You’re only making a mess by trying to put things straight. You’re trying to straighten out a wiggly world and no wonder you’re in trouble.

You—now, at this minute, you see—are the whole system of inning and outing. In other words, you often think, perhaps, “Maybe a long, long time ahead I shall reach the point where I wake up from manifestation and overcome the world-illusion, and discover that I am the supreme reality behind all this diversification.” My friends, there is no diversification! In other words, what you call diversification is your game in the same way as you chop the thing and then you say it is made of pieces. But you forget that you’ve cut it.

Seeking’s alright; I mean, it’s a free country—but it invariably takes you away from what you’re looking for because every search supposes I will find it later, not now. In the next moment. That somehow, by some gimmick, by some exercise, by some process of transformation, I will later discover what I want. This is postponement.

All talk about selfishness—all talk about success in becoming virtuous, or enlightened, or integrated, or non-neurotic, or self-actualized; all the terms that are being used, all this talk—attests to the fact that it hasn’t happened, and will, in fact, get in the way of its happening.

When the outcome of a game is known, the game is cancelled—because the whole point of playing the game is that we don’t know the outcome. Because the known future is already past, and the higher the degree of certainty of knowledge as to the future, to that extent it has happened. You’ve had it. And we don’t want to put the future in that situation—not really. Because, you see, if you think of the cosmos as basically a game of hide-and-seek—where the lord god is creating the universe by forgetting that he’s god and imagining that he’s you—then this is the fundamental way of getting rid of the eternal boredom of knowing all about it, and of there being no surprises. The whole vitality of being alive is that it is always surprising. To be enlightened is to be surprised at everything; that it is a wonder, that everything is a miracle, that it is highly improbable and really shouldn’t’ve happened at all—but there it is, you see? If there isn’t that sense, there is no vitality in anything.

Unaccepted, the universe has no meaning; it is senseless fate and chaos, but acceptance is a way of discovering meaning, not of manufacturing it.

If you get with yourself, get with gravity, get with energy (following its line of least resistance), you will discover that all the vibrations of nature are ecstatic, erotic, or blissful. Existence is orgasm.

The past is a memory, the future an expectation. Neither past nor future actually exist. There is simply eternal now.

A future is of no use to people who are not able to appreciate the useless. A future has no value if it is only survival value. And this, then, comes to the fact that beyond the value of time, beyond the value of survival, is the supreme value of play, of the useless.

The miracles of technology cause us to live in a hectic, clockwork world that does violence to human biology.

You have to adjust to facts: you can’t have a nation, you can’t have a society, in which everyone is always occupied in intellectual and computational pursuits. A few people have to be around who know how to handle the material world in a gracious way. And for these people we provide only regretfully, as an afterthought.

Our brains and the patterns in them are themselves members of the concrete, physical universe, and thus our abstractions are as much forms of nature as the structure of crystals or the organization of ferns.

It is a curious thing that it’s very difficult to get human beings to organize their energies for something pleasant. It’s only under fear, under external threat to their life, that human beings will really get busy and cooperate. So the solidarity of any group of human beings depends to an enormous extent on an external menace. And therefore, that menace is friendly to the solidarity and the cooperative enterprise of the group.

The more we try to elaborate perfectly foolproof methods of arranging our lives, the more we find ourselves encumbered with impossible details. That’s the fallacy of too much law.

Those things in life which are most pleasurable almost invariably happen unexpectedly. They are not contrived.

The meaning, the goodie about life, is exactly here and now. We’re not going anywhere. Could you get this point of view? Look out in the street and you will see people frantically thinking they’re going somewhere, that they have important business. And they have a far-out look in their eyes and their noses stick way out in front of them. And they are going somewhere! They are on purpose! They have something to achieve! Here and now, sitting around here, you realize we don’t have to go anywhere.

What sort of a gamble is worth making? Is life, is existence, a gamble where we should say: well, you’ve got to be kind of careful about this. Don’t get too involved, you see? Don’t put your shirt on it. Play it cool and cautious. Well, I’m going to ask: what are you going to win on the basis of that game? All you’ll win, you see, is anxiety. That’s all you’ll get. You’ll get enough goodies to make you go on being anxious.

I’m beginning to reveal an assumption that underlies our practical everyday conduct that we don’t ordinarily look at: whether it is better to draw out life in what we call a sensible way, make it as long as possible, or whether it wouldn’t be much better to make it as vivid as possible for a short time.

Life and death constitute a more glorious life than life alone—a truth which can only be proved in acceptance. For if we can learn to love both life and death, we find that life and death are in turn an expression of love. If we can learn to love, to accord freedom to both the heights and the depths of our own nature, we shall instantly realize that this love is not something that we have produced alone but it is in the very nature of the universe, and that our heights and depths are unintelligible without it.

If you are a superior person in any way—morally, intellectually, physically—you have no means of knowing that you’re a superior person except through the presence of relatively inferior people. And were they to disappear, you would be in limbo and you wouldn’t know where you were at all. The higher always depends on the lower in the same way as the flower of the plant depends on the soil, the rows upon the manure. And so, too, the subjective (the self) goes along with the objective (what the self knows) in an inseparable union.

You and the universe which seems to constrain you are not two things. If you play the game that you are only here, then you will feel pushed around. But when—through trying to resign from either pushing around or being pushed around—you discover that it can’t be done, you then become very much aware there is no point getting away from anything. Where is away? And so it’s said: a true Zen monk has a mountain hermitage in any place that he stands on.