filled with paradoxes
"Do you know where the disease lies which keeps you from reaching enlightenment? It lies where you have no faith in yourself. When faith in yourself is lacking you find yourself hurried by others in every possible way. At every encounter you are no longer your own master; you are driven about by others this way and that. All that is required is all at once to cease leaving yourself in search of something external. When this is done you will find yourself no different from the Buddha.
Do you want to know who the Buddha is? Buddha is no other than the one who is, at this moment, right in front of me listening to me talk. You have no faith in yourselves and therefore you are in quest of someone else, somewhere outside. And what will you find? Nothing but words and names, however excellent. You will never reach the moving spirit in the Buddha.
Make no mistake. You, yourselves, raise the obstructions that impede your minds."
- Rinzai Roku
"As for me, I am rather often uneasy in my mind, because I think that my life has not been calm enough; all those bitter disappointments, adversities, changes keep me from developing fully and naturally in my artistic career."
- Vincent van Gogh
"Beware of the man who works hard to learn something, learns it, and finds himself no wiser than before. He is full of murderous resentment of people who are ignorant without having come by their ignorance the hard way."
- Kurt Vonnegut
"Why must you read? Just listen quietly. You never ask why you must play, why you must eat, why you must look at the river, why you are cruel - do you? You rebel and ask why you must do something when you don't like to do it. But reading, playing, laughing, being cruel, being good, seeing the river, the clouds - all this is part of life; and if you don't know how to read, if you don't know how to walk, if you are unable to appreciate the beauty of a leaf, you are not living. You must understand the whole of life, not just one little part of it. That is why you must read, that is why you must look at the skies, that is why you must sing, and dance, and write poems, and suffer, and understand; for all that is life."
- Jiddu Krishnamurti
"so filled with paradoxes that it jumps through hoops
that aren't even there."
- Dick Allen
"When you meet a fencing master, show him your sword.
Do not give your poem to a man who's not a poet."
- Master Lin-Chi
"What is a life of depth? Is it to have a lot of deep experiences? Spiritual experiences? Enlightenment experiences? Or, are we immediately off the track when we envision any kind of experiences which would fill a life of depth? Important questions.
To really live a life of depth is to not depend on any experience at all - whether profound or not. Rather it is to let each experience point you back to the void from which it arose, to the state present before the experience itself.
To see each experience as your own perception of conditions continually emerging from the stillness of emptiness is half of it. To be reminded by experience (rather than hypnotized by it) to Return is the other half. So to live a life of depth, experience becomes the finger pointing back to the Before. It’s a reminder."
- G. Bluestone
"We are prisoners of our natural brains. As children we grow, and new programs are layered down, set into the jelly of our brains. When we are young we write many of these programs in order to adapt to a bizarre and often dangerous environment. And then we grow some more. We mature. We find our places in our cities, in our societies, in ourselves. We form hypotheses as to the nature of things. These hypotheses shape us in turn, and yet more programs are written until we attain a certain level of competence and mastery, even of comfort, with our universe. Because our programs have allowed us this mastery, however limited, we become comfortable in ourselves, as well. And then there is no need for new programs, no need to erase or edit the old. We even forget that we were once able to program ourselves. Our brains grow opaque to new thoughts, as rigid as glass, and our programs are frozen for life, hardwired, so to speak, within our hardened brains.
We should all know the code of our programs, otherwise we can never be free.
If I could find courage, I wondered, what would I see? Would I be ashamed of the arrangement of my programs - of my very self - beyond my control? Ah, but what if I could write new metaprograms, controlling this arrangement of programs? Then I might one day attain the uniqueness and value I found so lacking in myself and the rest of my race; as an artist composes a tone poem, I could create myself and call into being wonderful new programs which had never existed within the rippling tides of the universe. Then I would be free at last, and the flame would burn like star fire; then I would be something new, as new to myself as the morning sun is to a newborn child."
- David Zindell
"The way of awakening and freedom requires that we ask ourselves, with all of the earnestness, honesty, and humility at our command, just this one fundamental question:
“Am I willing to live this moment with as much attention and affection as possible, or am I going to do something else?”
- Scott Morrison
Ah! that moving procession that has left me by the road-side! Its fantastic colors are more brilliant and beautiful than the sun on the undulating waters. What matter if souls and bodies are failing beneath the feet of the ever-pressing multitude! It moves with the majestic rhythm of the spheres. Its discordant clashes sweep upward in one harmonious tone that blends with the music of other worlds - to complete God's orchestra.
It is greater than the stars - that moving procession of human energy; greater than the palpitating earth and the things growing thereon. Oh! I could weep at being left by the wayside; left with the grass and the clouds and a few dumb animals. True, I feel at home in the society of these symbols of life's immutability. In the procession I should feel the crushing feet, the clashing discords, the ruthless hands and stifling breath. I could not hear the rhythm of the march.
Salve! ye dumb hearts. Let us be still and wait by the roadside."
- Kate Chopin
"I see life as a roadside inn where I have to stay until the coach from the abyss pulls up. I don't know where it will take me, because I don't know anything. I could see this inn as a prison, for I'm compelled to wait in it; I could see it as a social centre, for it's here that I meet others. But I'm neither impatient nor common. I leave who will stay shut up in their rooms, sprawled out on beds where they sleeplessly wait, and I leave who will chat in the parlours, from where their songs and voices conveniently drift out here to me. I'm sitting at the door, feasting my eyes and ears on the colours and sounds of the landscape, and I softly sing - for myself alone - wispy songs I compose while waiting."
- Fernando Pessoa
The Book of Disquiet
The poet is a faker
Who’s so good at his act
He even fakes the pain
Of pain he feels in fact.
And those who read his words
Will feel in what he wrote
Neither of the pains he has
But just the one they don’t.
And so around its track
This thing called the heart winds,
A little clockwork train
To entertain our minds.
- Fernando Pessoa
13+ different ways of looking at one of Pessoa's poems
"So, to put it in a negative way, you can't do anything to change yourselves, to become better, to become happier, to become more serene, to become more mystical. But if I say you can't do a damn thing, you can understand this negative statement in a positive way. What I am really saying is that you don't need to do anything, because if you see yourself in the correct way, you are all as much extraordinary phenomena of nature as trees, clouds, the patterns in running water, the flickering of fire, the arrangement of the stars, and the form of a galaxy. You are all just like that, and there is nothing wrong with you at all."
- Alan Watts
"All of a sudden, as if a surgical hand of destiny had operated on a long-standing blindness with immediate and sensational results, I lift my gaze from my anonymous life to the clear recognition of how I live. And I see that everything I've done, thought or been is a species of delusion or madness. I'm amazed by what I managed not to see. I marvel at all that I was and that I now see I'm not.
I look at my past life as at a field lit up by the sun when it breaks through the clouds, and I note with metaphysical astonishment how my most deliberate acts, my clearest ideas and my most logical intentions were after all no more than congenital drunkenness, inherent madness and huge ignorance. I didn't even act anything out. I was the role that got acted. At most, I was the actor's motions.
All that I've done, thought or been is a series of submissions, either to a false self that I assumed belonged to me because I expressed myself through it to the outside, or to a weight of circumstances that I supposed was the air I breathed. In this moment of seeing, I suddenly find myself isolated, an exile where I'd always thought I was a citizen. At the heart of my thoughts I wasn't I.
I'm dazed by a sarcastic terror of life, a despondency that exceeds the limits of my conscious being. I realize that I was all error and deviation, that I never lived, that I existed only in so far as I filled time with consciousness and thought. I feel, in this moment, like a man who wakes up after a slumber full of real dreams, or like a man freed by an earthquake from the dim light of the prison he'd grown used to.
This sudden awareness of my true being, of this being that has always sleepily wandered between what it feels and what it sees, weighs on me like an untold sentence to serve.
It's so hard to describe what I feel when I feel I really exist and my soul is a real entity that I don't know what human words could define it. I don't know if I have a fever, as I feel I do, or if I've stopped having the fever of sleeping through life. Yes, I repeat, I'm like a traveler who suddenly finds himself in a strange town, without knowing how he got there, which makes me think of those who lose their memory and for a long time are not themselves but someone else. I was someone else for a long time - since birth and consciousness - and suddenly I've woken up in the middle of a bridge, leaning over the river and knowing that I exist more solidly than the person I was up til now. But the city is unknown to me, the streets are new, and the trouble has no cure. And so, leaning over the bridge, I wait for the truth to go away and let me return to being fictitious and non-existent, intelligent and natural."
- Fernando Pessoa
"Anything that really frightens you may contain a clue to enlightenment. It may indicate to you how deeply you are attached to structure, whether mental, physical, or social. Attachment and resistance are appearances with the same root: when you resist by pulling away your awareness, the emotion is one of fear, and the contraction is experienced as a pull like magnetism or gravity; that is, attachment. That is why we often fear to open our minds to more exalted spiritual beings. We think fear is a signal to withdraw, when in fact it is a sign we are already withdrawing too much."
- Thaddeus Golas
The Lazy Man's Guide to Enlightenment
And when you wake up, everything changes and nothing changes.
If a blind man realizes that he can see, has the world changed?"
- Dan Millman
"The first enemy of a man of knowledge is Fear. A terrible enemy - treacherous, and difficult to overcome. It remains concealed at every turn of the way, prowling, waiting. And if the man, terrified in its presence, runs away, his enemy will have put an end to his quest."
- Carlos Castaneda
"Finally you come to a point where you almost know it all. You are very wise. You are very pure ... except for the fact that you may well have gotten caught in the last trap ... the desire to know it all and still be you, the knower. This is an impossibility. For all of the finite knowledge does not add up to the infinite. In order to take the final step, the knower must go. That is, you can only BE it all, but you can't know it all. The goal is non-dualistic - as long as there is a knower and known you are in dualism."
- Baba Ram Dass
Be Here Now
"We live our lives entirely inside an illusion - a virtual reality far more convincing than any yet created by computer. So mesmerized are we by it that we find the greatest difficulty in imagining that the world could be any other way."
- David Darling
"I am a lazy man. Laziness keeps me from believing that enlightenment demands effort, discipline, strict diet, non-smoking, and other evidences of virtue. There is a paradise in and around you right now, and to be there you don't even have to make a move. There is nothing you need to do first in order to be enlightened. All potential experiences are within you already. You can open up to them at any time."
- Thaddeus Golas
"It's odd that after thousands of years of great spiritual examples and literature we have to remind ourselves that spirituality is to be found in everyday life. The world's sacred poetry, ritual, prayer and art are filled with images of incarnated divinity ... that lies, admittedly sometimes hidden, in the temporal, or the transpersonal that animates our personal lives. Hundreds of times painters have taken up the theme of the “Annunciation” and have pictured that moment, that eternal moment that is in all our lives, when the angel says: “You, mortal person, have divinity in you.”
- Thomas Moore
"In the commonplace clutter of my literary drawers I sometimes find things I wrote ten or fifteen years ago, or longer, and many of them seem to be written by a stranger; I can't recognize the voice as my own. But who wrote them, if not me? I felt those things, but in what seems to be another life, one from which I've now awoken, as if from someone else's sleep.
I often come across pages I wrote in my youth, when I was seventeen or twenty, and some of them reveal an expressive power I can't remember having back then. There are certain phrases and sentences written in the wake of my adolescence that seem like the product of the person I am now, with all that I've learned in the intervening years. I see I'm the same as what I was. And since in general I feel that I've greatly progressed from what I was, I wonder where the progress is, if back then I was the same as now.
I must not have known myself at all back then. How did I develop into what I already was? How have I come to know the I that I never knew back then? And everything becomes a confusing labyrinth where I stray, in myself, away from myself.
It's easy enough to form a theory of the fluidity of things and souls, to understand ourselves as an inner flow of life, to imagine that we're a large quantity, that we traverse ourselves, that we have been many ...
But in this case there's something besides the flow of personality between its own banks: there's an absolute other, an extraneous self that was me. That with age I should lose my imagination, my emotion, a certain kind of intelligence, a way of feeling - all of this, while causing regret, wouldn't cause me any great wonder. But what am I confronting when I read myself as if reading a stranger? On what shore am I standing if I see myself in the depths?
At other times I find pages that I not only don't remember having written, which in itself doesn't astonish me, but that I don't even remember having been capable of writing, which terrifies me. Certain phrases belong to another mentality. It's as if I'd found an old picture that I know is of me, with a different height and with features I don't recognize, but undoubtedly me, terrifyingly I."
- Fernando Pessoa
Many stars lined up
hoping you'd notice.
A wave rose towards you
out of the past
or a violin
offered itself
As you passed an open window.
These were instructions, your mission.
But could you perform it?
Weren't you always distracted
Waiting for something
As if all this was announcing
A lovers arrival?
- Rainer Maria Rilke
"You talk to yourself too much. You're not unique in that. Everyone of us does. We maintain our world with our inner dialogue. A man or woman of knowledge is aware that the world will change completely as soon as they stop talking to themself."
- Don Juan
"People are always asking why, but one must realize that why is a barren question. You expect an answer addressed in terms of motivation: you want to know the cause of what somebody is doing, and the goal it leads to. If you are acting without a goal in mind, however, you can't say why you're doing it, except to do it.
Yet people are still bothered, and ask, "Why do it then?" as if to say, "Why use energy at all? Why not just be still?" But of course that's the same as asking, "Why does the universe exist?" Why, in other words, is there motion?
The answer to that is because there is stillness. And why is there stillness? Because there is motion. In this way you reach an end to the question why, because it just goes around in circles. Another way to reach an end to the question why is to go back into the past, because when you do you find explanations behind explanations, so that, in the words of a favorite semanticists’ verse:
Big explanations have little explanations upon their backs to bite them, and little explanations have lesser explanations, and so on infinitum.
In other words, you can never get there.
What happens, in fact, when we search the past to try to understand why we are doing what we are doing? What happens is that the track fades away. Look back as far as you may, but you will never find the beginning because the track gives out, just as the wake of a ship vanishes, or the contrail of a plane melts into the air. The past, which we considered to be the push-off point, or the cause, is gone.
The real reason the past doesn't work as an explanation, however, is of course very simple: the push-off, the cause, never was in the past, it has always been in the present. It is perfectly obvious that if there was a time when the universe came into being, when it did do so, it was now. And that now is still here, and it is still beginning, right at this moment. So what we call the past is simply the traces, the fade-outs trailing away from the present.
So there is little point in asking why you are here, because unless you think you are here to resolve some past business in which case you have been motivated as if you were a billiard ball hit by a cue the issue is irrelevant.
Everybody is always talking about motivation and asking why, "Why do it?" But you can always say, "Why not?" And although that sounds a little childish by way of an answer, there is no why, and in a way that is rather splendid."
- Alan Watts
"We have a conception of ourselves as nothing more than the superficial scanning mechanism called "consciousness." Of course, if that is all you are, naturally you feel driven, because you are disconnecting yourself from the vast workings that lie behind consciousness.
We disown the part of ourselves that we call instinctual, animal, or primitive. We think instead that as human beings we are the garnishing on top of the evolutionary pile. We feel we are much more evolved, not realizing that everything we have by way of consciousness and reason grows out of the primal energy that lies underneath it.
Therefore, if reason grows out of the primal energy that we are, then it means that the primal energy is at least reasonable, whatever else it may be. You can tell the tree by its fruits for "by their fruits you shall know them" and so it is that figs do not grow on thistles, or grapes on thorns, and a stupid universe does not create people. People are a manifestation of the potentiality in the energy of the universe, and if we are intelligent, then that which we express is also intelligent. By logical extension, that in which we express it is our central self. The world is not something external; it is what is most fundamentally you.
As long as we think we are motivated by something external, however, and therefore feel insufficient, as long as we have that conception of ourselves, we are playing to win, because what we want is to win more, and become more. But as I pointed out, our conception or image of ourselves is only a caricature, and as such is abstract and completely inadequate. It feels as if we're insufficient in some way.
If you ask, "What did you do yesterday?" the average person will consult memory and give you a very attenuated, strung-out chronicle of events, having reduced yesterdays experience to a thin line of words. What you did yesterday becomes what you noticed yesterday, and what you noticed yesterday was a very tiny part of what happened. It was only as much as you could record in some memory code, in words or in brief impressions.
If you identify yourself with that skinny little stream of life, it is no wonder that you feel unsatisfied, because you ate the fish bones instead of the fish. And since we think that is what is happening all the time, and that life is only this skinny little thing, we feel hungry for experience, for thrills, and for ecstasy.
We say, "There must be more coming," and we need more and more future, because the past is gone, and it was a scraggly past anyway. We have no present, because life looks like an hourglass: It has a big future and a big past, but only a tiny little neck of a present that everything is squeezed through.
In Buddhist symbology the idea behind the hourglass is represented as a kind of being called a preta. A preta is thought of as a hungry spirit, and these creatures are represented as having enormous bellies but mouths and throats only about the diameter of a needle, so they can never get enough. That tiny mouth and immense belly represents the neck of the hourglass, and the feeling of having no present.
In fact, our present is enormously rich, and you will realize this if you understand that there is no time except present time. There is only now; there never was any time but now, and there never will be any time but now. It is all now. There is no hurry to gobble life down, and if you do you won't be able to digest it. We can go on much longer than we suppose without eating, so it's all right to just sit and be in the present."
- Alan Watts
"I consider it neither a human nor a literary error to attribute a soul to the things we call inanimate. To be a thing is to be the object of an attribution. It may be erroneous to say that a tree feels, that a river runs, that a sunset is sad or that the calm ocean (blue from the sky it doesn't have) smiles (from the sun outside it). But it's every bit as erroneous to attribute beauty to things. It's every bit as erroneous to say that things possess color, form, perhaps even being. This ocean is saltwater. This sunset is the initial diminishing of sunlight in this particular latitude and longitude. This little boy playing next to me is an intellectual mass of cells - better yet, he's a clockwork of subatomic movements, a strange electrical conglomeration of millions of solar systems in miniature."
- Fernando Pessoa
"Of so many great teachers I've met in India and Asia, if you were to bring them to America and get them a house, two cars, a spouse, three kids, a job, insurance, and taxes, they would all have a hard time."
- Pir Vilayat Khan
"Here's the premise: We are all, right now, living the life we choose. This choice, of course, is not a single, monumental choice. No one decides, for example, “I'm going to move to L.A., and in five years I will be a waiter in a so-so restaurant, planning to get my 8-by-10's done real soon so that I can find an agent and become a star,” or “I'm going to marry a dreadful person and we'll live together in a loveless marriage, staying together only for the kids, who I don't much like, either.”
No. The choices I'm talking about here are made daily, hourly, moment by moment. Do we try something new, or stick to the tried-and-true? Do we take a risk, or eat what's already on our dish? Do we ponder a thrilling adventure, or contemplate what's on TV? Do we walk over and meet that interesting stranger, or do we play it safe? Do we indulge our heart, or cater to our fear?
The bottom-line question: Do we pursue what we want, or do we do what's comfortable?
For the most part, most people most often choose comfort - the familiar, the time-honored, the well-worn but well-known. After a lifetime of choosing between comfort and risk, we are left with the life we currently have.
And it was all of our own choosing."
- Peter McWilliams
"Your wandering thoughts are just happening. The buzz in the head is just happening. There you are. It is not being pushed around by anything. It is the big happening. It isn’t happening to you, it is you happening, and that’s the difference.
Meet your real self."
"When you are not thinking, you have no ego, because your ego is nothing more than a habitual concept."
- Alan Watts
"When we remember we are all mad, the mysteries disappear and life stands explained."
- Mark Twain
"There's a fine line between genius and insanity. I have erased this line."
- Oscar Levant
"You have to know how to accept rejection and reject acceptance."
- Ray Bradbury
"Why is this thus? What is the reason for this thusness?"
- Artemus Ward
"I know the answer! The answer lies within the heart of all mankind! The answer is twelve? I think I'm in the wrong building."
- Charles M. Schulz
"We've heard that a million monkeys at a million keyboards could produce the Complete Works of Shakespeare;
now, thanks to the Internet, we know this is not true."
- Robert Wilensky
I have known the silence of the stars and of the sea,
And the silence of the city when it pauses,
And the silence of a man and a maid,
And the silence of the sick
When their eyes roam about the room.
And I ask: For the depths,
Of what use is language?
A beast of the field moans a few times
When death takes its young.
And we are voiceless in the presence of realities -
We cannot speak.
A curious boy asks an old soldier
Sitting in front of the grocery store,
“How did you lose your leg?”
And the old soldier is struck with silence,
Or his mind flies away
Because he cannot concentrate it on Gettysburg.
It comes back jocosely
And he says, “A bear bit it off.”
And the boy wonders, while the old soldier
Dumbly, feebly lives over
The flashes of guns, the thunder of cannon,
The shrieks of the slain,
And himself lying on the ground,
And the hospital surgeons, the knives,
And the long days in bed.
But if he could describe it all
He would be an artist.
But if he were an artist there would be deeper wounds
Which he could not describe.
There is the silence of a great hatred,
And the silence of a great love,
And the silence of an embittered friendship.
There is the silence of a spiritual crisis,
Through which your soul, exquisitely tortured,
Comes with visions not to be uttered
Into a realm of higher life.
There is the silence of defeat.
There is the silence of those unjustly punished;
And the silence of the dying whose hand
Suddenly grips yours.
There is the silence between father and son,
When the father cannot explain his life,
Even though he be misunderstood for it.
There is the silence that comes between husband and wife.
There is the silence of those who have failed;
And the vast silence that covers
Broken nations and vanquished leaders.
There is the silence of Lincoln,
Thinking of the poverty of his youth.
And the silence of Napoleon
After Waterloo.
And the silence of Jeanne d’Arc
Saying amid the flames, “blessed Jesus”
Revealing in two words all sorrows, all hope.
And there is the silence of age,
Too full of wisdom for the tongue to utter it
In words intelligible to those who have not lived
The great range of life.
And there is the silence of the dead.
If we who are in life cannot speak
Of profound experiences,
Why do you marvel that the dead
Do not tell you of death?
Their silence shall be interpreted
As we approach them.
- Edgar Lee Masters
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