Playing on the Seashore
I do not know what
I may appear to the world,
but to myself
I seem to have been
only like a boy
playing on the seashore,
and diverting myself
in now and then finding
a smoother pebble
or a prettier shell
than ordinary,
whilst the great
ocean of truth
lay all undiscovered
before me.
- Isaac Newton
Living Forward Into Mystery
“Few of us would deny that the universe is a stranger place than the generally accepted natural laws can account for.
Everyone is familiar with the phenomenon of feeling more or less alive on different days. Everyone knows on any given day that there are energies slumbering in him which the incitements of that day do not call forth, but which he might display if these were greater. Most of us feel as if a sort of cloud weighs upon us, keeping us below our highest notch of clearness in discernment or sureness in reasoning. Compared with what we ought to be we are only half awake. We are making use of only a small part of our possible mental and physical resources.
The human individual lives unusually far within his limits. He possesses powers of various sorts which he habitually fails to use. He energizes below his maximum. He behaves below his optimum.
In other words, for everyday purposes human beings have a certain predetermined limit. It is like the thermostat on a central heating system. When the temperature rises above a certain point it automatically switches off the heating. When our tiredness reaches a certain limit, we also switch off automatically, and allow ourselves to sink into a passive state. But if some crisis arises, we refuse to allow ourselves to switch off. Our thermostat readjusts itself. The implication seems to be that each of us contains a vast reservoir of energy. We live subject to arrest by degrees of fatigue which we have come only from habit to obey.
There is nothing mystical or occult about this. We all have within us a robot, akin to the automatic pilot in an airplane, whose task is to simplify our lives by handling a series of routines. Learning to do something new requires considerable effort and concentration, but once we have mastered it, our robot takes over and does it far more quickly and efficiently than we could do it consciously. The trouble is, the robot can become so efficient that it takes over most of our life. We begin to live like a robot. We do things automatically. It takes some sudden crisis to jar us out of this automatic living.
Like our bodies, our feelings are also controlled by the robot, running on automatic pilot. We seldom experience new feelings. For the most part, we play the same old feelings over and over again. Our minds contain a vast unused library of thoughts and ideas. The world around us is full of an infinite number of interesting things that the robot is trained to ignore. We accept the universe around us as stable and normal, when there is immense mystery and complexity and reality hidden from us by ignorance and habit.”
from Colin Wilson & Dr. Christopher Evans, The Book of Great Mysteries, Dorset Press, 1986.
To Be Somebody
“It is strange, the desire to show off or to be somebody. It seems so impossibly difficult to be simple, to be what you are, and not pretend. To be what you are is in itself very arduous without trying to become something, which is not difficult. You can always pretend, put on a mask, but to be what you are is an extremely complex affair; because you are always changing; you are never the same and each moment reveals a new facet, a new depth, a new surface. You can’t be all this at one moment for each moment brings its own change. So if you are intelligent, you give up being anything.”
- J. Krishnamurti
Stop Aspiring and Start Writing
“Advice? I don’t have advice. Stop aspiring and start writing. If you’re writing, you’re a writer. Write like you’re a goddamn death row inmate and the governor is out of the country and there’s no chance for a pardon. Write like you’re clinging to the edge of a cliff, white knuckles, on your last breath, and you’ve got just one last thing to say, like you’re a bird flying over us and you can see everything, and please, for God’s sake, tell us something that will save us from ourselves. Take a deep breath and tell us your deepest, darkest secret, so we can wipe our brow and know that we’re not alone. Write like you have a message from the king. Or don’t. Who knows, maybe you’re one of the lucky ones who doesn’t have to.”
- Alan Watts
When It Rains
At one meeting a man who had just started coming to meetings said, “Mr. Gurdjieff, what are you trying to do?”
“What I try do?” Mr. Gurdjieff- replied, “I try show people when it rains the streets are wet.”
That struck me so strongly that I have never forgotten it.
When Mr. Gurdjieff was here on his last visit to New York in 1949, I happened to be alone with him one afternoon in his apartment at the Wellington. In the course of a brief conversation I said to him, “Mr. Gurdjieff, years ago a new man in a group asked you what you were trying to do. You said, ‘I try show people when it rains the streets are wet.’
“I say this?” he asked me as if with great surprise.
So there is the first unforgettable remark and an addition equally unforgettable.
~ Edwin Wolfe, “Episodes with Gurdjieff”
Reblogged from my Tumblr, Crashingly Beautiful.
The Stillness
The stillness
in stillness
is not
the real stillness.
Only when
there is stillness
in movement
can the spiritual rhythm appear
which pervades
heaven and earth.
Ts’ai-ken T’an
(Click the picture for an amazing post over at Froth from Walt on Eight Attitude Awareness)
Things To Do On A Balcony
“Try not to pursue a thought
entering your mind by thinking,
unless it is useful.”
- John Fuchs
If You Want To Write
- Know that you have talent, are original and have something important to say.
- Know that it is good to work. Work with love and think of liking it when you do. It is easy and interesting. It is a privilege. There is nothing hard about it but your anxious vanity and fear of failure.
- Write freely, recklessly, in first drafts.
- Tackle anything you want to – novels, plays, anything. Only remember Blake’s admonition: “Better to strangle an infant in its cradle than nurse unacted desire.”
- Don’t be afraid of writing bad stories. To discover what is wrong with a story write two new ones and then go back to it.
- Don’t be ashamed of what you have written in the past. How I always suffered from this! How I would regurgitate out of my memory (and still do) some nauseous little lumps of things I had written! But don’t do this. Go on to the next. And fight against this tendency, which is much of it due not to splendid modesty, but a lack of self respect. We are too ready (women especially) not to stand by what we have said or done. Often it is a way of forestalling criticism, saying hurriedly: “I know it is awful!” before anyone else does. Very bad and cowardly. It is so conceited and timid to be ashamed of one’s mistakes. Of course they are mistakes. Go on to the next.
- Try to discover your true, honest, untheoretical self.
- Don’t think of yourself as an intestinal tract and tangle of nerves in the skull, that will not work unless you drink coffee. Think of yourself as incandescent power, illuminated perhaps and forever talked to by God and his messengers. Remember how wonderful you are, what a miracle!
- If you are never satisfied with what you write, that is a good sign. It means your vision can see so far that it is hard to come up to it. Again I say, the only unfortunate people are the glib ones, immediately satisfied with their work. To them the ocean is only knee-deep.
- When discouraged, remember what van Gogh said: “If you hear a voice within you saying: you are no painter, then paint by all means, lad, and that voice will be silenced, but only by working.”
- Don’t be afraid of yourself when you write. Don’t check-rein yourself. If you are afraid of being sentimental, say, for heaven’s sake be as sentimental as you can of feel like being! Then you will probably pass through to the other side and slough off sentimentality because you understand it at last and really don’t care about it.
- Don’t always be appraising yourself, wondering if you are better or worse than other writers. “I will not Reason & Compare,” said Blake, “my business is to Create.” Besides, since you are like no there being ever created since the beginning of Time, you are incomparable.
And why should you do all these things? Why should we all use our creative power and write or paint or play music, or whatever it tells us to do?
Because there is nothing that makes people so generous, joyful, lively, bold, and compassionate, so indifferent to fighting and the accumulation of objects and money. Because the best way to know the Truth or Beauty is to try to express it. And what is the purpose of existence Here or Yonder but to discover truth and beauty and express it, i.e., share it with others?
- from Brenda Ueland, If You Want To Write, Saint Paul, Minnesota: Graywolf Press, 2007, p. 161-163.
Springtime Moonlit Night
A little touch, a fragment heard- with this alone I weave in my mind my springtime moonlit night.
- from Sri Arnivan’s book “Selected Writings” where he describes the practice of pratyahara (withdrawal of the mind and senses from outer objects).
