The lover heals the world not by a vague and abstract love for everybody and everything, but by becoming passionate and vowing fidelity to concrete relationships, persons, institutions, and places.
Burnout is nature’s way of telling you, you’ve been going through the motions your soul has departed; you’re a zombie, a member of the walking dead, a sleepwalker. False optimism is like administrating stimulants to an exhausted nervous system.
Being pretty successful, I can, of course, afford some luxuries. But I realize again and again how we have to disillusion ourselves of the idea that these things are going to give us real satisfaction.
The sacred is discovered in what moves and touches us, in what makes us tremble.
What shapes our lives are the questions we ask, refuse to ask, or never think to ask.
If we come from good families where we have been supported well, there is a disillusionment we have to undergo in terms of the culture’s values. We have to get beyond our cultural mythology to find out who we are.
Enter each day with the expectation that the happenings of the day may contain a clandestine message addressed to you personally. Expect omens, epiphanies, casual blessings and teachers who unknowingly speak to your condition.
I suspect that we are all recipients of cosmic love notes. Messages, omens, voices, cries, revelations, and appeals are homogenized into each day’s events. If only we knew how to listen, to read the signs.
A society in which vocation and job are separated for most people gradually creates an economy that is often devoid of spirit, one that frequently fills our pocketbooks at the cost of emptying our souls.
We suffer from the illusion that the faster we run, the more likely we are to grasp happiness. The truth is that the velocity necessary for success rarely exceeds the rate of reflection.
I think it’s increasingly hard to have deep self-knowledge without entering the darkness in some way.
You don’t go through a deep personal transformation without some kind of dark night of the soul.
Down to earth advice about the path that leads away from the kingdom of the hollow men.
When you genuinely lose your illusions, you begin to marvel at things, because you don’t have the answers any more.
Each day befriend a single fear, and the miscellaneous terrors of being human will never join together to form such a morass of vague anxiety that it rules your life from the shadows of the unconscious. We learn to fly not by being fearless, but by the daily practice of courage.
The abyss beyond our beliefs is something we have to pass through in order to see the world anew, to see it in terms not dictated so much by our culture, our parents, or our religious convictions.
We can only choose whether we will feel and not what we will feel.
If we had a better understanding of the ways we think about enemies, we might be able to think of more rational ways of settling conflict.
I try to steer away from high metaphysical belief because I think we humans do best when we realize that we don’t know all that much.
I think we’re always in the process of writing and rewriting the story of our lives, forming our experiences into a narrative that makes sense. Much of that work involves demythologizing family myths and cultural myths – getting free of what we have been told about ourselves.