Zen

If Zen is approached with the usual mental attitude, it will seem quite incomprehensible. Our average Western intellectuality would consider its paradoxical language simply as a play upon words. Its full significance is revealed only when we approach it in a different manner, making our minds available to the new processes of inner perception which it suggests. - Robert Linssen

It is quite false to imagine that Zen is a sort of individualistic, subjective purity in which the monk seeks to rest and find spiritual refreshment by the discovery and enjoyment of his own interiority. It is not a subtle form of spiritual self-gratification, a repose in the depths of one's own inner silence. Nor is it by any means a simple withdrawal from the outer world of matter to an inner world of spirit. The first and most elementary fact about Zen is its abhorrence of this dualistic division between matter and spirit. Any criticism of Zen that presupposes such a division is, therefore, bound to go astray. - Thomas Merton

Being Zen about something means just being as it is. Seeing clearly, hearing clearly, smelling clearly, tasting clearly, touching clearly – that’s Zen. So everything as it is, is truth. But when we add thinking, we don’t see truth as it is. We see something that we like, or we don’t like; we want or don’t want’ we accept or don’t accept. That’s not Zen. - Venerable Hyon Gak