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
‘Originally…’ ‘In essence…’ ‘Essentially…’ ‘At source…’ ‘Basically…’ ‘Ultimately…’ ‘Fundamentally…’ ‘The bottom line is…’ ‘At the end of the day…’ ‘When all is said and done…’
We seem to use these phrases whenever we feel the need to reduce or sum up the complex, unquantifiable and unsayable to what we falsely imagine is ‘the final answer’. The reductionist pull is quite natural in the face of infinite causes and conditions and yet what we’re attempting to define is undefinable.
That taste is my guide. The taste of myself. I don't pretend to be what others were, nor understand what others say they understood. No one knows anything! The temptation to become someone else different no longer exists: In the peace of my own absence I inhale my perfume And find the taste of myself.
Roque Torres Moreira
In Zen, we try to remember that each moment, whether good or bad, is perfect in itself because there is nothing to add to it to make it any more of what it already is…
Nothing Is Perfect, Except Everything
Now is the focal point of eternity.
Objectivity is a conceit.
Scientists find the hard problem of consciousness such a problem because it won’t submit to the scientific method. There is no problem, not even a hard one. Directly experienced subjectively, which is the only possible way it can be, consciousness is exactly everything it appears to be.
I’m not only curious about the nature of my own mind but also about how other minds experience whatever they experience – the phenomenology of being.
It seems to me that the project (if it could be called such a thing) of waking up or so-called enlightenment is no more than fully embracing the life one finds oneself in. The life that lives us fully, unconditionally, unedited. To recognise and appreciate that this – whatever, however, whenever is always completely and wholly it.