Sublime

When I realized that I was seeing the world as it is, that led to the feeling of kinship. Whatever I paid attention to, that seemed to be me at that moment. I’d already been everything, done everything, owned everything. I’d already been this wall and this couch. All you have to do is be you and everything comes to you. It is not a question of owne

—Alan Watts, The Way of Zen

If at some fundamental level we don’t need fixing, then the life we’re already leading, this ordinary day-to-day life of ours, is not the problem but, somehow, already the solution we’re looking for.

That’s both the good news and the bad news: this is it. When we really see that’s true, we cannot help but laugh at our old pretensions, our old sense of specialness, our old certainty about the wonders we were going to find at the end of the rainbow. We’ve spent years facing the wall so that…well, so that we could spend years facing a wall. We hav

The cypress tree koan might shift your stories about who you are and the limit those stories put on your happiness. You might notice that you get no merit from your good deeds, since they are done for their own sake. Also you are not a victim since no matter how terrible your past and how close you might be to despair, the moment of the cypress tre

J’ai envie de vous parler d’Épicure, ce sage penseur de la Grèce antique. Il était convaincu, comme tout être doué de raison, qu’il n’y a pas de vie dans l’au-delà et qu’il nous faut mener la seule et unique existence qui est la nôtre dans la paix et la joie autant qu’il est possible. Quel but donner à sa vie ? La réponse se trouve, selon lui, dans

Traditional monastic Zen practice employs attention to all details of everyday life as practice in saying “that’s me” to everything that we usually think of as outside of ourselves.

—Charlotte Joko Beck, Nothing Special: Living Zen