Book Title: Zen Buddhism
Author(s): Christmas Humphereys
Publisher: William Heinemann LTD

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Page 262
________________ INSTEAD OF CONCLUSION 229 least for a few minutes every day; it matters not when, where or how. Learn the value of silence, of being alone with the best of you. Let the silence speak to you, not with ideas about it and about) but with a bright and gentle certainty. Learn to listen. (4) Encourage the intuitive factor in the mind. Look for it, believe in it, trust it, use it. Don't hit it on the head when it speaks and say, “That's nonsense, I can't do that!" It may be nonsense; it may none the less be true. Don't fritter away your attention in gossip, "news''-papers, empty films. They are not "wrong" and still less "sin", for there are no such things. They are, however, a waste of time, and in the noise of the market place a whisper of truth is not easily heard. Yet check this whisper with your reason. Much that passes for intuition is only physical instinct or prejudice dressed up, or promptings from the psychic plane, and the psychic is just three planes removed from the intuition. Meanwhile, while waiting for satori itself, induce the results of it. Lift yourself up to a plane of certainty, sincerity, impersonal rightness of action and a sense of the flow of the Universe. Boldly feel yourself an active agent of All-Power, All-Life, but see to it that you are an impersonal agent, for self, the personal, self-seeking self at the wrong end of the cosmic wave-length gets rudely knocked about. (5) Expand your understanding till it hurts. Take in more and more. Expand in time, with the knowledge of hundreds of millions of years, of light years, to the nearest star. Then move through space from earth to the sun, and thence from solar system to solar system till the brain reels and the very stars go wheeling round the sky.

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