Culture is not your friend. Culture is for other peoples’ convenience and the convenience of various institutions, churches, companies, tax collection schemes, what have you. It is not your friend. It insults you. It disempowers you. It uses and abuses you. None of us are well-treated by culture.”
-Terence McKenna
As soon as I heard his voice, I felt as if a wind swept through my head. I let shoes be shoes, and it seemed to me that the distracted phase of mind I had just experienced dated from a long-vanished period, maybe a year or two back, and was about to be quietly effaced from my memory. I began to observe the old fellow.”
-Knut Hamsun
Hunger
The communication is only an effort to bring the hearer to the edge of the abyss; it is a signpost, not the thing itself.”
-Joseph Campbell
Pathways to Bliss
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
Fuck, I thought, in reference to the passing, fragmented awe I felt about my laptop working. For most of my life I had believed everything was broken. I had believed everything was broken in a manner that, I’d only recently begun to understand, blindly assumed things that weren’t true. My whole life I had been oriented toward the world in a manner that reflected me back. I’d always started with myself, only pretending to look outward, and only pretending to look inward too. I’d always viewed malice and tragedy as the only true facts of my life, ignoring everything else that didn’t fit my self-serving narrative. I had believed that everything was broken when in fact the opposite was true: everything worked! Even that which didn’t seem to work worked. It’s an unbelievable miracle, I thought, parroting Jordan Castro.”
-Jordan Castro
The Novelist
In town, everything was chaotic and contradictory. News from abroad was censored, but travel was left unrestricted. Confused was increased by a spate of new and conflicting regulations, and by the arbitrary way controls were imposed or lifted. The one thing that would have clarified the position was an overall picture of world events; but this was prohibited by the determination of the politicians to ban all foreign news. My impression was that they had lost their heads, did not know how to deal with the approaching danger, and hoped to keep the public in ignorance of its exact nature until a plan had been evolved.”
-Anna Kavan
Ice
1967
Thoughts were snakes shooting through high grasses. Now you see them, now you don’t. As you walk in the high grasses, you must take a stick and beat the ground. Scare up the snakes, pursue them to the edge of the field into the open and see them, exorcise them. You must perform this ritual now. In the middle of the night, alone with pen and paper, you sound out the snakey thoughts. You write one of those letters that’s never meant to be sent, isn’t addressed to anyone. No one’s eyes are meant to see this. This is a private ritual. The writer, the reader are trying to get as close together as possible. They are coming together, sealed in a word on a page where you’re trying to make the shooting thoughts come out in the pen. Shoot them down your arm, through your fingers, and out the end of your pen. Make them visible. You know it’s primitive: filling up a page so you can empty your mind. But you’re doing what you must: trying to let go. You’re starting by addressing yourself:”
-Constance DeJong
Modern Love
If you keep shining the neon light of analysis and accountability on the tender tissue of your belonging, you make it parched and barren.”
-John O’Donohue
Anam Ċara
He has rejected a great many books that he liked before the War, as well as a great many trends in painting or music, because they have not stood the test of experience. The work of human thought should withstand the test of brutal, naked reality. If it cannot, it is worthless. Probably only those things are worth while which can preserve their validity in the eyes of man threatened with instant death.”
-Czeslaw Milosz
The Captive Mind
‘When I stand and contemplate my fate and see the path along which you have led me… I reach my end, for artless I surrendered to one who is my undoing and my end.”
-Gabriel García Márquez
Love and Other Demons
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