“We in the West, living in a tradition of stubborn ego-centric practicality and geared entirely for the use and manipulation of everything, always pass from one thing to another, from cause to effect, from the first to the next and to the last and then back to the first. Everything always points to something else, and hence we never stop anywhere because we cannot…. Nothing is allowed to just be and mean itself: everything has to mysteriously signify something else….

“Both Buddhism and Christianity…show that suffering remains inexplicable most of all for the man who attempts to explain it in order to evade it, or who thinks explanation itself is an escape….the only thing to do about [suffering] is to plunge right into the middle of contradiction and confusion in order to be transformed by what Zen calls the “Great Death” and Christianity calls “dying and rising in Christ.

“…the whole context of Buddhist “mindfulness” or awareness, which in its most elementary form consists in that “bare attention” which simply sees what is right there and does not add any comment, any interpretation, any judgment, any conclusion. It just sees.

“If one reaches the point where understanding fails, this is not a tragedy: it is simply a reminder to stop thinking and start looking. Perhaps there is nothing to figure out after all: perhaps we only need to wake up.”

-Thomas Merton, Zen and the Birds of Appetite