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.
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
