The acts of your days on days make a certain-shaped thing of you. Then in the rhythm of life the influences too big for control strike a sharp blow or stroke or influence or vibration of some kind, that overcomes your own plan or sense of direction. And this same stroke arranges your relationships quite automatically. Suddenly you fit into the place where the thing you shaped will go with mathematical nicety. It is as though a lot of scattered things were dancing about; and CLAP! they were all in a pattern... No amount of jiggling could shake you into a place you did not fit, for which you had not shaped yourself. Only when you are too inert to shape yourself, are you at the mercy of the Pattern Maker. Stewart Edward White
The Struggle of each generation is the interpretation of the whispered allotment of wisdom into the current vernacular. You are at the turning of a great tide. Who is there to offer guidance in the age-proven technique of living, and yet point ahead to the regions we are appointed to explore? Across the Unknown
Consciousness is the matrix and sustenance of form. Electric current, a cloud in the sky, a bug flying by, within every variation of matter, at the heart of the particles that make forms, consciousness exists.
There was a Time - Kasse Mady Diabate & Tunde Jegede (A Film by Ron Wyman)
Dead Can Dance - The Host Of Seraphim To be a true artist is to unlock the deeper tissue of who we are as human beings and wake that up inside the other. Music and art has always led us back to being able to unlock the door of who we are as human beings, intellectually and soulfully and emotionally. It opens up the pathway of the heart and enables you to speak through the work, to offer an olive branch and to create a sense of community, and to provoke people to remember who they are and who they can be and try to find their potential outside of materiality. Lisa Gerrard
Let honest conviction ring out; and strike a new note of responsibility.
It’s a time for honoring the bounty of earth with a focus upon gratitude and blessings for abundance.
She, who is the Grain Mother, She who is the seed, She, who is the womb, the soil, The provider of life indeed. She is the regenerative power, With the elements, she works with intent, The miracles within this cosmic plain, Throughout the wheel of ascent. And now the Sun-God has reached his height, In celebration of our Goddess, A reminder, of that which we have to reap, A time, again, for re-dress. We have abundance: an explosion, Of everything we and the earth did sow, And nurtured from all four corners, Which helped it all to grow. Lammas by Andrea Gibbons
Sometimes the great famine of blessings in and around us derives from the fact that we are not living the life we love; rather, we are living the life that is expected of us. We have fallen out of rhythm with the secret signature and light of our own nature. It is strange to be here. The mystery never leaves you alone. Behind your image, below your words, above your thoughts, the silence of another world waits. A world lives within you. No-one else can bring you news of this inner world.
Time to go into the dark where the night has eyes to recognize its own. There you can be sure you are not beyond love. The dark will be your womb tonight. The night will give you a horizon further than you can see. You must learn one thing. The world was made to be free in. Give up all the other worlds except the one to which you belong. Sometimes it takes darkness and the sweet confinement of your aloneness to learn anything or anyone that does not bring you alive is too small for you. Sweet Darkness - David Whyte
May all that is unforgiven in you be released. May your fears yield their deepest tranquilities. May all that is unlived in you blossom into a future graced with love. John O’Donohue
"He who strives on and lives to strive; Can earn redemption still"
The great Goethe has given us a distinct and visible description of this denial of the will, brought about by great misfortune and by the despair of all deliverance, in his immortal masterpiece Faust, in the story of the sufferings of Gretchen. I know of no other description in poetry. It is a perfect specimen of the second path, which leads to the denial of the will not, like the first, through the mere knowledge of the suffering of the whole world which one acquires voluntarily, but through the excessive pain felt in one's own person. It is true that many tragedies bring their violently willing heroes ultimately to this point of complete resignation, and then the will-to-live and its phenomenon usually end at the same time. But no description known to me brings to us the essential point of that conversion so distinctly and so free from everything extraneous as the one mentioned in Faust. Arthur Schopenhauer -The World as Will and Representation
Debussy - La mer: Gilda Tabarez Video "Dialogue of the wind and the sea"
Just before the battle, just before the noise, the young soldier was handed a blue envelope letter as he sat in his trench. It is so exciting When your girlfriend is writing, or your mother is writing or dad, people of your heart. But it would have been better had he gotten no letter. It begins: "Forgive my silence I was tired of waiting and farewell. I will not wait for you any more. With a man I am leaving, hope you wont be grieving, wish you wont be killed in this terrible war!" Bullets sang in the air and he cried in despair:" Oh my God, its a stab in the back! With this letter I'm truly killed as if with a bullet, Just before tanks begin their deadly attack!" Glassy eyes, he stopped breathing...Only scraps of the letter were strewn by the wind! Vladimir Vissotsky - La lettre
Onwards. And so onwards along the path of wisdom, with a hearty tread, a hearty confidence! However you may be, be your own source of experience! Throw off your discontent about your nature; forgive yourself your own self, for you have in it a ladder with a hundred rungs, on which you can climb to knowledge....Do not these very experiences help you to pursue with greater understanding enormous stretches of earlier humanity? Have not many of the most splendid fruits of older culture grown up on that very ground that sometimes displeases you, on the ground of impure thinking? ...Likewise, you must be familiar with history and the delicate game with the two scales: "on the one hand-on the other hand." Stroll backwards, treading in the footprints in which humanity made its great and sorrowful passage through the desert of the past; then you have been instructed most surely about the places where all later humanity cannot or may not go again... You have it in your power to merge everything you have lived through-attempts, false starts, errors, delusions, passions, your love and your hope-into your goal, with nothing left over... When your sight has become good enough to see the bottom in the dark well of your being and knowing, you may also see in its mirror the distant constellations of future cultures. Nietzsche - Human, All Too Human
The book’s aim was to deconstruct and dissemble dominant trends of thought, with a keen eye for false prophets and plaster saints, to encourage new ways of thinking philosophically and emancipate the individual locked in ideology and culture: A commitment to the discovery of truth through a critical process of questioning and deconstruction.
Falling in love with a poem or a character is not greatly different from falling in love with a human; without that initial falling in love I don’t think memory begins... Without memory you cannot think; you cannot do anything; you have to train memory. If a poem pierces you enough in heart and intellect it qualifies as an immortal wound... and any poet who wounds you by wonder has given you an immortal wound... Poetry is an art of sound as much as an art of the printed word. The great work of poetry is to help us become free artists of ourselves. That work requires us to hear, and not merely to read, the poetry: to pull apart the thoughts of the poem, to delve into the words used, and that also is a process of appropriating, of coming to possess the poem, making it your own. Harold Bloom
Our predisposition to impose narratives we are able to condense a collection of individual details into a single, unified story, that helps the brain assimilate information. By assigning a narrative to these events we oversimplify them and discard information that does not appear to support our narrative. Details deemed irrelevant are lost, effectively changing our memory of what’s happened. By eliminating we trick ourselves into believing that life is easier to understand and explain than it really is. As a result of our predisposition toward the narrative fallacy we blind ourselves to the possibility of Black Swans and often misinterpret their significance when they occur. In order to be better-equipped to cope with Black Swans we must accept the reality of life’s unpredictability rather than ignore it. Nassim Taleb - The Black Swan, The Impact of the Highly Improbable
When a cuckoo goes crazy, it is God going crazy. Don't exclude him. Concentration is a narrowing of consciousness; meditation is expansion: all doors are open and windows are open, and you are not choosing. When you don't choose you cannot be distracted. Distraction arises out of your-effort to concentrate. You can listen in a meditative way; then you are simply open, available - you listen tome, and you listen to the birds also, and the wind passes through the trees and creates a sound; you listen to that also. You listen to the whole existence. Then birds and me and the wind are not three separate things. They are not. They are happening simultaneously, together, all together, and you listen to the whole. Of course, then your understanding will be tremendously enriched because the birds are also saying the same thing in their way, and the wind is also carrying the same message in its way, and I am also saying the same thing in a linguistic way, so that you can understand it more. Otherwise, the message is the same. Mediums differ, but the message is the same, because God is the message. Osho on Rudolph Steiner
We arise mutually from a shared source; we do no harm. In this expression of compassion a Buddhist Priest in Southern Vietnam set herself on fire as a way of pointing to the agonies of her country and saying, there by the grace of being aware of my own becoming go I.
Life has a rhythm, it's constantly moving. It's found in every part of daily life.
I believe I’ve been put on this earth to tell stories of people like me who live between worlds. So I sought very much in...The Reluctant Fundamentalist to really bring some sense of bridge-making, some sense of healing, a sense of community that goes beyond the stereotypes, goes beyond the myopia, goes beyond the ignorance. Mira Nair
The Reluctant Fundamentalist: Mohsin Hamid in Conversation
The mind at the best of times is a ruinous house, with traps. Gina Apostol examines how an inflated notion of virtue can infect our brains and where idealism, naiveté, and arrogance can conspire toward tragedy.
To understand the universe, we say there's space, time, matter, and energy. It may well be that to fully understand consciousness, there is something equally fundamental: conscious experience or having subjective states. You see something. You hear something. You're aware of yourself. You're angry. You're sad. Those are all different conscious states..How does anxiety or sadness or the color blue emerge out of all of that? David Chalmers on Fundamental Nature of Consciousness
So while the Vessels (people or souls) one by one were speaking, One spied the little Crescent all were seeking: And then they jogg'd each other, "Brother! Brother! "Hark to the Porter's Shoulder-knot a-creaking!" Omar Khayyam
The Crescent, according to Yogananda's interpretation, is the third eye of wisdom & divine wakefulness. The Porter is God, the one who carries creation and upholds Reality. Old-style porters would tie a rope around a heavy burden to hold it on their shoulder and, as they walk with the weight, that shoulder-knot would often make a creaking noise against the shifting strain. But this creaking shoulder-knot is the sound that holds material existence aloft, the sound of creation. It is by first discovering that inner sound and following it with the awareness that we finally discover the crescent doorway that opens unto enlightened awareness.
“I want to sing like the birds sing, not worrying who listens or what they think” Rumi
Your thoughts and emotions are a vibration which attracts other things to you at that vibration. Love and gratitude are the highest frequencies or vibrations and hate and fear the lowest frequencies.
ne component of a developing identity is an understanding of personal persistence or self-continuity; how one remains the same person throughout the various changes in their life. Zadie Smith on David Foster Wallace - Changing My Mind
There is a hidden meaning behind all events, and this hidden meaning is serving your own evolution. The Seven Spiritual Laws - Deepak Chopra
Our consciousness and capacity for reflection cause us to doubt ourselves or become self-conscious, and prevent us from acting with the singlemindedness and purity of an animal or a puppet. Consciousness creates a split in our nature and is the effect of eating from the tree of knowledge, and we cannot escape it, as long as we are barred from Eden. Yet if we continue to become more self-aware, we may eventually be able to carry out the actions we choose with confidence and to bring these two parts of ourselves into harmony and no longer suffer doubt or internal conflict. Heinrich von Kleist
