When you get free from certain fixed concepts of the way the world is, you find it is far more subtle, and far more miraculous, than you thought it was.

Everything in the world is gloriously meaningless.

If, then, my awareness of the past and future makes me less aware of the present, I must begin to wonder whether I am actually living in the real world.

Increasingly, the world around us looks as if we hated it.

If the universe is meaningless, so is the statement that it is so. If this world is a vicious trap, so is its accuser, and the pot is calling the kettle black.

Paradoxical as it may seem, the purposeful life has no content, no point. It hurries on and on, and misses everything. Not hurrying, the purposeless life misses nothing, for it is only when there is no goal and no rush that the human senses are fully open to receive the world.

The world is a marvelous system of wiggles.

...mysticism and empiricism go together in opposition to scholasticism...they base themselves on the non-linear world of experience rather than the linear world of letters.

Without birth and death, and without the perpetual transmutation of all the forms of life, the world would be static, rhythm-less, undancing, mummified.

Do you define yourself as a victim of the world? Or, as the world?

You, yourself, are the eternal energy which appears as this Universe. You didn't come into this world; you came out of it. Like a wave from the ocean.

The anitya doctrine is, again, not quite the simple assertion that the world is impermanent, but rather that the more one grasps at the world, the more it changes.

You are something that the whole world is doing just as when the sea has waves on it.

We do not "come into" this world; we come out of it, as leaves from a tree.

The whole point of Zen is to suspend the rules we have superimposed on things and to see the world as it is

But we try to pretend, you see, that the external world exists altogether independently of us.

The difficulty for most of us in the modern world is that the old-fashioned idea of God has become incredible or implausible.

A myth is an image in terms of which we try to make sense of the world.

We think that the world is limited and explained by its past. We tend to think that what happened in the past determines what is going to happen next, and we do not see that it is exactly the other way around! What is always the source of the world is the present; the past doesn't explain a thing. The past trails behind the present like the wake of a ship and eventually disappears.

And people get all fouled up because they want the world to have meaning as if it were words... As if you had a meaning, as if you were a mere word, as if you were something that could be looked up in a dictionary. You are meaning.

This world's no blot for us, Nor blank; it means intensely, and means good: To find its meaning is my meat and drink.

My world's both parts, and 'o! Both parts must die.

"This is the one and only firmament; therefore it is the absolute world. There is no other world. The circle is complete. I am living in Eternity. The ways of this world are the ways of Heaven."

See with what heat these Dogs of Hell advance To waste and havoc yonder World.