Life exists only at this very moment, and in this moment it is infinite and eternal. For the present moment is infinitely small; before we can measur… - Alan Watts

Zen does not attempt to be intelligible – that is, capable of being understood by the intellect. The method of Zen is to baffle, excite, puzzle and exhaust the intellect until it is realized that intellection is only thinking about; it will provoke, irritate and again exhaust the emotions until it is realised that emotion is only feeling about, and then it contrives, when the disciple has been brought to an intellectual and emotional impasse, to bridge the gap between second-hand conceptual contact with reality, and first-hand experience. To effect this it calls into play a higher faculty of the mind, known as intuition or Buddhi, which is sometimes called the ‘Eye of the Spirit’. In short, the aim of Zen is to focus the attention on reality itself, instead of on our intellectual and emotional reactions to reality — reality being that ever-changing, ever-growing, indefinable something known as “life,” which will never stop for a moment for us to fit it satisfactorily into any rigid system of pigeon-holes and ideas.

does the root of a flower influence the flower as something fundamentally different from it? No, surely the root and the flower are one process, and like your head and your feet it all goes together. In that sense then, the universe, and what you or I do, all goes together, and so that picture of the universe is really a picture of you.

Sanctity or sagehood as an exclusive vocation is [...] symptomatic of an exclusive mode of consciousness in particular. Its basic assumption is that God and nature are in competition and that man must choose between them. Its standpoint is radically dualistic[.]