to feel oneself lost
"Poetic or true or creative imagination, in its most sharpened Western form, is a noetic vision; it is cognitively meaningful, requiring the maintenance and not the sacrifice of ordinary consciousness.
Imagination has the uncanny ability to see into the inner life of things and to assure us that there is more in our experience of the world than meets the unreflecting eye."
- Roberts Avens
"There is a vitality, a life force,
a quickening that is translated through you into action,
and because there is only one of you in all time, this expression is unique.
If you block it, it will never exist through any other medium and be lost.
The world will not have it.
It is not your business to determine how good it is;
nor how valuable it is; nor how it compares with other expressions.
It is your business to keep it yours clearly and directly, to keep the channel open.
You do not even have to believe in yourself or your work.
You merely have to keep open and aware directly to the urges that motivate you.
Keep the channel open.
No artist is pleased . . .
There is no satisfaction whatever at any time.
There is only a queer, divine dissatisfaction;
a blessed unrest that keeps us marching and makes us more alive than the others."
- Martha Graham
The Hollow Men
Between the idea
And the reality
Between the motion
And the act
Falls the Shadow
For Thine is the Kingdom
Between the conception
And the creation
Between the emotion
And the response
Falls the Shadow
Life is very long
Between the desire
And the spasm
Between the potency
And the existence
Between the essence
And the descent
Falls the Shadow
For Thine is the Kingdom
For thine is
Life is
- Thomas Stearns Eliot
there's a river
that invents us together
a river you write
out of the matter
you become when you read it
a river translating
on paper
what my senses perceive
a river
where our eyes commune
with the bread of each letter
there's a river
a river passing through my head
- Manuel Ulacia
"Do not surrender your individuality, which is your greatest agent of power, to the customs and conventionalities that have got their life from the great mass. Do you want to be a power in the world? Then be yourself."
- Ralph Waldo Trine
"Love is / invisible, and what cannot be seen cannot be stifled."
- Bruce Whiteman
Two. One to change it, and one not to change it.
"Well, I wanted to be a philosopher, which is the idlest occupation in the world. I wanted to be involved in abstract thought, but because of various problems with the authorities I wasn't able to pull that one off. A lifetime of idleness in academia would have really suited me. So I was thrown out, as it were. Other than that, there seemed no possible idle occupations, so writing . . . although writing isn't exactly idleness. There's an enormous tension between indolence and languor."
- Will Self
"The poet discovers himself alone on a darkened stage, suffering temporary amnesia. What terror not to be able to remember or to imagine what you wanted to say. A language dysfunction, a disease of imagination's present time. The expectant audience sits unmoving and utterly silent. A small asexual voice offstage prompts the first words of a monologue in whispers, and the poet begins to speak, a time-delayed recitation of the future. A light at the back of his head comes on and moves to direct his footsteps as the ghostly unembodied voice continues to prompt him. When it stops, he asks himself: 'What was I saying, what was it I wanted to say? This is a play I am making up and someone is directing me from the wings. I want to scratch at the back of my head where the light is coming from, but it only gutters when I swing my hand and remains out of reach. There is a silence you choose and a silence that descends on you when the prompter decides to make you nervous, and that is terrifying. I cannot memorize what I will think to say when it tells me. It is so unnewtonian it takes your breath away."
- Bruce Whiteman
The Invisible World is in Decline
"And this is the simple truth - that to live is to feel oneself lost. He who accepts it has already begun to find himself, to be on firm ground. Instinctively, as do the shipwrecked, he will look around for something to which to cling, and that tragic, ruthless glance, absolutely sincere, because it is a question of his salvation, will cause him to bring order into the chaos of his life. These are the only genuine ideas; the ideas of the shipwrecked. All the rest is rhetoric, posturing, farce."
- Søren Kierkegaard
"The very people who believe that everything has already been discovered and everything said, will greet your work as something new, and will close the door behind you, repeating once more that nothing remains to be said." . . . "Newness is in the mind of the artist who creates, and not in the object he portrays."
"What moves men of genius, or rather, what inspires their work, is not new ideas, but their obsession with the idea that what has already been said is still not enough."
- Eugene Delacroix
journal - May 14, 1824 Paris
Art & Originality
"I suggest that forces within the writer-reader personal encounter foment unreality. The reader comes equipped with a vivid, fresh, outside impression of works the writer remembers wearily from the inside, as a blur of intention, a stretch of doubting drudgery, a tangle of memories and fabrications, a batch of nonsensical reviews, and a disappointed sigh from the publisher. The reader knows the writer better than he knows himself; but the writer's physical presence is light from a star that has moved on."
- John Updike
Writers I Have Met
Wild Apples by Henry David Thoreau
"Thoreau planned to call the manuscript Wild Fruits, but the homespun simplicity of that title is deceptive. The sprawling text he left behind in his exuberant chicken-scratch hand was conceived as a definitive botanical almanac of edible New England flora, ranging from the arcane (thimbleberry, butternut, hound's tongue) to the classic (pumpkin, cranberry, beach plum). This may sound like a doctoral research project, but in Thoreau's mind it came to be freighted with the overtones of a summa or scripture: in one of his journals he even refers to the work as his "New Testament."
- David Barber
Thoreau's Wild Apples
"The human mind has grown even since the time of the Buddha, 2,500 years ago. The human mind is more noisy and more all-pervasive, and the egos are bigger. There's been an ego growth over thousands of years; it's growing to a point of madness, with the ultimate madness having been reached in the twentieth century. One only needs to read twentieth-century history to see that it has been the climax of human madness, if it's measured in terms of human violence inflicted on other humans.
So in the present time, we can't escape from the world anymore; we can't escape from the mind. We need to enter surrender while we are in the world. That seems to be the path that is effective in the world that we live in now. It may be that at the time of the Buddha, withdrawing was much, much easier than it would be now. The human mind was not yet so overwhelming at that time."
- Eckhart Tolle
"Mankind consists of a wide variety of souls. We have those who are perhaps below the norm, even depraved - some of these may in the past have been involved in violent karma. There is the great run of average people, which includes most of us. Then the forerunners, who are geniuses in a variety of fields, science, literature, the arts. And above these are those developed in an all-round fashion: the Goethes, Schweitzers, von Humboldts, and a host more who may be said to have had a world view of human and terrestrial life. There are spiritual philosophers such as Plato, Pythagoras, and Plotinus, to name a few from our Western tradition; and others in all parts of the world whose ideas have affected their own and succeeding ages in a profound manner. Above these are the world teachers, those superb examples of human evolution: Buddhas and Christs, who represent what each of us may one day achieve in the far, far future, in the course of many incarnations of evolution."
- John P. Van Mater
Reincarnation, the Key to History
"What is so intriguing about our own era in history is that the human quest for knowledge and understanding in the last 25 years has seen an amazing blend of shamanic techniques, psychedelic drugs and the international global boom in resurrecting the pre-Christian, pagan, totemic and Hindu traditions. At the same time, with these computers . . . you have a situation where you can walk around in realities of your own construction. So we are very much on a threshold. I don't want to put any limits on what I'm saying, but here we have ancient techniques merging with the most modern. Computers give us the ways to communicate with the basic language of the universe - which is quanta-electronic. Matter and bodies are just electrons that have decided to come together, buzzing around with information."
- Timothy Leary
"Humanity is under great pressure to evolve because it is our only chance of survival as a race. This will affect every aspect of your life and close relationships in particular. Never before have relationships been as problematic and conflict ridden as they are now. As you may continue to pursue the goal of salvation through a relationship, you will be disillusioned again and again. But if you accept that the relationship is here to make you conscious instead of happy, then the relationship will offer you salvation, and you will be aligning yourself with the higher consciousness that wants to be born into this world. For those who hold to the old patterns, there will be increasing pain, violence, confusion, and madness."
- Eckhart Tolle
The Power of Now
"The mind is a superb instrument if used rightly. Used wrongly, however, it becomes very destructive. To put it more accurately, it is not so much that you use your mind wrongly - you usually don't use it at all. It uses you. This is the disease. You believe that you are your mind. This is the delusion. The instrument has taken you over."
- Eckhart Tolle
"No one is someone, a single immortal man is all men. Like Cornelius Agrippa, I am god, hero, philosopher, demon, and world—which is a long-winded way of saying that I am not."
- Jorge Luis Borges
The Immortal
Three Books of Occult Philosophy
Written by Henry Cornelius Agrippa
Cornelius Agrippa; A Ballad of a Young Man that would Read Unlawful Books, and how he was Punished
written by Robert Southey
"...wise men conceive it no way irrational that it should be possible for us to ascend by the very same degrees through each world, to the same very original world itself, the Maker of all things and First Cause..."
- Cornelius Agrippa
"There is a catalogue of private acts which you harbour inviolable and do not speak about. Hold it whole in your head and consider what everyone you know is doing right now. Small isolated things which your imagining rescues from the silence of privacy. A social encyclopedia of the present tense. Somewhere the personality slips its leash and disappears over the back fence leaving nothing ferocious to fight off the throng of details that rushes into your brain. You become a society, a public resource, a random dictionary of ephemera. And love is the force which allows you to speak in the midst of all this negative capability and which keeps you away from madness and inside a body with a future."
- Bruce Whiteman
"Everything monstrous happening in the world has an ancient ancestry. The monster is intrinsic while our awareness of the monster has evolved."
- Frank Cawson
"The spaces that monters occupy in ourselves tend to be the inaccessible places where fear and dangers are never far away. Egos have a habit of relegating monsters to such territory, and in the normal course of events our conscious minds tend to steer well clear of these waters. If external circumstance induces fear or panic, however, then we can find ourselves in monster-territory quite easily, and we may then project our monsters onto external objects. Children may find it easy to perceive threatening faces or monsters in shadows at night, whereas adults tend to lose the ability to cross the threshold so easily. However, a soldier tense with apprehension may perceive inanimate objects as the enemy attacking, or he may perceive his own comrades as the foe. Similarly psychiatric patients for whom fear and anxiety are constant companions may perceive other people to be machines or devils."
- Richard Ebbs
monsters
"They crouch in the corners and lurk under windows. They curl around drainpipes and blend into doorways. They're so clever at hiding most folks won't see them at all."
a love of monsters
Monsters from the Id consists of two short stories by Clark Ashton Smith that demonstrate, brilliantly, the link between poetry and horror, which is that both have their roots in the unconscious.
"Killing the Buddha on the road means destroying the hope that anything outside ourselves can be our master. No one is bigger than anyone else. There are no mothers and fathers for grown-ups, only sisters and brothers."
- Sheldon Kopp
"In his book On Having No Head, Douglas Harding pointed out that our actual experience of life is of being a stalk, the body, which ends at the chest and shoulders, upon which sits the entire universe. We can't directly experience ourselves as having a head; we simply assume we are looking out through the eyes in our head because we see others doing that, and when we look in the mirror, that's what we see. But our experience is of an undifferentiated world of colors, shapes, textures, sounds, feelings and sensations, all existing in one reality, roughly in the spot where we think of our head as being. All that exists, exists on top of the stalk that I call me.
The truly amazing next step in this realization is that the stalk I call me is included in the total existence that extends outward from the top of the stalk. My actual experience is that nothing is separate. I cannot say that any one thing is separate from any other one thing because they all occupy the same space - the space that exists, and contains, the stalk that I call me."
- Cheri Huber
"What actually happened was something absurdly simple and unspectacular: just for the moment I stopped thinking. Reason and imagination and all mental chatter died down. For once, words really failed me. I forgot my name, my humanness, my thingness, all that could be called me or mine. Past and future dropped away. It was as if I had been born that instant, brand new, mindless, innocent of all memories. There existed only the Now, that present moment and what was clearly given in it. To look was enough. And what I found was khaki trouserlegs terminating downwards in a pair of brown shoes, khaki sleeves terminating sideways in a pair of pink hands, and a khaki shirtfront terminating upwards in - absolutely nothing whatever! Certainly not in a head."
- Douglas Harding
"By watching our thoughts over a period of time, we can see that the mind is operating literally 'by itself '. Thoughts 'just appear' and keep on appearing automatically. We have this feeling that it is 'me' who is thinking, but this is just a conditioned reflex caused by the concept of ourself as an individual. By watching thoughts we can see how they appear unbidden, uncalled. Just try not thinking for a even a few seconds and see that it is impossible. No 'me' is controlling them. We may have the illusion of purposely thinking about a particular subject, but notice that the idea to purposely think about something comes by itself. Then we do it, automatically, but with the false feeling we are the 'decider'. That feeling of being the 'decider' is not us, it belongs to the mind. It is something we are perceiving.
This is not proven in just a few minutes of thought watching. It often takes many months of diligent watching to really see it and to be convinced. This is because the conditioned feeling of being the 'thinker' is so deep that the very idea that the mind goes its own way seems ridiculous. But the payoff of this single discovery is enormous in terms of liberation and deeper understanding of ourselves and the universe."
- Galen Sharp
"Groundedness comes in many forms: resolute common sense, daily prayer or meditation, a regular job that keeps us engaged with material realities, physical exercise, or something as simple as family life. One needs a sufficient engagement with the requirements of the so-called 'real world' so that one is less likely to fall prey to flights of fancy or become engulfed by archetypes, repressed complexes, or manias that will make one lose one's wits. The specter of madness haunts the spiritual search.
A recurring motif of the esoteric tradition is the realm of the unseen - other dimensions, invisible entities, inner planes, etheric bodies, energy centers, planetary forces, hidden masters, the list goes on and on. Some people with a tendency toward paranoia are strongly attracted to the esoteric precisely because it mirrors their secret fears: unseen forces affect our lives, consensus reality is a sham, the universe is somehow converging on our personal slice of life. The spiritual landscape is littered with addled mystics who jumped into esoteric belief systems that were more than their sanity could bear.
Which leads us to a skill that it would be wise to cultivate: the ability to maintain a simultaneous belief and disbelief in all matters esoteric until you have undeniably experienced them for yourself. Let us call this 'faithful skepticism'.
The kind of 'knowing' that one finds in gnosis is personally verified. It isn't based on the hearsay of another's experience. And even when you have experienced something that seems real, it is well to keep room in your world view for the possibility that it is all in your imagination. Keep things in perspective."
- Richard Smoley, Jay Kinney
Hidden Wisdom
At the mere touch of cold philosophy?
There was an awful rainbow once in heaven:
We know her woof, her texture; she is given
In the dull catalogue of common things.
Philosophy will clip an angel's wings,
Conquer all mysteries by rule and line,
Empty the haunted air, and gnomed mine
Unweave a rainbow"
- John Keats
"A small child is taken to the zoo for the first time. This child may be any one of us or, to put it another way, we have been this child and have forgotten about it. In these grounds - these terrible grounds - the child sees living animals he has never before glimpsed; he sees jaguars, vultures, bison, and - what is still stranger - giraffes. He sees for the first time the bewildering variety of the animal kingdom, and this spectacle, which might alarm or frighten him, he enjoys. He enjoys it so much that going to the zoo is one of the pleasures of childhood, or is thought to be such. How can we explain this everyday and yet mysterious event?
We can, of course, deny it. We can suppose that children suddenly rushed off to the zoo will become, in due time, neurotic, and the truth is there can hardly be a child who has not visited the zoo and there is hardly a grown-up who is not a neurotic. It may be stated that all children, by definition, are explorers, and that to discover the camel is in itself no stranger than to discover a mirror or water or a staircase.
It can also be stated that the child trusts his parents, who take him to this place full of animals. Besides, his toy tiger and the pictures of tigers in the encyclopedia have somehow taught him to look at the flesh-and-bone tiger without fear. Plato (if he were invited to join in this discussion) would tell us that the child had already seen the tiger in a primal world of archetypes, and that now on seeing the tiger he recognizes it. Schopenhauer (even more wondrously) would tell us that the child looks at the tigers without fear because he is aware that he is the tigers and the tigers are him or, more accurately, that both he and the tigers are but forms of that single essence, the Will."
- Jorge Luis Borges
The Book of Imaginary Beings
"If you need to visualize the soul, think of it as a cross between a wolf howl, a photon, and a dribble of dark molasses. But what it really is, as near as I can tell, is a packet of information. It's a program, a piece of hyperspatial software designed explicitly to interface with the Mystery. Not a mystery, mind you, the Mystery. The one that can never be solved.
To one degree or another, everybody is connected to the Mystery, and everybody secretly yearns to expand the connection. That requires expanding the soul. These things can enlarge the soul: laughter, danger, imagination, meditation, wild nature, passion, compassion, psychedelics, beauty, iconoclasm, and driving around in the rain with the top down. These things can diminish it: fear, bitterness, blandness, trendiness, egotism, violence, corruption, ignorance, grasping, shining, and eating ketchup on cottage cheese.
Data in our psychic program is often nonlinear, nonhierarchical, archaic, alive, and teeming with paradox. Simply booting up is a challenge, if not for no other reason than that most of us find acknowledging the unknowable and monitoring its intrusions upon the familiar and mundane more than a little embarrassing.
But say you've inflated your soul to the size of a beach ball and it's soaking into the Mystery like wine into a mattress. What have you accomplished? Well, long term, you may have prepared yourself for a successful metamorphosis, an almost inconceivable transformation to be precipitated by your death or by some great worldwide eschatological whoopjamboreehoo. You may have. No one can say for sure.
More immediately, by waxing soulful you will have granted yourself the possibility of ecstatic participation in what the ancients considered a divinely animated universe. And on a day to day basis, folks, it doesn't get any better than that."
- Tom Robbins
You gotta have soul
Esquire
October 1993
The deep parts of my life pour onward,
as if the river shores were opening out.
It seems that things are more like me now,
that I can see farther into paintings.
I feel closer to what language can't reach.
With my sense, as with birds, I climb
into the windy heaven, out of the oak,
and in the ponds broken off from the sky
my feeling sinks, as if standing on fishes.
- Rainer Maria Rilke
[translated by Robert Bly]
"Time is like a river made up of the events which happen, and its current is strong; no sooner does anything appear than it is swept away, and another comes in its place, and will be swept away too."
- Marcus Aurelius
are Buddha’s speech.
The colored mountains
are Buddha’s pure body.
Night brings eighty-four
thousand poems of Buddha.
Listen, someday you may awaken."
- Su Shih
"There are two kinds of people in this world; those who think there are two kinds of people and those who are smart enough to know better."
- Tom Robbins
"According to the current doctrines of mysticoscientism, we human animals are really and actually nothing but "organic patterns of nodular energy composed of collocations of infinitesimal points oscillating on the multi-dimensional coordinates of the space-time continuum". I'll have to think about that. Sometime. Meantime, I'm going to gnaw on this sparerib, drink my Blatz beer, and contemplate the a posteriori coordinates of that young blonde over yonder, the one in the tennis skirt, tying her shoelaces."
- Edward Abbey
- Charles Horton Cooley
"It is customary for adults to forget how hard and dull school is. The learning by memory all the basic things one must know is the most incredible and unending effort. Learning to read is probably the most difficult and revolutionary thing that happens to the human brain and if you don't believe that watch an illiterate adult try to do it. School is not so easy and it is not for the most part very fun, but then, if you are very lucky, you may find a teacher. Three real teachers in a lifetime is the very best of luck. I have come to believe that a great teacher is a great artist and that there are as few as there are any other great artists. Teaching might even be the greatest of the arts since the medium is the human mind and spirit."
- John Steinbeck
lasts.
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