THE QUESTERS’ JOURNAL

*(denotes unknown source)

 

[As suggested in the Remedy home page, the Questers’ Journal comprises literary, psychological and philosophical insights gleaned from our search for understanding of self and our world across time. Through tracking the processes and products of noteworthy East and West minds, we aspired to the acquisition of a functional measure of understanding and enlightenment for ourselves. The selections are not streamed nor ‘packaged’ by chronology, author nor subject matter, nor were they ever intended to be. There is no ‘teaching’ goal nor agenda in the Journal, so enter it anywhere, anytime, and allow strengthening insight to flow through you. Enjoy.]

 

“The time has come,” The Walrus said, “to talk of many things: Of shoes – and ships – and sealing wax – Of cabbages – and kings – And why the sea is boiling hot – And whether pigs have wings.” (Lewis Carroll)

 

A person without humour has little wisdom.                                                                    (Lama Govinda)

 

In reality, every ego –so far from being a unity, is in the highest degree a manifold world, a constellated heaven, a chaos of forms, of states and stages, of inheritances and potentialities. As a body everyone is single, as a soul never.                                                                                                                       (Hermann Hesse)

 

I am an experiment on the part of nature, a gamble within the unknown, perhaps for a new purpose, perhaps for nothing, and my only task is to allow this game on the part of the primeval depths to take its course, to feel its will within me and make it wholly mine.                                                                                    (ibid)

 

Go, eat your bread in gladness and drink your wine in joy, for your action was long ago approved by God. Let your clothes always be freshly washed and your head never lack ointment. Enjoy happiness with a woman you love all the fleeting days of life that have been granted you under the sun. Whatever it is in your power to do, do with all your might. For there is no doing, no learning, no wisdom in the grave to which you are going.         (Eccles. 9: 7-10)

 

Twelve basic characteristics of creative people:

*  They are more observant

*  They express only part-truths

*  In addition to seeing things as others do, they see things others do not

*  They are independent in their cognitive faculties, which they value highly

*  They are motivated by their talent and values

*  They are more capable of holding many ideas at once, and comparing new ideas, hence making a richer synthesis

*  They have more sexual drive and are more vigorous from a physical point of view, and more sensitive

*  They have more complex lives, and see a more complex universe

*  They become more aware of unconscious motives and fantasy life

*  They have strong egos that permit them to regress and return to normality

*  They allow the distinction between subject and object to disappear for certain periods of time, as in love and mysticism

*  The objective freedom of their organism is at a maximum, and their creativity is a function of that objective freedom

(Source- Frank Barron as quoted by Silvano Arieti “Creativity: The Magic Synthesis”)

 

Once you leave your own knowledge of God, your own sentiment, and take secondary knowledge such as St. Paul’s or George Fox’s, you get wider from God with every year this secondary form lasts. Let me admonish you, - first of all - to go alone.                                                                                               (Ralph Waldo Emerson)

 

Each of us rides his personal universe, his own travelling box of space and time, and what they have in common is the same structure and coherence.                                                            (Jacob Bronowski)

 

Every animal leaves traces of what it was; man alone leaves traces of what he created.

                                                                                                                             (Bronowski  “The Ascent of Man”)

 

I very much doubt if anyone of us has the faintest idea of what is meant by the reality of existence of anything but our own egos.                                                                                 (Sir Arthur Eddington)

 

We were in search of matter, but now all new insight into matter shows that there is no matter; it looks more and more like a thought, and less and less like a thing.                             (ibid)

 

Above and below are bound to one another. The word of him who wishes to speak with men without speaking to God is not fulfilled; but the word of him who wishes to speak with God without speaking with men goes astray.                                                                                                        (Martin Buber “Dialogue”)

 

Plato has repeatedly called “Thinking” a voiceless colloquy of the soul with itself. Everyone who has really thought knows that within this remarkable process there is a stage at which an “inner court” is questioned and replies.                                                                                                   (Buber  “Dialogue”)

 

Each of us is encased in an armour which we soon, out of familiarity, cease to notice. There are only moments which penetrate it and stir the soul to sensibility.                         (Martin Buber  “The Way of Response”)

 

No action is ever lost - nothing we do is without result. We can’t know the quality or the results of our actions except in the most limited way. All we can do is to try to be as sure as we can of what we are doing so far as it relates to ourselves. In fact, not to flail about and be deluded victims of our passions. If you’re going to do something that looks evil, don’t smear it with icing and pretend it’s good; just bloody well do it and keep your eyes peeled. That’s all.                                                                                                       (Robertson Davies)

 

This is the Great Theatre of Life. Admission is free but the taxation is mortal. You come when you can, and leave when you must. The show is continuous.                                     (ibid)

 

The world we see is only that part of it that registers on the senses.      (Democritus)

 

Why is it when we talk to God, we are said to be praying, but when God talks to us we’re said to be schizophrenic?                                                                                                             (Lily Tomlin)

 

Selves are not independently existing soul-pearls, but artifacts of the social processes that create us and, like other artifacts, subject to sudden shifts in status. The only “momentum” that accrues to the trajectory of a self, or a club, is the stability imparted to it by the web of beliefs (memes) that constitute it, and when those beliefs lapse, it lapses, either permanently or temporarily.                                 (Daniel C. Dennett)

Concerning discourse, Dennett quotes:

                   E.M. Forster “ How can I tell what I think until I see what I say?”

                   J.H. Jackson “We speak, not only to tell others what we think, but to tell ourselves what we think.”

 

Lord make me chaste - but not yet.                                                       (St. Augustine, as a young man)

 

God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, change the things I can and the wisdom to know the difference.                                                                                                (Reinhold Niebuhr)

 

Oh, no: I had never wished to teach. I had nothing to teach. I wished only to learn, to be always the student, never the pro­fessor. And with being eternally a student went the idea of be­ing free to move, to pass from one town and one country to another, at least while enough youth and energy remained for me to love exploration and to profit by it.

                                                                                                        (Santayana)

 

Prayer, among sane people, has never superseded practical efforts to secure the desired end; a proof that the sphere of expression was never really confused with that of reality.                        (Santayana)

“I do not know what I may appear to the world, but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the seashore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.”                    (Isaac Newton)

 

Those who do not remember their history are condemned to repeat it.        (Santayana)

 

People will forget what you said. People will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.                                                                                                                  *

 

The mass of mankind is divided into two classes - the Sancho Panzas who have a sense for reality, but no ideals, and the Don Quixotes with a sense for ideals, but mad.                                        (Santayana)

 

The true philosopher, who is not one chiefly by profession, must be prepared to tread the wine-press alone. He may indeed flourish like the bay-tree in a grateful environment, but more often he will rather resemble a reed shaken by the wind. Whether starved or fed by the accidents of fortune he must find his essential life in his own ideal.                                                                                                                     (Santayana)

 

There is nothing cheaper than idealism. It can be had by merely not observing the ineptitude of our chance prejudices, and by declaring that the first rhymes that have struck our ear are the eternal and necessary harmonies of the world.                                                                                                  (Santayana)

 

Intuition runs equally into truth and into error, and can settle nothing if not controlled by experience

                                                                                                        (Santayana)

 

From the Bhagavad-Gita:

 For the Soul, there is neither birth nor death. Nor, having once been alive, does it  ever cease to exist. It is unborn, eternal, ever-existing, undying and primeval. It is not slain when the body is slain.    (1-20)

 

The mind is restless, turbulent, obstinate and very strong, and to subdue it is more difficult than controlling the wind.                                                                                                                                     (6-34)

[from the Vedas  –  ‘An individual is the passenger in the carriage of the material body, and intelligence is the driver. Mind is the driving instrument (reins) and the five senses are the horses. The self is thus the enjoyer or sufferer in the association of mind and senses.’]

Christianity, even in its orthodox forms, covers various kinds of morality, and its philosophical incoherence betrays itself in dis­ruptive movements, profound schisms, and total alienation on the part of one Christian from the inward faith of another. Trappist or Calvinist may be practicing a heroic and metaphysical self-surrender while the busy-bodies of their respective creeds are fos­tering, in God's name, all their hot and miscellaneous passions.

                                                                                                        (Santayana)

 

When we extend ourselves, our self enters new and unfamiliar territory. We do things that we are unaccustomed to and it is frightening. It always has been and it always will be but the fear is inescapable if we are to advance. Courage is not the absence of fear, it is the advancing on the Hero's Journey in spite of fear, the extension despite the resistance.                                                                   (Joseph Campbell)

 

Every idea which is formed in the human mind, every activity and emotion, has some relation, direct or indirect, to pain and pleasure.                                                                              (Santayana)

 

The first time I saw him, he was walking down Lover's Lane holding his own hand.

                                                                                                                             (Fred Allen)

 

No language can be ugly to those who speak it well, no religion unmeaning to those who have learned to pour their life into its moulds. Of course these forms vary in intrinsic excellence; they are by their specific character more or less fit and facile for the average mind. But the man and the age are rare who can choose their own path; we have generally only a choice between going ahead in the direction already chosen, or halting and blocking the path for others.                                                                                           (Santayana)

 

Dream not of Utopias but be content if the least thing go forward, and count the outcome of the matter in hand as a small thing. For who can change another’s conviction? Failing a change of conviction, we merely get men pretending to be persuaded and chafing like slaves under coercion.   (Marcus Aurelius “Meditations”)

 

Parental functions in nature are limited to nursing the extremely young. This phase of the instinct, being the most primitive and fundamental, is most to be relied upon even in man. Especially in the mother, care for the children's physical well-being is unfailing to the end. She understands the vegetative soul, and the first lispings of sense and sentiment in the child have an absorbing interest for her. In that region her skill and delights are miracles of nature; but her insight and keenness gradually fade as the children grow older. Seldom is the private and ideal life of a young son or daughter a matter in which the mother shows particular tact or for which she has instinctive respect. Even rarer is any genuine community in life and feeling between parents and their adult children. Often the parents' influence comes to be felt as a dead constraint, the more cruel that it cannot be thrown off without unkindness; and what makes the parents' claim at once unjust and pathetic is that it is founded on passionate love for a remembered being, the child once wholly theirs, that no longer exists in the man.                 (Santayana)

 

We must not only cast asunder the snare of the mind and the senses, but flee also from the snare of the thinker, the snare of the theologian and the church-builder, the meshes of the WORD and the bondage of the IDEA. All these are within us waiting to wall in the spirit with forms;  but we must always go beyond, always renounce the lesser for the greater, the finite for the Infinite; we must be prepared to proceed from illumination to illumination, from experience to experience, from soul-state to soul-state…Nor must we attach ourselves even to the truths we hold most securely, for they are but forms and expressions of the Ineffable who refuses to limit Itself to any form or expression.                         (Sri Aurobindo – “Synthesis of Yoga”)

 

There are four main standards of human conduct which make an ascending scale:

First            Personal need, preference and desire

Second      The law and good of the many

Third          The ideal ethic

Fourth        The highest divine law of Nature.                                         (ibid)

 

Truly, we do not think, will or act but thought occurs in us, will occurs in us, impulse and act occur in us; our ego sense gathers around itself, refers to itself all this flow of natural activities. It is cosmic FORCE, it is NATURE which forms the thought, imposes the will, imparts the impulse. Our body, mind and ego are a wave of the sea of force in action and do not govern it, but by it are governed and directed.        (ibid)

 

A hunt for supernatural powers leads to a fatal self-inflation into an unnatural, inhuman and undivine bigness of magnified ego; the larger the being, the more danger of large-scale disaster.    (ibid)

 

The supreme state of human love is the unity of one soul in two bodies.          (ibid)

 

If the realization, fulfillment, service of the one Self demands from us an action that seems to others self-service or self-assertion in the egotistic sense or seems egotistic enjoyment or self-indulgence, that action we must do; we must be governed by the guide within rather than by the opinions of men. The influence of the environment is all delusion and vanity.                                                                                      (ibid)

 

The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing.          (Edmund Burke)

 

There are always two methods of securing harmony: one is to unify all the given elements, and another is to reject and expunge all the elements that refuse to be unified. Unity by inclusion gives us the beautiful; unity by exclusion, opposition, and isolation gives us the sublime. Both are pleasures: but the pleasure of the one is warm, passive, and pervasive; that of the other cold, imperious, and keen. The one identifies us with the world, the other raises us above it.                                                                                                   (Santayana)

 

We inhabit a vast ocean of energy which is outside the reach of our senses and our measuring instruments.                                                                                   (David Bohm - Physicist and friend of Krishnamurti)

 

The phenomenal world that we observe in our ordinary state of consciousness represents only one aspect of reality – the ‘explicate’ or unfolded order. Its generative matrix – the ‘implicate’ or enfolded order – exists on another level of reality and cannot be directly observed, except possibly in episodes of non-ordinary consciousness, such as deep meditative, mystical or psychedelic states.          (ibid)

 

The ‘ implicate domain’ could equally well be called Idealism, Spirit, Consciousness; the separation of matter and spirit is an abstraction. The ground is always one.                                            (ibid)

 

Matter is like a small ripple on this tremendous ocean of energy [implicate domain] having some relative stability and being manifest.                                                                                                (ibid)

 

This ocean of energy could be thought of as an ocean of light – light being the fundamental activity in which existence has its ground.                                                                                                (ibid)

 

No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main; if a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friends or thine own were; any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind; and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.                                                            (John Donne)

 

Intense magnification shows our bodies are only oscillating fields of energy – a void, in other words.

(Itzhak Bentov)

 

A disease may be an out-of-tune behaviour of one or another of our organs. When a strong harmonizing rhythm is applied, the interference pattern of waves, which is the organ, may start pulsing in tune again. This may be the principle behind psychic healing.                                                                        (ibid)

 

Energy in pendulums causes them to entrain and if one is set at an odd beat, it will be brought back to the original entrainment by the energy of the other pendulums. Similarly, when a person deviates from the “rhythm” of the group, the group tries to bring him back into entrainment with them.                         (ibid)

 

When a man knows that his life is over, he can look back upon it from a universal standpoint. He has nothing more to live for, but if the energy of his mind remains unimpaired, he will still wish to live, and, being cut off from his personal ambitions, he will impute to himself a kind of vicarious immortality by identifying himself with what is eternal. He speaks of himself as he is, or rather as he was. He sums himself up, and points to his achievement. This I have been, says he, this I have done.                                                                     (Santayana)

 

The young man who has not wept is a savage, and the old man who will not laugh is a fool.  (ibid)

 

“Enlightenment is the goal; Healing is the by-product.   As the darkness fades, the transformation process becomes one of creativity rather than healing”.

                                                (Source –“Heyoan” an entity channelled thru Barbara Ann Brennan)

 

Learning the contexts of life is a matter that has to be discussed – not internally – but as a matter of external relationship between two creatures. Relationship is always a product of ‘double description’; think of the two parties to the interaction as two eyes, each given a monocular view of what goes on (with each’s respective peripherals), and, together, giving a binocular view in depth. This double view IS the relationship.        (Gregory Bateson)

 

Miracles are dreams and imaginings whereby materialists hope to escape from their materialism…The introduction of the supernatural into the scheme of explanation destroys all belief and all disbelief, leaving only a state of mind, completely gaga, but which some find pleasant…Harboring one kind of superstition tends to lead to another.                                                                                                                         (ibid)

 

One of the important things about depression is to not get caught in the notion that entertainment will cure it.                                                                                                                    (ibid)

 

Meditation is often proposed as a way of handling stress – but it is also a way of unlearning the addiction to entertainment and its accompanying vulnerability to boredom.                                 (ibid)

 

The greatest artist is he who expresses what is felt by everybody. But how does he do it? By being more subjective than others. The more he expresses HIMSELF, i.e. his innermost being, the nearer he comes to others.                                                                                                           (Lama Govinda)

 

The universe resembles the shape of the electrical fields around an egg or a seed. In, say, a tree seed, the vibrating molecules of the genes carrying the information about the form of the tree have somehow coded the spatial and temporal form of the tree, so that we can say that the seed carries not only information as to shape of the tree, but also its unfoldment in time. The spatial coding is given by the amino acid sequence; the temporal perhaps by the relationships in the frequencies of vibration of the molecular segments with respect to each other. The seed’s space/time has been condensed and stored, awaiting the proper objective time for its unfoldment. It is the representation of the tree in an altered and higher state of consciousness.                                                                                                                                                   (Itzhak Bentov)

 

Keep me away from the wisdom which does not cry, the philosophy which does not laugh, and the greatness which does not bow before children.                                                             (Kahlil Gibran)

 

As one’s gifts increase, his friends decrease.                                           (ibid)

 

Keep me from the man who says “I am a candle to light people on their way”. But to the one who seeks to make his way through the light of the people, bring me nearer.                                (ibid)

 

Friendship with the ignorant is as foolish as arguing with a drunkard.         (ibid)

 

Some people act continually in ways that other - society or individuals - impose. “What do I think OUGHT to be done?” “What does my society say SHOULD be done?” They do not always act in accord with the opinions of others; indeed may act as to contradict those opinions, but are still acting in terms of those opinions.                                                                                                                                                 (Carl Rogers)

 

Most people tend not to listen; we instead evaluate another’s statements because listening is too dangerous – we might be changed and this is one of the most frightening prospects many of us face.         (ibid)

 

“Brief were my days amongst you, and briefer still the words I have spoken. But should my voice fade in your ears, and my love vanish in your memory, then I will come again, and with a richer heart and lips more yielding to the spirit will I speak. Yes, I shall return with the tide, and though death may hide me, and the greater silence enfold me, yet again will I seek your understanding… Know, therefore, that from the greater silence I shall return… Forget not that I shall come back to you… A little while, and my longing shall gather dust for another body. A little while - a moment of rest upon the wind - and another woman shall bear me”.     (Kahlil Gibran – epilogue to “The Prophet”)

 

A child in the womb, no sooner born than returned to the earth - such is the fate of man, the fate of nations and of the sun, the moon, and the stars.                                                     (Gibran)

 

Nature is a living unity of living units, in each of which the power of the whole is present …we ourselves, and the things we call our own, come and vanish and return again.                            (Giordano Bruno)

 

If two people who love each other let a single instant wedge itself between them, it grows – it becomes a month, a year, a century; it becomes too late.                                                  (Jean Giraudoux)

 

They say dying animals go into hiding; and I could understand that instinct. There are phases of distress when help is neither possible nor desired. It is simpler, easier, more honest to be seasick alone, and to die alone. The trouble then seems something fated, not to be questioned, like life itself; and nature is built to face it and to see it out.

                                                                                                                             (Santayana)

 

That the end of life should be death may sound sad: yet what other end can anything have? The end of an evening party is to go to bed; but its use is to gather congenial people together, that they may pass the time pleasantly. An invitation to the dance is not rendered ironical because the dance can not last for ever; the youngest of us and the most vigorously wound up, after a few hours, has had enough of sinuous stepping and prancing. The transience of things is essential to their physical being, and not at all sad in itself; it becomes sad by virtue of a sentimental illusion, which makes us imagine that they wish to endure, and that their end is always untimely; but in a healthy nature it is not so.                                                                              (Santayana)

 

You don't get to choose how you're going to die, or when. You can only decide how you're going to live. Now.                                                                                                                                *

 

To find your own way is to follow your own bliss. This involves analysis, watching yourself and seeing where the real deep bliss is – not the quick little excitement, but the real, deep, life-filling bliss.   (Joseph Campbell)

 

Schopenhauer points out that when you reach an advanced age and look back over your lifetime, it can seem to have had a consistent order and plan, as though composed by some novelist. Events that when they occurred had seemed accidental and of little moment turn out to have been indispensable factors in the composition of a consistent plot. So who composed the plot?

Schopenhauer suggests that just as your dreams are composed of an aspect of yourself of which your consciousness is unaware, so too, your whole life is composed by the will within you. And just as people whom you will have met apparently by mere chance become leading agents in the structuring of your life, so too will you have served unknowingly as an agent, giving meaning to the lives of others. The whole thing gears together like one big symphony, with everything unconsciously structuring everything else … one great dream of a single dreamer in which all the dream characters dream too … Everything arises in mutual relation to everything else, so you can’t blame anybody for anything. It is even as though there were a single intention behind it all, which always makes some kind of sense, though none of us knows what the sense might be, or has lived the life that he quite intended.                                                                                                                      (Joseph Campbell)

 

When the imagination and will power are in conflict .... it's almost always the imagination which wins.      *

 

The happy filling of a single hour is so much gained for the universe at large, and to find joy and sufficiency in the flying moment is perhaps the only means open to us for increasing the glory of eternity.     (Santayana)

 

We must welcome the future, remembering that soon it will be the past; and we must respect the past remembering that once it was all that was humanly possible.                                                            (ibid)

 

Friendship is almost always the union of a part of one mind with a part of another; people are friends in spots.                                                                                                                                    (ibid)

 

When the Tao is lost, there is goodness.

When goodness is lost, there is kindness.

When kindness is lost, there is justice.

When justice is lost, there is ritual.

Now ritual is the husk of faith and loyalty,

and the beginning of confusion.                                                   (Tao Te Ching - v 18 – Lao Tzu)

 

Truth is a jewel which should not be painted over; but it may be set to advantage and shown in a good light.                                                                                                         (Santayana)

 

A bore is a person who deprives you of solitude without providing you with company.

                                                                                                                             (Gian Gravina)

 

A form of immortality exists in man in that memory, while it confirms mortality (in recognizing the death of past relatives) also extends our existence via the virtual reality of past events and historical truths – e.g. the memory of father/grandfather can enhance/context/enrich the present moment. The form of immortality issuing from memory is that expression of our own individual mortality by sharing in the species life-line, again via learning/wisdom derived from shared experiences and memories.                                          (Santayana)

 

The truth is cruel, but it can be loved, and it makes free those who have loved it.         (ibid)

 

Cultivate imagination, love it, give it endless forms, but do not let it deceive you.        (ibid)

 

Nature never intended for us to pat ourselves on the back. If she had, our hinges would have been different.                                                                                                                                                                   *

 

Motivation is food for the brain. You mightn't get enough in one sitting, but need continual and regular top ups.                                                                                                                                                               *

 

The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read or write but those who cannot learn, unlearn and relearn.                                                                                                                                              *

 

Christianity persecuted, tortured, and burned. Like a hound it tracked the very scent of heresy. It kindled wars, and nursed furious hatreds and ambitions. It sanctified, quite like Mohammedanism, extermination and tyranny. All this would have been impossible if, like Buddhism, it had looked only to peace and the liberation of souls. It looked beyond; it dreamt of infinite bliss and crowns it should be crowned with before an electrified universe and an applauding God. These were rival baits to those which the world fishes with, and were snapped at, when seen, with no less avidity. Man, far from being freed from his natural passions, was plunged into artificial ones quite as violent and more disappointing. Buddhism had tried to quiet a sick world with anesthetics; Christianity sought to purge it with fire.                                                                                                  (Santayana)

 

                                LOVE

"Love her."

"I told you the feeling isn't there anymore."

"Love her."

"You don't understand. The feeling of love just isn't there."

"Then love her. If the feeling isn't there, that's a good reason to love her."

"How do you love when you don't love?"

"My friend, love is a verb. Love - the feeling - is fruit of love, the verb.

"So love her. Serve her. Sacrifice. Listen to her. Empathize. Appreciate. Affirm her. Are you willing to do that?"

   In the great literature of all progressive societies, love is a verb - not a noun.                 *

 

Some people can be so gracious in person, but so tactless with the aid of distance.             *

 

We shall not cease from exploration

And the end of all our exploring

Will be to arrive where we started

And know the place for the first time.                                                                     (T.S. Eliot)

 

“Between the desire and the spasm” –each of us owes his being to the fact that at some moment a man and a woman leapt the gap.                                                          (Quote by T S Eliot, commentary by Rollo May)

 

Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, who are we to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented and fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be? You playing small doesn't serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so other people won't feel insecure around you..... And as we let our light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others!"                                                                                (Nelson Mandella)

 

Any path is only a path, and there is no affront, to oneself or to others, in dropping it if that is what your heart tells you…Look at every path closely and deliberately. Try it as many times as you think necessary. Then ask yourself…“Does this path have heart?” If it does, the path is good; if it doesn’t, it is of no use.

          (Carlos Castenada)

                               

I always wanted to be somebody. I should have been more specific.          (Lily Tomlin)

 

Having the presence of mind to do nothing is the crucial part of a spiritual crisis.

Doing nothing is tremendous wisdom in the face of madness.

And madness can be felt clearly. We know we are losing it and we go ahead with the insanity.

So doing nothing becomes gigantic in its importance.

Wait for your mud to settle. Wait for calmness and clarity.

Waiting is the hardest thing to do when we are flipping out. The urge to break, fix, smash, strike a blow is a powerful impulse. It feels uncontrollable.

Everything depends on what we believe. So make this your belief: I can control my actions until I am calm again.

It is true.

You can't do it forever. But you can do it for one minute. And then another minute. And then another minute.

If you keep doing it, you've done it for an hour.

Emotional storms come in waves. Each one you survive without acting out strengthens your “wait” muscles.

There is beautiful peace at the end of this path. But don't think about that.

You're not ready for peace. Right now, just make it through the next moment and the next, and the next without doing anything at all.    Just be.

The ultimate answer to everything.

Right here in your own laboratory of the soul.                                   (John MacEnulty - Eman8tions)

 

I have observed the power of the watermelon seed. It has the power of drawing from the ground and through itself 200,000 times its weight. When you can tell me how it takes this material and out of it colours an outside surface beyond the imitation of art, and then forms inside of it a white rind and within that again a red heart, thickly inlaid with black seeds, each one of which in turn is capable of drawing thru itself 200,000 times its weight - - - when you can explain to me the mystery of a watermelon, you can ask me to explain the mystery of God.                                                                                                                          (William Jennings Bryan)

 

The mad thing about love is that one wants to hurry and lose the interim. In this way, one wants to get closer to the end. In this way, love in one of its aspects coincides with death.         (Albert Camus)

 

The primary activity of the psyche is imaging. --- What we are, REALLY, and the reality we live, the psychic reality, is the poetic imagination going on day and night. We really do live in dream time; we really are such stuff as dreams are made of. --- If at the soul’s core we are images, then we must define life as the actualization over time of that originating seed image - and that image, not the time that actualized it, is the primary determinant in your life.                                                                                                               (James Hillman)

 

Your life is the ongoing operation of imagination; you imagine yourself into existence, or, let’s say, an image is continuing to shape itself into the oak tree you consider your reality.                      (ibid)

 

MICHAEL VENTURA’S concept of  THE WATCHER - that sense of a constant companion, who is you yet more than you, and who seems always with you, watching from a slight distance --- always a bit older than you, usually silent, features indistinct - not actually passive but rarely active. Its action is to watch. It’s outside of you (glimpsed in the mirror sometimes). Anyone who travels alone is aware of this companion - the sense of being in the company of oneself, - the presence from which comes the mood of your solitude. It is necessary to befriend one’s Watcher - not make an enemy of it, nor judging ‘conscience’. Then despite one’s own dislike of oneself (for one’s tabooed actions and thoughts) your Watcher will be calm, non-judgmental and a friend to one’s solitude.

Notwithstanding the lack of formal recognition for the ‘Watcher’ entity as a cultural concept, the sense of it is so common that it is taken as a given. During bad times one’s relationship with one’s Watcher is critical. It may be all one has then. The Watcher does not appear to care about society or morality or the idea of good or evil. The Watcher cares about YOU, and if it’s on your side to begin with, it’s all the way on your side. When we do look into our own eyes in the mirror we have the inescapable impression, so powerful and astonishing, that someone is looking back at us---that experience of being looked back at sobers us immediately---someone looks back questioningly, serious, alert and without intent to comfort; and we feel more depth in the eyes looking at us than we ordinarily sense in our own eyes as we stare out at the world. How strange! Who could it be that is looking at us? We conclude that it is another part of us, the half that we don’t allow to pass out of our eyes when we glance at others - and that darker and more serious half looks back at us only at rare times.

 

Ventura queries “In the madness contexting/running sexual relationships, one asks oneself ‘What are the people saying? Do my friends like her, can they talk to her? Does she like them? Does my family like her – or, if I’m trying to break with my family, do they NOT like her? If we’re thinking of children, do I really want something of her father in my son? How do I feel when I walk down the street with her? What are the people saying?’”

Hillman’s response – “There’s a communal aspect to love. Love does not simply exist as a private tryst or trust between two people in a personal relationship; it’s a communal event.” and “The people are thinking/saying ‘Is this good for us all?’ and this is different from ‘Is it good for you?’ They ask ‘Is this good for us? Is this going to bring fruit and benefit to us? Or is this going to bring new disturbances to us?’”

 

Try as we may, we cannot make insights with reason or will. Something imaginative is needed.

                                                                                                                                                (Santayana)

 

Lillith glared at God

“I’ll not go back”

She hissed at him –

“Adam is such a bore.”

 

“That was my plan
You willful wench,

Lie down –

I’ll tell you more.”

 

Long before the goddess became part of the feminist consciousness, the women’s movement celebrated Lillith, whose story is found in biblical Apocrypha. Lillith , the first wife of Adam and the original wild woman, rejected her second-class status symbolized by the “missionary position’, and disappeared into the Void to be replaced by the submissive (but manipulative) Eve. Under patriarchal interpretation, Lillith became a demon, who haunted children and pregnant women, thus inverting the “good mother” role. Lillith became a dark destroyer in Judaism and “Queen of the Witches” in Christian tradition. Recent scholarship relates Lillith to goddess worship, to “wind” or “breath” or “spirit”, connecting her to the African goddess Oya as well as to the “space” aspect of the Eastern goddess Kwan Yin and the Tibetan feminist spirits known as dakinis. Feminist psychological interpretation sees Lillith as the “breath of life”, the symbol of women’s wisdom and power which has become a source of evil under patriarchy: in short a fitting patron saint for the women’s movement.                                                        (Starhawk)

 

Our biography is our biology. Thoughts that carry emotional, mental, psychological or spiritual energy produce biological responses that are then stored in our cellular memory.    (Medical Intuitive Caroline Myss)

 

My Lord God, I have no idea where I am going, I do not see the road ahead of me. I cannot know for certain where it will end. Nor do I really know myself, and the fact that I think I am following Your will does not mean that I am actually doing so. But I believe that the desire to please You does in fact please. And I hope that I have that desire in all that I am doing. I hope that I will never do anything apart from that desire. And I know that if I do this You will lead me by the right road, though I may know nothing about it. Therefore I will trust You always, though I may seem to be lost in the shadow of death. I will not fear, for You are ever with me and You will never leave me to face my perils alone.                                                       (Thomas Merton  -Thoughts in Solitude)

 

--- everything here apparently needs us, this fleeting world, which in some strange way keeps calling to us. Us, the most fleeting of all.                                                                          (Rilke)

 

What is necessary, after all, is only this: solitude, vast inner solitude. To walk inside yourself and meet no one for hours - that is what you must be able to attain.                                      (ibid)

 

For one human being to love another human being: that is perhaps the most difficult task that has been entrusted to us, the ultimate task, the final test and proof, the work for which all other work is merely preparation.                                                                                           (ibid)

 

The phrase “I Love You” parroted between child and parent, without ideas, indignation, anxiety, fantasy, but only as an anesthetic, may have a subtext that means many things, but it definitely does not mean love, for when you love someone you are filled with fantasies, ideas and anxieties.  There would be an avenging sensibility, a sense of real moral right and wrong, of judgment of good or bad weighing over the family. In families lacking love, the members have no fears, no desires, no strong angers or ambitions, no pity and no terror, no images nor language for their expression. They do share one fantasy: denial. It is not ultimately parental control or parental chaos that children run away from: they run from the void of living in a family without any fantasy other than shopping, keeping up the car and routines of NICENESS.                                                           (Santayana)

 

– from “The Diary of Adam and Eve”

Eve – It is my prayer, it is my longing, that we may pass from this life together – a longing which shall never perish from this earth, but shall have a place in the heart of every wife that loves, until the end of time; and it shall be called by my name.

But, if one of us should go first, it is my prayer that it shall be I; for he is strong, I am weak; I am not so necessary to him as he is to me – life without him would not be life; how could I endure it? This prayer is also immortal, and will not cease from being offered up while my race continues. I am the first wife; and in the last wife I will be repeated.

 

Adam (at Eve’s grave) - Wheresoever she was, THERE was Eden.               (Mark Twain)

 

So sorry!! My karma just ran over your dogma.                                                                                 *

 

SETH re ‘FALSE HUMILITY’ False humility tells you that you are nothing. It often hides a distorted, puffed up, denied self-pride, because no man or woman can really accept a theory that denies personal self-worth.

Fake humility can cause you to tear down the value of others, because if you accept no worth in yourself you cannot see it in anyone else either. True self-pride allows you to perceive the integrity of your fellow human beings and permits you to help them use their strengths. Many people make a great show out of helping others, for example, encouraging them to lea