This is what I mean by becoming religious: no guilt, no ego, no trip of any kind...just being herenow...being with the trees and the birds and the rivers and the mountains and the stars.

Bring everything up to the surface. Accept your humanity, your animality. Whatsoever is there, accept it without any condemnation. Acceptance is transformation, because through acceptance awareness becomes possible.

All our attachments are outward oriented and hence this illusion.

Don´t be unnecessarily burdened by the past. Go on closing the chapters that you have read; there is no need to go back again and again.

You have to pull all your energy back to the present moment. And the moment the whole energy becomes a pool, here and now, the explosion of light happens and you are, for the first time, absolutely yourself - an eternal being, an immortal being, who knows nothing of death, who has never come across any darkness.

A Buddha is not a man of concentration, he is a man of awareness. He has not been trying to narrow down his consciousness; on the contrary, he has been trying to drop all barriers so that he becomes totally available to existence. Watch... existence is simultaneous. I am speaking here and the traffic noise is simultaneous. The train, the birds the wind blowing through the trees - in this moment the whole of existence converges. You listening to me, I speaking to you, and millions of things going on - it is tremendously rich.

Zen is all-inclusive. It never denies, it never says no to anything; it accepts everything and transforms it into a higher reality.