Zen, in its essence is the art of seeing into the nature of one's own being, and it points the way from bondage to freedom. By making us drink right from the fountain of life it liberates us from all the yokes under which we finite beings are usually suffering in this world.

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.

The ego-shell in which we live is the hardest thing to outgrow.

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

Unless we agree to suffer we cannot be free from suffering.

The mistake consists in our splitting into two what is really and absolutely one. Is not life one as we live it, which we cut to pieces by recklessly applying the murderous knife of intellectual surgery?

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.