you are dreaming
"Oh what a catastrophe, what a maiming of love when it was made a personal, merely personal feeling, taken away from the rising and setting of the sun, and cut off from the magic connection of the solstice and equinox. This is what is the matter with us, we are bleeding at the roots, because we are cut off from the earth and sun and stars, and love is a grinning mockery, because, poor blossom, we plucked it from its stem on the tree of life, and expected it to keep on blooming in our civilized vase on the table."
- D.H. Lawrence
On Living
I
Living is no laughing matter:
you must live with great seriousness
like a squirrel, for example-
I mean without looking for something beyond and above living,
I mean living must be your whole occupation.
Living is no laughing matter:
you must take it seriously,
so much so and to such a degree
that, for example, your hands tied behind your back,
your back to the wall,
or else in a laboratory
in your white coat and safety glasses,
you can die for people-
even for people whose faces you've never seen,
even though you know living
is the most real, the most beautiful thing.
I mean, you must take living so seriously
that even at seventy, for example, you'll plant olive trees-
and not for your children, either,
but because although you fear death you don't believe it,
because living, I mean, weighs heavier.
II
Let's say you're seriously ill, need surgery -
which is to say we might not get up
from the white table.
Even though it's impossible not to feel sad
about going a little too soon,
we'll still laugh at the jokes being told,
we'll look out the window to see it's raining,
or still wait anxiously
for the latest newscast ...
Let's say we're at the front-
for something worth fighting for, say.
There, in the first offensive, on that very day,
we might fall on our face, dead.
We'll know this with a curious anger,
but we'll still worry ourselves to death
about the outcome of the war, which could last years.
Let's say we're in prison
and close to fifty,
and we have eighteen more years, say,
before the iron doors will open.
We'll still live with the outside,
with its people and animals, struggle and wind-
I mean with the outside beyond the walls.
I mean, however and wherever we are,
we must live as if we will never die.
III
This earth will grow cold,
a star among stars
and one of the smallest,
a gilded mote on blue velvet-
I mean this, our great earth.
This earth will grow cold one day,
not like a block of ice
or a dead cloud even
but like an empty walnut it will roll along
in pitch-black space ...
You must grieve for this right now
-you have to feel this sorrow now-
for the world must be loved this much
if you're going to say "I lived."
- Nazim Hikmet
"We all have a deep longing and a deep fear of the discovery of what we are, and the mind devises any way it can to avoid this discovery.
The most effective way it avoids Awakening is to seek it.
You are already that which is.
But your mind is frightened to let go and still has an idea that something special should happen."
- Tony Parsons
The Open Secret
- Gotthold Ephraim Lessing
"Ecstasy is what everyone craves - not love or sex, but a hot-blooded, soaring intensity, in which being alive is a joy and a thrill. That enravishment doesn't give meaning to life, and yet without it life seems meaningless."
- Diane Ackerman
a mirror that cannot close its eyes
to your longing. My eyes wet with
yours in the early light. My mind
every moment giving birth, always
conceiving, always in the ninth
month, always the come-point. How
do I stand this? We become these
words we say, a wailing sound moving
out into the air. These thousands of
worlds that rise from nowhere, how
does your face contain them? I'm
a fly in your honey, then closer, a
moth caught in flame's allure, then
empty sky stretched out in homage.
- Jelaluddin Rumi
The Glance Songs of Soul-Meeting
Immersed in that celestial music,
Moment by moment, steady,
A stalwart guardian of the endless
Stream nurturing it.
Strong and solid,
Unmoving at its thick base,
Its long, soft needles swaying
Gently as feathers in warm wind.
Alive it was, and unfolding as the
Present, retaining only the flow,
Nothing more.
- G. Bluestone
Journeys on Mind Mountain
Whether or not she or he likes it, of course.
Whether or not he or she is even necessarily aware of it.
And in part that’s because, by trying to imagine the present, writers have a hand in imagining the future, and, by having a hand in imagining the future, writers have a hand, a tiny hand, granted, a tiny hand but a real hand, a real hand and therefore an important hand, in shaping its architectonics.
And in part that’s because trying to imagine the present and therefore the future is a means for our species of remaining awake, a way of rousing ourselves in the midst of our dreaming.
Thinking, Ludwig Wittgenstein once reminded us, is digestion; thinking, in other words, is that much a component of who we are.
If you don’t use your own imagination, Ronald Sukenick once reminded us, somebody else is going to use it for you."
- Lance Olsen
"We have stopped reading, we have not the time. Our mind is solicited simultaneously from too many sides: it has to be spoken to quickly as it passes by. But there are things that cannot be said or understood in such haste, and these are the most important things for man. This accelerated movement, which makes coherent thought impossible, may alone be sufficient to weaken, and in the long run utterly to destroy, human reason."
- Lamennais
(1819)
the blankness of eternity which you cover slowly,
affirming time's scrawl as a right
and your daring as necessity;
the page, which you cover woodenly,
ruining it, but asserting your freedom and power to act,
acknowledging that you ruin everything you touch
but touching it nevertheless,
because acting is better than being here in mere opacity;
the page, which you cover slowly
with the crabbed thread of your gut;
the page in the purity of its possibilities;
the page of your death,
against which you pit such flawed excellences
as you can muster
with all your life's strength:
that page will teach you to write.
- Annie Dillard
The Writing Life
- A. A. Milne
"As soon as you accept the accidental effects, they are no longer accidents. They are necessity – the part of yourself that you could not expect or design beforehand. Thus the realm of your creativity grows wider."
- Kazuaki Tanahashi
"To know what you prefer instead of humbly saying Amen to what the world tells you you ought to prefer, is to have kept your soul alive."
- Brenda Ueland
"How does the creative impulse die in us? The English teacher who wrote fiercely on the margin of your theme with blue pencil: "Trite, rewrite," helped to kill it. Critics kill it, your family. Families are great murderers of the creative impulse, particularly husbands. Older brothers sneer at younger brothers and kill it. There is that American pastime known as "kidding", - with the result that everyone is ashamed and hang-dog about showing the slightest enthusiasm or passion or sincere feeling about anything.
You have noticed how teachers, critics, parents and other know-it-alls, when they see you have written something, become at once long-nosed and finicking and go through it gingerly sniffing out the flaws. Aha! a misspelled word! as though Shakespeare could spell! As though spelling, grammar and what you learn in a book about rhetoric has anything to do with freedom and the imagination!
So often I come across articles written by critics of the very highest brow, and by other prominent writers, deploring the attempts of ordinary people to write. The critics rap us savagely on the head with their thimbles, for our nerve. No one but a virtuoso should be allowed to do it.
But this is one of the results: that all people who try to write become anxious, timid, contracted, become perfectionists, so terribly afraid that they may put something down that is not as good as Shakespeare.
And so no wonder you don't write and put it off month after month, decade after decade. For when you write, if it is to be any good at all, you must feel free, - free and not anxious.
Yes, I hate orthodox criticism. The usual small niggling, fussy-mussy criticism, which thinks it can improve people by telling them where they are wrong, and results only in putting them in straightjackets of hesitancy and self-consciousness, and weazening all vision and bravery.
I hate it not so much on my own account, for I have learned at last not to let it balk me. But I hate it because of the potentially shining, gentle, gifted people of all ages, that it snuffs out every year. It is a murderer of talent. And because the most modest and sensitive people are the most talented, having the most imagination and sympathy, these are the very first ones to get killed off. It is the brutal egoists that survive."
- Brenda Ueland
" . . . you are all original and talented and need to let it out of yourselves; that is to say, you have the creative impulse.
But the ardor for it is inhibited and dried up by many things; as I said, by criticism, self-doubt, duty, nervous fear which expresses itself in merely external action like running up and downstairs and scratching items off lists and thinking you are being efficient; by anxiety about making a living, by fear of not excelling.
Now this creative power I think is the Holy Ghost. My theology may not be very accurate but that is how I think of it. I know that William Blake called this creative power the Imagination and he said it was God. He, if anyone, ought to know, for he was one of the greatest poets and artists that ever lived.
Now Blake thought that this creative power should be kept alive in all people for all their lives. And so do I. Why? Because it is life itself. It is the Spirit. In fact it is the only important thing about us. The rest of us is legs and stomach, materialistic cravings and fears.
How could we keep it alive? By using it, by letting it out, by giving some time to it.
We have come to think that duty should come first. I disagree. Duty should be a by-product. Writing, the creative effort, the use of imagination, should come first, - at least for some part of every day of your life. It is a wonderful blessing if you will use it. You will become happier, more enlightened, alive, impassioned, light-hearted and generous to everybody else. Even your health will improve. Colds will disappear and all the other ailments of discouragement and boredom.
Now, you see, I have established a reason for your working at writing, not in a trifling, weak way, but with affection and endurance. In other words, I want to make you feel that there is a great intrinsic reward to writing. Unless you feel that you will soon give it up. You won't last very long at it. A few rejection slips will flatten you out. A few years of not making a cent out of it will make you give it up and feel bitterly that it was a waste of time.
I want to assure you with all earnestness, that no writing is a waste of time, - no creative work where the feelings, the imagination, the intelligence must work. With every sentence you write, you have learned something. It has done you good. It has stretched your understanding. I know that."
- Brenda Ueland
If You Want To Write
"Now this is an inevitable truth: whatever you write will reveal your personality, and whatever you are will show through in your writing.
Now to get to writing the truth, i.e., what you really feel, and to speak it straight out, tearing aside all gauzes and films of circumspection or intentionalness or gentility or assumed brutality, if you do not know what this means now, write twenty more stories and a true, careless, slovenly, impulsive, honest diary every day of your life, and you will.
Unless you are a very clear-sighted and introspective person, this is a long discipline. The way to do it is, Dostoevsky said: "Never, never lie to yourself. Don't lie to others, but least of all to yourself." "What do you really care about and love? Who are you?" And one of the very worst, self-murdering lies that people tell to themselves is that they are no good and have no gift and nothing important to say.
I have kept such a slovenly, headlong, helter-skelter diary for many years. I have written in it, off and on, and sometimes in exact detail and as minutely and accurately as the Recording Angel. Horrible things (that I did not know about myself) are revealed in it but perhaps remarkable things too. It has been a great help to me. This is what it has done for me:
It has shown me that writing is talking, thinking, on paper. And the more impulsive and immediate the writing the closer it is to the thinking, which it should be.
It has made me like writing. For years it was the most boring, dreaded, and effortful thing to do - doubt-impeded, ego-inflated.
It has shown me more and more what I am - what to discard in myself and what to respect and love."
- Brenda Ueland
- Natalie Goldberg
Writing Down The Bones
"If you want to be a writer, write. If you want to be a painter, then paint. There are no magical barriers and there are no ships that are coming for you. You have to follow your dream as if it were something your life depended on. Just begin and don't ever, ever slow down. Make no compromises and do the best work you are capable of. Throw out the old ideas or use them as levers to discover new ones. Reinvent, waste, invert, twist, bend, and puncture your ideas with new ones. Combine, reverse, and put things where they don't belong. Teach your mind how to misbehave. Then, in the chaos, take the exacto knife to it and make it simple."
- Mark Stephen Meadows
"And one more thing. Who knows if he is great, or talented? No one. We don't even know what we are, or what our lives are like.
Van Gogh and Chekhov and all great people have know inwardly that they were something. They have had a passionate conviction of their importance, of the life, the fire, the god in them. But they were never sure that others would necessarily see it in them, or that recognition would ever come."
- Brenda Ueland
"The only success with which a writer might be meaningfully concerned, is how successfully his or her adjectives exude their flavors, his or her syntax drums out its cadence, his or her metaphors eternalize their phrases, or whether or not, when their nouns meet their verbs, the verbs yell out, "Gotcha, baby!" For the task of the writer is not to attain recognition or reward but to meditate upon our passing world and, through the working magic of language, awaken in the solitary reader a sense of wonder at that world. "
- Tom Robbins
- Anne Sexton
"I never know when I sit down, just what I am going to write. I make no plan; it just comes, and I don't know where it comes from."
- D.H. Lawrence
- Robert Stone
- Stanley Kunitz
- Anne Lamott
"The process of creating is related to the process of dreaming although when you are writing you're doing it and when you're dreaming, it's doing you."
- Robert Stone
- Jorge Luis Borges
"Read carefully, then don't read; work hard, then forget about it; know your tradition, then liberate yourself from it; learn language, then free yourself from it. Finally, know at least one form of magic."
- Gary Snyder
- Allen Ginsberg
"What is life but the angle of vision? A man is measured by the angle at which he looks at objects. What is life but what a man is thinking of all day? This is his fate and his employer. Knowing is the measure of the man. By how much we know, so we are."
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
"The known is finite, the unknown infinite; intellectually we stand on an islet in the midst of an illimitable ocean of inexplicability. Our business in every generation is to reclaim a little more land."
- Thomas Huxley
Every year without knowing it I have passed the day
When the last fires will wave to me
And the silence will set out
Tireless traveler
Like the beam of a lightless star
Then I will no longer
Find myself in life as in a strange garment
Surprised at the earth
And the love of one woman
And the shamelessness of men
As today writing after three days of rain
Hearing the wren sing and the falling cease
And boding not knowing to what.
- W.S. Merwin
"There is no better than here.
When your there becomes a here you will simply obtain another there that again looks better than here."
- Cherie Carter-Scott
If Life is a Game, These are the Rules
"What you are seeing and hearing right now is nothing but a dream. You are dreaming right now in this moment.
Your mind is a dream where a thousand people talk at the same time, and nobody understands each other.
Your mind sees with the eyes and perceives waking reality. But your mind also sees and perceives without the eyes, although the reason is hardly aware of this perception. Your mind lives in more than one dimension.
Your mind is divided as your body is divided. Your mind can talk and listen to itself. A thousand parts of your mind can all be speaking at the same time, each part has different thoughts and feelings; each one has a different point of view. Each part is like a separate living being; it has its own personality and its own voice. One part of your mind has objections to certain thoughts and actions, and another part supports the actions of the opposing thoughts. All these little living beings create inner conflict because they each have a voice.
Your mind creates a lot of chaos which causes you to misinterpret everything and misunderstand everything. You only see what you want to see and hear what you want to hear. You don't perceive things the way they are. You have the habit of dreaming with no basis in reality.
It's very interesting how your mind works. You have the need to justify everything, to explain and understand everything, in order to feel safe. You have millions of questions that need answers because there are so many things that your reasoning mind cannot explain. You lie to yourself just to make yourself right.
You must become aware that you are dreaming all the time."
- Don Miguel Ruiz
The Four Agreements
What we know of other people
is only our memory of the moments
During which we knew them. And they have
changed since then.
To pretend that they and we are the same
Is a useful and convenient social convention
Which must sometimes be broken. We must
also remember
That at every meeting we are meeting a
stranger."
- T.S. Eliot
1. Just watch everything happen. This is the same thing as surrendering.
2. The reason you can't do it is because you're afraid of your own mind.
3. To do it, you have to stop the continuous squinching that makes you you.
4. The self that gets lost in thoughts is also a thought.
5. Everything of which you can be aware is a mental event, including the "me" who thinks it's aware.
6. That "me" is the thought that Ramana Maharshi says is last to go, his "I-thought." His method aims at suffocating that thought by placing all attention on it.
7. One of thinking's main purposes is to say "this really exists" and "that does not," but this distinction isn't useful for meditation.
8. Forget about the nature of reality. This is about phenomenology.
9. Watching takes the fun out of thoughts. The pain, too.
10. All thinking is motivated by an intention (intention is not quite the right word, but the proper word does not exist) to excite a feeling.
11. Nothing you think can make you happy for very long.
12. Being lost in thoughts is a form of masturbation.
13. This instruction sums it up: don't daydream. Or does it?
14. And this one too: be aware. But it makes a difference whether you are aware of something or of anything.
15. You can play a lot of games with meditation that are pure wastes of time.
16. Gurdjieff's self-remembering is the same thing as Theravada's mindfulness.
17. Minds are incredibly prone to travel in ruts.
18. The reason we have to do this stuff -- seek relief from unhappiness, meditate, get enlightened -- is that nature designed our minds for brains that were much less intelligent than the ones we have.
19. Small children hum like cats when they eat. The memory is worth recovering.
- Freddie Yam
What I've Learned From Meditating
- Joseph Goldstein
"The lesson which life repeats and constantly enforces is look under foot. You are always nearer the divine and true sources of your power than you think. The lure of the distant and difficult is deceptive. The great opportunity is where you are. Do not despise your own place and hour. Every place is under the stars, every place is the center of the world."
- John Burroughs
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