You didn’t come into this world. You came out of it, like a wave from the ocean. You are not a stranger here.

Zen does not confuse spirituality with thinking about God while one is peeling potatoes. Zen spirituality is just to peel the potatoes.

Psychedelic experience is only a glimpse of genuine mystical insight, but a glimpse which can be matured and deepened by the various ways of meditation in which drugs are no longer necessary or useful. If you get the message, hang up the phone. For psychedelic drugs are simply instruments, like microscopes, telescopes, and telephones. The biologist does not sit with eye permanently glued to the microscope, he goes away and works on what he has seen.

Waking up to who you are requires letting go of who you imagine yourself to be.

The easiest way to get into the meditative state is to begin by listening. If you simply close your eyes and allow yourself to hear all the sounds that are going on around you, just listen to the general hum and buzz of the world as if you were listening to music. Don’t try to identify the sounds you are hearing, don’t put names on them, simply allow them to play with your eardrums. As you hear sounds coming up in your head, thoughts, you simply listen to them as part of the general noise going on just as you would be listening to the sound of my voice or just as you would be listening to cars going by or to birds chattering outside the window. So look at your own thoughts as just noises and soon you will find that the so called ‘outside world’ and the so called ‘inside world’ come together, they are a happening. Your thoughts are a happening, just like the sounds going on outside, and everything is simply a happening, and all you are doing is watching it.

Our idea of personality of ourselves includes no information, whatsoever, about the hypothalamus (an organ of the brain), the pineal gland, really of the way we breathe, of how our blood circulates, of how we manage to form a sentence, how we manage to be conscious, how you open and close your hand. The information contained in your image of yourself contains nothing about all that. And therefore, obviously, is an extremely inadequate image.

Your physical organism is one continuous process with everything else that's going on, just as the waves are continuous with the ocean, your body is continuos with the total energy system of the cosmos, and it's all you, only you're playing this game that you're only this bit of it.

The ego is nothing other than the focus of conscious attention, it's like a radar on ship, the radar on ship is a troubleshooter, is there anything in the way?, and conscious attention is a designed function to scan the environment, like a radar does, and note for any troublemaking changes, but if you identify your self, with your troubleshooter, then naturally you define yourself as being in a perpetual state of anxiety; and the moment we cease to identify with the ego, and become aware that we are the whole organism, you realize how harmonious it all is.

In other words, in the same way as in the drama: to have the play it's necessary to introduce a villain, it's necessary to introduce a certain element of trouble. So, in the whole scheme of life, there has to be the shadow, because without the shadow there can't be the substance. So this is why there is a very strange association between crime and all naughty things, and holyness. You see, holyness is way beyond being good. Good people aren't necessarily holy people. A holy person is one who is whole, who has, as it were, reconciled his opposites, and so there's always something slightly scary about holy people. And other people react to them in very strange ways; they can't make up their minds whether they're saints or devils. And so holy people have, throughout history, always created a great deal of trouble, along with their creative results.

Every one of us is an aperture through which the whole cosmos looks out.