given him, he is at once universal and unique.

The more we struggle for life as pleasure, the more we are actually killing what we love.

Increasingly, the world around us looks as if we hated it.