One looks, looks long, and the world comes in.
(via apoetreflects)
But suddenly you’re ripped into being alive. And life is pain, and life is suffering, and life is horror, but my god you’re alive and its spectacular.
(Source: moreofamore, via hollyfriesen)
People say that what we’re all seeking is a meaning for life. I don’t think that’s what we’re really seeking. I think that what we’re seeking is an experience of being alive, so that our life experiences on the purely physical plane will have resonances within our own innermost being and reality, so that we actually feel the rapture of being alive.
Half the people in the world think that the metaphors of their religious traditions, for example, are facts. And the other half contends that they are not facts at all. As a result we have people who consider themselves believers because they accept metaphors as facts, and we have others who classify themselves as atheists because they think religious metaphors are lies.
We’re in a free fall into future. We don’t know where we’re going. Things are changing so fast. And always when you’re going through a long tunnel, anxiety comes along. But all you have to do to transform your hell into a paradise is to turn your fall into a voluntary act. It’s a very interesting shift of perspective … Joyfully participate in the sorrows of the world and everything changes.
God is a metaphor for that which trancends all levels of intellectual thought. It’s as simple as that.
“Sacred space is a space
that is transparent
to transcendence,
and everything within
such a space furnishes
a base for meditation,
even for the youngest child.
When you enter
through the door,
everything within such
a space is symbolic,
the whole world
is mythologized,
and spiritual life is possible.
This is a place where
you can go and feel safe
and bring forth what you are
and what you might be.
This is the place of
creative incubation.
At first you might find
that nothing happens there.
But if you have a
sacred place and use it,
you will eventually
find yourself
again and again.”
—Joseph Campbell, Mythologist / Author (1904-1987)
Thank you to the sublime Tao of Photography.
Schopenhauer, in his splendid essay called “On an Apparent Intention in the Fate of the Individual,” points out that when you reach an advanced age and look back over your lifetime, it can seem to have had a consistent order and plan, as though composed by some novelist. Events that when they occurred had seemed accidental and of little moment turn out to have been indispensable factors in the composition of a consistent plot. So who composed that plot? Schopenhauer suggests that just as your dreams are composed by an aspect of yourself of which your consciousness is unaware, so, too, your whole life is composed by the will within you. And just as people whom you will have met apparently by mere chance became leading agents in the structuring of your life, so, too, will you have served unknowingly as an agent, giving meaning to the lives of others, The whole thing gears together like one big symphony, with everything unconsciously structuring everything else. And Schopenhauer concludes that it is as though our lives were the features of the one great dream of a single dreamer in which all the dream characters dream, too; so that everything links to everything else, moved by the one will to life which is the universal will in nature.
