smitri - "recollection" or constant awareness of the immediate present.

"What we call things, facts, or events are after all no more than convenient units of perception, recognizable pegs for names, selected from the infinte multitude of lines and surfaces, colors, and textures, spaces and densities which surround us."

"We do not know what it is. We only know that it is."

"The truth is always in relation to a point of view."

The type of intelligence that we have cultivated beings anxiety for at least 3 principal reasons:

1) Dividing the world into separate facts & events.
2) Responsibility to cope with our separation with nature.
3) Awareness of time (and working against it).

"The paradox that intelligence...cannot proceed very far without also having to embrace its polar opposite-Instinctual faith."

"Hinduism & Buddhism...unlike most forms of Christianity...envisage not an escape, but a resolution of the conflict within this present life."

"To overcome the conflict between intelligence and instinct it is first necessary to understand, or at least imagine, a point of view, or perhaps a state of mind, which is experiential rather than intellectual - a kind of sensation rather than a set of ideas."

"The sensation I am tyring to describe is the experience of things and events in relationship, as distinct from the partial experience of things and events in separation."

Suchness (Taoism)

"Why is the mutual interdependence between ourselves and the external world not the most obvious and dominant fact of consciousness? Because we look at things separately instead of simultaneously."

Koan: Show me your original face which you had before your father and mother conceived you!

"Let your mind alone;
let it think whatever it likes.
But one of the things it like is interfering with itself."

"In Zen, the master does not teach the student anything, but forces him to find out for himself, and, furthermore, does not think of himself as a master, since it is only from the standpoint of the unawakened student that there are masters."

"There are no Zen masters because Zen has nothing to teach."

"Zen appeals in the West because it does not preach, moralize, and scold. No guilt or recrimination."

The Westerner must fee himself free of the itch to justify himself. Lacking this, Zen will be either "beat" or "square", either a revolt from the culture and social order or a new form of stiffness and respectability".

"Zen is above all the liberation of the mind from conventional thought, and this is something utterly different from rebellion against convention, on the one hand, or adapting foreign conventions, on the other."

"The 'beat' mentality: Nonparticipation in the "American Way of Life" a revolt that which does not seek to change the existing order but simply turns away from it to find significance of life in subjective experience rather than objective achievement."

"When Kerouac gives his philosophical final statement, 'I don't know. I don't care. And it doesn't make any difference' - the cat is out of the bag, for there is a hostility in these words which clangs with self-defence".

Yun-men:"Everyday is a good day."

"Kerouac's own Buddhism is a true beat Zen which confuses "anything goes" at the existential level with "anything goes" on the artistic and social levels."

"The claim that substances (marijana, peyote, mescaline) induce states of satori must be treated with reserve...some of their effects are quite unlike anything found in genuine mysticism."

"Indecision is such an obvious and easilt deplored weakness, such a sure butt for contempt by saint and satanist alike. So the poor mugwump simultaneously admires and is horrified by those who seem to have the strengh of will to go one way or the other".