“ We are living in a culture entirely hypnotized by the illusion of time, in which the so-called present moment is felt as nothing but an infinitesimal hairline between an all-powerfully causative past and an absorbingly important future. We have no present. Our consciousness is almost completely preoccupied with memory and expectation. We do not realize that there never was, is, nor will be any other experience than present experience. We are therefore out of touch with reality. We confuse the world as talked about, described, and measured with the world which actually is. We are sick with a fascination for the useful tools of names and numbers, of symbols, signs, conceptions and ideas. There is however, a way out of this predicament… ”

“ No, I don’t think I will kiss you, although you need kissing, badly. That’s what’s wrong with you. You should be kissed and often, and by someone who knows how. ”

“ But it is perhaps not such a good idea to look back-all the stories say so. Best not to look back. Best to believe there will be happily ever afters all the way around-and so there may be; who is to say there will not be such endings? Not all boats sail away into the darkness never find the sun again, or the hand of another child; if life teaches anything at all, it teaches that there are so many happy endings ”

“ The meaning of the wonderful Zen saying “Every day is a good day” is that they come one after another, and yet there is only this one. You don’t link them. This, as I intimated just a moment ago, seems to be an atomization of life. Things just do what they do. The flower goes puff, and people go this way and that way, and so on, and that is what is happening. It has no meaning, no destination, no value. It is just like that. When you see that, you see it’s a great relief. That is all it is. Then, when you are firmly established in suchness, and it is just this moment, you can begin again to play with the connections, only you have seen through them. Now they don’t haunt you, because you know that there isn’t any continuous you running on from moment to moment who originated sometime in the past and will die sometime in the future. All that has disappeared. So, you can have enormous fun anticipating the future, remembering the past, and playing all kinds of continuities. This is the meaning of that famous Zen saying about mountains: “To the naive man, mountains are mountains, waters are waters. To the intermediate student, mountains are no longer mountains, waters are no longer waters.” In other words, they have dissolved into the point instant, the tshana. “But for the fully perfected student, mountains are again mountains and waters are again waters. ”

“ Nature is wiggly, everything wiggles, the outlines of the hills, the shapes of the tress, the way the wind brushes the grass, the clouds, tracks of streams. It all wiggles. And for some reason or other we find wiggly things very difficult to keep track. And you know, we say to people, ‘keep still so that I can see you, keep still for the camera. And we say, “well let’s get things straightened out, let’s get this ironed out, let’s get it all squared away.” And then somehow we think we understand things, when we have translated them into terms of straight lines and squares. Maybe that’s why they call rather rigid people squares. But it doesn’t fit nature. You know wherever human beings have been around and done their thing, you’ll find rectangles; we live in boxes. Our streets - especially across states like Kansas and Nebraska - are laid out in a grid pattern … why they even dropped a grid pattern on top of San Francisco, with all those hills, so that cars run away. Because it seems that the human being really has a very simple kind of mind. And all this wiggliness is too complicated. ”