Two Quotes Today

Two quotes today. The first one I came across yesterday while browsing The Natural Awareness Facebook page."Of all the footprints, that of the elephant is the greatest. Of all the meditations, contemplation of death is the greatest." (Shakyamuni Buddha)The second I wrote down a couple of weeks ago. Michael Meade mentioned it in one of his talks that I downloaded and listened to on the mail route. “Take your well-disciplined strengths and stretch them between two opposing poles. Because inside human beings is where God learns.” --Rainer Maria Rilke

Jung on Yoga And Eastern Religion

Carl Jung on practicing yoga:

"The European who practices yoga does not know what he is doing. It has a bad effect upon him, sooner or later he gets afraid and sometimes it even leads him over the edge of madness."-- Carl Jung, Pg. 346, The Ideas of James Hillman

You've got to wonder if this psychological insight still holds true today to some degree.

Soul and Spirit

Lately I've been rereading my journals from the past of years. I ran across this entry on June 6th, 2011:

The Wild Man isn't like an Eastern Mystic: "When it comes time for a young male to talk with the Wild Man he will find the conversation quite distinct from a talk with a minister, a rabbi, or a guru. Conversing with the Wild Man is not talking about bliss or mind or spirit, or 'higher consciousness,' but about something wet, dark, and low--what James Hillman would call 'soul'." [Robert Bly, Iron John]

I've mentioned a couple of times that I sit zazen(meditate)for a half-n-hour every morning. There are times when I wonder why I'm doing it. Robert Bly once said this about enlightenment and the soul: "Mythology is more helpful than enlightenment or to put it chronologically, years of mythology need to come, accustoming the soul to darkness, before the soul is ready for enlightenment."

Part of the reason I do it is to relax and slow my thoughts. But than this excerpt from an interview with psychologist James Hillman comes to mind:

Safransky: What if the goal is merely a few minutes of calm?

Hillman: If that’s the goal, what’s the difference between meditation and having a nice drink? Or going to the hairdresser and sitting for an hour and flipping through a magazine? Or writing a long letter, a love letter? Do you realize what we’re not doing in this culture? Having an evening’s conversation with people; that can be so relaxing. Moving one’s images, moving one’s soul; I think we’ve locked on to meditation as the main method for settling down.

It’s better to go into the world half-cocked than not to go into the world at all. I know when something’s wrong. And I can say, “This is outrageous. This is insulting. This is a violation. And it’s wrong.” I don’t know what we should do about it; my protest is absolutely empty. But I believe in that empty protest.

You see, one of the ways you get trapped into not going into the world is when people — usually in positions of power — say, “Oh, yeah, wise guy, what would you do about it? What would you do about the Persian Gulf crisis?” I don’t know what I’d do. I don’t know. But I know when I feel something is wrong, and I trust that sense of outrage, that sense of insult. And so, empty protest is a valid way of expressing feeling, politically. Remember, that’s where we began: how do you connect feeling with politics? Well, one of the ways is through that empty protest. You don’t know what’s right, but you know what’s wrong.

No Secret Knowledge?

This morning, I found a quote in Ishmael that is related to the quote I posted by Kurt Vonnegut a few weeks back. Here is the quote by Vonnegut:

“Meditation is holy to me, for I believe that all the secrets of existence and nonexistence are somewhere in our heads - or in other people's heads. And I believe that reading and writing are the most nourishing forms of meditation anyone has so far found. By reading the writings of the most interesting minds in history, we meditate with our own minds and theirs as well. This is to me is a miracle.”

Here is the one I found in Ishmael:

"I didn't want a guru or a kung fu master or spiritual director. I didn't want to become a sorcerer or learn the zen of archery or meditate or align my chakras or uncover past incarnations. Arts and disciplines of that kind are fundamentally selfish; they're all designed to benefit the pupil - not the world. I was after something else entirely, but it wasn't in the Yellow Pages or anywhere else I could discover.

In Hermann Hesse's "The Journey to the East," we never find out what Leo's awesome wisdom consists of. This is because Hesse couldn't tell us what he himself didn't know. He was like me - he just yearned for there to be someone in the world like Leo, someone with a secret knowledge and a wisdom beyond his own. In fact, of course, there is no secret knowledge; no one knows anything that can't be found on a shelf in the public library. But I didn't know that then." [Daniel Quinn, Pg. 5, Ishmael]

My Usage of Quotes

Periodically I wonder why I like to use quotes. Alot of my thoughts are quotes. Of course, there are many reasons why I think I do. One of the answers to my question is found in this quote (Surprise!) by Kurt Vonnegut. Ever since reading "Palm Suday" on those cold winter mornings back in the old farmhouse next to the woodstove it has stuck with me.

“Meditation is holy to me, for I believe that all the secrets of existence and nonexistence are somewhere in our heads - or in other people's heads. And I believe that reading and writing are the most nourishing forms of meditation anyone has so far found. By reading the writings of the most interesting minds in history, we meditate with our own minds and theirs as well. This is to me is a miracle.”

Meditation in the Morning

This morning before going out to work on the cordwood house, I chose to turn on the computer and meditate. Whenever I think of meditation or hear it mentioned, I picture a person sitting cross-legged humming for hours on end. Well, not no more. Kurt Vonnegut has offered us a different perspective on what it means to meditate.

"Literature is holy to me […] Meditation is holy to me, for I believe that all the secrets of existence and non existence are somewhere in our heads - or in other people's heads.

And I believe that reading and writing are the most nourishing forms of meditation anyone has so far found.

By reading the writings of the most interesting minds in history, we meditate with our own minds and theirs as well.

This to me is a miracle." Kurt Vonnegut