In My Own Way

“It seems that those who go deeply into almost any of the great spiritual traditions come to the same place and find themselves talking the same language.”

In My Own Way

“If we get rid of all wishful thinking and dubious metaphysical speculations, we can hardly doubt that – at a time not too distant – each one of us will simply cease to be.  It won’t be like going into darkness forever, for there will be neither darkness, nor time, nor sense of futility, nor anyone to feel anything about it.  Try as best you can to imagine this, and keep at it.  The universe will, supposedly, be going on as usual, but for each individual it will be as if it had never happened at all; and even that is saying too much, because there won’t be anyone for whom it never happened.  Make this prospect as real as possible: the one total certainty.  You will be as if you had never existed, which was, however, the way you were before you did exist – and not only you but everything else.  Nevertheless, with such an improbable past, here we are.  We begin from nothing and end in nothing.  You can say that again.  Think it over and over, trying to conceive the fact of coming to never having existed.  After a while you will begin to feel rather weird, as if this very apparent something that you are is at the same time nothing at all.  Indeed, you seem to be rather firmly and certainly grounded in nothingness, much as your sight seems to emerge from that total blankness behind your eyes.  The weird feeling goes with the fact that you are being introduced to a new common sense, a new logic, in which you are beginning to realize the identity of ku and shiki, void and form.  All of a sudden it will strike you that this nothingness is the most potent, magical, basic, and reliable thing you ever thought of, and that the reason you can’t form the slight idea of it is that it’s yourself.  But not the self you thought you were.”

In My Own Way

“To ‘realize Buddha in this body’ is to realize that you yourself are in fact the universe.  You are not, as parents and teachers are wont to imply, a mere stranger on probation in the scheme of things; you are rather a sort of nerve-ending through which the universe is taking a peek at itself, which is why, deep down inside, almost everyone has a vague sense of eternity.  Few dare admit this because it would amount to believing that you are God, and God in our culture is the cosmic Boss, so that anyone imagining himself to be be God is deemed either blasphemous or insane.  But for Buddhists this is no problem because they do not have this particular idea of God, and so also are not troubled by the notion of sin and everlasting damnation.  Their picture of the universe is not political, not a kingdom ruled by a monarch, but rather an organism in which every part is a ‘doing’ of the whole, so that everything that happens to you is understood as your own karma, or ‘doing.’  Thus when things go wrong you have no one but yourself to blame.  You are not a sinner but a fool, so try another way.”

In My Own Way

“I can have the feeling ’self’ only in relations to, and by contrast with, the feeling ‘other.’  In the same way, I am what I am only in relation to what everything else is.  The Japanese call this ji-ji-mu-ge, which means that between every thing-event (ji) and every other thing-event there is no (mu) barrier (ge).  Each implies all, and all implies each.”

In My Own Way

“The heart of Zen is not an idea but an experience, and when that experience happens (and ‘happens’ is just the right word) you are set free from ideas altogether.  Certainly, you can still use them, but you no longer take them seriously.”

In My Own Way

“Every human being is a metaphysician just as every philosopher has appetites and emotions – and by this I mean that we all have certain basic assumptions about the good life and the nature of reality.  Even the typical businessman who asserts that he is a practical fellow unconcerned with higher things declares thereby that he is a pragmatist or a positivist, and not a very thoughtful one at that.”

In My Own Way

“The uninstructed adventurer with psychedelics, as with Zen or yoga or any other mystical discipline, is an easy victim of what Jung calls ‘inflation,’ of the messianic megalomania that comes from misunderstanding the experience of union with God.”

In My Own Way

“My retrospective attitude to LSD is that when one has received the message, one hangs up the phone.”

In My Own Way

“I see this disaster in the larger context of American prohibitionism which has done more than anything else to corrupt the police and foster disrespect for law, and which our economic pressure has, in the special problem of drug abuse, spread to the rest of the world.  Although my views on this matter may be considered extreme, I feel that in any society where the powers of Church and State are separate, the State is without either right or wisdom in enforcing sumptuary laws against crimes which have no complaining victims.  When the police are asked to be armed clergymen enforcing ecclesiastical codes of morality, all the proscribed sins of the flesh, of lust and luxury, become – since we are legislating against human nature – exceedingly profitable ventures for criminal organizations which can pay both the police and the politicians to stay out of trouble.  Those who cannot pay constitute about one-third of the population of our overcrowded and hopelessly managed prisons, and the business of their trial by due process delays and overtaxes the courts beyond all reason.”

In My Own Way

“The enlightened one sees the world that others see, but does not conceive it in the way others do, as a collection of separate things other than himself.  For when we get the actual sense of depth from a drawing in perspective, the concept is overruling the eyes, as Adelbert Ames had constructed a whole series of experiments demonstrating that we see what we believe rather than believe what we see.”