26 posts tagged “quotables”

Compassion becomes a bridge to the world outside. Trust and compassion for oneself bring inspiration to dance with life, to communicate with the energies of the world. Lacking this kind of inspiration and openness, the spiritual path becomes the samsaric path of desire. One remains trapped in the desire to improve oneself, the desire to achieve imagined goals.... Compassion automatically invites you to relate with people, because you no longer regard people as a drain on your energy. They recharge your energy, because in the process of relating with them, you acknowledge your wealth, your richness. So if you have difficult tasks to perform, such as dealing with people or life situations, you do not feel you are running out of resources. Each time you are faced with a difficult task, it presents itself as a delightful opportunity to demonstrate your richness, your wealth. There is no feeling of poverty at all in this approach to life.

from Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism by Chogyam Trungpa

...fear of the inexplicable has not alone impoverished the existence of the individual; the relationship between one human being and another has also been cramped by it, as though it had been lifted out of the riverbed of endless possibilities and set down in a fallow spot on the bank, to which nothing happens. For it is not inertia alone that is responsible for human relationships repeating themselves from case to case, indescribably monotonous and unrenewed, it is shyness before any sort of new, unforeseeable experience with which one does not think oneself able to cope. But only someone who is ready for everything, who excludes nothing, not even the most enigmatical, will live the relation to another as something alive and will hirself draw exhaustively from hir own existence.

--Ranier Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

I'm not ready for everything, but I think myself able to cope. I hope.  I will try.  I want to live in relation to the other as someone, fully alive, subjective.

Our lives are not our own; they belong to the people who desperately need us.

To understand suffering, you must go beyond pain and pleasure. Your own desires and fears prevent you from understanding and thereby helping others. In reality there are no others, and by helping yourself you help everybody else. If you are serious about the suffering of mankind, you must perfect the only means of help you have, yourself.

Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

"At bottom, every woman knows well enough that she is a unique being, only once on this earth; and by no extraordinary chance will such a marvelously picturesque piece of diversity in unity as she is, ever be put together a second time."

--Nietzsche, regendered

Nothing can cure the soul but the senses, just as nothing can cure the senses but the soul.

Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

All credibility, all good conscience, all evidence of truth come only from the senses.

Nietzsche

There is lots of room to make mistakes. That's true, absolutely true. But such room for mistakes cannot be created unless there is surrendering, giving, some kind of opening. It cannot take place if there's no basis for it. However, if there is some basis --if we can give away our aggression or attempt to give it away, if we attempt to open up and strip away our territoriality and possessiveness -- then there is lots of room for making mistakes. That doesn't necessarily mean there is room for dramatic mistakes, but lots of little dribbles of mistakes can take place, which usually occur in any case -- we can't avoid it. We have to allow ourselves to realize that we are complete fools; otherwise, we have nowhere to begin. We have to be willing to be a fool and not always try to be a wise guy. We could almost say that being willing to be a fool in one of the first wisdoms.
--from Dharma Art by Chogyam Trungpa

"I don't want to be that jackass," I've said often of late, in conversation with friends and lovers regarding the complications of trying to date multiple women simultaneously, while being in full integrity, honesty and coming from the heart in all of it, with everyone.  Why am I doing it?  Because I've made a commitment to myself to not get into a significant and mutually exclusive relationship for a while.  (How long this "for a while" is something I trust myself to know.)  How am I doing it?  I'm making it up as I go along, relying on what I've learned of the Dharma from teachers, from my own practice, from living and working in the Naropa community, and synthesizing that with what I learned of Queer Ethics care of a course of the same name, and my integration of it. 

For my speech and activity in all of this, I'm relying on my heart to tell me what is true, within the context of what the whipsnap quickness of my mind can discern, what my senses perceive, and what comes through intuitively as a gestalt or a tiny detail or anywhere in between.  I'm also continually nudging myself along the edge of what feels like slightly risky or potentially embarrassing self-disclosure because the only way to make any of this workable is for ongoing and open communication to be the ground of relationship.

"I don't want to be that jackass" means that I want to do all of this right; I want to be true, I want to be real, I want to be a living breathing expression of what a queer ethics is, in practice, not in theory.  But the thing is, I'm going to screw up.  Sometimes, I'm going to be that jackass, whether out of ignorance or perhaps even the best intentions.  And sometimes, you're going to screw up.  We're going to hurt each other.  There's no guarantee of not getting hurt in committing to one-to-one relationship either.

I don't think this will ever work without the room to make mistakes.  Without the chance to just blurt it out, saying the wrong thing, or saying the right thing poorly.  We can always go back and edit later.  We can converse, we can discuss, we can debate, we might even argue or fight.  We may reach agreement, or at least an understanding.  Wounds can be salved, bruises kissed.  I cannot promise to be perfect.  I can't even try to be perfect. I can only promise that I will be true to my heart and as real and as present with you as I have the capacity to be in any given moment.  And that I will tell you when I'm shutting down and checking out.  And that I'll come back.  And I'll work with my shit, your shit, and our boundaries. And I can avoid the major deal-breaking blunders and other jackassery.

I am completely willing to be a fool.

However, I realize that not everyone is willing to be so foolish as I.  Regardless of my clarity about interpersonal queer ethics, theory is not the same thing as practice. This is not a game, regardless of how playfully I may engage it.  This is not an experiment, although this practice is, due to its newness, rather experimental (I have to develop my ethics into a method, approach, or way of being, which is always going to be a trial-and-error process).

This is me seeking the fullest bloom of my heart
...
or something romantically foolish like that :)

From The Angry Black Woman:

When white people say:

“I don’t see color”

or

“We should live in a colorblind society”

What they’re actually saying is:

“I refuse to deal with how our culture and society treats people of color because it makes me uncomfortable. I don’t want to understand how having a different skin color or ethnicity affects other people because that means I would have to think and consider other points of view. What I want is to not have to think. I prefer to believe I live in a fantasy land where no one ever pays attention to skin color, ethnicity, culture, or religion. I am part of the problem with race relations, not its great savior.”

Just so you know.

Genuine inspiration is not particularly dramatic. It's very ordinary. It comes from settling down in your environment and accepting situations as natural. Out of that you begin to realize that you can dance with them. So inspiration comes from acceptance rather than from having a sudden flash of a good gimmick coming up in your mind. Natural inspiration is simply having something somewhere that you can relate with, so it has a sense of stableness and solidity. Inspiration has two parts: openness and clear vision, or in Sanskrit, shunyata and prajna. Both are based on the notion of original mind, traditionally known as buddha mind, which is blank, nonterritorial, noncompetitive, and open.

--from "One Stroke" in Dharma Art by Chogyam Trungpa

Inside this new love, die.
Your way begins on the other side.
Become the sky.
Take an axe to the prison wall.
Escape.
Walk out like someone suddenly born into color.
Do it now.
You're covered with a thick cloud.
Slide out the side. Die,
and be quiet. Quietness is the surest sign
that you've died.
Your old life was a frantic running
from silence.

The speecheless full moon
comes out now.

--Rumi