"If there is anything morbid in your processes, just remember that sickness is the means by which an organism frees itself of foreign matter; so one must just help it to be sick, to have it's whole sickness and break out with it, for that is its progress"

"All emotions are pure which gather you and lift you up; that emotion is impure which seizes only one side of your being and so distorts you"

-Rilke

"You're obliged to pretend respect for people and institutions you think absurd. You live attached in a cowardly fashion to moral and social conventions you despise, condemn, and know lack all foundation. It is that permanent contradiction between your ideas and desires and all the dead formalities and vain pretenses of your civilization which makes you sad, troubled and unbalanced. In that intolerable conflict you lose all joy of life and all feeling of personality, because at every moment they suppress and restrain and check the free play of your powers. That's the poisoned and mortal wound of the civilized world".

-Mirbeau

"The mythic world is "within", in the form of our dreams and visions, but also "without" when the outer world seems full of archetypal coincidences and we enact our myths (not always to our advantage...) In addition, part of the power and privilege of a human being, whether we refer to this as magic or religion, is to control (magic) or propitiate (religion) the powers of the spiritual realm.
...In the psychology of this ancient model, a human being has no real or fixed identity, but a kind of hollow space or receptivity that may become filled with spiritual or archetypal energy. When a young man going into battle is filled with the numinous power of the bear or the eagle that has come to him in vision, this might be seen as positive possession. The legendary prowess of the totem animal, which has become his own, enables him to transcend human fear and frailty. However, when someone becomes obsessed or identified with and animal in a psychotic way (such as certain hebephrenic schizophrenics who think they are chickens, for example), the possession is unhealthy, indeed, because in the process he loses his human autonomy, the ability to choose his own behavior".

-Stephen Larsen

"...Because I was afraid. You forget I am only a magician, whose conjuring raises nothing more formidable than devils. But this is a bit of the Old Magic that is no longer understood, and I prefer not to meddle with it. You, to the contrary, are a poet, and the Old Magic was always favourable to poets."

-James Branch Cabell

"As they stared blankly in dumb misery deepening as they slowly realised all they had seen and all they had lost, a capricious little breeze, dancing up from the surface of the water, tossed the aspens, shook the dewy roses and blew lightly and caressingly in their faces; and with its soft touch came instant oblivion. For this is the last best gift that the kindly demi-god is careful to bestow on those to whom he has revealed himself in their helping: the gift of forgetfulness. Lest the awful remembrance should remain and grow, and overshadow mirth and pleasure, and the great haunting memory should spoil all the after-lives of little animals helped out of difficulties, in order that they should be happy and lighthearted as before."

-----------

"It's lucky we've got the stream with us, to take us home. Isn't it jolly to feel the sun again, soaking into one's bones! And hark to the wind playing in the reeds!'

'It's like music--far away music,' said the Mole nodding drowsily.

'So I was thinking,' murmured the Rat, dreamful and languid. 'Dance-music--the lilting sort that runs on without a stop--but with words in it, too--it passes into words and out of them again--I catch them at intervals--then it is dance-music once more, and then nothing but the reeds' soft thin whispering.'

'You hear better than I,' said the Mole sadly. 'I cannot catch the words.'

'Let me try and give you them,' said the Rat softly, his eyes still closed. 'Now it is turning into words again--faint but clear--Lest the awe should dwell--And turn your frolic to fret--You shall look on my power at the helping hour--But then you shall forget! Now the reeds take it up--forget, forget, they sigh, and it dies away in a rustle and a whisper. Then the voice returns--

'Lest limbs be reddened and rent--I spring the trap that is set--As I loose the snare you may glimpse me there--For surely you shall forget! Row nearer, Mole, nearer to the reeds! It is hard to catch, and grows each minute fainter.

'Helper and healer, I cheer--Small waifs in the woodland wet--Strays I find in it, wounds I bind in it--Bidding them all forget! Nearer, Mole, nearer! No, it is no good; the song has died away into reed-talk.'

'But what do the words mean?' asked the wondering Mole.

'That I do not know,' said the Rat simply. 'I passed them on to you as they reached me. Ah! now they return again, and this time full and clear! This time, at last, it is the real, the unmistakable thing, simple--passionate--perfect----'

'Well, let's have it, then,' said the Mole, after he had waited patiently for a few minutes, half-dozing in the hot sun.

But no answer came. He looked, and understood the silence. With a smile of much happiness on his face, and something of a listening look still lingering there, the weary Rat was fast asleep."

-Kenneth Grahame, from The Piper at the Gates of Dawn, a chapter of The Wind in the Willows

"This triteness is really the penalty of 'appropriation': the things that are trite, or (in a bad sense) familiar, are the things that we have appropriated, legally or mentally. We say we know them. They have become like the things which once attracted us by their glitter, or their colour, or their shape, and we laid hands on them, and then locked them in our hoard, acquired them, and acquiring ceased to look at them."

-Tolkien

"We don't see things as they are, we see things as we are."

Anais Nin

"My cosmic schmuck principle holds that, if you occasionally notice that you've been thinking or acting like a cosmic schmuck, you''ll become less of a cosmic schmuck. And the more often you notice that you're thinking and acting like a cosmic schmuck, the less of a cosmic schmuck you become. On the other hand if you never, never, never suspect that you might be thinking or acting like a cosmic schmuck, you will remain a cosmic schmuck for the rest of your life."

-Robert Anton Wilson

"Writing poetry consists in letting the word be heard behind words"

-Gerhart Hauptmann

"But the cult of the self, which is really at the engine of consumer society and which now dominates our culture...is very differnt...it is about a kind of breakage of community...and of course this is what consumer society is about - it's about creating anxieties and fears quite consciously...this cult at its core has many of the traits of psychopaths. It's about superficial charm, it's about grandiosity, self-importance, a need for constant stimulation, a penchant for lying, deception, and manipulation, and an incapacity for remorse or guilt. It's about presentation, not about integrity. It's about image. And this is exceedingly dangerous."

-Chris Hedges

"The blind was down; but outside the moon rose up out of the sea, and laid the silver path across the waters that is the way to places at the edge of the world and beyond, for those that can walk on it."

-Tolkien

"...when we begin to practice and to learn more, we may think we should be adding tricks or embellishments of all kinds to our practice. This is the approach of spiritual materialism. It seems fascinating and efficient to use more gadgets to run our domestic scene, office scene, spiritual scene or whatever scenes we may have. American society already has enough gadgets, but we want more.

In the long run, that approach is wasteful and creates further chaos. Spiritual discipline is not about advancement, but it is a question of undoing what we have created already. We are not talking about extending ourselves to become greater or more professional meditators, we are talking about meditation as unlearning.

We should be aware that spiritual materialism creates garbage. Some of the mental tricks associated with spirituality are so fantastic and outlandish that one wonders who dreamed up such things. One might feel dwarfed by such seemingly impressive wisdom. We purchase this stuff. We pile up one cardboard box of spiritual stuff after another. We bring it home and take it out of the cardboard box it came in, and then we find that our garage is completely filled with boxes after boxes with labels on them. A lot of these complicated techniques are just garbage that is being imposed on us. They have nothing to do with unlearning, undoing, or simplifying at all.

We have all made these kinds of collections. In fact, without them, we couldn’t come to the spiritual path. Some people like to collect junk, some like to collect antiques, some like to collect stamps. You have your own style of collecting. Some of these collections may be worthwhile. In the practice of meditation, you are surrendering the collections you have made, and that process could be genuine and beautiful. On the other hand, sometimes we are aggressive about holding onto our collections-we want to get something out of them."

-Chogyam Trungpa

"Those who are enlightened never stop forging themselves. The realizations of such masters cannot be expressed well in words or by theories. The most perfect actions echo the patterns found in nature."

-Morihei Ueshiba

"All that glisters is not gold;
Often have you heard that told:
Many a man his life hath sold
But my outside to behold:
Gilded tombs do worms enfold.
Had you been as wise as bold,
Young in limbs, in judgement old
Your answer had not been inscroll'd
Fare you well, your suit is cold."

-Shakespeare

All that is gold does not glitter,
Not all those who wander are lost;
The old that is strong does not wither,
Deep roots are not reached by the frost.
From the ashes a fire shall be woken,
A light from the shadows shall spring;
Renewed shall be blade that was broken,
The crownless again shall be king.

-Tolkien

According to the silence, winter has arrived-
a special kind of winter. I, its inventor,
watch it freeze in calendars and stare
out of clocks. I do not feel its cold.

Across a certain farm evening crows go flying,
intervals of sky that I have seen before,
the bearing of a river: I advance, a wanderer
out of thought country, that serious, quiet place,

Till according to the silence all the light is gone
and according to the dark all wanderers are home

-William Stafford, "Shepherd"


Across the round field under the dark male tower
drift the two horses, the chestnut and the black,
aloof and quiet as two similar clouds -

alike and distant, heads towards the wind,
and the grass a green pool under moving clouds
under the sickle gulls, the screaming grey eyed girls

Only by night around the standing tower
the stallion's white teeth in the brown mare's shoulder
those eight hooves fly like thunder in the wind,
like water falling under the night's drum

-Alex Comfort, "The Lovers"

"Unite yourself to the cosmos, and the thought of transcendence will disappear. Transcendence belongs to the profane world. When all trace of transcendence vanishes, the true person - the Divine Being - is manifest. Empty yourself and let the Divine function."

"You cannot see or touch the Divine with your gross senses. The Divine is within you, not somewhere else. Unite yourself to the Divine, and you will be able to perceive gods wherever you are, but do not try to grasp or cling to them."

"When you bow deeply to the universe, it bows back; when you call out the name of God, it echoes inside you."

-Morihei Ueshiba

Your morning smile of torture
Holds me in its grip
You trace the taste of yesterday
The bruise upon my lip
You touch my eyes and hypnotize
And slip inside my heart
I wait for this forever
But we always fall apart

You want to hold me closer
And secretly entice
You take the size of shadowed men
And punish me with kisses every night

This espionage is sweeter now
Now that we're alone
But I meet your eyes and then despise
All we call our own
I write my name in lipstick
On the mirror as I leave
To stay would be too dangerous
To break the make-believe

You want to hold me closer
And secretly entice
You take the size of shadowed men
And punish me with kisses every night


-The Glove, "Punish me with kisses"

"The whole point is that we have grown up with a very strange relationship with society. Sometimes we like society and are trying to get into it and become a replica of everyone else. You do exactly the same thing as everyone else, and it feels good. You have a social standard to relate to and you have your M.A. or Ph.D. You are a professional person and you have a car of your own. You know how to cook food, entertain friends, you are humorous and engaging. You are even eloquent and interesting. You are a good host, a good driver, an acceptable person, a nice guy.
But at the same time, you don't want to be like that at all. Your complex about society takes all kinds of forms. Sometimes you want to be above society and bring society up to your level. You are part of an exclusive lodge or club. Only highly evolved people can work with you, deal with you. You are not like the rest of the world, not like the others. You are special, very special. You eat different food. You even drive differently, maybe. You break the law in a different way- with conscious effort. You cook meals specially, and you talk a special way; you articulate differently. You put the accent on the metaphysical or mystical, or on being zany. Society pushes people into this kind of attitude because there are so many repetitions taking place.

On the other hand, sometimes people have the feeling that they can't even make it up to the repetitious level. They feel belittled, uneducated. But then, once you've gotten to that level and you feel you are just like everybody else, you want to rise above this and do special things. You acquire special art treasures, which you show. You develop a special handicraft or a talent that you have that is out of the ordinary. The selling point in all this is that it is every special, unlike anything else, that you are a very special person, which is another kind of neurosis that goes on in society. First you try very hard to be ordinary, and then, when you achieve that, you try to rise above the ordinariness.
There are all kinds of different levels and different approaches to trying to ignore the loneliness."

-Chogyam Trungpa

"The streets were the ones that they walked along each morning and afternoon and yet quite different, for they had their own separate, breathing life that the country always has, but that towns do not by day. Even her footsteps did not seem to belong to her. The night seized and transformed them, just as it transformed the greenhouses they passed from useful places for growing things into cold night palaces."

-Penelope Farmer

"The practice of meditation is a way of unmasking ourselves, our deceptions of all kinds, and also the practice of meditation is a way of bringing out the subtleties of intelligence that exist within us. The experience of meditation sometimes plays the role of playmate: sometimes it plays the role of devil's advocate, fundamental depression. Sometimes it acts as an encouragement for birth, sometimes as an encouragement for death."

"We constantly produce a display, a theatrical scene. For each situation we create the appropriate backdrop and the appropriate lighting. We also have the appropriate actors, mainly ourselves, who appear on the stage. We carry on this kind of play, this theatrical game, all the time, and we are constantly using our antennae, so to speak, to feel out the total effect our stage set is having."

-Chogyam Trungpa