[Image: “Please Refrain Yourselves,” by John E. Simpson. (Photo shared here under a Creative Commons License; for more information, see this page at RAMH.)]

From whiskey river’s commonplace book (in slightly different wording):

Groundedness comes in many forms: resolute common sense, daily prayer or meditation, a regular job that keeps us engaged with material realities, physical exercise, or something as simple as family life. One needs a sufficient engagement with the requirements of the so-called real world so that one is less likely to fall prey to flights of fancy or become engulfed by archetypes, repressed complexes, or manias that will make one lose one’s wits. The specter of madness haunts the spiritual search. To point this out should not be dismissed as mere pessimism or negativity.

A recurring motif of the esoteric traditions is the realm of the unseen — other dimensions, invisible entities, inner planes, etheric bodies, energy centers, planetary forces, hidden masters, the list goes on and on. While it may prove necessary to grant a provisional reality to such claims in the course of inner exploration, there lies a real danger in swallowing them wholesale and proceeding blithely onward. It is all too easy to project one’s wishes or fears onto the twilight zone of the invisible, reading deep portents into chance occurrences and see-ing connections where none actually exist.

Some people with a tendency toward paranoia are strongly attracted to the esoteric precisely because it mirrors their secret fears: unseen forces affect our lives, consensus reality is a sham, the universe is somehow converging on our personal slice of life. The spiritual landscape is littered with addled mystics who jumped into esoteric belief systems that were more than their sanity could bear and –most significantly — more than their closely watched personal experience had borne out.

Which leads us to [a] skill that it would be wise to cultivate: the ability to maintain a simultaneous belief and disbelief in all matters esoteric until you have undeniably experienced them for yourself. Let us call this “faithful skepticism.”

The kind of “knowing” that one finds in gnosis is personally verified. It isn’t based on the hearsay of another’s experience or revelation any more than it is based on theological dogma or belief.. Even when you have experienced something that seems real, it is well to compare notes with an experienced teacher and keep room in your worldview for the possibility that it is all in your imagination. Keep things in perspective.

(Richard Smoley and Jay Kinney [source]) [See the note below for an aside about this passage]

…and:

Whenever we finish talking to ourselves the world is always as it should be. We renew it, rekindle it with life, we uphold it with our internal talk. Not only that, but we also choose our paths as we talk to ourselves. Thus we repeat the same choices over and over until the day we die, because we keep on repeating the same internal talk over and over until the day we die.

(Carlos Castaneda, A Separate Reality [source])

…and:

Sentient beings are in essence buddhas.
It is like water and ice.
There is no ice without water,
There are no buddhas outside sentient beings.

What a shame, sentient beings seek afar,
Not knowing what is at hand.
It is like wailing from thirst
In the midst of water.

(Hakuin [source])

From elsewhere:

And there was money to think about; there was always money. He’d saved on rent these past eight months; on the other hand, what he’d saved on rent he’d spent on drink, to quell the anxiety caused by the means he’d adopted of saving rent. Life was a series of loops, each smaller than the last.

(Mick Herron [source])

…and:

What the Silence Said

Do you still believe in borders now?
Birds soar over your maps and walls, and always have.
You might have watched how the smoke from your own fires
travelled on wind you couldn’t see
wafting over the valley
and up and over the hills and over the next valley and the next hill.

Did you not hear the animals howl and sing?
Or hear the silence of the animals no longer singing?
Now you know what it is to be afraid.

You think this is a dream? It is not
a dream. You think this is a theoretical question?
What do you love more than what you imagine is your singular life?
The water grows clearer. The swans settle and float there.

Are you willing to take your place in the forest again? to become loam and bark
to be a leaf falling. from a great height. to be the worm who eats the leaf
and the bird who eats the worm? Look at the sky: are you
willing to be the sky again?
You think this lesson is
too hard for you You want the time-out to end. You want
to go to the movies as before, to sit and eat with your friends.
It can end now, but not in the way you imagine You know
the mind that has been talking to you for so long—the mind that
can explain everything? Don’t listen.

You were once a citizen of a country called I Don’t Know.
Remember the burning boat that brought you there? Climb in.

(Marie Howe [source])

…and:

You’ve got no time at all, but it seems like you’ve got forever. You’ve got nothing to do, but it seems like you’ve got everything.

You make coffee and smoke a few cigarettes; and the hands of the clock have gone crazy on you. They haven’t moved hardly, they’ve hardly budged out of the place you last saw them, but they’ve measured off a half? two-thirds? of your life.

You’ve got forever, but that’s no time at all.

You’ve got forever; and somehow you can’t do much with it. You’ve got forever and it’s a mile wide and an inch deep and full of alligators.

(Jim Thompson [source])

_____________________________

Note: I’ve been dipping into whiskey river‘s extensive but (alas) limited collection of quotations for close to twenty years now; inevitably, I’ve used some of them more than once. This week, the opening selection (by Richard Smoley and Jay Kinney) first showed up at RAMH in a Friday post about four years ago, here, and I devoted some time to ruminating further about it.

[back]