2024: Index W

Walsh, Neale Donald

"Your soul doesn't care what you do for a living -- and when your life is over, neither will you.  Your soul cares only about what you are being while you are doing whatever you are doing."  (05/25/2022) (07/05/2023)

Watts, Alan

"I had a discussion with a great master in Japan, and we were talking about the various people who are working to translate the Zen books into English, and he said, "That's a waste of time.  If you really understand Zen, you can use any book. You could use the Bible.  You could use Alice in Wonderland. You could use the dictionary, because the sound of the rain needs no translation.  (05/10/2023)

"Nothing is more creative than death, since it is the whole secret of life.  It means that the past must be abandoned, that the unknown cannot be avoided, that "I" cannot continue, and that nothing can be ultimately fixed.  When a man knows this, he lives for the first time in his life.  By holding his breath, he loses it.  By letting go, he finds it."  (03/09/2022)

"The trouble is that people spend so much energy looking for the God that they fail to see the activity which is surely a sad state of affairs.  What is this activity?  The rivers flow; the flowers bloom; you walk down the street.  Really, we should need to say no more than this ... " (04/19/2023)

"We could say that meditation doesn't have a reason or doesn't have a purpose.  In this respect it's unlike almost all other things we do except perhaps making music and dancing.  When we dance, the journey itself is the point, as when we play music the playing itself is the point.  And exactly the same thing is true in meditation.  Meditation is the discovery that the point of life is always arrived at in the immediate moment."  (06/14/2022)

"You don't look out there for God, something in the sky, you look in you."  (03/12/2022)

"You have to cultivate an attitude to life where you're not trying to get anything out of it. You pick up a pebble on the beach, look at it, it's beautiful.  Don't try and get a sermon out of it ... Just enjoy it.  Don't feel that you've got to salve your conscience by saying that this is for the advancement of your aesthetic understanding.  Enjoy the pebble.  If you do that, you become healthy." (01/04/2022)

Wei Wu Wei

"No one becomes "enlightened."  The term simply implies an absence of what-you-are-not; in other words, an awakening from the phantom-identity unto the normal state of what-you-are." (01/09/2022)

 

Wells, H. G.

"We must not allow the clock and the calendar to blind us to the fact that each moment of life is a miracle and mystery." 

White, E. B.

"Always be on the lookout for the presence of wonder."

Whitman, Walt

"Not I, nor anyone else can travel that road for you.  You must travel it by yourself.

"It is not far.  It is within reach.

"Perhaps you have been on it since you were born, and did not know.

"Perhaps it is everywhere on water and on land." (01/14/2022)

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"Why, who makes much of a miracle?

"As to me I know nothing else but miracles ...

"To me every hour of the light and dark is a miracle,

"Every cubic inch of space is a miracle,

"Every square yard of the surface of the earth is spread with the same,

"Every foot of the interior swarms with the same."  (11/13/2023) 

Wilber, Ken

"Yasutani Roshi used to explain enlightenment as -- and these are his words -- "the direct awareness that you are more than this puny body or limited mind.  Stated negatively, it is the realization that the universe is not external to you.  Positively, it is experiencing the universe as yourself.""  (07/11/2023)

Wilde, Oscar

"The final mystery is oneself ... who can calculate the orbit of his own soul?"

Wise, Nina

"Be quiet, be still.  Let the mond rest.  Discover who you really are."  (07/13/2022)

Wordsworth, William

"And then my heart

    "with pleasure fills,

"And dances with the

    "daffodil."  (04/17/2022)

Wu-Men

"One instant is eternity

Eternity is the now

When you see through this one instant

You see through the One who sees."  (09/05/2023)

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"Ten thousand flowers in spring, the moon in autumn, a cool breeze in summer, snow in winter.

"If your mind isn't clouded by unnecessary things, this is the best season of your life."  (06/02/2023)

Wu Hsin

"The flower is not concerned about tomorrow. 

"It does not plan.

"It does not worry about death.

"Nor does it make an effort to smell beautiful.

"The flower teaches being -- Being what one is."  (05/19/2023)

Wuxi, Sixin

"Investigate what's right under your own feet.  Contemplate it, get to the bottom of it.  What is the truth of it?"  (06/11/2022)