Emerson
To laugh often and much;
to win the respect of intelligent people
and the affection of children;
to earn the appreciation of honest critics
and endure the betrayal of false friends;
to appreciate beauty; to find the best in others;
to leave the world a bit better,
whether by a healthy child,
a garden patch
or a redeemed social condition;
to know even one life has breathed easier
because you have lived.
This is to have succeeded.
The greatest homage we can pay to truth is to use it.
In the woods, we return to reason and faith. There I feel that nothing can befall me in life,--no disgrace, no calamity (leaving me my eyes), which nature cannot repair. Standing on the bare ground,--my head bathed by the blithe air and uplifted into infinite space, --all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eyeball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part and parcel of God. The name of the nearest friend sounds then foreign and accidental: to be brothers, to be acquaintences, master or servant, is then a trifle and a disturbance. I am the lover of uncontained and immortal beauty. In the wilderness, I find something more dear and connate than in streets or villages. In the tranquil landscape, and especially in the distant line of the horizon, man beholds somewhat as beautiful as his own nature.
Whoso would be a man, must be a nonconformist. He who sould gather immortal palms must not be hindered by the name of goodness. Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind. Absolve you to yourself and you shall have the sufferage of the world.
Be yourself; no base imitator of another, but your best self. There is something which you can do better than another. Listen to the inward voice and bravely obey that. Do the things at which you are great, not what you were never made for.
To be great is to be misunderstood.
Great men are they who see that spiritual is stronger than any material force; that thoughts rule the world.
The whole course of things goes to teach us faith. We need only obey. There is guidance for each of us, and by lowly listening we shall hear the right word.... Place yourself in the middle of the stream of power and wisdom which flows into you as life, place yourself in the full center of that flood, then you are without effort impelled to truth, to right, and a perfect contentment.
It is a lesson which all history teaches wise men,
to put trust in ideas, and not in circumstances.
We lie in the lap of immense intelligence, which makes us receivers of its truth and organ of its activity. When we discern justice, when we discern truth, we do nothing by ourselves, but allow a passage to its beams. If we ask whence this comes, if we seek to pry into the soul that causes, all philosophy is at fault. Its presence or its absence is all we can affirm.
If you would lift me you must be on higher ground.
The crowning fortune of a man [person] is to be born to some pursuit which finds him employment and happiness, whether it be to make baskets, or broadswords, or canals, or statues, or songs.
Each man [person] has his own vocation. The talent is the call. There is one direction in which all space is open to him. He has faculties silently inviting him thither to endless exertion. ... He inclines to do something which is easy to him and good when it is done, but which no other man [person] can do. He has no rival. For the more truly he consults his own powers, the more difference will his work exhibit from the work of any other. (On Character and Self-Reliance)
Nature arms each man with some faculty which enables him to do easily some feat impossible to any other, and thus makes him necessary to society. ... Society can never prosper, but must always be bankrupt, until every man does that which he was created to do. (Wealth)
Adopt the pace of nature: her secret is patience.
The greatest man in history was the poorest.
The powers of the soul are commensurate with its needs.
The spirit only can teach. Only he can give who has, he only can create who is.
Have the courage not to adopt another's courage. There is scope and cause and resistance enough for us in our proper work and circumstance.
Belief consists in accepting the affirmations of the soul; unbelief, in denying them.
Every spirit makes its house, but afterwards the house confines the spirit.
Every man is a divinity in disguise, a god playing the fool.
Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind.
Souls are not saved in bundles.
Immortality will come to such as are fit for it; and he who would be a great soul in the future must be a great soul now.
There's no road has not a star above it.
God will not have his work made manifest by cowards.
Men live on the brink of mysteries and harmonies into which they can never enter, and with their hand on the doorlatch they die outside.
Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string. Accept the place the divine providence has found for you, the society of your contemporaries, the connection of events.
I do not wish to expiate, but to live. My life is for itself and not for a spectacle. I much prefer that it should be of a lower strain, so it be genuine and equal, then that it should be glittering and unsteady. I wish it to be sound and sweet, and not to need diet and bleeding.
He walks abreast with his days and feels no shame in not 'studying a profession', for he does not postpone his life, but lives already. He has not one chance, but a hundred chances.
Nothing can bring you peace but yourself. Nothing can bring you peace but the triumph of principles.
Quotes from Henry David Thoreau
Dreams are the touchstones of our character.
Let us know and conform only to the fashions of eternity.
Silence is the communing of a conscious soul with itself. If the soul attend for a moment to its own infinity, then and there is silence. She is audible to all men, at all times, in all places, and if we will we may always hearken to her admonitions.
While civilization has been improving our houses, it has not equally improved the men who are to inhabit them. It has created palaces, but it was not so easy to create noblemen and kings.
The perception of beauty is a moral test.
I learned this, at least, by my experiment: that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he had imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours.
Only that day dawns to which we are awake.
Let nothing come between you and the light.
We must learn to reawaken and keep ourselves awake, not by mechanical aids but by an infinite expectation of the dawn, which does not forsake us in our soundest sleep.I know of no more encouraging fact than the unquestionable ability of man to elevate his life by conscious endeavor. It is something to be to paint a particular picture, or to carve a statue, and so to make a few objects beautiful, but it is more glorious to carve and paint the very atmosphere and medium through which we look, which we morally can do. To affect the quality of the day, that is the highest of arts.
We all stand in the front rank of the battle every moment of our lives; where there is a brave man there is the thickest of the fight, there the point of honor.
Time is but the stream I go a-fishing in. I drink in it. But while I drink, I see the sandy bottom and detect how shallow it is. Its thin current slips by, and eternity remains.
You cannot kill time without injuring eternity.
On Being Oneself
I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, to discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practice resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world; or if it were sublime, to know it by experience, and to be able to give a true account of it in my next excursion.
The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. What is called resignation is confirmed desperation.
I am disappointed to find that most that I am and value myself for is lost, or worse than lost, on my audience. I fail to get even the attention of the mass. I should suit them better if I suited myself less. I feel the public demand an average man - average thoughts and manners - not originality, nor even absolute excellence. You cannot interest them except as you are like them and sympathize with them.
Why should we be in such desperate haste to succeed and in such desperate enterprises? If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away.
If I am not I, who will be?
I cannot tell you what I am, more than a ray of the summer's sun. What I am I am, and say not. Being is the great explainer.
I was not born to be forced. I will breathe after my own fashion.
The greater part of what my neighbors call good I believe in my soul to be bad, and if I repent of anything it is very likely to my good behavior.
"Cars" sound like "cares" to me.
Go not so far out of your way for a truer life; keep strictly onward in that path alone which your genius points out. Do the things which lie nearest to you, but which are difficult to do.
All genuine goodness is original and as free from cant and tradition as the air.
Each man's necessary path, though as obscure and apparently uneventful as that of a beetle in the grass, is the way to the deepest joys he is susceptible of; though he converses only with moles and fungi and disgraces his relatives, it is no matter if he knows what is steel to his flint.
Pursue some path, however narrow and crooked, in which you can walk with love and reverence. Wherever a man separates from the multitude and goes his own way, there is a fork in the road, though the travelers along the highway see only a gap in the paling.
Public opinion is a weak tyrant compared with our own private opinion. What a man thinks of himself, that it is which determines, or rather indicates, his fate.
On Communication / Relationship
The greatest compliment that was ever paid me was when one asked me what I thought, and attended to my answer. (LWP)
Just so hollow and ineffectual, for the most part, is our ordinary conversation. Surface meets surface. When our life ceases to be inward and private, conversation degenerates into mere gossip. We rarely meet a man who can tell us any news which he has not read in a newspaper, or been told by his neighbor; and, for the most part, the only difference between us and our fellow is that he has seen the newspaper, or been out to tea, and we have not. In proportion as our inward life fails, we go more constantly and desperately to the post-office. You may depend on it, that the poor fellow who walks away with the greatest number of letters, proud of his extensive correspondence, has not heard from himself this long while.(LWP)
On Work
How trivial and uninteresting and wearisome and unsatisfactory are all employments for which men will pay you money!
I have thoroughly tried schoolkeeping, and found that my expenses were in proportion , or rather out of proportion, to my income, for I was obliged to dress and train, not to say think and believe, accordingly, and I lost my time into the bargain. As I did not teach for the good of my fellow-men, but simply for a livelihood, this was a failure.
... I do not need the police of meaningless labor to regulate me....(LWP)
Most men would feel insulted if it were proposed to employ them in throwing stones over a wall, and then in throwing them back, merely that they might earn their wages. But many are no more worthily employed now.(LWP)
The ways by which you may get money almost without exception lead downward. To have done anything by which you earned money merely is to have been truly idle or worse. If the laborer gets no more than the wages which his employer pays him, he is cheated, he cheats himself. If you would get money as a writer or lecturer, you must be popular, which is to go down perpendicularly. Those services which the community will most readily pay for, it is most disagreeable to render. You are paid for being something less than a man.(LWP)
The community has no bribe that will tempt a wise man. You may raise money enough to tunnel a mountain, but you cannot raise money enough to hire a man who is minding his own business. An efficient and valuable man does what he can, whether the community pay him for it or not.(LWP)
If I should sell both my forenoons and afternoons to society, as most appear to do, I am sure that for me there would be nothing left worth living for. I trust that I shall never thus sell my birthright for a mess of pottage. I wish to suggest that a man may be very industrious, and yet not spend his time well. There is no more fatal blunderer than he who consumes the greater part of his life getting his living. All great enterprises are self-supporting. The poet, for instance, must sustain his body by his poetry, as a steam planing-mill feeds its boilers with the shavings it makes. You must get your living by loving.(LWP)
It is remarkable that there is little or nothing to be remembered written on the subject of getting a living; how to make getting a living not merely holiest and honorable, but altogether inviting and glorious; for if getting a living is not so, then living is not. One would think, from looking at literature, that this question had never disturbed a solitary individual's musings. Is it that men are too much disgusted with their experience to speak of it? The lesson of value which money teaches, which the Author of the Universe has taken so much pains to teach us, we are inclined to skip altogether. As for the means of living, it is wonderful how indifferent men of all classes are about it, even reformers, so called- whether they inherit, or earn, or steal it. I think that Society has done nothing for us in this respect, or at least has undone what she has done. Cold and hunger seem more friendly to my nature than those methods which men have adopted and advise to ward them off.(LWP)
On Business
Superfluous wealth can buy superfluities only. Money is not required to buy one necessary of the soul.
Most men are engaged in business the greater part of their lives, because the soul abhors a vacuum, and they have not discovered any continuous employment for man's nobler faculties.
If a man has spent all his days about some business, by which he has merely got to be rich, as it is called, i.e., has got much money, many houses and barns and woodlots, then his life has been a failure, I think; but if he has been trying to better his condition in a higher sense than this, has been trying to invent something, to be somebody, - i.e., to invent and get a patent for himself - so that all may see his originality, though he should never get above board - and great inventors, you know, commonly die poor - I shall think him comparatively successful.
If a man walk in the woods for love of them half of each day, he is in danger of being regarded as a loafer; but if he spends his whole day as a speculator, shearing off those woods and making earth bald before her time, he is esteemed an industrious and enterprising citizen. As if a town had no interest in its forests but to cut them down!(LWP)
Do not hire a man who does your work for money, but him who does it for love of it.(LWP)
That so many are ready to live by luck, and so get the means of commanding the labor of others less lucky, without contributing any value to society! And that is called enterprise! I know of no more startling development of the immorality of trade, and all the common modes of getting a living. The philosophy and poetry and religion of such a mankind are not worth the dust of a puffball. The hog that gets his living by rooting, stirring up the soil so, would be ashamed of such company. If I could command the wealth of all the worlds by lifting my finger, I would not pay such a price for it.(LWP)
Did God direct us so to get our living, digging where we never planted - and He would, perchance, reward us with lumps of gold?(LWP)
On Truth
In accumulating property for ourselves or our posterity, in founding a family or a state, or acquiring fame even, we are mortal; but in dealing with truth we are immortal, and need fear no change or accident.
We select granite for the underpinning of our houses and barns; we build fences of stone; but we do not ourselves rest on an underpinning of granitic truth, the lowest primitive rock. Our sills are rotten. What stuff is the man made of who is not coexistent in our thought with the purest and subtlest truth?(LWP)
Men were making speeches to him all over the country, but each expressed only the thought, or the want of thought, of the multitude. No man stood on truth. They were merely banded together, as usual one leaning on another, and all together on nothing; as the Hindus made the world rest on an elephant, the elephant on a tortoise, and the tortoise on a serpent, and had nothing to put under the serpent.(LWP)
Shall the mind be a public arena, where the affairs of the street and the gossip of the tea-table chiefly are discussed? Or shall it be a quarter of heaven itself- an hypaethral temple, consecrated to the service of the gods? I find it so difficult to dispose of the few facts which to me are significant, that I hesitate to burden my attention with those which are insignificant, which only a divine mind could illustrate. Such is, for the most part, the news in newspapers and conversation. It is important to preserve the mind's chastity in this respect.(LWP)
By all kinds of traps and signboards, threatening the extreme penalty of the divine law, exclude such trespassers from the only ground which can be sacred to you. It is so hard to forget what it is worse than useless to remember! If I am to be a thoroughfare, I prefer that it be of the mountain brooks, the Parnassian streams, and not the town sewers.(LWP)
If we have thus desecrated ourselves- as who has not?- the remedy will be by wariness and devotion to reconsecrate ourselves, and make once more a fane of the mind. We should treat our minds, that is, ourselves, as innocent and ingenuous children, whose guardians we are, and be careful what objects and what subjects we thrust on their attention. Read not the Times. Read the Eternities. Conventionalities are at length as had as impurities. Even the facts of science may dust the mind by their dryness, unless they are in a sense effaced each morning, or rather rendered fertile by the dews of fresh and living truth. Knowledge does not come to us by details, but in flashes of light from heaven. Yes, every thought that passes through the mind helps to wear and tear it, and to deepen the ruts....(LWP)
On Freedom
Talk about slavery! ... It exists wherever men are bought and sold, wherever a man allows himself to be made a mere thing or a tool, and surrenders his inalienable rights of reason and conscience. Indeed this slavery is more complete than that which enslaves the body alone. ... I never yet met with, or heard of, a judge who was not a slave of this kind, and so the finest and most unfailing weapon of injustice.
America is said to be the arena on which the battle of freedom is to be fought; but surely it cannot be freedom in a merely political sense that is meant. Even if we grant that the American has freed himself from a political tyrant, he is still the slave of an economical and moral tyrant.(LWP)
Do we call this the land of the free? What is it to be free from King George and continue the slaves of King Prejudice? What is it to be born free and not to live free? What is the value of any political freedom, but as a means to moral freedom?(LWP)
We are provincial, because we do not find at home our standards; because we do not worship truth, but the reflection of truth; because we are warped and narrowed by an exclusive devotion to trade and commerce and manufactures and agriculture and the like, which are but means, and not the end.(LWP)
On Politics
The inefficient offer their inefficiency to the highest bidder, and are forever expecting to be put into office. One would suppose that they were rarely disappointed.(LWP)
As a snow-drift is formed where there is a lull in the wind, so, one would say, where there is a lull of truth, an institution springs up. But the truth blows right on over it, nevertheless, and at length blows it down.(LWP)
Those things which now most engage the attention of men, as politics and the daily routine, are, it is true, vital functions of human society, but should be unconsciously performed, like the corresponding functions of the physical body. They are infrahuman, a kind of vegetation. I sometimes awake to a half-consciousness of them going on about me, as a man may become conscious of some of the processes of digestion in a morbid state, and so have the dyspepsia, as it is called. It is as if a thinker submitted himself to be rasped by the great gizzard of creation. Politics is, as it were, the gizzard of society, full of grit and gravel, and the two political parties are its two opposite halves- sometimes split into quarters, it may be, which grind on each other. Not only individuals, but states, have thus a confirmed dyspepsia, which expresses itself, you can imagine by what sort of eloquence. Thus our life is not altogether a forgetting, but also, alas! to a great extent, a remembering, of that which we should never have been conscious of, certainly not in our waking hours. Why should we not meet, not always as dyspeptics, to tell our bad dreams, but sometimes as eupeptics, to congratulate each other on the ever-glorious morning? I do not make an exorbitant demand, surely.(LWP)
The Spirit Walk
* * * * * * * * * * *When you follow your bliss...
Doors will open where you would not have
thought there would be doors, and where
there wouldn't be a door for anyone else.
--------Joseph Campbell
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
Until one is committed, there is hesitancy, the chance to
draw back, always ineffectiveness. Concerning all acts of
initiative (and creation) there is one elementary truth, the
ignorance of which kills countless ideas and splendid plans:
that the moment one definitely commits oneself, then
Providence moves too. All sorts of things occur to help one
that would never otherwise have occurred. A whole stream
of events issues from the decision, raising in ones favor all
manner of unforeseen incidents and meetings and material
assistance, which no man could have dreamed would have come his way.
------Goethe* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
It is only with the heart
that one can see rightly;
What is essential is invisible to the eye.
--------Antoine de Saint Exupiary
* * * * * * * * * * * * * *
Listen, listen, listen to my heart song
I will always love you
I will always serve you
I will never forget you
I will never forsake you
Sweat Lodge Chant* * * * * * * * * * * *
The present moment is where life can be
found, and if you don't arrive there, you miss
your appointment with life. You don't have to
run any more. Breathing in, we say 'I have
arrived.' Breathing out, we say, 'I am home.'
This is a very strong practice, a very deep
practice.
--Thich Nhat Hanh* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
I began to see that, when it comes right down to it, we are
nothing until that nothing becomes so dedicated that it is like
a vessel through which good things can move, an instrument
for receiving knowledge and sharing it with others who
might be in need.
---Bear Heart* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
The word God still aroused a certain antipathy. When the
thought was expressed that there might be a God personal
to me this feeling was intensified. I didn't like the idea. I
could go for such conceptions as Creative Intelligence,
Universal Mind or Spirit of Nature but I resisted the
thought of a Czar of the Heavens, however loving His sway
might be. I have since talked with scores of men who felt
the same way.
My friend suggested what then seemed a novel idea. He
said, "Why don't you choose your own conception of
God?" That statement hit me hard. It melted the icy
intellectual mountain in whose shadow I had lived and
shivered many years. I stood in the sunlight at last
Bill W. Co-founder of Alcoholics Anonymous* * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
One does not become enlightened by
imagining figures of light but by making the
darkness conscious.
---Carl Jung
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
How good and how pleasant it is that brothers sit together.
Psalm 133
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
I have just three things to teach:
simplicity, patience, compassion.
These three are your greatest treasures.
Simple in actions and in thoughts,
you return to the source of being.
---Tao Te Ching* * * * * * * * * * * *
Never spend time with people who don't respect you.
----Maori proverb* * * * * * * * * * * *
Raven Quest Adventures
*****************************************************************The Trail Is Beautiful...
Be Still...
Dakota Indian
**********************************************
Hear me, four quarters of the world - a
Relative I am! Give me the strength to walk
The soft earth, a relative to all that is!
Give me the eyes to see and the strength
To understand, that I may be like you. With
Your power only can I face the winds.Black Elk
*********************************************
Take the breath of the new dawn
And make it part of you.
It will give you strength.Hopi
*********************************************
If you let yourself be absorbed completely
If you surrender completely to the moments as they pass,
You live more richly those moments.Anne Morrow Lindbergh
********************************************
You don't have to control your thoughts:
You just have to stop letting them control you.Dan Millman
********************************************
We are what we think.
All that we are arises with our thoughts.
With our thoughts,
We make the world.Buddha
********************************************
The past no longer exists except
As a set of memories and impressions
You keep alive in the present.Dan Millman
********************************************
Many men go fishing all of their lives
Without knowing
That it is not fish that they are after.Henry David Thoreau
********************************************
To sit or lie upon the ground is to be able to think more deeply into the mysteries of life and come closer to a kinship to all other lives about you.Kenneth Meadows
************************
We are like the man who was searching under the light of a street lamp for the key to the safe where he kept his valuables, "Can I help you to find it?" asked a kindly passer-by. They both searched and searched, but there was no sign of the key. Finally the passer-by inquired: "Are you absolutely sure you lost it here?""Oh, " said the man, "I didn't lose it here. I lost it in the house, but it's dark inside and it's light out here so I thought this would be an easier place to look."
We may smile at the householder's stupidity, but most of us have been guilty of similar logic. It is easier to look for something under some kind of illumination provided by others, but if what we are seeking was never there in the first place no amount of so-called "enlightenment" will lead us to find it. We search in vain. Yet all the householder had to do was to go home and turn on his own light and the key he wanted would have been within his capacity to find.
The Medicine Way
by Kenneth Meadows************************
Man's heart, away from nature, becomes hard.
Luther Standing Bear
************************
O Great Spirit of our
Ancestors, I raise
My pipe to you.
To your messengers the four winds, and
To Mother Earth who provides
For your children.
Give us wisdom to teach our children
To love, to respect and to be kind
To each other so that they may grow
With peace in mind.
Let us learn to share all good things that
You provide for us on this Earth.
Native American Prayer
************************
The future is largely fashioned in the present out of the fabric of the past. Our thinking and our actions, therefore, condition the future. Change the thinking and you change the attitudes to the way things are done. Change the things that are done and you change the future.
Earth Medicine
************************
So in life, some enter the services of fame and others of money, but the best choice is that of those few who spend their time in the contemplation of nature and as lovers of wisdom.Pythagoras
************************The more I study and observe things, the more convinced I become that sorrow over separation and death is perhaps the greatest delusion. To realize that it is a delusion is to become free. There is no death, no separation of the substance.
Mahatma Gandhi
************************The tiger approached me, stalking,
And opened it's tooth filled mouth
And released a roar
That shook the universe all around.
Although full with fear
I stared unflinching, deep into its eyes.
And was devoured, and became the tiger.
Now there is nothing left to fear
Nothing at all.Eaglecrow
************************
Yesterday is History, Tomorrow is a Mystery and Today is a gift:
that's why we call it - The Present.
Brian Dyson
CEO of Coca Cola
************************
THE MEDICINE WAY
Let Light enfold me
That my inward eye may see clearly
The Path the lies ahead.
Let my mind be opened up
That I may recognize
The signposts along the Way.Grant me the wisdom
That comes from understanding
The true from the false.
And guide my steps
So that should I falter or stumble,
Tripped by former beliefs
That blind me still
I may go forward with courage
And with the determination
Which persistence bears.Let me be embraced
With the Love by which
The whole Creation is moved.
The very Essence with which
All things are held together
Dependent yet individuated..
In which all are my relatives.Let me know the way
That is the Beauty Way
The beautiful way
Where all who will
May Walk in Beauty
And where the end of the Path
Is but a new beginning
To my infinity.
And every new beginning
Another ever-present moment
In Eternity.
**************
Many of our fears are tissue-paper-thin,
And a single courageous step
Would carry us clear through them.Brendan Francis
************************All the animals except man
Know that the principal business of life
Is to enjoy it.
Samuel Butler
************************We are all prisoners of our minds.
This realization is the first step
On the journey to freedom
Ram Dass
************************We must close our eyes and invoke a new
Manner of seeing
A wakefulness that is the birthright of us all,
Though few put it to use.
Plotinus***************************************
In order that the mind should see light instead of
Darkness, so the entire soul must be turned away
From this changing world, until its eye can learn
To contemplate reality and that supreme splendor
Which we have called the good. Hence there may
Well be an art whose aim would be to effect this
Very thing.
Socrates
************************This we know: All things are connected
Like the blood which unites one family.
All things are connected.
Whatever befalls the earth
Befalls the sons of the earth.
Man did not weave the web of life.
He is merely a strand in it.
Whatever he does to the web
He does to himself.
Chief Seattle
************************As we learn we always change,
And so does our perceiving.
This changed perception then
Becomes a Teacher
Inside each of us.
Seven Arrows******************************************
Grandfather,
Look at our brokenness.
We know that in all creation
Only the human family
Has strayed from the sacred way.
We know that we are the ones
Who are divided
And we are the ones
Who must come back together
To walk in the sacred way
Grandfather,
Sacred One,
Teach us love, compassion, honor
That we may heal the earth
And heal each other.
Ojibway Prayer
************************The first duty of love
Is to listen.
Paul Tillich
************************When you come to a fork in the road,
Take it.Yogi Berra
******************************
Guest House
This being human is a guest house.
Every morning a new arrival.A joy, a depression, a meanness,
Some momentary awareness comes
As an unexpected visitor.Welcome and entertain them all!
Even if they're a crowd of sorrows,
Who violently sweeps your house
Empty of it's furniture,
Still, treat each guest honorably.
He may be clearing you out
For some new delight.The dark thought, the shame, the malice,
Meet them at the door laughing,
And invite them in.Be grateful for whoever comes,
Because each has been sent
As guide from beyond.
Rumi
************************"Who are You?" crooned the Caterpillar.
Alice replied rather shyly,
"I hardly know, Sir, just at present.
I know who I was when I got up this morning,
but I think I must have changed several times since then."
Lewis Carroll*************************************************************
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the four agreements
BE IMPECCABLE WITH YOUR WORD
Speak with integrity. Say only what you mean. Avoid using the word to speak against yourself or to gossip about others. Use the power of your word in the direction of truth and love.
TAKE NOTHING PERSONALLY
Nothing others do is because of you. What others say and do is a projection of their own reality, their own dream. When you are immune to the opinions of others, you won’t be the victim of needless suffering.
MAKE NO ASSUMPTIONS
Find the courage to ask questions and to express what you really want. Communicate with others as clearly as you can to avoid misunderstandings, sadness, and drama. With just this one agreement, you can completely transform your life.
ALWAYS DO YOUR BEST
Your best is going to change from moment to moment; It will be different when you are healthy as opposed to sick. Under any circumstance, simply do your best, and you will avoid self-judgement, self-abuse, and regret.
-------Don Miguel Ruiz on The Toltec Way
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I told you once that our lot as men is to learn, for good or bad.
don Juan Matus
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In modern times it (the heroes journey) is experienced through dreams and hallucinations in the office of the modern psychoanalyst-therapist-priest. And always after the thrills of getting under way, the adventure develops into a journey of darkness, horror, disgust and phantasmagoric fear. The crux of the curious difficulty lies in the fact that our conscious views of what life ought to be seldom corresponds to what life actually is. Generally, we refuse to admit within ourselves or within our friends the fullness of that pushing, self-protective, malodorous, carnivorous, lecherous fever which is the very nature of our organic selves.
Joseph Campbell
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If the warrior is an instinctual energy form, then it is here to stay. And it pays to face it.
The Warrior traditions all affirm that, in addition to training, what enables a Warrior to reach clarity of thought is living with the awareness of his own impending death. The Warrior knows the shortness of his life and how fragile it is. A man under the guidance of the Warrior knows how few his days are. Rather than depressing him, this awareness leads him to an outpouring of life-force and to an intense experience of his life that is unknown to others. Every act counts.Robert Moore
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A warrior must focus his attention on the link between himself and his death. Without remorse, sadness or worrying, he must focus his attention on the fact that he does not have time and let his acts flow accordingly. He must let each of his acts be his last battle on earth. Only under those conditions will his acts have their rightful power. Otherwise they will be, for as long as he lives, the acts of a fool.
don Juan Matus
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A man accessing the Warrior archetype...
has as unconquerable spirit, great courage, is fearless, takes responsibility for his actions, has self discipline...Robert Moore
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When a Warrior is in service to a True King---that is, to a transcendent cause---he does well, and his body becomes a hardworking servant, which he requires to endure cold, heat, pain, wounds, scarring, hunger, lack of sleep, hardships of all kinds. The body usually responds well. The person in touch with the Warrior can work long hours, ignore fatigue, do what is necessary, finish the Ph.D. and all the footnotes, endure obnoxious department heads, live sparsely like Ralph Nader, write as T.S. Eliot did under a single dangling light bulb for years, clean up shit and filth endlessly like Saint Francis or Mother Teresa, endure contempt, disdain, and exile as Sakharov did. A clawed hand takes the comfort-loving baby away, and an adult warrior inhabits the body.
Robert Bly
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In order to become a man of knowledge one must be a warrior, not a whimpering child. One must strive without giving up, without complaint, without flinching, until one sees . . .
don Juan Matus
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The real accomplishment (in life) is the art of being a warrior, which is the only way to balance the terror of being a man with the wonder of being a man.
Carlos Castaneda
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God will not have his work made manifest by cowards.
Emerson
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Every Light casts shadows. The shadow of the protecting, empowering energy of the Warrior is cowardice and abuse. When these possess a person he becomes either timid and unwilling to face life on life's terms, or he becomes savage and harmful to himself and others. Fear of these shadows, can prevent one from realizing his true path.
Eaglecrow* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
Warriors,warriors we call ourselves. We fight for splendid virtue, for high endeavor, for sublime wisdom, therefore we call ourselves warriors.
---Aunguttara Nikaya
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The world's a puzzle; no need to make sense out of it.
No amount of knowledge will nourish or sustain your spirit...Life requires more than knowledge...Life demands right action if knowledge is to come alive.
The warrior acts, and the fool only reacts.Dan Millman
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Warriorship inside, then, amounts to a soul alertness that helps protect a human being from being turned into copper wire, and protects us from shamers, unconscious swordsman, hostile people, and greedy interior beings.
Robery Bly
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Your bodily soul wants comforting.
The severe father wants spiritual clarity.
He scolds but eventually
leads you into the open.
Pray for a tough instructor
to hear and act and stay within you.
We have been busy
accumulating solace.
Make us afraid of how we were.Rumi
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More Quotations
The tests, ordeals and ultimate deed are to make the hero capable of enduring full possession of the mother destroyer, his inevitable bride. With that he knows that he and the father are one. He is in the father's place.
In modern times it (the heroes journey) is experienced through dreams and hallucinations in the office of the modern psychoanalyst-therapist-priest. And always after the thrills of getting under way, the adventure develops into a journey of darkness, horror, disgust and phantasmagoric fear. The crux of the curious difficulty lies in the fact that our conscious views of what life ought to be seldom corresponds to what life actually is. Generally, we refuse to admit within ourselves or within our friends the fullness of that pushing, self-protective, malodorous, carnivorous, lecherous fever which is the very nature of our organic selves.
-----------Joseph Campbell
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"It seems that no matter where I turn in society, there is a prefabricated design waiting to consume me. In the natural world, though, I feel no such threat. I don't have to agree with the experts, star in Little League, confess past sins, or worry about future damnation---in nature I am simply invited to celebrate my life, here and now".
------Joseph Jastrab
"A spiritual life naturally embodies trouble. If you aren't experiencing trouble with it then you aren't truly doing it."
------Michael Meade
One of my teachers on The Vision Quest, the heroes journey and the search for the Holy Grail: A hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a world of supernatural wonder: fabulous forces are there encountered and a decisive victory is won: the hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow man.
-----Joseph Campbell
When we get out of the glass bottles of our ego,
and when we escape like squirrels turning in the
cages of our personality
and get into the forests again,
we shall shiver with cold and fright
but things will happen to us
so that we don't know ourselves.
Cool, unlying life will rush in,
and passion will make our bodies taut with power,
we shall stamp our feet with new power
and old things will fall down,
we shall laugh, and institutions will curl up like
burnt paper.
---D.H. LAWRENCE
In the woods, we return to reason and faith. There I feel that nothing can befall me in life,--no disgrace, no calamity (leaving me my eyes), which nature cannot repair. Standing on the bare ground,--my head bathed by the blithe air and uplifted into infinite space, --all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eyeball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part and parcel of God. The name of the nearest friend sounds then foreign and accidental: to be brothers, to be acquaintences, master or servant, is then a trifle and a disturbance. I am the lover of uncontained and immortal beauty. In the wilderness, I find something more dear and connate than in streets or villages. In the tranquil landscape, and especially in the distant line of the horizon, man beholds somewhat as beautiful as his own nature.
---EMERSON
I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, to discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practice resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world; or if it were sublime, to know it by experience, and to be able to give a true account of it in my next excursion.
---THOREAU
And the world cannot be discovered by a journey of miles, no matter how long, but only by a spiritual journey,a journey of one inch, very arduous and humbling and joyful, by which we arrive at the ground at our feet, and learn to be at home.
WENDELL BERRY
ONE HOUR TO MADNESS AND JOY
One hour to madness and joy! O furious! O confine me not!
(What is this that frees me so in storms?
What do my shouts amid lightnings and raging winds mean?)
O to drink the mystic deliria deeper than any other man!
O savage and tender achings!
~~~
O to escape utterly from others' anchor and holds!
To drive free! to love free! to dash reckless and dangerous!
To court destruction with taunts, with invitations!
To ascend, to leap to the heavens of the love indicated to me!
To rise thither with my inebriate soul!
To be lost if it must be so!
To feed the remainder of life with one hour of fulness and freedom!
With one brief hour of madness and joy.
---WALT WHITMAN
