Swami Ashokananda Was A Brilliant And Accomplished

Water Is Patient; It Can Stagnate And Let Itself Be Coated With Scum If Need Be. It Is As Gentle As The Morning's Dew. It Is Non-confrontational, Even Respectful, In Circumventing The Rocks In A Stream. It Makes Room For Everything That Enters Its Pools. It Accommodates By Assuming The Shape Of Any Vessel It Is Poured Into. And It Is Humble, Seeking Always The Lowest Level. Yet Along With - Or Rather Because Of These Adaptive, Yielding Properties, It Is Ultimately Irresistible; It Carves Canyons Out Of Stone.

Exclusively Oral Cultures Are Unencumbered By Dead Knowledge, Dead Facts. Libraries, On The Other Hand, Are Full Of Them.

I've Spent The Last 50 Years Or So Steeping Myself In The World's Religions, And I've Done My Homework. I've Gone To Each Of The World's Eight Great Religions And Sought Out The Most Profound Scholars I Could Find, And I've Apprenticed Myself To Them And Actually Practiced Each Faith.

In Nature, The Emphasis Is In What Is Rather Than What Ought To Be.

The Word Translated, Koan, It Means A Problem. But It's A Very Special Problem. And To Strip It Down To The Way It Works, You Are Given A Problem Which Has No Rational Solution. There Is A Contradiction Built Into It. One Standard - One Is This Is The Sound Of Two Hands Clapping. What Is The Sound Of One Hand Clapping? And So On. All Right, So The First Thing Is That It Brings Your Rational Mind To An Impasse.