Madmen & Poets - Scandinavian Sunday (This is the theantidote)
(But I think it is very useful, and indeed more accurate, to call it “the mind” instead of “my mind.) Imagine if for the next twenty-four hours you had to wear a cap that amplified your thoughts so that everyone within a hundred yards of you could hear every thought that passed through your head. Imagine if the mind were broadcast so that all about you could overhear your thoughts and fantasies, your dreams and fears. How embarrassed or fearful would you be to go outside? How long would you let your fear of the mind continue to isolate you from the hearts of others? And though this experiment sounds like one which few might care to participate in, imagine how freeing it would be at last to have nothing to hide. And how miraculous it would be to see that all others’ minds too were filled with the same confusion and fantasies, the same insecurity and doubt. How long would it take the judgmental mind to begin to release its grasp, to see through the illusion of separateness, to recognize with some humor the craziness of all beings’ minds, the craziness of mind itself?
Stephen and Ondrea Levine, “Who Dies?” (from Whiskey River)
“Every one of us lives in the expectation of eventually finding perfect happiness (the truth of which took me some time to accept), and we believe that some modification either of the outside world or within ourselves is the key that will unlock the door to this lost paradise. The truth, according to Benoit and to Zen, is that this paradise is not something past or future but has always been our state and is our eternal being. But something keeps us from becoming aware of it. Becoming conscious of that state is not something that will be available to us in the future but is offered to us from this moment, at every moment.”
Supreme Doctrine: A recap of Benoit’s main ideas
a deep bow to occurrences
Emptiness is not something sacred in which to believe. It is an emptying: a letting go of the fixations and compulsions that lock one into a tight cell of self that seems to exist in detached isolation from the turbulent flux of life.
themagiclantern, itnumberpi: via bicpen)
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excerpt from Gustave Flaubert's, "A Sentimental Education," 1869
The light at certain points illuminating the outskirts of the wood, left the interior in deep shadow, or else, attenuated in the foreground by a sort of twilight, it exhibited in the background violet vapours, a white radiance. The midday sun, falling directly on wide tracts of greenery, made splashes of light over them, hung gleaming drops of silver from the ends of the branches, streaked the grass with long lines of emeralds, and flung golden spots on the beds of dead leaves. Looking upward, they could distinguish the sky through the tops of the trees. Some of them, which were enormously high, looked like patriarchs or emperors, or, touching one another at their extremities formed with their long shafts, as it were, triumphal arches; others springing forth obliquely from below, seemed like falling columns. This heap of big vertical lines gaped open. Then, enormous green billows unrolled themselves in unequal embossments as far as the surface of the valleys, toward which advanced the brows of other hills looking down on white plains, which finally lost themselves in an undefined pale tinge.
— Gustave Flaubert
John Singer Sargent, “Street in Venice,” 1882 (from: themagiclantern, my-ear-trumpet, shouperduper & colourbomb)
Benjamin Britten - Simple Symphony, Op. 4: I. Boisterous Bourree
