(Amazon) “In the West, Zen Buddhism has a reputation for paradoxes that defy logic. In particular, the Buddhist concept of nonduality — the realization that everything in the universe forms a single, integrated whole — is especially difficult to grasp. In The Other Side of Nothing, Zen teacher Brad Warner untangles the mystery and explains nonduality in plain English. To Warner, this is not just a philosophical problem: nonduality forms the bedrock of Zen ethics, and once we comprehend it, many of the perplexing aspects of Zen suddenly make sense.”
We are not individual beings but components of an infinite reality that is just one single entity.
Zen Buddhists are Buddhists whose main thing is meditation. […] A way to learn to clearly see what reality actually is, beyond all dogmas and beliefs.
In everything in the world there exists nothing besides illusions. […] We can’t see the true nature of reality, but we can discover it. […] No explanation can ever match the reality it’s trying to describe.
In one sense, God created us. In another sense we are continuously creating God.
“Our life and our surroundings are part of a single continuum.” […] “Action and the place in which it occurs are indivisible.” — Nishijima Roshi
Mind and matter are two aspects of the same thing.
When we stop wanting things to be different from how they actually are, we stop suffering.
The truest thing you can ever say is, “I don’t know.”
The body exists within awareness rather than awareness being something that occurs inside the body or even inside the mind. The body is inside me rather than me being inside the body. […] The body is a manifestation of consciousness or of mind.
“Zazen is good for nothing!” — Kodo Sawaki
Whatever the particular thing is that you think is the worst thing in the world, it is part of you.
What the Buddhist teachers will tell you is that the thing most of us think of as normal life is a kind of deep mass hallucination that almost everyone in the world is partaking in.
Emptiness is that which is unnamable. It’s that something that we can’t really understand but that underlies everything. […] We are something that has grown out of emptiness.
We are not just a single independent unit. We are part of a chain of causes that somehow has come to imagine itself to be a single independent unit.
What we are and what time is are the very same thing.
“The entire evolution of science would suggest that the best grammar for thinking about the world is that of change, not of permanence. Not of being, but becoming. He says, “The difference between things and events is that things persist in time; events have limited duration.” He gives a rock as an example of a thing, as contrasted with an event. But, he says, “On closer inspection, in fact, even the things that are most ‘thinglike’ are nothing more than long events.” A rock isn’t a rock forever — even though it might seem like that to us humans. It starts off as a bunch of sand, gets compressed and melted, exists as a rock for a while, and eventually wears away into sand again. Even to say it started off as sand is wrong, because the sand wasn’t always sand either. The molecules that make up each grain of sand have their own complicated history. Therefore, any given rock’s existence as a rock is an event within the long, long history of its constituent, parts.”
— The Order of Time by Carlo Rovelli (quoted in The Other Side of Nothing)
(Dogen) believed he changed from moment to moment, that he was an event, not a thing.
What we do here and now can never be undone.
Perceive each particular thing in this entire universe as a moment in time. […] We don’t just live within time and space. We *are* time and space.”
The entire universe is just the self putting itself on display for itself to marvel at. […] What we are as individuals is a bunch of different ways that the universal self uses to experience itself. […] The universe wants to know all about itself. And to do so, it needs as many opinions as possible.
We’re manifestations of the universal mind.
“All things exist precisely because I personally experience them.” — Kasha Uchiyama
Our past and our future are part of us right now.
Emptiness to a Buddhist doesn’t mean a dark, black void. It means things just as they are.
We are the process of the universe observing itself. […] We are one way that the universe tries to figure out what it is. We are the universe’s curiosity about itself. We are a process.
My most terrifying fears are just secretions of my brain.
“Me” seems to be made up mostly of memory and imagination.
Does a person appear into a universe that was already there before she or he was born, or does the universe arise simultaneously with the person who perceives it?
What if there is only one consciousness? What if that one, singular consciousness just appears to be a bunch of distinct individual consciousnesses?
Thoughts are the superficial activity taking place on the surface of the mind. Thoughts are attached to personhood.
“When the room is ten feet wide, the universe is ten feet wide.” — old Zen saying
Each moment is a separate universe unto itself.
The world comes into being simultaneously with my coming into being.
The mind and body are not two things but two manifestations of an underlying reality that is neither body nor mind.
“If you stop speaking and thinking, there is nothing you cannot understand.” — From Chinese poem (Inscription on Faith and Mind by Zen Master Sosan)
Doing and doer are one and the same. You are not an individual who does stuff. Doing stuff happens, but you don’t do anything.
We are kind of a project that the universe is working on.
You have to give up everything that you believe yourself to be in order to discover what you really are.
Is that why I’m here? Is it because the Universal Mind can’t experience itself without splitting itself up in bazillions of pieces?