Mountains should be climbed with as little effort as possible and without desire. The reality of your own nature should determine the speed. If you become restless, speed up. If you become winded, slow down. You climb the mountain in an equilibrium between restlessness and exhaustion.
~ Robert Pirsig
But in the sixties, everything blew up. Something almost like a mutation broke out among people from fifteen to twenty-five, to the utter consternation of the adult world. From San Francisco to Katmandu, there suddenly appeared multitudes of hippies with hair, beards, and costumes that disquietingly reminded their elders of Jesus Christ, the prophets, and the apostles—who were all at a safe historical distance.
At the peak of our technological affluence, these young people renounced the cherished values of Western civilization—the values of property and status. Richness of experience, they maintained, was far more important than things and money, in pursuit of which their parents were miserably and dutifully trapped in squirrel cages.
Scandalously, hippies did not adopt the ascetic and celibate ways of traditional holy men. They took drugs, held sexual orgies and substituted free-loving communities for the hallowed family circle. Those who hoped that all this was just an adolescent quest for kicks that would soon fade away were increasingly alarmed, for it appeared to be in lively earnest.
The hippies moved on from marijuana and LSD to Hindu chants and yoga, hardly aware that mysticism, in the form of realizing that one’s true self is the Godhead, is something Western society would not tolerate…
~ Alan Watts
Anyone claiming to be an expert is selling something. I brandish my ignorance like a crucifix at vampires.
~ Aaron Bady
One must remember how fascinating the most ordinary everyday things are to a child, because they see them all as marvelous – because they see them all in a way that is not related to survival and profit.
When we get to thinking of everything in terms of survival and profit value, as we do, then the shapes of scratches on the floor cease to have magic. And most things, in fact, cease to have magic.
So therefore, in the course of nature, once we have ceased to see magic in the world anymore, we’re no longer fulfilling nature’s game of being aware of it. There’s no point in it any longer.
And so we die. And, so something else comes to birth, which gets an entirely new view. And so nature’s self-awareness is a game worth the candle.
~ Alan Watts
Medieval society, in the west, comparable to Hindu society, allowed people to check out of the game. It revered and encouraged hermits, monks, nuns of various typed of discipline. This is not encouraged in contemporary society. Insecure societies are the most intolerant to those who are non-joiners. They are so unsure of the validity of their game rules that they say “everyone must play!”
Now that’s a double bind. You can’t say to a person “You must play!” because what you’re saying is you are required to do something which will be acceptable, only if you do it voluntarily. So “everyone must play!” is the rule in the United States and almost all republic governments. That kind of society, watch out for it! It turns in a quick click into fascism because of it’s terror of the outsider.
Now a free and easy society loves outsiders and takes care of them. In our present world, you cannot abandon nationality without the greatest difficulty. People who try to abandon nationality get constantly deported from one place to another. You must belong to this thing! as Thoreau put it, “However far into the forest you may go – men will pursue you and compel you to belong to their desperate company of odd fellows.”
~ Alan Watts
‘Israel’ in Hebrew does not mean a land or a nation. It literally means ‘he has struggled with God.’ It means exactly what ‘Jihad’ means in Arabic: ‘Struggle for God.’
These sacred words do not refer to a patch of land, or to a religious war. Only the adolescent mind of the fundamentalist would so reduce and impoverish their meaning.
Both terms describe our inward struggle to lift the human heart beyond the ego, toward the beauty of the divine will, the will for peace and justice.
~ Fred LaMotte
Watch how your mind judges. Judgment comes, in part, out of your own fear. You judge other people because you’re not comfortable in your own being. By judging, you find out where you stand in relation to other people. The judging mind is very divisive. It separates. Separation closes your heart. If you close your heart to someone, you are perpetuating your suffering and theirs. Shifting out of judgment means learning to appreciate your predicament and their predicament with an open heart instead of judging. Then you can allow yourself and others to just be, without separation.
The only game in town is the game of being, which includes both highs and lows. Every time you push something away, it remains there. The pile under the rug gets very big. Your lows turn out to be more interesting than your highs because they are showing you where you’re not, where you have work to do.
You just say, “Thank you for teaching.” You don’t have to judge another being. You just have to work on yourself.
When somebody provokes your anger, the only reason you get angry is because you’re holding on to how you think something is supposed to be. You’re denying how it is. Then you see it’s the expectations of your own mind that are creating your own hell. When you get frustrated because something isn’t the way you thought it would be, examine the way you thought, not just the thing that frustrates you. You’ll see that a lot of your emotional suffering is created by your models of how you think the universe should be and your inability to allow it to be as it is.
~ Ram Dass
Renounce the tyranny of positive thinking. People who only talk about success, abundance, and joy usually want to sell us something.
There is grace in loss, sorrow, and bewilderment too. Breathe through tears, troughs, shadows. The seer of light is the seer of darkness.
The nectar of seeing is the sweetness. The moment I abandon my preference for the full over the empty, the void is a voluptuous rose.
~ Fred LaMotte
Oh, these vast, calm measureless mountain days, inciting at once to work and rest!
Days in whose light every thing seems equally divine, opening a thousand windows to show us God.
Nevermore, however weary, should one faint by the way who gains the blessings of one mountain day;
…whatever his fate, long life, short life, stormy or calm, he is rich forever.
~ John Muir
Kinnaird 