Who Are You?

“There is nothing else than now. There is neither yesterday, certainly, nor is there any tomorrow. How old must you be before you know that?“

“Try to learn to breathe deeply, really to taste food when you eat, and when you sleep, really to sleep. Try as much as possible to be wholly alive with all your might, and when you laugh, laugh like hell. And when you get angry, get good and angry. Try to be alive. You will be dead soon enough.”

Quotes by Ernest Hemingway

“Death is the only wise advisor that we have. Whenever you feel that everything is going wrong and you’re about to be annihilated, turn to your death and ask if that is so. Your death will tell you that you’re wrong; that nothing really matters outside its touch. Your death will tell you, ‘I haven’t touched you yet.”

“Forget the self and you will fear nothing, in whatever level or awareness you find yourself to be.”

Quotes by Carlos Castaneda

“Be anchored in fearlessness. What is worldly life but fear?“

“How many lives are frittered away, age after age, in endless coming and going. Find out who you are!”

Quotes by Anandamayi Ma

Reminders from the Greats

“Be here now.” – Ram Dass

“You are not a problem that needs solving.” – Eckhart Tolle

“To be truly happy you must realize who you are with nothing.” – Gangaji

“Worry is praying to the devil.” – Terence McKenna

“It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us.” – Marianne Williamson

“Silence is also conversation.” – Ramana Maharshi

“Here is my secret: I don’t mind what happens.” – Jiddu Krishnamurti

“A certain darkness is needed to see the stars.” – Osho

Thrown Out of the Nest

“To be fully alive, fully human, and completely awake is to be continually thrown out of the nest. To live fully is to be always in no-man’s-land, to experience each moment as completely new and fresh. To live is to be willing to die over and over again.”

Quote by Pema Chödrön

“A bird is safe in its nest – but that is not what its wings are made for.”

Quote by Amit Ray

The Anonymous Seed

“Burying and planting. The culmination of one love, one dream, one self, is the anonymous seed of the next. There is very little difference between burying and planting. For often, we need to put dead things to rest, so that new life can grow. And further, the thing put to rest—whether it be a loved one, a dream, or a false way of seeing—becomes the fertilizer for the life about to form. As the well-used thing joins with the earth, the old love fertilizes the new; the broken dream fertilizes the dream yet conceived; the painful way of being that strapped us to the world fertilizes the freer inner stance about to unfold. This is very helpful when considering the many forms of self we inhabit over a lifetime. One self carries us to the extent of its usefulness and dies. We are then forced to put that once beloved skin to rest, to join it with the ground of spirit from which it came, so it may fertilize the next skin of self that will carry us into tomorrow. There is always grief for what is lost and always surprise at what is to be born. But much of our pain in living comes from wearing a dead and useless skin, refusing to put it to rest, or from burying such things with the intent of hiding them rather than relinquishing them. For every new way of being, there is a failed attempt mulching beneath the tongue. For every sprig that breaks surface, there is an old stick stirring underground. For every moment of joy sprouting, there is a new moment of struggle taking root. We live, embrace, and put to rest our dearest things, including how we see ourselves, so we can resurrect our lives anew.”

Excerpt from The Book of Awakening, by Mark Nepo

Your Losses and Endings

“How do you want to approach death? With curiosity? With a sense of adventure? With gratitude? With presence? Practice meeting all your losses and endings in life with these attitudes. Practice in every moment. What is found then is found now, and you will meet death with the values and attitudes you inhabit every day.”

Quote by Sallie Tisdale

“The future is an infinite succession of presents. Make your desired attitudes a mastered reaction to life.”

Quote by Howard Zinn

Everything in the Cosmos

“Light does not come from light, but from darkness.”

“It would be frightening to think that in all the Cosmos, which is so harmonious, so complete and equal to itself, that only human life is happening randomly, that only one’s destiny lacks meaning.”

“The way towards ‘wisdom’ or towards ‘freedom’ is the way towards your inner being. This is the simplest definition of metaphysics.”

“The primitive magician, the medicine man or shaman is not only a sick man, he is above all, a sick man who has been cured, who has succeeded in curing himself.”

“It was lunar symbolism that enabled man to relate and connect such heterogeneous things as: birth, becoming, death, and resurrection; the waters, plants, woman, fecundity, and immortality; the cosmic darkness, prenatal existence, and life after death, followed by the rebirth of the lunar type (“light coming out of darkness”); weaving, the symbol of the “thread of life,” fate, temporality, and death; and yet others. In general most of the ideas of cycle, dualism, polarity, opposition, conflict, but also of reconciliation of contraries, of coincidentia oppositorum, were either discovered or clarified by virtue of lunar symbolism. We may even speak of a metaphysics of the moon, in the sense of a consistent system of “truths” relating to the mode of being peculiar to living creatures, to everything in the cosmos that shares in life, that is, in becoming, growth and waning, death and resurrection.”

All quotes by Mircea Eliade

Photo description: Interacting group of several galaxies (called Arp 194), along with a “cosmic fountain” of stars, gas and dust that stretches over 100,000 light-years.
Photo credit: NASA, ESA and the Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA)

To Probe with Intense Sensitivity

“Great works of art in all cultures succeed in capturing within the constraints of their form both the pathos of anguish and a vision of its resolution. Take, for example, the languorous sentences of Proust or the haiku of Basho, the late quartets and sonatas of Beethoven, the tragicomic brushwork of Sengai or the daunting canvases of Rothko, the luminous self-portraits of Rembrandt and Hakuin. Such works achieve their resolution not through consoling or romantic images whereby anguish is transcended. They accept anguish without being overwhelmed by it. They reveal anguish as that which gives beauty its dignity and depth.”

“Not only are we inescapably alone in the realms of our private thoughts, perceptions and feelings, but we are also, paradoxically, inescapably together in a world with others.”

“The inner aim of thought is never fully realized until it ripens into vocal utterances through which others can have access- albeit indirect- to our personal experience. In fact, an inner experience only achieves true completeness when it has been spoken. No matter how profound an insight one may gain, as long as it stays inarticulately concealed within an introspective silence, it remains one-dimensional and incomplete.”

“To meditate is not to empty the mind and gape at things in a trancelike stupor. Nothing significant will ever be revealed by just staring blankly at an object long and hard enough. To meditate is to probe with intense sensitivity each glimmer of color, each cadence of sound, each touch of another’s hand, each fumbling word that tries to utter what cannnot be said.”

“A lack of being remains unaffected by a plenitude of having.”

“The meaning of man’s life, as we have seen, is not measured by what he has, but by what he is. No matter how many possessions we have amassed, how much wealth we have accrued, how respected and secure our position is in society, how numerous the pieces of information we have accumulated, in moments of lucidity we may still abruptly perceive the dreadful futility of it all, the overwhelming emptiness and pointlessness of such a life.”

“Did I live? The human world is like a vast musical instrument on which we play our individual part while simultaneously listening to the compositions of others in an effort to contribute to the whole. We don’t chose whether to engage, only how to; we either harmonize or create dissonance. Our words, our deeds, our very presence create and leave impressions in the minds of others just as a writer makes impressions with their words. Who you are is an unfolding narrative. You came from nothing and will return there eventually. Instead of taking ourselves so seriously all the time, we can discover the playful irony of a story that has never been told in quite this way before.”

All quotes by Stephen Batchelor

Photo of the Rothko Chapel, a non-denominational chapel in Houston, Texas, founded by John and Dominique de Menil

Learning for Understanding

“Whatsoever is contrary to nature is contrary to reason, and whatsoever is contrary to reason is absurd.”

“Peace is not an absence of war, it is a virtue, a state of mind, a disposition for benevolence, confidence, justice.”

“The ordinary surroundings of life which are esteemed by men (as their actions testify) to be the highest good, may be classed under the three heads — Riches, Fame, and the Pleasures of Sense: with these three the mind is so absorbed that it has little power to reflect on any different good.”

“The highest activity a human being can attain is learning for understanding, because to understand is to be free.”

“Do not weep; do not wax indignant. Understand.”

“The more clearly you understand yourself and your emotions, the more you become a lover of what is.”

“Happiness is a virtue, not its reward.”

All quotes by Baruch Spinoza
Born: November 24, 1632, Died: February 21, 1677