monkey mind
It is by chaos out of dream, it began as dream and it has continued as dream
down to the last headline you read in a newspaper,
and of our dreams there are two things above all others to be said,
that only madmen could have dreamed them or would have dared to -
and that we have shown a considerable faculty for making them come true."
- Bernard DeVoto
but you are the music
while the music lasts."
- T. S. Eliot
"Here, surrounded by the products of nature, often I sit for hours, while my senses feast upon the spectacle of nature. Here the majestic sun is not concealed by any dirty roof made by human hands, here the blue sky is my sublime roof.
When in the evening I contemplate the sky in wonder and the host of luminous bodies continually revolving within their orbits, suns or earths by name, then my spirit rises beyond these constellations so many millions of miles away to the primeval source from which all creation flows and from which new creations shall flow eternally.
When, now and again, I endeavor to formulate my seething emotions in music - oh, then I find that I am terribly deceived; I throw my scrawled paper upon the ground and feel firmly convinced that never shall anyone born on this earth be able to express in sounds, words, colors or stone those heavenly images that hover before his excited imagination in his happiest hours . . . yes, it must come from above, that which strikes the heart; otherwise it's nothing but notes, body without spirit, isn't that so?
What is body without spirit? Earth or muck, isn't it? The spirit must rise from the earth, in which for a time the divine spark is confined, and much like the field to which the ploughman entrusts precious seed, it must flower and bear many fruits, and, thus multiplied, rise again towards the source from which it has flown. For only by persistent toil of the faculties granted to them do created things revere the creator of infinite nature."
- Ludwig van Beethoven
"Inner silence works from the moment you begin to accrue it. The desired result is what the old sorcerers called stopping the world, the moment when everything around us ceases to be what it's been.
It is this moment when man the slave becomes man the free being, capable of feats of perception that defy our linear imagination."
- Carlos Castaneda
Stays Rigid,
Outward Things Will
Disclose Themselves.
Moving, Be Like Water.
Still, Be Like a Mirror.
Respond Like an Echo.
- Bruce Lee
"By the very nature of creative insights, it is difficult to study it scientifically. Science is about repeatability. Creativity is not about repeatability. When you come across an idea, something irreversible occurs in your brain. Your brain is in a different state than before. You cannot request the brain to go back to the 'before'' state and measure the creative process over again."
- Ken Mogi
"The alchemists had an excellent image for the transformation of suffering and symptom into a value of the soul. A goal of the alchemical process was the pearl of great price. The pearl starts off as a bit of grit, a neurotic symptom or complaint, a bothersome irritant in one's secret inside flesh, which no defensive shell can protect oneself from. This is coated over, worked at day in day out, until the grit one day is a pearl; yet it must still be fished up from the depths and pried loose. Then when the grit is redeemed, it is worn. It must be worn on the warm skin to keep its luster: the redeemed complex which once caused suffering is exposed to public view as a virtue. The esoteric treasure gained through occult work becomes an esoteric splendor."
- James Hillman
"Despair is the result of each earnest attempt to go through life with virtue, justice and understanding and fulfill their requirements. Children live on one side of despair, the awakened on the other side."
- Hermann Hesse
The Journey to the East
"I want you to look up at the sky. Do you see it? It is a big sky. If you've never been this far west, then imagine yourself standing beneath the sky in Ohio: a two-lane highway, the day gray, you can see the horizon all around. Nothing disturbs that view but an occasional farmhouse . . .
So, either in New Mexico or Ohio, we are under a big sky. That big sky is wild mind. I'm going to climb up to that big sky straight over our heads and put one dot on it with a Magic Marker. See that dot? That dot is what Zen calls monkey mind or what western psychology calls part of conscious mind. We give all our attention to that one dot. So when it says we can't write, that we're no good, we are failures, fools for even picking up a pen, we listen to it.
This is how it works: You've always wanted to be a writer, but instead you decide you should become a health care worker. You go to school for four years. You get a degree in social work. You are at your first day of your new job, listening to an orientation, and you realize you really did want to be a writer. You quit your job, go to the library with a notebook, and begin page one of the great American novel. You are halfway through page one when you decide it is too hard to be a writer. You want to open a cafe' so writers can come in and sip the best caffelatte and write all afternoon. You open the cafe'. You are serving caffelatte to all the writers in your town. It is a Tuesday. You look out at your customers and see they are writing and you are not. You want to write.
This goes on endlessly. This is monkey mind. This is how we drift. We listen and get tossed away. We put all our attention on that one dot.
Meanwhile, wild mind surrounds us.
Western psychology calls wild mind 'the unconscious', but I think 'the unconscious' is a limiting term. If it is true that we are all interpenetrated and interconnected, then wild mind includes mountains, rivers, Cadillacs, humidity, plains, emeralds, poverty, old streets in London, snow, and moon. A river and a tree are not unconscious. They are part of wild mind. I do not consider even a dream unconscious. A dream is a being that travels from wild mind into the dot / monkey mind / conscious self to wake us up.
So our job as writers is not to diddle around our whole lives in the dot but to take one big step out of it and sink into the big sky and write from there. Let everything run through us and grab as much as we can of it with a pen and paper. Let yourself live in something that is already rightfully yours - your own wild mind.
I think what good psychotherapy does is help bring you into wild mind, for you to learn to be comfortable there, rather than constantly grabbing a tidbit from wild mind and shoving it into the conscious mind, thereby trying to get control of it. This is what Zen, too, asks you to do: to sit down in the middle of your wild mind. This is all about a loss of control. This is what falling in love is, too: a loss of control. Can you do this? Lose control and let wild mind take over? It is the best way to write.
To live, too."
- Natalie Goldberg
Wild Mind
"My working habits are simple:
long periods of thinking, short periods of writing."
- Ernest Hemingway
"I never quite know when I'm not writing. Sometimes my wife comes up to me at a party and says, 'Thurber, stop writing!'
She usually catches me in the middle of a paragraph."
- James Thurber
"I think if I get into the habit of writing a bit about what happens, or rather doesn't happen, I may lose a little of the sense of loneliness and desolation which abides in me."
- Alice James
"A writer - and, I believe, generally all persons - must think that whatever happens to him or her is a resource. All things have been given to us for a purpose, and an artist must feel this more intensely. All that happens to us, including our humiliations, our misfortunes, our embarrassments, all is given to us as raw material, as clay, so that we may shape our art."
- Jorge Luis Borges
"The problem is that there are no good maps for the journey of a writer; each one goes it alone. Ultimately, that is always true, but it's good to hear accounts of the process, so we know others have walked the path. We, as writers, need to legitimize our way as a path that we have taken. Instead, a lot of writers act like victims plagued by the agonies of writing. We are actually great warriors facing the barriers to truth. We are digesting experience for society."
- Natalie Goldberg
"Inspiration may be a form of superconsciousness, or perhaps of subconsciousness - I wouldn't know. But I am sure it is the antithesis of self-consciousness."
- Aaron Copland
"Perhaps the questioner is more than just curious, yearning for a jealously kept prescription on how to be a writer. There is none. Writing is the one "profession" for which there is no professional training: Creative writing courses can teach the aspirant only to look at her or his writing critically, not how to create. The only school for a writer is the library - reading, reading. A journey through realms of how far, wide and deep writing can venture in the endless perspectives of human life. Learning from other writers' perceptions that you have to find your way to yours, at the urge of the most powerful sense of yourself - creativity. Apart from that, you're on your own."
- Nadine Gordimer
"Writing is so difficult that I often feel that writers, having had their hell on earth, will escape all punishment hereafter."
- Jessamyn West
"Why are we reading, if not in hope of beauty laid bare, life heightened and its deepest mystery probed ? Why are we reading if not in hope that the writer will magnify and dramatize our days, will illuminate and inspire us with wisdom, courage, and the possibility of meaningfulness, and will press upon our minds the deepest mysteries, so that we may feel again their majesty and power? What do we ever know that is higher than that power which, from time to time, seizes our lives, and reveals us startlingly to ourselves as creatures set down here bewildered? Why does death so catch us by surprise, and why love? We still and always want waking. We should amass half dressed in long lines like tribesmen and shake gourds at each other, to wake up; instead we watch television and miss the show."
- Annie Dillard
"The writer is something of a shape-changer and trickster, someone a little more treacherous, eccentric, and unpredictable than she at first appears, because she is continually buffeted and transformed by an inner life invisible from the outside. She may speak to you in complete sentences about what her day was like, but inside another life is being lived, one full of beauties and monstrosities, upheavals and transgressions."
- Eric Maisel
"With writing, you can examine your feelings and beliefs, providing a catalyst for revelation. When a feeling is internalized, it expands and can become overwhelming. As emotions are released onto paper, it often leads to healing. Writing can be a tool for transformation, shining the light on the inside, dispelling the darkness, taking you through external layers and bringing you closer to your soul."
- Hillary Carlip
"I think we too easily forget the real purpose of language - to build bridges between our consciousnesses - to share the experience of life that is unique for each of us."
- Hal Zina Bennett
"The writer isn't made in a vacuum. Writers are witnesses.
The reason we need writers is because we need witnesses to this terrifying century."
- E. L. Doctorow
The Alchemist picked up a book that someone in the caravan had brought. Leafing through the pages, he found a story about Narcissus.
The alchemist knew the legend of Narcissus, a youth who knelt beside a lake to contemplate his own beauty. He was so fascinated by himself that, one morning, he fell into the lake and drowned. At the spot where he fell, a flower was born, which was called the narcissus.
But this was not how the author of the book ended the story.
He said that when Narcissus died, the goddesses of the forest appeared and found the lake, which had been fresh water, transformed into a lake of salty tears.
"Why do you weep?" the goddesses asked.
"I weep for Narcissus." the lake replied.
"Ah, it is no surprise that you weep for Narcissus," they said, "for though we always pursued him in the forest, you alone could contemplate his beauty close at hand."
"But . . . was Narcissus beautiful?" the lake asked.
"Who better than you to know that?" the goddesses said in wonder. "After all, it was by your banks that he knelt each day to contemplate himself!"
The lake was silent for some time. Finally, it said:
"I weep for Narcissus, but I never noticed that Narcissus was beautiful. I weep because, each time he knelt beside my banks, I could see, in the depths of his eyes, my own beauty reflected."
"What a lovely story," the alchemist thought.
- Paulo Coelho
The Alchemist
translated by Alan R. Clarke
"Let us think of the still nameless poets, still nameless writers, who should be brought together and kept together. I am sure it is our duty to help these future benefactors to attain that final discovery of themselves which makes for great literature. Literature is not a mere juggling of words; what matters is what is left unsaid, or what may be read between the lines. Were it not for this deep inner feeling, literature would be no more than a game, and we all know that it can be much more than that."
- Jorge Luis Borges
#63
"the problem with thinking aloud is rereading your thoughts after seven hours of sleep and a large cup of coffee and wondering who wrote that, why she shared it and what on earth was she thinking, because you sure as hell have no clue.
#70
seize the day, they say. live each moment as if it's your last. it's such a daunting task, when i think about it. like, sitting here right now, typing these words, what could i be missing?
#71
i am still learning. the moment i think i've got a pretty good handle on things, i've figured a lot of it out, i'm in the clear, i realize i am far from it and i was stupid to even think that way.
lesson number one: you have no clue."
- Christine Castro
fragments are skinny slivers of life sliced and stored: moments, poignant or awkward. memories, lived or dreamed. all in bitesized morsels for easy digestion.
"The things we are ashamed of, the dark scars that cover our wounds and our crude attempts to heal with substance and isms, that holy hell hole is our gift. Not maybe, not just for some people.
It simply is.
That doesn't mean the abusers and users are off the hook. But that's not our business. Your only and essential job is to choose, not just to accept, but to powerfully and willingly choose, the parents, the past and the personality you have been given. It takes just a moment, a flutter of an eyelid. But it's the difference between loss and life. The difference between a victim and a writer."
- Catherine Robson
"Imagine a deep, wide, river flowing along. Suddenly it falls over a high precipice. The river becomes a waterfall, breaking up into myriads of droplets. Each droplet seems separate, buffeted about by external forces, fighting for its very existence. But at the bottom of the waterfall all the drops merge back into a river, all separateness gone. We humans are rather like the drops of water, forgetting that we are always part of the great river of life."
- Adrian Bint
"When one has a spacious mind, then there is room for everything. When one has a narrow mind, then there is only room for a few things; everything has to be manipulated and controlled, so that you have only what you think is right - what you want is there - and everything else has to be pushed out. Now life on that level is always suppressed and constricted; it is always a struggle - there is always tension to keep every thing in order all the time. If you have got just a very narrow view of life, the disorder of life always has to be ordered for you, so you are always busy, manipulating the mind, pushing things out or holding on to things."
- Ajahn Sumedho
"It is not wisdom if we simply believe what we are told. True wisdom is to directly see and understand for ourselves. At this level then, wisdom is to keep an open mind rather than being close-minded, listening to other points of view rather than being bigoted; to carefully examine facts that contradict our beliefs, rather than burying our heads in the sand; to be objective rather than prejudiced and partisan; to take time about forming our opinions and beliefs rather than just accepting the first or most emotional thing that is offered to us; and to always be ready to change our beliefs when facts that contradict them are presented to us. A person who does this is certainly wise and is certain to eventually arrive at true understanding. The path of just believing what you are told is easy."
- Bhikkhu Shravasti Dhammika
"The very mind that wants to control things is the mind that's caught up to begin with. When you're caught up, you have fewer possibilities. Your mind can manifest in more ways if you keep it from taking form. Technique is just a means for understanding that. Do you understand what it means to not let your mind take form? When you allow the mind to harden itself into a shape, a feeling, an intensity, technique, or strategies rather than allowing that clear, mirror like perception to arise, that is allowing the mind to take form.
The technique is something you do while you try not to let it interfere with the spaciousness of your mind. If you let your mind take form, it becomes localized. When you feel that happen, Return and come back to a formless state. The more that you can do that, the more you'll be your own person. The less you can do that, the more circumstances will dictate to you who you are at every moment."
- Takuan Soho
"Mindfulness is nothing more or less than the practice of attention.
Zen wants us to wake up from the sleepwalk of the routine and automatic - to bring full attention to our walking and talking, hearing and breathing, eating and working - to every aspect of our lives. There is no right or wrong way of doing things; there is only being more or less conscious. The goal is not to correct ourselves but to become more fully conscious of ourselves. Instead of struggling to improve ourselves, we can bring attention to the way we view the world around us and to our reactions and responses to it. Experienced mindfully, everything becomes a vehicle for liberation.
For example, when a thought of jealousy arises, we can unconsciously give in to it and be quickly overtaken by hatred. We can struggle against it. We can get caught up in guilt. Or we can examine the thought itself and attempt to understand the context from which it has arisen. What prompts me to see myself threatened by another? Our thoughts and feelings become windows to awakening."
- Laurence G. Boldt
Zen Soup
"By being with yourself, by watching yourself in your daily life with alert interest, with the intention to understand rather than to judge, in full acceptance of whatever may emerge, because it is there, you encourage the deep to come to the surface and enrich your life and consciousness with its captive energies. This is the great work of awareness; it removes obstacles and releases energies by understanding the nature of life and mind. Intelligence is the door to freedom and alert attention is the mother of intelligence."
- Nisargadatta Maharaj
"As a Buddhist I have learnt that what principally upsets our inner peace is what we call disturbing emotions. All those thoughts, emotions, and mental events which reflect a negative or uncompassionate state of mind inevitably undermine our experience of inner peace.
All such negative thoughts and emotions as hatred, anger, pride, lust, greed, envy, and so on have the effect of disturbing our inner equilibrium."
- Dalai Lama
All day I think about it, then at night I say it.
Where did I come from, and what am I supposed to be doing?
I have no idea.
My soul is from elsewhere, I'm sure of that,
and I intend to end up there.
This drunkenness began in some other tavern.
When I get back around to that place,
I'll be completely sober. Meanwhile,
I'm like a bird from another continent, sitting in this aviary.
The day is coming when I fly off,
but who is it now in my ear who hears my voice?
Who says words with my mouth?
Who looks out with my eyes? What is the soul?
I cannot stop asking.
If I could taste one sip of an answer,
I could break out of this prison for drunks.
I didn't come here of my own accord, and I can't leave that way.
Whoever brought me here will have to take me home.
This poetry, I never know what I'm going to say.
I don't plan it.
When I'm outside the saying of it,
I get very quiet and rarely speak at all.
- Jalaluddin Rumi
When you do things from your soul, you feel a river
moving in you, a joy.
When actions come from another section, the feeling
disappears. Don't let
others lead you. They may be blind or, worse, vultures.
Reach for the rope
of God. And what is that? Putting aside self-will.
Because of willfulness
people sit in jail, the trapped bird's wings are tied,
fish sizzle in the skillet.
The anger of police is willfulness. You've seen a magistrate
inflict visible punishment. Now
see the invisible. If you could leave your selfishness, you
would see how you've
been torturing your soul. We are born and live inside black water in a well.
How could we know what an open field of sunlight is? Don't
insist on going where
you think you want to go. Ask the way to the spring. Your
living pieces will form
a harmony. There is a moving palace that floats in the air
with balconies and clear
water flowing through, infinity everywhere, yet contained
under a single tent.
- Rumi
"A man who is seeking for realization is not only going around searching for his spectacles without realizing that they are on his nose all the time, but also were he not actually looking through them he would not be able to see what he is looking for!"
- Wei Wu Wei
"We get to think of life as an inexhaustible well. Yet everything happens only a certain number of times, and a very small number, really. How many more times will you remember a certain afternoon of your childhood, some afternoon that's so deeply a part of your being that you can't even conceive of your life without it? Perhaps four or five times more.... perhaps not even that. How many more times will you watch the full moon rise? Perhaps twenty. And yet it all seems limitless."
- Paul Bowles
Love and desire and hate:
I think they have no portion in us after
We pass the gate.
They are not long, the days of wine and roses;
Out of a misty dream
Our path emerges for a while, then closes
Within a dream.
- Ernest Dowson
"Life is short and we have never too much time for gladdening the hearts of those who are traveling the dark journey with us. Oh be swift to love, make haste to be kind."
- Henri Frederick Amiel
The subject of the chapter was the wind."
"In 1967 a London police station received a new telephone number: 40116. A constable asked a friend to call him during duty hours the following evening, but he got the number wrong. He said 40166. That evening, while on patrol, the constable observed a light on in a factory and went to investigate. As he arrived, the phone rang. He picked it up and found it was his friend ringing as requested. The ex-directory number of the factory was 40166."
"On August 24, 1983, the Amtrak Silver Meteor train began its normal journey from Miami to New York. At 7:40 p.m. the train struck and killed a woman fishing from a bridge. Sixteen miles further on it destroyed a truck parked too close to the track. At 1:10 a.m. it hit a tractor-trailer on a crossing, derailing two passenger cars and injuring 21 people. Continuing its journey an hour later, at 2:37 a.m. it ran headlong into a car that had ignored warning lights on another crossing. At this point the rest of the journey was canceled."
"Early in his film career, actor, Anthony Hopkins, was asked to star in the film The Girl from Petrovka. To prepare for the role, he attempted to find a copy of the original novel. His search proved totally fruitless - no one, it seemed, could help him. Then one day he wandered into a London underground station - and found a copy of the novel on a bench. Hopkins eventually flew abroad to make the film. He met the author of the novel, who told him of his annoyance at losing a copy with notes inside, which he had lent to a friend in London. It soon transpired that this was the very copy that Hopkins had found."
"Chance, in its literal sense, means the way in which fortuitous circumstance occurs. The process is accidental, in that no overall system exists or can be deduced from the chaotic nature of the universe. In this sense, universal forces are blind, and beyond understanding, for no pattern can be gleaned from chaos.
Such an understanding of chance began to rise some 400 years ago, with our growing scientific world view. Prior to this, the universe had no place for chance, for everything was ordered by God. In this sense, the universe was meaningful, but with the scientific banishing of God, His meaning had also to be banished. This left a huge intellectual black hole which had to be filled, and it was filled by chaos and the principle of non-understanding. Delete 'God', insert 'chance' - and no matter which you choose, both are articles of faith, for both are considered beyond ultimate understanding."
- Anthony North
The Supernatural
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