The Temptations Of God Were Always More

The Moment Of Truth, The Sudden Emergence Of A New Insight, Is An Act Of Intuition. Such Intuitions Give The Appearance Of Miraculous Flushes, Or Short-circuits Of Reasoning. In Fact They May Be Likened To An Immersed Chain, Of Which Only The Beginning And The End Are Visible Above The Surface Of Consciousness. The Diver Vanishes At One End Of The Chain And Comes Up At The Other End, Guided By Invisible Links.

The Ultimate Truth Is Penultimately A Falsehood.

In My Youth I Regarded The Universe As An Open Book, Printed In The Language Of Equations, Whereas Now It Appears To Me As A Text Written In Invisible Ink, Of Which In Our Rare Moments Of Grace We Are Able To Decipher A Small Segment.

When Reality Becomes Unbearable, The Mind Must Withdraw From It And Create A World Of Artificial Perfection. Plato's World Of Pure Ideas And Forms, Which Alone Is To Be Considered As Real, Whereas The World Of Nature Which We Perceive Is Merely Its Cheap Woolworth Copy, Is A Flight Into Delusion.

Zen Is To Religion What A Japanese "rock Garden" Is To A Garden. Zen Knows No God, No Afterlife, No Good And No Evil, As The Rock-garden Knows No Flowers, Herbs Or Shrubs. It Has No Doctrine Or Holy Writ: Its Teaching Is Transmitted Mainly In The Form Of Parables As Ambiguous As The Pebbles In The Rock-garden Which Symbolise Now A Mountain, Now A Fleeting Tiger. When A Disciple Asks "what Is Zen?", The Master's Traditional Answer Is "three Pounds Of Flax" Or "a Decaying Noodle" Or "a Toilet Stick" Or A Whack On The Pupil's Head.