Aim Quote by Thomas Merton

Personal experience, therefore, is everything in Zen. No ideas are intelligible to those who have no backing of experience.

— D.T. Suzuki

Zen values the simple, concrete, living facts of everyday direct personal experience.

— James H. Austin

In Zen you are learning how to make new realities, to build things inside your mind.

— Frederick Lenz

Zen culture invites us to experience reality without the intervening distractions of intellect, categories, analysis.

— Tom Hoover

Zen is the vehicle of reality.

— Jim Harrison

Zen is all-inclusive. It never denies, it never says no to anything; it accepts everything and transforms it into a higher reality.

— Rajneesh

No matter what verbal space you try to enclose Zen in, it resists, and spills over ... the Zen attitude is that words and…

— Douglas Hofstadter

Although profoundly "inconsequential," the Zen experience has consequences in the sense that it may be applied in any direction, to any conceivable human activity,…

— Alan Watts

“When you live a Zen lifestyle, you are living in tune with whatever it is that you are doing on a day-to-day basis, while…

— Alexis G. Roldan

“Zen is above all a matter of personal experience. The student is asked to accept nothing the truth of which he cannot demonstrate for…

— Katsuki Sekida

I consider writing a legitimate Zen practice.

— Natalie Goldberg

“By emphasizing doubt rather than belief, perplexity rather than certainty, and questions rather than answers, Zen practice granted me the freedom to imagine.”

— Stephen Batchelor