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When we are mired in the relative world, never lifting our gaze to the mystery, our life is stunted, incomplete; we are filled with yearning for that paradise that is lost when, as young children, we replace it with words and ideas and abstractions — such as merit, such as past, present, and future — our direct, spontaneous experience of the thing itself, in the beauty and precision of this present moment. We identify, label, and interpret our surroundings as abstract concepts, quite separate from another concept, which is our own separate identity and ego.

— Peter Matthiessen Nine-Headed Dragon River: Zen Journals 1969-1982 (1986)

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More quotes by Peter Matthiessen

Amazingly, we take for granted that instinct for survival, fear of death, must separate us from the happiness of pure and uninterpreted experience, in which body, mind, and nature are the same.

The Snow Leopard (1978)

Yet that light is always present, like the stars of noon. Man must perceive it if he is to transcend his fear of meaningless, for no amount of “progress” can take its place.

The Snow Leopard (1978)

I have often tried to isolate that quality of "Zen" which attracted me so powerfully to its literature and later to the practice of zazen.

Nine-Headed Dragon River: Zen Journals 1969-1982 (1986)

Zen has been called the "religion before religion," which is to say that anyone can practice, including those committed to another faith.

Nine-Headed Dragon River: Zen Journals 1969-1982 (1986)

Today most scientists would agree with the ancient Hindus that nothing exists or is destroyed, things merely change shape or form; that matter is insubstantial in origin, a temporary aggregate of the pervasive energy that animates the electron.

The Snow Leopard (1978)

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Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Peter Matthiessen (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.