Selfless actions create a higher karma, which brings you into higher states of mind. When you are in higher states of mind you will see things that you never saw before.

All action is generated by desire. It is the desire to live that causes us to reincarnate.

Beyond this world there are myriad worlds, thousands of inter-dimensional planes with different types of beings going through other cycles of existence. Beyond all beings is something that is eternal.

In the advanced practice, the relationship between the Zen master and the student becomes very terse. The Zen master will expect things of the student because the student is in graduate school.

We are alive for a certain period of time in any given lifetime. We are competing against time. It is a race to see if we can wake up before we go to sleep again. That is the challenge.

As a former English professor, I can assure you that grammar is the qualitative interpolation of language. Adjectives, pronouns, predicates, past pluperfect indicative - ridiculous. It has qualities, shadings, differentiations, rhythmic structures of symbolic meaning.

As a monk you have a responsibility to meditate many hours a day. Not just to sit there but to think of the ten thousand radiances.