“...it becomes vividly clear that in concrete fact I have no other self than the totality of things of which I am aware.”
— Alan Watts
Mind scribbles.
If I knew what I was doing this wouldn’t be here.
If I knew what I was doing this wouldn’t be here.
Looking back over old journal entries from years ago I see a completely different person. Recognisable but gone. How transient and ephemeral our selves are.
Ouch
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). 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.
When I look to see where and what I am I find nothing but everything.
“The two demons are fear and desire. Now, everyone knows that demons aren’t real. That they’re imaginary. So how is it that they exist and persist? There’s no great mystery here. Fear and desire are entirely memory-based. Desire is remembered pleasure; fear is remembered pain. No memory, no problem.”
Good afternoon.
Treetops
We all take our feelings very seriously but what are they?
What stories are we all telling ourselves this morning?
After a hectic weekend at work enjoying a slightly slower start this morning with coffee and a cool breeze before my late shift tonight.
Good morning.
“I've lived through some terrible things in my life, some of which actually happened.”
— Mark Twain
Good morning.
We project our trance onto the machine and find it blinking back.
This is the danger: not that machines fool us, but that we fool ourselves—and the machine reflects that deception perfectly. It mimics the self we think we are.
This old girl is 16 years and 3 months young. She just keeps on truckin…
Good afternoon.
Things are finite. Being is infinite.
“Do you think that I count the days? There is only one day left, always starting over: it is given to us at dawn and taken away from us at dusk.”
— Jean-Paul Sartre
It’s fascinating to watch how quickly and automatically direct experience is transformed into a story and how rapidly that little story is then interwoven to fit, in one way or another, with all the other stories we having running perpetually.
Good morning.
“One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious. The latter procedure, however, is disagreeable and therefore not popular.”
— Carl Jung
“Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror. Just keep going. No feeling is final.”
— Rainer Maria Rilke
Good afternoon.
You can only wake up to your own life.
“My job is not to run around doing things. I am a human being, not a human doing.”
Good morning.
Thinking is great fun.
Watching thoughts pop up out of nowhere and then disappear again just as mysteriously.
Hopping on a thought train and riding it to who knows where. All very entertaining.
The trouble begins when you start holding on to them and taking them personally. Identifying with them and believing them to be true.
Good morning.
“I have nothing when I realize that nothing is mine. That I’m briefly a steward. A caretaker. I am nothing when I realize that as the dweller is not the dwelling, I am not the body. I do nothing when I realize that doer-ship is a fiction. Everything happens by itself. I am not the doer; I am the done-to.”
“Light only has meaning when it illuminates something dark and enlightenment is no good unless it helps to recognize darkness.”
— Carl Jung
Good afternoon.
There is no next, this is always it
“Any idea we have right here and now of what next looks like, is a painting made by our mind, and holds no reality. There is only this, the eternal, ever present here and now, constantly unfolding.”
Looking forward to this. Shifty, the
new film/ series from Adam Curtis.
UK only I fear 😕
Good morning.
“When we turn 40 we stop saying ‘hi’ and start saying ‘bye’.
— Martin Amis
The point of utopias and dystopias is that we end up somewhere in the middle. What we fail to recognise is that we have to deal with aspects of both in an ongoing and perpetual negotiation that never ends. Just like ourselves, society and culture never arrive.
Good afternoon.
We cannot rid ourselves of anything that happens because we are everything that happens.
“The observer is the observed and therein lies sanity, the whole.”
— Jiddu Krishnamurti
The shift from a busy, confused and overwhelmed mind to that of open, clear, spaciousness is counterintuitively slight but experientially enormous.
Good morning.
“The boundary to what we can accept is the boundary to our freedom.”
— Tara Brach
Being alive is the only adventure.
At meditation this evening I felt an exquisite intensity of the moment – of everything happening all at once.
“When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the Universe.”
— John Muir
“Different strokes for different folks or for different moments. One moment you need Zen. The next moment you need Advaita. Then maybe you suddenly find yourself drawn to Christian mystics or Sufis. Or maybe you’re suddenly moved to throw it all out the window and start from scratch, knowing nothing, believing nothing. Each possibility has something unique to offer.
Good morning.
Good morning.
Things go away. Everything is always here.
Good morning.
