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We no more think our thoughts than we beat our hearts or digest our food. Thought is automatic, spontaneous and just as essential as all of our other bodily functions. We just make the mistake that our felt sense of self or ‘I’ is doing the thinking. We don’t, and can’t, choose our thoughts any more than we can choose to grow our hair.
Thoughts are merely revealed in consciousness. When we are unconscious thoughts are no more apparent to us than our endocrine system is when we are conscious.
Consciousness permits only an infinitesimal fraction of our brain’s activity to be revealed. And the felt sense of self or ‘I’ isn’t doing any of it.
I’m not interested in pleasure, joy, bliss, silence or stillness any more than I’m interested in discomfort, unease, dissatisfaction, suffering or pain. I am simply whatever is happening.
The minute a thing goes into language it is ipso facto conditioned in its objectivity.
Carl Jung
To suffer without complaint is the only lesson we have to learn in this life.
Vincent van Gough
The wise man accepts his pain, endures it but does not add to it.
Marcus Aurelius
One must not avoid unhappiness. One must accept suffering; it is a great teacher. There, that's the error, one must not seek happiness. The happiness that one seeks is a usurped one. Organic happiness, the bliss that comes from the center of the earth, that alone is fruitful and that simply comes. Sometimes happiness surges from the deepest suffering.
Carl Jung
The world is not comprehensible, but it is embraceable — through the embracing of one of its beings.
Martin Buber
To be old can be glorious if one has not unlearned how to begin.
Martin Buber
Let us thank the life I have lived for all the happy and all the sad hours, for every joy, for every sadness.
Carl Jung
I never wish to be easily defined. I’d rather float over other people’s minds as something strictly fluid and non-perceivable; more like a transparent, paradoxically iridescent creature rather than an actual person.
Franz Kafka
We become subjects in a world of separate objects and things. When all ideas and conceptions of separate objects are dropped and everything is seen as dynamic, seamless, flow all we are left with is presence.
Everything we need to know about consciousness is contained within the experience of consciousness itself.
I do not fear death. I had been dead for billions and billions of years before I was born, and had not suffered the slightest inconvenience from it.
Mark Twain
Natural man is not a ‘self’— he is the mass and a particle in the mass, collective to such a degree that he is not even sure of his own ego.
Carl Jung
I am not interested in escaping from ordinary life by attaining nirvana. In my experience, any apparent unsatisfactoriness disappears in any moment of real awakening. In a flash, the inexpressible suchness of being alive in this world of ours shines brightly, whether I am suffering or not.
Robert Saltzman
Sometimes, there is only a hair's breadth of difference between what one enjoys and what one must endure.
Robert Saltzman
This morning I stubbed my toe. Badly. You know, the kind that hurts beyond all reason. The stubbing that convinces you the toe must be broken (it never is though). We’re all too familiar with that briefest of delays between the actual physical contact before the searing pain inevitably hits.
And it occurred to me, as I was reeling and grimacing, that the exquisitely awful pain was an intensely pure encounter with consciousness/ awareness/ life/ whatever. The crystal clarity of the agony was as perfectly it as the glorious relief that slowly came as the pain eventually subsided.
As intimate an encounter with being as anything else.
The varying flavours of phenomena are all of a piece. Whole, complete and indivisible. None of it can be pulled apart, edited out or separated off from the rest.
At a certain point what we want and what we don’t want dissolves into simply what happens.
The specific qualities of experience pale in comparison to the simple presence of everything, the fact that anything is happening at all.
If one is in the business of finding answers in life then, if they exist at all, they surely reside within the full unconditional embrace and affirmation of whatever is happening right here right now.
And so, we don't have to contrive our way into any particular state. We don’t need to achieve some better experience, secure some other moment that’s somehow clearer, more awakened or whatever. No, this moment, exactly as it is, is already the clear seeing. The moment appears in perfect clarity. The appearance of the moment is its clarity, the clear presence of whatever appears. Whether what’s appearing is being described as exhaustion, confusion, disappointment or contentment, it appears in and as perfect clarity, the clarity of what is.
John Astin
Within the realm of willpower we have choice, but beyond that no choice at all.
Carl Jung