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| 1. | A myth is an image in terms of which we try to make sense of the world. |
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| 2. | And although our bodies are bounded with skin, and we can differentiate between outside and inside, they cannot exist except in a certain kind of natural environment. |
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| 3. | And the attitude of faith is the very opposite of clinging to belief, of holding on. |
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| 4. | And the image of the world in the book of Genesis is that the world is an artifact. It is made, as a potter takes clay and forms pots out of it, or as a carpenter takes wood and makes tables and chairs out of it. |
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| 5. | And the more you become aware of the unknown self - if you become aware of it - the more you realize that it is inseparably connected with everything else that is. |
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| 6. | Buddhism has in it no idea of there being a moral law laid down by somekind of cosmic lawgiver. |
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| 7. | But I'll tell you what hermits realize. If you go off into a far, far forest and get very quiet, you'll come to understand that you're connected with everything. |
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| 8. | But at any rate, the point is that God is what nobody admits to being, and everybody really is. |
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| 9. | But of course in Oriental cultures, they don't think of God as an autocrat. God is the fundamental energy of the world which performs all this world without having to think about it. |
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| 10. | But the attitude of faith is to let go, and become open to truth, whatever it might turn out to be. |
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| 11. | But the point is this: when you're feeling blue and bored, it's not a good idea to have a drink, because you may become dependant on alcohol whenever you feel unhappy. |
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| 12. | But to me nothing - the negative, the empty - is exceedingly powerful. |
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| 13. | But we try to pretend, you see, that the external world exists altogether independently of us. |
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| 14. | Faith is a state of openness or trust. |
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| 15. | I find that the sensation of myself as an ego inside a bag of skin is really a hallucination. |
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| 16. | If you awaken from this illusion, and you understand that black implies white, self implies other, life implies death - or shall I say, death implies life - you can conceive yourself. |
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| 17. | If you study the writings of the mystics, you will always find things in them that appear to be paradoxes, as in Zen, particularly. |
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| 18. | In known history, nobody has had such capacity for altering the universe than the people of the United States of America. And nobody has gone about it in such an aggressive way. |
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| 19. | In other words, a person who is fanatic in matters of religion, and clings to certain ideas about the nature of God and the universe, becomes a person who has no faith at all. |
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| 20. | My metaphysics, let me be perfectly frank with you, are that there the central self, you can call it God, you can call it anything you like, and it's all of us. |
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| 21. | Never pretend to a love which you do not actually feel, for love is not ours to command. |
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| 22. | No work or love will flourish out of guilt, fear, or hollowness of heart, just as no valid plans for the future can be made by those who have no capacity for living now. |
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| 23. | Obviously a body requires air, and the air must be within a certain temperature range. |
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| 24. | Omnipotence is not knowing how everything is done; it's just doing it. |
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| 25. | Religion is not a department of life; it is something that enters into the whole of it. |
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| 26. | See, Buddhism is not essentially moralistic. |
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| 27. | So the bodhisattva saves all beings, not by preaching sermons to them, but by showing them that they are delivered, they are liberated, by the act of not being able to stop changing. |
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| 28. | So the relationship between the environment and the organism is transactional. |
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| 29. | So then, in Buddhism, change is emphasized. |
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| 30. | So then, the relationship of self to other is the complete realization that loving yourself is impossible without loving everything defined as other than yourself. |
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| 31. | So to describe myself in a scientific way, I must also describe my surroundings, which is a clumsy way getting around to the realization that you are the entire universe. |
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| 32. | So what I think we could aim for in the way of human civilization and culture would be a system in which we are all highly aware of our existing interconnection and unity with the whole domain of nature, and therefore do not have to go to all sorts of wild extremes to find that union. |
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| 33. | So what is discord at one level of your being is harmony at another level. |
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| 34. | So, the trouble is, that we have one-sided minds, and we notice the wave of life when it is at its peak or crest. |
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| 35. | Technology is destructive only in the hands of people who do not realize that they are one and the same process as the universe. |
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| 36. | The Earth is geological, yes, but this geological entity grows people, and our existence on the Earth is a symptom of this other system, and its balances, as much as the solar system in turn is a symptom of our galaxy, and our galaxy in its turn is a symptom of a whole company of other galaxies. |
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| 37. | The difficulty for most of us in the modern world is that the old-fashioned idea of God has become incredible or implausible. |
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| 38. | The ego is nothing other than the focus of conscious attention. |
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| 39. | The moralist is the person who tells people that they ought to be unselfish, when they still feel like egos, and his efforts are always and invariably futile. |
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| 40. | The myths underlying our culture and underlying our common sense have not taught us to feel identical with the universe, but only parts of it, only in it, only confronting it - aliens. |
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| 41. | The only way to make sense out of change is to plunge into it, move with it, and join the dance. |
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| 42. | The reason we want to go on and on is because we live in an impoverished present. |
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| 43. | The religious idea of God cannot do full duty for the metaphysical infinity. |
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| 44. | The style of God venerated in the church, mosque, or synagogue seems completely different from the style of the natural universe. |
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| 45. | The whole idea of there being only space, and nothing else at all is not only inconceivable but perfectly meaningless, because we always know what we mean by contrast. |
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| 46. | There's no point in going on living unless we make the assumption that the situation of life is optimal. |
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| 47. | Things are as they are. Looking out into it the universe at night, we make no comparisons between right and wrong stars, nor between well and badly arranged constellations. |
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| 48. | To have faith is to trust yourself to the water. When you swim you don't grab hold of the water, because if you do you will sink and drown. Instead you relax, and float. |
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| 49. | Underneath the superficial self, which pays attention to this and that, there is another self more really us than I. |
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| 50. | Wars based on principle are far more destructive... the attacker will not destroy that which he is after. |
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| 51. | We cannot be more sensitive to pleasure without being more sensitive to pain. |
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| 52. | We identify in our exerience a differentiation between what we do and what happens to us. |
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| 53. | Well actually, when you look out there and see all these people and things sitting around, that's how it feels inside your head. |
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| 54. | What the devil is the point of surviving, going on living, when it's a drag? But you see, that's what people do. |
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| 55. | What we really are is, first of all, the whole of our body. |
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| 56. | You and I are all as much continuous with the physical universe as a wave is continuous with the ocean. |
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| 57. | You are a function of this total galaxy, bounded by the Milky Way, and this galaxy is a function of all other galaxies. |
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| 58. | You are that vast thing that you see far, far off with great telescopes. |
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| 59. | You are the eternal thing that comes and goes that appears - now as John Jones, now as Mary Smith, now as Betty Brown - and so it goes, forever and ever and ever. |
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| 60. | You don't look out there for God, something in the sky, you look in you. |
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| 61. | You must understand as one of the fundamental points of Buddhism, the idea of the world as being in flux. |
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| 62. | Zen does not confuse spirituality with thinking about God while one is peeling potatoes. Zen spirituality is just to peel the potatoes. |
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