It’s dark because you are trying too hard.
Lightly child, lightly. Learn to do everything lightly.
Yes, feel lightly even though you’re feeling deeply.
Just lightly let things happen and lightly cope with them…
Our thoughts, ideas and opinions are the least of us. Always late to the party that’s already in full swing, uninvited yet full of their own self importance and righteousness.
Patterns, symbols, archetypes, myths, stories – maps of unknowable territories. What is created when the universe attempts to apprehend itself.
If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you.
Apparently attributed to Jesus, from the Gnostic Gospels, but could just have easily have come from Carl Jung.
A nice meditation circle this evening. A modest six attendees in contrast to the fourteen last week. It had a very intimate feel and the dialogue between sits flowed more easily and freely.
I still don’t know why I go.
No one chooses what to like or dislike. All that arises preconceptually, and then we call the conscious coming to awareness of those preconceptual brain states ‘me’.
— Robert Saltzman
If you’re moved by something, it doesn’t need explaining.
If you’re not, no explanation will move you.
— Federico Fellini
I think and think and think. I’ve thought myself out of happiness one million times, but never once into it.
— Jonathan Safran Foer
Finding and accepting your own mind makes clear the recognition that, not only does all seeking end, but you are home having never left.
I have no interest in theory or academia…
That’s all very well in practice but will it work in theory?
— Garret FitzGerald
Somewhere along the way, you realize that no one will teach you how to live your own life — not your parents or your idols, not the philosophers or the poets, not your liberal arts education or your twelve-step program, not church or therapy or Tolstoy. No matter how valuable any of that guidance, how pertinent any of that wisdom, in the end you discover that you make the path of life only by walking it with your own two feet under the overstory of your own consciousness — that singular miracle never repeated in all the history and future of the universe, never fully articulable to another.
What started off as dank and foggy has blossomed into a crisp and bright day with more than a hint of warmth to it.
There is no perfection, only completeness, which is exactly what we always are.
Home.
Is this what you think it means to be human? How little adept we are at living! We tie ourselves up with intentions, not mindful of the fact that intention is the limitation, yes, the exclusion of life. And how much childish, shortsighted egotism lies in an intention! We believe that we can illuminate the darkness with an intention, and in that way aim past the light. How can we presume to want to know in advance from where the light will come to us?
— Carl Jung, The Black Books
When you feel you are everything there is no need to believe in anything.
Debris from the recent floodwaters caught in the branches of trees over ten feet above the river’s usual level.
The sea used to be my contemplative companion on the morning walk to work but now it’s rivers and mountains – the same ebb and flow of nature, just differing rhythms and vibrations of the whole happening.
The sun exquisitely striking the hills through the clouds this morning on my way into town.
Both the poetic and the mythic image at once reveal and conceal.
The meaning is divined rather than defined, implicit rather than explicit, suggested rather than stated.
– Alan Watts, The Two Hands of God: The Myths of Polarity via Tony Cartledge
What’s here now? 