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The more you look, the more you will see.
Oct 1, 2025
And what is good, Phaedrus, And what is not good— Need we ask anyone to tell us these things?
You want to know how to paint a perfect painting? It's easy. Make yourself perfect and then just paint naturally.
Quality... you know what it is, yet you don't know what it is.
The more you look, the more you see.
Absence of Quality is the essence of squareness.
There's so much talk about the system. And so little understanding.
Sometimes it's a little better to travel than to arrive
So round and round you go, spinning mental wheels and nowhere finding anyplace to get traction. What the hell...is it?
The test of the machine is the satisfaction it gives you. There isn't any other test. If the machine produces tranquility it's right. If it disturbs you it's wrong until either the machine or your mind is changed.
Mental reflection is so much more interesting than TV it's a shame more people don't switch over to it.
The solutions all are simple - after you have arrived at them. But they're simple only when you know already what they are.
Peace of mind produces right values, right values produce right thoughts. Right thoughts produce right actions.
Peace of mind produces right values, right values produce right thoughts. Right thoughts produce right actions and right actions produce work which will be a material reflection for others to see of the serenity at the center of it all.
If someone's ungrateful and you tell him he's ungrateful, okay, you've called him a name. You haven't solved anything.
In the temple of science are many mansions ... and various indeed are they that dwell therein and the motives that have led them thither.
You look at where you're going and where you are and it never makes sense, but then you look back at where you've been and a pattern seems to emerge.
Other people can talk about how to expand the destiny of mankind. I just want to talk about how to fix a motorcycle. I think that what I have to say has more lasting value.
Traditional scientific method has always been at the very best, 20 - 20 hindsight. It's good for seeing where you've been. It's good for testing the truth of what you think you know, but it can't tell you where you ought to go.
Programs of a political nature are important end products of social quality that can be effective only if the underlying structure of social values is right. The social values are right only if the individual values are right. The place to improve the world is first in one's heart and head and hands, and then work outward from there.
Civilization, or "the system" or "society" or whatever you want to call it, is best served not by mules but by free men.
For every fact there is an infinity of hypotheses.
I think metaphysics is good if it improves everyday life; otherwise forget it.
We take a handful of sand from the endless landscape of awareness around us and call that handful of sand the world.
The only Zen you can find on the tops of mountains is the Zen you bring up there.
To speak of certain government and establishment institutions as 'the system' is to speak correctly . . . They are sustained by structural relationships even when they have lost all other meaning and purpose. People arrive at a factory and perform a totally meaningless task from eight to five without question because the structure demands it be that way. There's no villian, no 'mean guy' who wants them to live meaningless lives, it's just that the structure, the system demands it and no one is willing to take on the formidable task of changing the structure just because it is meaningless.
The real University... has no specific location. It owns no property, pays no salaries, and receives no material dues... The real University is a state of mind. It is that great heritage of rational thought that has been brought down to us through the centuries.
The truth knocks on the door and you say, go away, I'm looking for the truth, and it goes away. Puzzling.
Institutions such as schools, churches, governments and political organizations of every sort all tended to direct thought for ends other than truth, for the perpetuation of their own functions, and for the control of individuals in the service of these functions.
We’re in such a hurry most of the time we never get much chance to talk. The result is a kind of endless day-to-day shallowness, a monotony that leaves a person wondering years later where all the time went and sorry that it’s all gone.
The real cycle you're working on is a cycle called yourself.
In a car you're always in a compartment, and because you're used to it you don't realize that through that car window everything you see is just more TV. You're a passive observer and it is all moving by you boringly in a frame. On a cycle the frame is gone. You're completely in contact with it all. You're in the scene, not just watching it anymore, and the sense of presence is overwhelming.
Talk about rationality can get very confusing unless the things with which rationality deals are also included.
What we think of as reality is a continuous synthesis of elements from a fixed hierarchy of a priori concepts and the ever changing data of the senses.
The range of human knowledge today is so great that we're all specialists and the distance between specializations has become so great that anyone who seeks to wander freely between them almost has to forego closeness with the people around him.
If you become restless, speed up. If you become winded, slow down. You climb the mountain in an equilibrium between restlessness and exhaustion.
The Buddha, the Godhead, resides quite as comfortably in the circuits of a digital computer or the gears of a cycle transmission as he does at the top of a mountain or in the petals of a flower. To think otherwise is to demean the Buddha - which is to demean oneself.
The place to improve the world is first in one's own heart and head and hands.
…the doctrinal differences between Hinduism and Buddhism and Taoism are not anywhere near as important as doctrinal differences among Christianity and Islam and Judaism. Holy wars are not fought over them because verbalized statements about reality are never presumed to be reality itself.
What I mean (and everybody else means) by the word 'quality' cannot be broken down into subjects and predicates. This is not because Quality is so mysterious but because Quality is so simple, immediate and direct.
Any effort that has self-glorification as its final endpoint is bound to end in disaster.
If your mind is truly, profoundly stuck, then it might be much better off than when it was loaded with ideas
The best students always are flunking. Every good teacher knows that.
No one is fanatically shouting that the sun is going to rise tomorrow. They know it's going to rise tomorrow.
When you live in the shadow of insanity, the appearance of another mind that thinks and talks as yours does is something close to a blessed event.
Any philosophic explanation of Quality is going to be both false and true precisely because it is a philosophic explanation. The process of philosophic explanation is an analytic process, a process of breaking something down into subjects and predicates. What I mean (and everybody else means) by the word 'quality' cannot be broken down into subjects and predicates. This is not because Quality is so mysterious but because Quality is so simple, immediate and direct.
I think present-day reason is an analogue of the flat earth of the medieval period. If you go too far beyond it you're presumed to fall off, into insanity. And people are very much afraid of that. I think this fear of insanity is comparable to the fear people once had of falling off the edge of the world. Or the fear of heretics. There's a very close analogue there.
Just put one foot in front of the other.
I think this fear of insanity is comparable to the fear people once had of falling off the edge of the world. Or the fear of heretics...What's happening is that each year our old flat earth of conventional reason becomes less and less adequate to handle the experiences we have and this is creating wide-spread feelings of topsy-turviness. As a result we're getting more and more people in irrational areas of thought...occultism, mysticism, drug changes and the like...because they feel an inadequacy in classical reason to handle what they know are real experiences.
What's wrong with technology is that it's not connected in any real way with matters of the spirit and of the heart. And so it does blind, ugly things quite by accident and gets hated for that.