Quotes About Contemplation

Because now I am grown so old and neutral....

And what do I think about? What thoughts do I have! - What thoughts! a whole host, multitude, and world of thoughts, I keep devising new ones and reworking old ones, some of the old ones are concluded and are only thought of as conclusions, whole worlds of new ones come crashing into my fingers, and it never ends.

I wanta swim in rivers and drink goatmilk and talk with priests and just read Chinese books and amble around the valleys talking to farmers and their children.

I sat cross-legged in the sand and contemplated my life. Well, there, and what difference did it make? What's going to happen to me up ahead?

And suddenly, not a soul's at the store as for other & similar & just as blank reasons, they've gone to the silence, the suppers of their own mystery.

I don't know

for you are an observer, you know, you observe things, that's why you live.

The old tree brooded over me silently, a living thing. I heard a mouse snoring in the garden weeds. The rooftops of Berkeley looked like pitiful living meat sheltering grieving phantoms from the enternality of the heavens which they feared to face. By the time I went to bed I wasn't taken in by no Princess or no desire for no Princess and nobody's disapproval and I felt glad and slept well.

We stopped in the unimaginable softness (293).

But you can go on thinking and imagining forever further and stop at no decisions to pick up a bag for the thinkings. Turn your thinking into your work, your thoughts a book, in sieges.

But the mountains were mighty solemn, and so was Japhy, and for that matter so was I, and in fact laugher is solemn.

The hot water pools are steaming, Fagan and Monsanto and the others are all sitting peacefully up to their necks, they're all naked, but there's a gang of fairies also there naked all standing in various bath house postures that make me hesitate to take my clothes off just on general principles. (p. 106)

Sunday morning,I empty of my little tricks to make life livable.

She turned away wearily. We lay on our backs, looking at the ceiling and wondering what God had wrought when He made life so sad.

You know to me a mountain is a Buddha. Think of the patience, hundreds of thousands of years just sittin there bein perfectly silent and like praying for all living creatures in that silence and just waitin for us to stop all our frettin and foolin.

I play games with her fabulous eyes and she longs to be in a monastery

Meditate outdoors. The dark trees at night are not really the dark trees at night, it's only the golden eternity.

little absent from everything in the way of a Zen Master actually who realizes that everything is indifferent anyway

There are also silent drinkers with big chapped red fists around silent glasses, huddled over, figuring out ways to get their wives outa their thoughts and you can see their mouths lengthen down and draw sorrow almost as you look.

Did they know that he stood on the bow every morning, noon, and night for an hour...this prayer of thanks to a God more a God than any to be found in book-bound, altar-bound Religion?

Sometimes I'd yell questions at the rocks and trees, and across gorges, or yodel - What is the meaning of the void? The answer was perfect silence, so I knew.

We've got to have mind-collecting weeks in our zendos where your mind tries to fly off like a Tinker Toy and like a good soldier you put it back together with your eyes closed except of course the whole thing is wrong.

Ah, holy hole!

They're so silent!" I said. "Yeah man, you know to me a mountain is a Buddha. Think of the patience, hundreds of thousands of years just sittin there bein perfectly perfectly silent and like praying for all living creatures in that silence and just waitin for us to stop all our frettin and foolin.