…there has to be suffering,
Andrei Tarkovsky – Instant Light
because it’s through suffering,
in the struggle between good and evil,
that the spirit is forged.
Again and again man correlates himself with the world, racked with longing to acquire, and become one with, the ideal which lies outside himself, which he apprehends as some kind of intuitively sensed first principle. The unattainability of that becoming one, the inadequacy of his own ‘I’, is the perpetual source of man’s dissatisfaction and pain.
Andrei Tarkovsky – Instant Light
The best teacher is the present moment – whatever, however it is.
Stumbled across this wonderful book of essays and stories while browsing in my favourite second hand bookshop today.
I was sold on the title alone and it hasn’t disappointed.
It is said that the human animal’s most significant aim is to find and secure meaning. What if meaning were our Achilles heel, our blind spot, our surest poison?
Hope is just fear in disguise. To live without hope is to live without fear.
Perhaps the fate of the human race was secured by the evolution of the individual ego self. In achieving self reflection the human animal’s attention was captured and then lost to meaning.
Feel what you feel, just don’t feel what you think.
Don't worry about getting in touch with your feelings they will get in touch with you.
Anon/ unknown
There is nothing of me that is alone and absolute except my mind, and we shall find that the mind has no existence by itself, it is only the glitter of the sun on the surface of the waters.
D. H. Laurence
At a certain point the conceptual demarcations of consciousness/ awareness, phenomena, mind, reality, self, world, inside, outside etc. all disappear or dissolve leaving a wholeness or oneness of unseparated, indivisible experience.
We are unknowably complex and sophisticated organic systems perfectly capable of running ourselves without meddling and interference from deluded, power-crazed insecure egos.
I read a computer engineer say that AI doesn’t know what it’s doing or how it’s doing it. I would suggest that neither do we.
I can highly recommend Wim Wenders’ latest film Perfect Days which I took the family to see last night. Very beautiful and profound.
I also recommend this interview with the director but ideally only to be read after seeing the film.
You don’t have to go on the road or travel to broaden your mind or learn or transform or… anything really. You can stay exactly where you are and, with an open heart and mind, the world will move through you.
When fully individuated and wholly awake to impermanence and interdependence then one is free to act intuitively and spontaneously without causing harm or damage to oneself or others.
Our prisons and hospitals are full of people with whom nature has been experimenting to unhappy ends.
Carl Jung
As with all attempts to pin down, define and solidify the world, trying to establish cause and effect leads one inexorably down infinite rabbit holes with no beginnings or ends.
Nobody sees anybody truly but all through the flaws of their own ego. That is the way we all see each other in life. Vanity, fear, desire, competition - all such distortions within our own egos - condition our vision of those in relation to us. Add to those distortions to our own egos the corresponding distortions in the egos of others - and you see how cloudy the glass must become through which we look at each other.
Tennessee Williams