“We should never forget that it was Christ himself who taught us to make usurious use of the talents entrusted to us and not hide them in the ground.”
-Carl Jung
(From ‘Answer to Job’ – referencing ‘the Parable of the Talents‘ from the Bible in Matthew 25 : 14-30)
“A lot of the time it’s our efforts that ruin us ; it’s when we try that we screw things up.”
– Tommy Tiernan
“Can any of you, by worrying add a single hour to your life? And why do you worry about clothes? See how the flowers of the field grow. They do not labour or spin. Yet I tell you that not even Soloman in all his splendour was dressed like one of those.”
– Matthew 6:27-29
All we ever have is maybes… maybe.
TF
“It’s dark because you are trying too hard.Aldous Huxley
Lightly child, lightly. Learn to do everything lightly.
Yes, feel lightly even though you’re feeling deeply.
Just lightly let things happen and
lightly cope with them.
I was so preposterously serious in those days,
such a humorless little prig.
Lightly, lightly – it’s the best advice ever given me.
When it comes to dying even.
Nothing ponderous, or portentous, or emphatic.
No rhetoric, no tremolos, no self conscious
persona putting on its celebrated imitation
of Christ or Little Nell.
And of course, no theology, no metaphysics.
Just the fact of dying and the fact
of the clear light.
So throw away your baggage and go forward.
There are quicksands all about you,
sucking at your feet,
trying to suck you down into fear and
self-pity and despair.
That’s why you must walk so lightly.
Lightly my darling, on tiptoes and no luggage,
not even a sponge bag, completely unencumbered.”
Humans share much with other animals — the basic needs of food and drink or sleep, for example — but there are additional mental and emotional needs and desires which are perhaps unique to us. To live on a day-to-day basis is insufficient for human beings; we need to transcend, transport, escape; we need meaning, understanding, and explanation; we need to see overall patterns in our lives. We need hope, the sense of a future. And we need freedom (or at least the illusion of freedom) to get beyond ourselves, whether with telescopes and microscopes and our ever-burgeoning technology or in states of mind which allow us to travel to other worlds, to transcend our immediate surroundings. We need detachment of this sort as much as we need engagement in our lives… transports that make our consciousness of time and mortality easier to bear. We seek a holiday from our inner and outer restrictions, a more intense sense of the here and now, the beauty and value of the world we live in.
Oliver Sacks ‘Hallucinations’
“Art is a lie that makes us realise truth…”
Pablo Picasso
There are pockets of heaven everywhere, if you’re open to them.
“Eternity is in love with the creations of time.”
William Blake
“The trouble with opinion is that it instantly islands us in the stream of life, cutting off its subject – and us along with it – from the interconnected totality of deep truth.”
……
“It is not enough to say that we cannot know or judge because all the information is not in. The process of gathering knowledge does not lead to knowing. A child’s world spreads only a little beyond his understanding while that of a great scientist thrusts outward immeasurably. An answer is invariably the parent of a great family of new questions. So we draw worlds and fit them like tracings against the world about us, and crumple them when they do not fit and draw new ones.”
John Steinbeck
“According to quantum mechanics, there is no such thing as objectivity. We cannot eliminate ourselves from the picture.”
“Quantum mechanics views particles as ‘tendencies to exist’ or ‘tendencies to happen’. How strong these tendencies are is expressed in terms of probabilities…
…It may be that the search for the ultimate ‘stuff’ of the universe is a crusade for an illusion. At the subatomic level, mass and energy change unceasingly into each other.”
“By watching time-lapse photography we know that plants often respond to stumlae with human-like reactions. They retreat from pain, advance toward pleasure, and even languish in the absence of affection. The only difference is they do it at a much slower rate than we do. So much slower, in fact, that it appears to the ordinary perception that they do not react at all…
If this is so, then how can we say with certainty that rocks, and even mountain ranges, do not react also as living organisms, but with a reaction time so slow that to catch it with time-lapse photography would require millenia between exposures! Of course, there is no way to prove this, but there is no way of disproving it either. The distinction between ‘living’ and ‘non-living’ is not so easy to make.”
“The importance of ‘nonsense’ cannot be overstated. The more clearly we experience something as ‘nonsense’, the more clearly we are experiencing the boundaries of our own self-imposed cognitive structures. Nonsense is that which doesn’t fit into the prearranged patterns which we have super-imposed on reality. There is no such thing as ‘nonsense’ apart from a judgemental intellect which calls it that.”
“According to Buddhist theory, reality is ‘virtual’ in nature. What appear to be ‘real’ objects in it, like trees and people, actually are transient illusions which result from a limited mode of awareness. The illusion is that parts of an overall virtual process are ‘real’ (permanent) ‘things’. Enlightenment is the experience that things, including ‘I’, are transient, virtual states, devoid of separate existences, momentary links between illusions of the past and illusions of the future unfolding in the illusion of time.”
“The appearance of physical reality, according to Mahayana Buddhism, is based upon the interdependence of all things (Indra’s Net).”
“The history of scientific thought, if it teaches us anything at all, teaches us the folly of clutching ideas too closely. To this extent, it is an echo of eastern wisdom, which teaches us the folly of clutching anything at all.”
“The way we pose our questions often illusorily limits our responses… There is always an alternative between every ‘this’ and every ‘that’.”
Some Words Left Behind 