"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."

Source : Peter Matthiessen (1998). “Nine-Headed Dragon River: Zen Journals 1969-1982”, p.16, Shambhala Publications

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