Fear ... Desire

As a man’s fears are big, so are his desires.

Accidents and openings

My one-year-old son tips over a little space heater in the room and it lies there running until I set it up right again. Okay, maybe Child Protective Services will be calling, or the Fire Department: mea culpa. But once he's turned it upside down, I can see its bright orange heating element up inside the top of it, that I had never seen before. I remember once having half-wondered where the element was located and then instantly forgetting about it. Mistakes are openings. When an accident occurs and topples something out its ordinary place, no matter how grand or inconsequential, an opening occurs. And when we encounter openings, hollow spaces of little or nothing, we are encountering the opportunity to open up a little to ourselves. A little chance to wake up, the first subconscious whiff of coffee in the morning.

Imagination is cruel

That cruel gift, imagination, which allows us to envision a perfect world while we live in a world that seems so far from perfect, a world that cannot possibly match our lovely mental concoctions. And yet we persist in the cruel practice. We stubbornly lash ourselves bloody by measuring ourselves -- and others -- against our own imagined standards.

Man in Quotes!

Can there possibly be a more insulting thought – especially to an artist or cosmopolite -- than “I am just a product of my times, of my people, of the town in which I grew up. My thoughts are not my own, no matter how much I enjoy thinking so. I have culled them, consciously or not, from the thoughts of others, who in turn have gotten their thoughts from the minds of better thinkers.” In fact, what am I but a man in quotes?

Man in Quotes

We may believe in Truth, but Truth is not something we encounter by believing. It does not rest in faith or belief. Belief is nothing more than wish-fulfillment and childish fantasy. Cinderella for the girls, Napoleon or Jesus for the boys. And the gap between belief and action is nothing other than playacting, a mask placed on top of a mask. As if we were marionettes dancing in a puppet stage, and as our gaze traces its way up along our strings, we see our puppet master, who is himself another marionette.

Nondualism: Who Are You?

Watching yourself watching the world. Watching how clear plastic transparencies appear in front of your eyes, transparencies with pictures on them—pictures of your thoughts, your feelings, your past, your imagination. The transparencies rise up before your eyes and then disappear. They overlap, forming the strangest patterns, complex collages and yet still, only transparencies. And what is it that is looking at these transparencies, and looking beyond them. What is doing the looking? What is it that looks?