February 2012
16 posts
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“Simple things are always the most difficult. In actual life it requires the...”
– Carl Gustav Jung, “Psychotherapists or the Clergy,” In The Collected Works of C. G. Jung. (R. F. C. Hull, Trans.). Vol 11, pp. 339-41, paras. 519, 520, 523. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
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“If you discover a very thick and deep shadow, be sure that there is, somewhere...”
– Mirra Alfassa, later Mirra Morisset and Mirra Richard (February 21, 1878 - November 17, 1973), also known as The Mother, was the spiritual collaborator of Sri Aurobindo
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looking within
“I would see D.T. Suzuki from time to time. He later came to see me at Todtmoos. It was in 1954 and I had just received a telegram from the Protestant Academy of Munich asking me to do a conference on oriental wisdom. I took advantage of his presence to ask him: “Master, could you tell me in a few words what oriental wisdom is?”
He smiled and said: “Western knowledge looks outside, Eastern ...
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Crashingly Beautiful: Leonard Cohen on Meditation →
…You run through your top ten erotic fantasies, ambition fantasies, revenge fantasies, global ratification fantasies. You run through them all until you bore yourself to death, basically, and the faculty that produces opinions and snap judgments and unrealistic scenarios for your own prominence, after you run through them for a number of years, they cease to have charge. They bore themselves...
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“One cannot begin to face the real difficulties of the life of prayer and...”
– Thomas Merton, The Climate of Monastic Prayer, Cistercian Publications, 1981
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“There is within us–in even the blithest, most light hearted among us—a...”
– Huston Smith, Why Religion Matters: The Fate of the Human Spirit in an Age of Disbelief (New York, N.Y.: Harper Collins, 2001), p.28
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Poetry Reading this Friday, February 3rd, Orchard...
”Poetry is knowledge, salvation, power, abadonment. An operation capable of changing the world, poetic activity is revolutionary by nature; a spiritual exercise; it is a means of interior liberation. Poetry reveals this world, it creates another.”
—Octavio Paz
What are you up to this Friday around 8pm? Consider coming to the Parabola poetry reading at Orchard House Cafe in...
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“Love lays siege to each being and seeks to discover an opening, a path leading...”
– Lev Gillet, The Burning Bush, (Springfield IL: Templegate, 1976), pp. 12-13.
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January 2012
12 posts
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“To deliver oneself up, hand oneself over, entrust oneself completely to the...”
– Thomas Merton is 97 today. (January 31, 1915 – December 10, 1968) was a 20th century Anglo-American Catholic writer. A Trappist monk of the Abbey of Gethsemani, Kentucky, he was a poet, social activist and student of comparative religion. In 1949, he was ordained to the priesthood and given the name...
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“What is to give light must endure burning.”
– Viktor E. Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning.
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“In silence we face and admit the gap between the depth of our being, which we...”
– Thomas Merton, Love & Living, Naomi Burton Stone and Br. Patrick Hart, Editors. New York: Harcourt. 1979, p. 41.
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Many Windows
“There are many windows through which we can look out into the world, searching for meaning … …Most of us, when we ponder on the meaning of our existence, peer through but one of these windows onto the world. And even that one is often misted over by the breath of our finite humanity. We clear a tiny peephole and stare through. No wonder we are confused by the tiny fraction of a whole that we see....
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“I came here to understand the primal drive of the modern hunter and to find a...”
– Erika Larsen speaking of her long term photographic project ‘Sami: The People Who Walk With Reindeer’
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“As soon as man began considering himself the source of the highest meaning in...”
– Václav Havel, Czech playwright, essayist, poet, dissident and politician. Former President of Czechoslovakia and the first President of the Czech Republic, (1936-2011), Disturbing the Peace: A Conversation with Karel Hvizdala (English translation by Paul Wilson), 1990, Ch. 1 : Growing Up...
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She Responded
The birds’ favorite songs You do not hear, For their most flamboyant music takes place When their wings are stretched Above the trees And they are smoking the opium Of pure freedom. It is healthy for the prisoner To have faith That one day he will again move about Wherever he wants, Feel the wondrous grit of life - Less structured, Find all wounds, debts stamped canceled, Paid. I once asked a...
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“Anyone who has probed the inner life, who has sat in silence long enough to...”
– Kabir Helminski
December 2011
8 posts
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Effortlessly
Effortlessly, Love flows from God to man, Like a bird Who rivers the air Without moving her wings. Thus we move in His world One in body and soul, Though outwardly separate in form. As the Source strikes the note, Humanity sings - The Holy Spirit is our harpist, And all the strings Which are touched in Love Must sound. —Mechtild of Magdeburg (1210-1282)
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“The things we really need come to us only as gifts, and in order to receive them...”
– Thomas Merton, Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander, (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1966), p. 204
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An excerpt from "Happy Medium" →
What does it mean to find the Middle Way? Not in the sense of picking up a book on Buddhism or contacting a teacher, but in ourselves and in our lives. There is always a draw to act, a restless wish to move, to create, to do something. And there is also a wish to submit–and I’m not talking about depression or being a mouse or some unwholesome slavish quality here but to a wholesome...
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“What’s the matter with you? What is it? What is it you’re doing here? I don’t...”
– Yúnmén Wényǎn (862 or 864 -949 CE), a major Chinese Zen master in Tang-era China.
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“Poetry is knowledge, salvation, power, abandonment. An operation capable of...”
– Octavio Paz, quoted in Bruce McEver’s essay “Poetry: A Bridge to the Sacred,” from the current winter issue: “Many Paths, One Truth.”
November 2011
10 posts
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“Imagine yourself as a living house. God comes in to rebuild that house. At...”
– C.S. Lewis, “Mere Christianity”
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“If you understand, you can love. But if understanding is not there, it is...”
– Thich Nhat Hahn
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October 2011
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September 2011
13 posts
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“True myth may serve for thousands of years as an inexhaustible source of...”
– Ursula K. Le Guin, “Myth and Archetype in Science Fiction”, Parabola I (4), Fall 1976 (Thank you, alive-alive-oh & itsalldhamma.)
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“Seeing does not come from thinking. It comes from the shock at the moment when,...”
– From “The Reality of Being,” by Jeanne de Salzmann excerpted as “Seeing is An Act,” PARABOLA, Fall 2011.