Quotes About Nonbeing

Only when that mortal "you" will have erased everything about itself that it cherishes and is holding to, will "you" have come to the brink of an experience of identity with that Being which is no being yet is the Being beyond the nonbeing of all things. Nor is It anything that you have ever known, ever named, or even thought about in this world:

Politics is action and all action is but a flaw in the perfection of inaction, which is peace, just as all being is but a flaw in the perfection of nonbeing. Which is God. For if God is perfection and the only perfection is in nonbeing, then God is nonbeing. Then God is nothing. Nothing can give no basis for the criticism of Thing in its thingness. Then where do you get anything to say? Then where do you get off?

Indeed, the best answer I have ever heard to the question of what it would be like to be dead (i.e., be nonbeing) is to imagine how it felt to be before you were conceived.

If life is as meaningless as death, if guilt is as questionable as perfection, if being is no more meaningful than nonbeing, on what can one base the courage to be?

In a like manner, as soon as we know the meaning of being and the meaning of nonbeing, we know that a thing cannot be and not be at one and the same time, and under the same formal consideration.

And we the people are so vulnerable. Our bodies are shot with mortality. Our legs are fear and our arms are time. These chill humors seep through our capillaries, weighting each cell with an icy dab of nonbeing, and that dab grows and swells and sucks the cell dry. That is why physical courage is so important—it fills, as it were, the holes—and why it is so invigorating. The least brave act, chance taken and passage won, makes you feel loud as a child.

Where we are right now has nothing to do with human time. The word now is meaningless. What we call a year is a tiny framework in a huge sea of time. We are engulfed." I lifted my arms. No words came, only images of the Japanese gardens I had once visited: Saih?-ji, Kinkaku-ji, Ry?an-ji. But this place was the font. The whole world was this, embedded in this, had issued from this. It was a place where, as D?gen said, being and nonbeing are rolled together

I no longer felt alone and it gave me, not strength, but a sweet sensation of happiness, though I knew sadness was lurking not far off, because all being arises from nonbeing, and everything that exists derives from its opposite.

Every religion implies that it treats the problem of being and nonbeing, life and death. Their languages are different, but they speak about the same things.

Remain in the eternal nebula, there, in the polyessence of a sweet nonbeing.

We have to nourish our insight into impermanence every day. If we do, we will live more deeply, suffer less, and enjoy life much more. Living deeply, we will touch the foundation of reality, nirvana, the world of no birth and no death. Touching impermanence deeply, we touch the world beyond permanence and impermanence. We touch the ground of being and see that which we have called being and nonbeing are just notions. Nothing is ever lost. Nothing is ever gained.

The universe and the person who creates the universe are not two different entities. Some Christian theologians say that God is the ground of being. This is quite close to Buddhism. But then Buddhism asks the question, If God is the ground of being, then what is the ground of nonbeing?

Instead of saying that being leads to birth, we should say that being and nonbeing lead to birth and death. In our head, we have become used to the idea that when we are born we come into being out of nonbeing and when we die we go from being into nonbeing. If we remove the idea of being and nonbeing, there is no more idea of birth and death.

Fear is born from our ignorance, from our concepts regarding life, death, being, and nonbeing. If we are able to get rig of all these concepts by touching the reality within ourselves, then nonfear will be there and the greatest relief will become possible.

If you know your true nature of no coming, no going; no being, no nonbeing; no birth, no death, then you will have no fear and can dwell in the ultimate dimension, nirvana, right here and now. You don't have to die in order to reach nirvana. When you dwell in your true nature, you are already dwelling in nirvana. We have our historical dimension but we also have our ultimate dimension, just as the Buddha does.

For the birds there is not a time that they tell, but the point vierge between darkness and light, between being and nonbeing. You can tell yourself the time by their waking, if you are experienced. But that is your folly, not theirs.

As we live our precarious lives on the brink of the void, constantly coming closer to a state of nonbeing, we are all too often aware of our fragitlity.

Directly stated, the evolution of the entire universe—stars, elements, life, man—is a process of drawing something out of nothing, out of the utter void of nonbeing.

LifeParticles are the particles of Nothingness that have attributes of being and nonbeing, and the particles of energy and consciousness, which are the essence of Life.

Neurosis is the way of avoiding nonbeing by avoiding being