Are your lessons done?

"How the hell did we get here? ..That's what I thought, this is all just an accident."

"I couldn't take the odor in there. We all smell like our parents. We smell like death."

"11 grand, that's my monthly nut, mortgage, private school, cars, insurance, vacation, entertainment, help. I'm covering my nut, but the prospect of covering it for the next 10 years does not inspire me to get out of bed in the morning. We are standing on a huge mountain of crap that used to be our future. [reply] Its best not to look down. [reply] Sink slowly up to the eyeballs, blink once, and call it a life."

"I was flirting to amuse myself." [reply] "Well I don't find it amusing." [reply] "Maybe you should flirt then." [reply] "Why, so you can score some extra points when everyone sees how confident you are because your wife's flirting is harmless, unlike yours? Nice try!"

"I am so fucking sick of getting a lump in my throat from listening to 25 year old music. Let's make some new music. [reply] "What was it like, the hospital, you never told me?" [reply] "Very quiet, like those buddhist monasteries you used to read about. Or maybe it was the tranquilizers, I could never really tell. Who knows, you might enjoy it there..."

"Its not about things, I'm trying to explore my own [mind] and you can only do that through experience. Experience is completely pre-packaged for us, everything ever known, from Richtenstein to Muddy Waters to the tombs of the Pharoahs, is instantly accessible online. Isn't that the glory of the information age? We've become information hunters and gatherers, and we keep gorging ourselves until we collapse under the weight of our own heads."

"It's ironic, isn't it, that men are the ones with no certainty left?  Women, on the other hand, are so deluded by the canons of pop sociology, it's like scripture for them, prescribing the path to the perfect life, how it all should be, its absolute rubbish."

"He deeply understands the Buddha's observation that all is suffering. He's a man, like us, drinks enormous amounts of saki, pain goes away, for a while. We are all trying to make paradise, why? What is it about this human life that is so unbearable that we try anything to make it better, including saki? Of course we must give it up. Without giving up, paradise is always something separate from us. But it takes great effort to keep that in mind, so, you must try harder."

Jeff: "You're a dirty old monk." 

Kozen: "This dress only hides the hard-on, it doesn't make it go away. Since Adam, man has tried everything to answer the woman problem, veiling them from head to foot, celibacy, rushing off to war, yet some problems have no solutions, they just point to the basic problem."

Jeff: "God, I hate this zen shit"

Kozen: "Me too."

Jeff: "My whole life I spent chasing women.. I should have been chasing God."

Kozen: "An equally fruitless task. He's not out there playing hide and seek.  We have to experience for ourselves the true nature of things, and for guys like us, it's a hell of a search."

Marty: "We were never free, were we?" 

Jeff: "Not for two seconds"

Marty: "We are so fucked up we can't even delude ourselves anymore.."

Kozen: "I too was looking forward to paradise, nice dry spot for rainy season. Now I have to go back to the monastery, bad food, cold.."

Jeff: "Sounds delightful.."

Kozen: "Sometimes it is delightful."

Jeff: "Cut the crap Kozen, how exactly is it delightful?"

Kozen: "Sitting in the meditation hall, for a second or two, the veil lifts, this unexpected sweetness of no coming and no going, and all this dissolves into a single activity of the cosmos, beyond hope, beyond despair, and for an instant, we're not separate from this activity of the cosmos, we manifest our true nature. Everything else is just an idea that doesn't work. Does it, friends?  You should come with me."

"There is no 'way.' Don't make the monastery into another dream of paradise. Its just a nice place. But your own true nature, your buddha nature, is inside you. Whether you realize it or not. How you realize it is up to you. Thank you both for my ticket. I am excited to fly first class.  If I see either of you on the plane, it will be nice. If not, I do not like goodbyes, so I will simply say, have splendid lives."

"No woman's gonna save me. And no tower to the sky is gonna save you. It's time to act like men for Christ's sake."