Quotes about Perception

O my God, how does it happen in this poor old world that Thou art so great and yet nobody finds Thee, that Thou callest so loudly and nobody hears Thee, that Thou art so near and nobody feels Thee, that Thou givest Thyself to everybody and nobody knows Thy name? Men flee from Thee and say they cannot find Thee; they turn their backs and say they cannot see Thee; they stop their ears and say they cannot hear Thee. Hans Denk

Nature at the middle distance is familiar - so familiar that we are deluded into believing that we really know what it is all about. See very close at hand, or at a great distance, or from an odd angle, it seems disquietingly strange, wonderful beyond all comprehension.

In nature, as in work of art, the isolation of an object tends to invest it with absoluteness, to endow it with that more-than-symbolic meaning which is identical with being.

God as a sense of warmth about the heart, God as exultation, God as tears in the eyes, God as a rush of power or thought—that was all right. But God as truth, God as 2 + 2 = 4—that wasn't so clearly all right.

Whatever one says on the air is bound to be misunderstood; for people take from the heard or printed discourse that which they are predisposed to hear or read, not what is there- all that TV can do is to increase the number of misunderstanders by many thousandfold — and at the same time to increase the range of misunderstanding by providing no objective text to which the voluntarily ignorant can be made to refer.

Threequarters of the time one's never in contact with things, only with the beastly words that stand for them.

Still, if one has to suffer in order to be beautiful, one must also expect to be ugly in order not to suffer.

Query: how to combine the belief that the world is a to a great extent illusory with belief that it is none the less essential to improve the illusion? How to be simultaneously dispassionate and not indifferent, serene like an old man and active like a young one?

Science starts with observation; but the observation is always selective. You have to look at the world through a lattice of projected concepts. Then you take the moksha-medicine, and suddenly there are hardly any concepts. You don't select and immediately classify what you experience; you just take it in. It's like that poem of Wordsworth's, 'Bring with you a heart that watches and receives.' In

That art thou': 'Behold but One in all things' -God within and God without. There is a way to Reality in and through the soul, and there is a way to Reality in and through the world. Whether the ultimate goal can be reached by following either of these ways to the exclusion of the other is to be doubted. The third, best and hardest way is that which leads to the divine Ground simultaneously in the perceiver and in that which is perceived.

It begins easily for the sake of poor imbeciles like me; but it goes on, it goes on, more and more fully and subtly and abstrusely and embracingly.

This suffocating interior of a dime-store shop was my own personal self; these gimcrack mobiles of tin and plastic were my personal contributions to the universe....What it had allowed me to perceive inside was not the Dharma-Body, in images, but my own mind; not Suchness, but a set of symbols - in other words, a homemade substitute for Suchness.