nousrose

[nousrose]

I have to see that the thought “I” is the greatest obstacle to consciousness of myself. Everything I know through my senses has a name. I am encumbered by names, which become more important than the things themselves. I name myself “I,” and in doing it as if I knew myself, I am accepting a thought that keeps me in ignorance. If I learn to separate myself from names, from thoughts, little by little I will come to know the nature of the mind and lift the veil it casts over me.

The Reality of Being

Jeanne De Salzmann

[nousrose]

You can be in paradise only when you do not know what it is like to be in paradise. As soon as you know, paradise is gone. No effort of thought can take you back, for thought – the conscious awareness of yourself as a mortal being – is the Fall. In the Garden of Eden, the primordial human pair are clothed in ignorance of themselves. When they come to self-awareness, they find they are naked. Thinking of yourself is the gift of the serpent that cannot be returned.

Feline Philosophy

John Gray

[nousrose]

Grief: this is the level of sadness, loss, and despondency. Most humans have experienced it for periods of time, but those who remain at this level live a life of constant regret and depression. This is the level of chronic mourning, bereavement, and remorse about the past; it is also the level of habitual losers and those chronic gamblers who accept failure as part of their lifestyle, often resulting in loss of jobs, friends, family, and opportunity, as well as money and health. Major losses in early life make one later vulnerable to passive acceptance of grief, as though sorrow were the price of life. In grief, one sees sadness everywhere: the sadness of little children, the sadness of world conditions, the sadness of life itself. This level colors one's entire vision of existence. Part of the syndrome of loss is the notion of the irreplaceability of what has been lost or that which it symbolized. There is a generalization from the particular so that the loss of a loved one is equated with the loss of love itself. At this level, such emotional losses may trigger a serious depression or death.

Power vs. Force

David R. Hawkins

[nousrose]

Whatever thoughts, or concepts, or obscuring [or disturbing] passions arise are neither to be abandoned nor allowed to control one; they are to be allowed to arise without one's trying to direct [or shape] them. If one does no more than merely recognize them as soon as they arise and persists in doing so, they will come to be realized [or to dawn] in their true [or void] form through not being abandoned. By that method, all things which may seem to be obstacles to spiritual growth can be made use of as aids on the Path.

Tibetan Yoga and Secret Doctrines

W. Y. Evans-Wentz

[nousrose]

Kali offers us the freedom that lies beyond death. You can enter her freedom through many doorways-looking into her force in nature, examining the hidden forces behind your shadow rage, or invoking her fire to help you dissolve emotional patterns and negative tendencies. Ultimately-and this is the secret that Kali reveals only to those who seek it—Kali's essence is the vast, empty, ultimately fertile void itself. Kali's blackness is the darkness of the ultimate mystery, the transcendent womb of black light out of which reality is always arising and into which it constantly subsides. She's the cloud of unknowing described by the Christian mystics; the presence behind all things. When you tune deeply into Kali's energy, letting the calm presence behind her eyes open you to the presence in your own, you discover that her death-dealing implements, her take-no-prisoners attitude toward ego, her revolutionary forcefulness and her vast love are simply aspects of her ultimate power to draw the mind within. Kali does indeed dissolve our structures, but it's always in service of the heart. She reverses the process that brings form out of the formless and takes us back to the absolute. The yogi's Kali is that power that can turn the mind inward in deep meditation, dissolving our body sense, dissolving our thoughts, liberating emotions into energy, and drawing all our energies into their source in the inner heart. Her great dissolve carries us into the recognition that all things are one in the Self. In the heart of hearts, Kali lives as the magnetic draw of ultimate oneness, the call of the Self to let go of everything that would separate us from what we always already are.

Awakening to Kali

Sally Kempton

[nousrose]

The self is taken to be preexistent, primordial, unitary, and transcendent of the world of objects, independent of body, mind, and social context. The person is constructed; the person is dependent on the psychophysical and social network in which it is realized; the person is complex, embodied and embedded. That is the difference between the actor and the role. We are roles, not actors.

Losing Ourselves

Jay L. Garfield

[nousrose]

There is something perennial about the idea that any literal view of nature, when pursued to its ultimate ramifications, destroys itself from within. It is as though every literal model carried within itself the seeds of its own falsification; as if nature resisted attempts to be limited or otherwise boxed in. Whatever we say it is, it indicates it is not; whatever we say it is not, it shows it might just be. These are built-in mechanisms of growth and renewal in nature that we ignore at our own peril. Nature is as fluid and elusive as a thought. Indeed, it is a thought: an unfathomable, compound thought we live in and contribute to. The world is a shared 'dream.' In it, as in a regular dream, the dreamer is himself the subject and the object; the observer and the observed.

Meaning in Absurdity

Bernardo Kastrup

[nousrose]

Death is not the opposite of life but of birth - life is a continuous realm out of which we are born; that (as Plato says) we can dimly remember during our existence; and to which we return when we die - to that totality of life compared to which mortal existence seems but a dreamlike fragment.

The Secret Tradition of the Soul

Patrick Harpur

[nousrose]

The state of imperfect transformation, merely hoped for and waited for, does not seem to be one of torment only, but of positive, if hidden, happiness. It is the state of someone who, in his wanderings among the mazes of his psychic transformation, comes upon a secret happiness which reconciles him to his apparent loneliness. In communing with himself he finds not deadly boredom and melancholy but an inner partner; more than that, a relationship that seems like the happiness of a secret love, or like a hidden springtime, when the green seed sprouts from the barren earth, holding out the promise of future harvests. It is the alchemical benedicta viriditas, the blessed greenness, signifying on the one hand the "leprosy of the metals" (verdigris), but on the other the secret immanence of the divine spirit of life in all things.

Mysterium Coniunctionis

Carl Jung

[nousrose]

Acceptance is not to be confused with passivity, which is a symptom of apathy. This form of acceptance allows engagement in life on life's own terms, without trying to make it conform to an agenda. With acceptance, there is emotional calm and perception is widened as denial is transcended. One now sees things without distortion or misinterpretation; the context of experience is expanded so that one is capable of "seeing the whole picture." Acceptance has to do essentially with balance, proportion, and appropriateness.

Power vs. Force

David R. Hawkins

[nousrose]

Only the inaccessible and elusive is truly alluring, Proust says. And what could be more inaccessible and elusive than the past? Each person is attracted over and over again to a predictable "type" of lover. Each has a habitual pattern of loving and of losing: "the men who have been left by a number of women have been left almost always in the same manner because of their character and of certain always identical reactions which can be calculated: each man has his own way of being betrayed." For Proust, love is a conscious, deeply creative act of communion with memory, reaching into and through the beloved to all of life. As he says, "The fact is that the person counts for little or nothing; what is almost everything is the series of emotions, of agonies which similar mishaps have made us feel in the past in connection with her." We do not love people for themselves, or objectively; quite the contrary, "we alter them incessantly to suit our desires and fears...they are only a vast and vague place in which our affections take root...It is the tragedy of other people that they are to us merely showcases for the very perishable collections of our own mind." Accordingly, it is only because we need people in order to feel love that we fall in love.

An Alchemy of Mind

Diane Ackerman

[nousrose]

The meaning of it all is unfolding right under our noses, all the time, but we can't see it. We don't pay any attention. We were taught from childhood to avert our gaze, lest we be considered fools. So now we seem to live in some kind of collective trance, lost in a daze. The likes of which have probably never before been witnessed in history. We feel the gaping emptiness and meaninglessness of our condition in the depths of our psyches. But, like a desperate man thrashing about in quicksand, our reactions only make things worse: we chase more fictitious goals and accumulate more fictitious stuff, precisely the things that distract us further from watching what is really happening. And, when we finally realize the senselessness of such reactions, we turn to 'gurus' doling out pill-form answers instead of paying attention to life, the only authentic teacher, who is constantly speaking to us. There is no literal shortcut to whatever it is that the metaphor of life is trying to convey. There is no literal truth. The meaning of it all cannot be communicated directly. There are no secret answers spelled out in words in some rare old book. The metaphor is the only way to the answers, if only we have patience and pay attention. Look around: what is life trying to say?

Why Materialism Is Baloney

Bernardo Kastrup

[nousrose]

Those who are in search of freedom will have to find their solitariness; they will have to find a way, means, method to reach their aloneness. Man is born as part of the world, as a member of a society, of a family, as part of others. He is brought up not as a solitary being, he is brought up as a social being. The whole training, education, culture, consists in how to make a child a fitting part of the society, how to make him fit with others. This is what psychologists call adjustment. And whenever somebody is a solitary he looks like maladjusted. Society exists as a network, a pattern of many persons, a crowd. There you can have a little freedom-at the cost of much. If you follow the society, if you become an obedient part to others, they will lease you a little world of freedom. If you become a slave, freedom is given to you. But it is a given freedom, it can be taken any moment back, and it is at a very great cost…In society, in a social existence, nobody can be absolutely free. The very existence of the other will create trouble. Sartre says, "The other is the hell," and he is right to a very great extent because the other creates tensions in you; you are worried because of the other. There is going to be a clash because the other is also in search of absolute freedom, you are also in search for absolute freedom-everybody needs absolute freedom-and absolute freedom can exist only for one.

The Mustard Seed

Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh

[nousrose]

Human life does not fulfill its promise within the structures and establishments of society, for all of these are at best but shadowy projections of another and more fundamental reality. No one comes to his true selfhood by being what society wants him to be nor by doing what it wants him to do. Family, society, church, trade and profession, political and patriotic allegiances, as well as moral and ethical rules and commandments are, in reality, not in the least conducive to the true spiritual welfare of the human soul. On the contrary, they are more often than not the very shackles which keep us from our true spiritual destiny. This feature of Gnosticism was regarded as heretical in olden days, and even today is often called "world denying" and "anti-life," but it is, of course, merely good psychology as well as good spiritual theology because it is good sense. The politician and the social philosopher may look upon the world as a problem to be solved, but the Gnostic, with his psychological discernment, recognizes it as a predicament from which we need to extricate ourselves by insight. For Gnostics, like psychologists, do not aim at the transformation of the world but at the transformation of the mind, with its natural consequence—a changed attitude toward the world.

The Gnostic Jung

Stephan A. Hoeller

[nousrose]

For everything sacred has the substance of dreams and memories, and so we experience the miracle of what is separated from us by time or distance suddenly being made tangible. Dreams, memories, the sacred they are all alike in that they are beyond our grasp. Once we are even marginally separated from what we can touch, the object is sanctified; it acquires the beauty of the unattainable, the quality of the miraculous. Everything, really, has this quality of sacredness, but we can desecrate it at a touch. How strange man is. His touch defiles and yet he contains the source of miracles.

Spring Snow

Yukio Mishima

[nousrose]

To be reborn hourly and daily in this life, we need to die — to give of ourselves wholly to the demands of the moment, so that we utterly "disappear." Thoughts of past, present, or future, of life and death, of this world and the next, are transcended in the superabundance of the now. Time and timelessness coalesce: this is the moment of eternity.

The Zen of Living and Dying

Philip Kapleau

[nousrose]

He who ventures courageously into a labyrinth seeking to find the truth of his life is forced by its circuitous pathways to circumambulate the center of himself, to learn to relate with it and to perceive it from all sides. He can only reach it by passing through the entire interior space of the labyrinth beforehand, by relating to all of its dimensions, and integrating them all into the wholeness of his personality. In fact, in a labyrinth all passages lead into each other, making up an interconnected whole. Uninterrupted and leaving no part out, they form the basis for life's adventure of individuation. Hermann Kern provides the following interpretation in relating such psychic processes to the figure of the labyrinth: The labyrinth is thus also a symbol of integration, individuation, of the concentration of all essential layers, aspects, and levels of meaning of a human existence. It symbolizes, among other things, the process of maturation from a one-dimensional person, fragmented into a thousand separate functions, into a rounded-out personality, composed in itself, which has found its center.

The Labyrinth

Helmut Jaskolski