“There is a vitality, a life force, an energy, a quickening that is translated through you into action, and because there is only one of you in all of time, this expression is unique. And if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium and it will be lost. The world will not have it. It is not your business to determine how good it is nor how valuable nor how it compares with other expressions. It is your business to keep it yours clearly and directly, to keep the channel open. You do not even have to believe in yourself or your work. You have to keep yourself open and aware to the urges that motivate you. Keep the channel open.” — Martha Graham
Category Archives: Philosophy
Wiping the Slate Clean
Understand that thought is fluid and that you are not your thoughts. You are something much, much bigger.
As many spiritual teachers say, you are the one noticing your thoughts. You are the nonphysical force that is able to sit back and notice life happening around you. You can observe thought happening inside of you and remain aware of and detached from it all
When you lean back into your spiritual nature and allow your human psychology (thoughts and emotions) to simply do what they do, you are free. You can watch the endlessly fascinating movie that is your life taking place without getting emotionally hooked into it. You’re much bigger than that movie.
When you don’t cling to thought as if it is true, the slate is wiped clean and your mind goes back to its natural, peaceful state. You have to be willing to be wrong about everything you know. It’s then that you catch a glimpse of the innate perfection in the system. You tap into the peace and clarity that lies beneath thought, and you find yourself there.
No rest of life
“There is no rest of life. Life is one. Without beginning, without middle, without ending. The concept: beginning middle and meaning comes from a sense of self which separates itself from what it considers to be the rest of life. But this attitude is untenable unless one insists on stopping life and bringing it to an end. That thought is in itself an attempt to stop life, for life goes on, indifferent to the deaths that are part of its no beginning, no middle, no meaning. How much better to simply get behind and push!” — John Cage
Manufactured Normalcy Field
I wouldn’t know how to begin to describe this piece, so I’ll just share a few nuggets. If you have any interest in things like past and present and reality, the full post is worth a read.
we live in a continuous state of manufactured normalcy. There are mechanisms that operate — a mix of natural, emergent and designed — that work to prevent us from realizing that the future is actually happening as we speak. To really understand the world and how it is evolving, you need to break through this manufactured normalcy field. Unfortunately, that leads, as we will see, to a kind of existential nausea.
What is interesting is how this psychological pre-disposition to believe in an unchanging, normal present doesn’t kill us.
How, as a species, are we able to prepare for, create, and deal with, the future, while managing to effectively deny that it is happening at all?
a typical air traveler never experiences anything that one of our ancestors could not experience on a fast chariot or a boat.
even though air travel is now a hundred years old, it hasn’t actually “arrived” psychologically. A full appreciation of what air travel is has been kept from the general population through manufactured normalcy.
we are all living, in user-experience terms, in some thoroughly mangled, overloaded, stretched and precarious version of the 15th century that is just good enough to withstand casual scrutiny.
Instead of a newspaper feeding us daily doses of a shared Field, we get a nauseating mix of news from forgotten classmates, slogan-placards about issues trivial and grave, revisionist histories coming at us via a million political voices, the future as a patchwork quilt of incoherent glimpses, all mixed in with pictures of cats doing improbable things.
We aren’t being hit by Future Shock. We are going to be hit by Future Nausea. You’re not going to be knocked out cold. You’re just going to throw up in some existential sense of the word.
I Am That by Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj
Excerpts from I Am That by Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj
All your problems are your body’s problems. All these lose their meaning the moment you realize that you may not be a mere body. You are nothing perceivable, or imaginable.#
Memory creates the illusion of continuity.
Time, space, causation are mental categories, arising and subsiding with the mind.
Nothing can happen unless the entire universe makes it happen. A thing is as it is, because the universe is as it is.
The world you can perceive is a very small world indeed. And it is entirely private. Take it to be a dream and be done with it.