Tag: Stones on the Path

“There is only one really serious philosophical question, and that is suicide. Deciding whether or not life is worth living is to answer the fundamental question in philosophy. All other questions follow from that.”
~ Albert Camus

“What do you want to get enlightened for? You may not like it.”
~ Shunryu Suzuki

“At the very least, sitting Zen practice, called zazen, will bring about a strong sense of well-being, as the clutter of ideas and emotions falls away and body and mind return to natural harmony with all creation. Out of this emptiness can come a true insight into the nature of existence, which is no different from one’s Buddha nature. To travel this path, one need not be a ‘Zen Buddhist,’ which is only another idea to be discarded, like ‘enlightenment’ and ‘the Buddha’ and like ‘God.’
~ Peter Matthiessen

“To be nobody but yourself in a world which is doing its best to make you everybody else, means to fight the hardest human battle ever and to never stop fighting.”
~ e.e. cummings

“What you see with your eyes closed is what counts.”
~ Lame Deer, Lakota sage

“Only our own searching for happiness prevents us from seeing it. It is like a vivid rainbow which you pursue without ever catching it, or a dog chasing its own tail. Although peace and happiness do not exist as an actual thing or place, they are always available, and accompany you every instant.”
~ Gendun Rinpoche

“Nobody sees a flower, really – it is so small – we haven’t time, and to see takes time, like to have a friend takes time.”
~Georgia O’Keeffe

“We are not rich by what we possess, but rather by what we can do without.”
~ Immanuel Kant

“Life, we learn too late, is in the living, in the tissue of every day and hour.”
~ Stephen Leacock

“A mind too active it no mind at all.”
~ Theodore Roethke

“What I like about experience is that it is such an honest thing. You may take any number of wrong turns; but keep your eyes open and you will not be allowed to go very far before the warning signs appear. You may have deceived yourself, but experience is not trying to deceive you. The universe rings true wherever you fairly test it.”
~ C.S. Lewis

“A human being is a part of the whole called by us ‘the universe,’ a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings, as something separate from the rest — a kind of optical delusion of consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and affection of a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of understanding and compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.”
~ Albert Einstein

We all went to the Denver Museum of Nature and Science on Sunday and watched a planetarium show called The Search for Life: Are We Alone? There was a sequence in it where over the course of a few minutes the perspective zoomed from our solar system, to the neighborhood of the Milky Way to the outside of the galaxy, to a view of hundreds of galaxies. It really gave me a better appreciation for how big the universe is. Yeah, we all know it’s big and infinite, but the visual zooming had an enlightening effect. I recommend it to anyone.