Sublime

the world that we know, when understood as the world as classified, is a product of the mind, and as the sound “water” is not actually water, the classified world is not the real world.

frippery.

With its characteristic emphasis on the concrete, Zen points out that our precious “self” is just an idea, useful and legitimate enough if seen for what it is, but disastrous if identified with our real nature. The unnatural awkwardness of a certain type of self-consciousness comes into being when we are aware of conflict or contrast between the

It would seem, then, that to get rid of the subjective distinction between “me” and “my experience”-through seeing that my idea of myself is not myself–is to discover the actual relationship between myself and the “outside” world. The individual, on the one hand, and the world, on the other, are simply the abstract limits or terms of a concrete

The truth is that in looking at the world bit by bit we convince ourselves that it consists of separate things, and so give ourselves the problem of how these things are connected and how they cause and effect each other.

Freud, as we shall see, was under the influence of a nineteenth-century fashion called “reductionism,” a curious need to put down human culture and intelligence by calling it a fluky by-product of blind and irrational forces.

the best pleasures are those for which we do not plan,

Indeed, it would be best to drop the idea of causality and use instead the idea of relativity.