Today, to live means merely to produce.

At the deepest level, the desire for complete union with God exhibits a narcissistic structure.

...I pray to God to make me free of God.

God is nothingness: He is 'beyond all speech.'

...Zen Buddhism, this religion of immanence.

Haikus allow the whole world to appear within things.

The freedom of the 'everyday mind' consists rather in not kneeling down in awe. Its mental attitude is better expressed as sitting unmoveable like an object.

The pornographic body lacks any symbolism. The ritualized body, by contrast, is a splendid stage, with secrets and deities written into it.

Thinking is more erotic than calculating.

It is not honourable to attack an enemy without putting yourself at risk.

In the empire of signs, the soul, psychology, is erased. There is no soul to infect the holy seriousness of ritual play.

Ritual society is a society of rules. It is based not on virtues but on a passion for rules.

The liturgy of emptiness dispels the capitalist economy of the commodity.

Poems are magic ceremonies of language.

Zen Buddhism is inspired by a basic trust in the Here, a basic trust in the world.

The huge laugh is a most extreme expression of freedom.

Enlightenment is an awakening to the everyday.

Psychological disorders are symptoms of a blocked story... The patient is cured the moment she narrates herself free.

A screen bans reality.

The reason that people take selfies is not narcissism. Rather, it is inner emptiness. There is no meaning to stabilize the ego. Faced with its inner emptiness, the ego constantly produces itself.

Without narration, life is purely additive.

The smartphone seems to be a playground, but it is a digital panopticon.

Stories on digital platforms like Facebook or Instagram are not genuine stories. They have no narrative duration. Rather, they are just sequences of momentary impressions that do not tell us anything.

If life can no longer be narrated, wisdom deteriorates, and its place is taken by problem-solving.

Emptiness is not a denial of the proper but an affirmation of it.

When we resist impermanence, the self intensifies.

To die is to wander.

The emptiness of Zen Buddhism... creates a neighborly nearness between things.

Emptiness simply prevents what is individual from insisting on itself.

Emptiness empties the one seeing into what is seen.

Sabbath rest does not follow creation; it brings creation to completion.

Today, tattoos lack symbolic power. All they do is point toward the uniqueness of the bearer. The body is neither a ritual stage nor a surface of projection; rather, it is an advertising space.

Rituals are processes of embodiment and bodily performances. In them, the valid order and values of a community are physically experienced and solidified.

The 'intense life' advertised by the neoliberal regime is in truth simply a life of intense consumption.

Every religious practice is an exercise in attention. A temple is the highest degree of attention.

Those who devote themselves to rituals must ignore themselves. Rituals produce a distance from the self, a self-transcendence.

Rituals are also symbolic practices... in the sense that they bring people together to create an alliance, a wholeness, a community.

When we subordinate rest to work, we ignore the divine.

Silent listening unites a people and creates community without communication.

In contrast to festivals, events do not create community.

Capitalism lacks narrativity.

Capitalism dislikes silence.

Sovereignty, the freedom unto death, is threatening to a society that is organized around work and production.

It is a sign of sovereignty to risk one's life, that is, to turn life into a game.

Following Foucault, we may define the art of life as a practice of suicide, of giving oneself to death, of depsychologizing oneself, of playing.

Power turns pure being into a having.

Ritual practices ensure that we treat not only other people but also things in beautiful ways, that there is an affinity between us and other people as well as things.

We can define rituals as symbolic techniques of making oneself at home in the world. They transforming being at home to being in the world. They turn the world into a reliable place. They are to time what a home is to space. They render time habitable.

Violence and freedom are the two endpoints on the scale of power.

An ethos of freedom stops power from solidifying into domination and makes sure it remains an open game.