spiritual wank

There’s a point of view that’s taken from some meditators. I find myself drawn to this, and I recognize it, and have to stop. It’s the point of view that there is no ego. That there is no personality. That this is an appearance.

‘Who is asking that question?’

Yeah — ‘who’s asking the question? Who needs to fix themselves? Who needs to do the work? Look for that who and when you see through that there’s no who and that’s it’s allll this, then you’ll see the silliness of your pursuit…’ Now the best teachers are the ones who say, yeah you wake up, you also grow up across these lines of development…

There’s a partial truth in that, but it’s only a partial truth.

It’s partial, exactly. Like sure you can inhabit unbound, contentless awareness and it will feel like there is absolutely no self and everything is perfect as it is. And then five seconds later when you’re back in your body, yelling at your kids, you’ll realize how irrelevant that is to actually being good in the world.”

-In conversation between
Zubin Damania and David Fuller

 

 

 

Ambivalent attachment

Her powerlessness to communicate is apparent in the dialogue she writes: the people talk along lines that never cross; each has his own language, which the other does not understand. Even in love, especially in love, any exchange is impossible, because Violette Leduc cannot accept a duality in which she sees lurking the threat of separation.”

 

– Simone de Beauvoir
La Bâtarde preface

Words to nerves

Words are like that, they deceive, they pile up, it seems they do not know where to go, and, suddenly, because of two or three or four that suddenly come out, simple in themselves, a personal pronoun, an adverb, a verb, an adjective, we have the excitement of seeing them coming irresistibly to the surface through the skin and the eyes and upsetting the composure of our feelings, sometimes the nerves that cannot bear it any longer…”

– José Saramago
Blindness