Wisdom of
Allen Watts
"Muddy water is best cleared by leaving it alone."
"The menu is not the meal."
"We seldom realize, for example that our most private thoughts and emotions are not actually our own. For we think in terms of languages and images which we did not invent, but which were given to us by our society."
"To have faith is to trust yourself to the water. When you swim you don't grab hold of the water, because if you do you will sink and drown. Instead you relax, and float."
"You are an aperture through which the universe is looking at and exploring itself."
"This is the real secret of life -- to be completely engaged with what you are doing in the here and now. And instead of calling it work, realize it is play."
"You are a function of what the whole universe is doing in the same way that a wave is a function of what the whole ocean is doing."
"Man suffers only because he takes seriously what the gods made for fun."
"Trying to define yourself is like trying to bite your own teeth"
"The only way to make sense out of change is to plunge into it, move with it, and join the dance."
"The art of living... is neither careless drifting on the one hand nor fearful clinging to the past on the other. It consists in being sensitive to each moment, in regarding it as utterly new and unique, in having the mind open and wholly receptive."
"Every intelligent individual wants to know what makes him tick, and yet is at once fascinated and frustrated by the fact that oneself is the most difficult of all things to know."
"Zen does not confuse spirituality with thinking about God while one is peeling potatoes. Zen spirituality is just to peel the potatoes."
"The more a thing tends to be permanent, the more it tends to be lifeless."
"Try to imagine what it will be like to go to sleep and never wake up... now try to imagine what it was like to wake up having never gone to sleep."
"Life is like music for its own sake. We are living in an eternal now, and when we listen to music we are not listening to the past, we are not listening to the future, we are listening to an expanded present."
can purchase. We need to raise $5,000 to purchase it and ship it here.
FINDING PEACE, an original metal sculpture, has been donated to the Zen Center. The artist, C.J. Rench, is well known throughout the Northwest and is growing in popularity. We appreciate his kind donation.
