In religion you are concerned with saving your “self” or your “soul.” Through Zen or other Eastern ways of liberation you come to recognize that the “self” is an abstraction from memory, which like all abstractions cannot be “held” or “saved” in any way, and that the real “you,” so to speak, is the on-going processes of your living. Instead of being a block-like entity to be “saved” from the rest of the universe, you become one process in an infinite number of processes, all of them working together in harmony.
I dislike the whole attitude of impersonal charity. Nowadays, you can deduct a CARE package from your income tax, but not what you give to a beggar who comes to your door. If I were making the laws I would completely reverse that. I consider governmental charity and all official, bureaucratic charity to be the utter antithesis of true charity.
I don’t think a human being can act at all until he’s all of one piece. If he’s divided against himself—one part saying, “You should be better than you are”—he’s incapable of effective action.
I once had an argument with Margaret Mead—she was being violently emotional about the necessity of stopping atomic armaments—and I said that it could be the very violence she was displaying which might bring about atomic war.
The world cannot be changed by the “wrong” people, however right their doing or not-doing. And, by the “wrong” people, I mean those who act from the feeling that man is separate from the natural universe—either pushing it around or being pushed around by it.
The ideas of individual freedom and fatalism rest on the same assumption—that man is separate, the boss or the puppet. In my view, he cannot act with wisdom unless he feels that what he does and what nature does are one and the same.