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"...I was indecisive and unsure of myself. I was always making excuses for myself. I was full of self pity...Don Juan turned my eyes outward and taught me how to see the magnificence of the world and how to accumulate personal power.
....death stands to your left. ...After all,
death is in no hurry. He will get you tomorrow or next week or in fifty
years. It makes no difference to him. The moment you remember you must
eventually die, you are cut down to the right size. When there is no way
of knowing whether I have one more minute of life, I must live as if this
is my last moment. Each act is the warrior's last battle. So everything
must be done impeccably. Nothing can be left pending....when death stands
to your left, you must create your world by a series of decisions. There
are no large or small decisions, only decisions that must be made now."
People do not respond for long to small and self-centered purposes or to self-aggrandizing work. Too many organizations ask us to engage in hollow work, to be enthusiastic about small-minded visions, to commit ourselves to selfish purposes, to engage our energy in competitive drives. Those who offer us this petty work hope we won't notice how lifeless it is. They hope that life's great motions are somehow absent from us.
When we respond with disgust, when we withdraw our energy from such endeavors, it is a sign of our commitment to life and to each other. Like all life, we can pursue a direction only towards wholeness. Like all life, we learn to sidestep the fearful minds that keep us from the great cohering motions which give meaning to our lives.
"There is only one dance," writes
T S Eliot. "There is only the dance of coherence, and it is the only dance
which brings us joy."
I remember a despairing white father in the Belgian Congo saying to me just before the debacle . . . "there is another great age of darkness closing in on the life of man and all that we can do is to create little fortresses wherein the authentic light of the spirit can be kept burning so that one day, when men wish to reach out for the light again, they will have places in which to find it. But, for the rest, we must just accept the inevitability of disaster."
You may well be right, and disaster may well come,' I had told him. But for me it will always be a point of honour to go on working to prevent disaster, if only to make certain it is the right kind of disaster life needs when it does ultimately come."
It was not the beautiful or
pleasant feelings that gave me new insight, but the ones against which
I fought most strongly: feelings that made me experience myself as shabby,
petty, mean, helpless, humiliated, demanding, resentful or confused, and
above all, sad and lonely. It was precisely through these experiences,
which I had shunned for so long, that I became certain that I now understood
something about my life, stemming from the core of my being, something
that I could not have learned from any book.
- Alice Miller
It takes so much to be a full human being that there are very few who have the enlightenment or the courage to pay the price. One has to abandon altogether the search for security and reach out to the risk of living with both arms. One has to embrace the world like a lover. One has to accept pain as a condition of existence. One has to court doubt and darkness as the cost of knowing. One needs a will stubborn in conflict, but apt always to total acceptance of every consequence of living and dying.
- Morris L. West
- Clement of Alexandria
The cherub with
the flaming sword is hereby commanded to leave his guard at the tree of
life, and when he does, the whole creation will be consumed, and appear
infinite, and holy, whereas it now appears finite and corrupt. This will
come to pass by an empowerment of sensual enjoyment. But first the notion
that man has a body distinct from his soul is to be expunged. If the doors
of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is: infinite.
For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro' the narrow
chinks of his cavern.
"Mediocre" tends to mean "undistinguished," while snobs enjoy their distinguishing hallmarks of style - how they wear clothes, use words, where they go and gather and gossip. ...Whatever the circumstances the genius has put you into, the fact of individuality defends the soul against all class-action claims. No soul is mediocre, whatever your personal taste for conventionality, whatever your personal record of middling achievements."
- James Hillman
Brother David Steindl-Rast: Among the many things that profoundly impress me about the Dalai Lama, quite high up on the list is his ability to say "I don't know". I've often wished that other people in prominent positions wouldn't feel the compulsion to have an answer for everything and would feel equally free to say "I don't know." It's a sign of wisdom to know that you don't know and a sign of stupidity to think that you know everything. I admire it enormously in him, and wonder why so few people in leading positions reach that stage.
Robert Aitken Roshi: The anxiety to have a ready answer, it seems to me, has two aspects. One is "I want to be equal to this question." Especially for someone in a position of leadership, for someone who's expected to have answers, not having an answer is equated with failure. We want our knowledge, our sense of the world, to form a reasonably complete pattern, one that will hold up under questioning. The second part of the problem is that it's very difficult for most people even to find the quietness that is the mind of "I don't know." Their inner monologues go on and on, constantly, so in response to a question, out comes that inner monologue, just projected into public discourse . . .
Not knowing is most intimate. Intimacy . . . is realization itself. When you are intimate with something, you are one with it. When the Dalai Lama says, "I don't know", he's showing himself and showing the truth.
I hear people everywhere saying that the trouble with our time is that we have no great leaders any more. If we look back we always had them. But to me it seems that there is a very profound reason why there are no great leaders any more. It is because they are no longer needed. The message is clear. You no longer want to be led from the outside. Every man must be his own leader. He now knows enough not to follow other people. He must follow the light that's within himself, and through this light he will create a new community. You see, wherever I go in the world, this to me is a general trend. I am aware of the fact that there are already people in existence today - take us - who really belong to a community which does not exist yet. That is, we are the bridge between the community we've left and the community which doesn't exist yet.
One of man's greatest failings is that he looks
almost always for an excuse, in the misfortune that befalls him through
his own fault, before looking for a remedy--which means he often finds
the remedy too late.
- Cardinal de Retz
The basic difference between an ordinary man and a warrior is that the warrior takes everything as a challenge while an ordinary man takes everything as a blessing or a curse.
The lesson of being free is so simple that it eludes us. We think of freedom as the unencumbered life, but it is really the unencumbered SELF. To be free is simply to act on one's truth, and to allow no one else to obscure that truth.
BOOKS SPECIFICALLY QUOTED ABOVE:
Margaret J. Wheatley & Myron Kellner-Rogers: A Simpler Way - Paperback.
Margaret J. Wheatley & Myron Kellner-Rogers: A Simpler Way - Hard cover.
Margaret J. Wheatley & Myron Kellner-Rogers: A Simpler Way - Audio Cassette.
Laurens van der Post: A Walk With a White Bushman.
William Blake: The Marriage of Heaven & Hell. Full colour, simple, low price.
Robert Aitken & David Steindl-Rast: The Ground We Share. Dialogue.
SUGGESTED BOOKS BY WRITERS QUOTED ABOVE:
(While these are not all readily available, they are the titles I'd recommend)
Carlos Castaneda: Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge Paperback.
Carlos Castaneda: Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge Hard cover.
Carlos Castaneda: Teachings of Don Juan: Audio Casssette; narrated by Peter Coyote.
Laurens van der Post: Yet Being Someone Other. Inner and outer autobiography
Laurens van der Post: The Night of The New Moon. Insights while Japanese P.O.W.
Alice Miller: Banished Knowledge : Facing Childhood Injuries. Controversial.
Morris West: A View from the Ridge : The Testimony of a Twentieth-Century Christian.
Clement of Alexandria: The One Who Knows God. Ancient wisdom.
James Hillman: The Soul's Code: In Search of Character and Calling.
