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.

Let the intellect alone, it has its usefulness in its proper sphere, but let it not interfere with the flowing of the life-stream.

You ought to know how to rise above the trivialities of life, in which most people are found drowning themselves.

Zen is the spirit of a man. Zen believes in his inner purity and goodness. Whatever is superadded or violently torn away, injures the wholesomeness of the spirit. Zen, therefore, is emphatically against all religious conventionalism.

Zen approaches it from the practical side of life-that is, to work out Enlightenment in life itself.

Not to be bound by rules, but to be creating one's own rules-this is the kind of life which Zen is trying to have us live.

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