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Humans are optimised for survival, not truth.
Find your own mind…
The meaning of being alive is just being alive.
Alan Watts
The problem is not suffering itself but thinking suffering is a problem and trying to avoid it.
Recognising the infinite, ever-changing variations of the complete, indivisible whole…
So-called spiritual teachings and discourse are no less prone to language games, semantic confusion and seemingly pointless hairsplitting than philosophy, science or any other locus of academia.
It appears to me that ordinary, everyday life is where the rubber really hits the road otherwise we’re just playing the ‘how many angels can dance on the head of a pin?’ game over and over.
Once we grasp that any form of language is just another story we lose the sense of so-called ‘ultimate truth’. The religious story, the science story, the artistic story etc. are all different fingers pointing at, yet never touching, the same moon. At a certain point you realise you are the moon and all that pointing is just pointing, nothing more.
Today, in an incredible second hand bookshop, I found a wonderful show catalogue of my favourite artist, Jasper Johns, from his recent exhibition at the Royal Academy of Arts in London.
I find his work simultaneously literal and obvious yet completely mysterious at the same time. Just like life!
Take an object. Do something to it. Do something else to it.
Jasper Johns
People know far more about themselves than they appreciate. Aspects of being and aliveness that are so obvious, yet seemingly unimportant, that they get completely overlooked.
If we really, really accept and embrace the reality of our finitude, our death; then our being, our aliveness needs no reason, explanation or identification with images of selfhood. We can simply be whatever arises free from doubt and fear.
Religions promise that death is not the end of “myself.” Tribal identification with race and nationality (and nowadays gender) creates an imaginary “myself.” Both faith and tribal identification are used to deny or distract from one undeniable, observable fact: each of us was born alone and will die alone.
Robert Saltzman
Perhaps the whole root of our trouble, the human trouble, is that we will sacrifice all the beauty of our lives, will imprison ourselves in totems, taboos, crosses, blood sacrifices, steeples, mosques, races, armies, flags, nations, in order to deny the fact of death, which is the only fact we have…
we will sacrifice all the beauty of our lives
If I got rid of my demons, I’d lose my angels.
Tennessee Williams
The desire to be happy and to resist and want to change one’s current experience is as much a cause of anxiety and unhappiness as anything else.
Nothing is left behind. We are always everything that has ever happened.
Certainly it hurts… The trick, William Potter, is not minding that it hurts.
TE Laurence
In essence, people cannot be compelled to be what they are not.
Philip K. Dick
There is no part of life any more special than any other. Every moment of being counts equally. Our wholeness relies upon the inclusion of the good, the bad and the ugly.