Caitlin Johnstone
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Listen to a reading of this article (reading by Tim Foley):
âBeing a guru is weird, man. I mean, how many different ways can you say âHey you ever notice how everything just kinda is? Well, it just kinda is!â But the words come anyway. Somehow they keep on coming.â
~ Hank âBonesawâ Lucille
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âThe most worthwhile spiritual teachings donât actually teach you any new knowledge. Rather, they direct your attention to aspects of your own experience that youâd previously overlooked or hadnât paid much attention to. They get you questioning your unquestioned assumptions about very fundamental components of your experience like your sense of self, your means of perception, and the workings of your own mind. The most skillful teachers therefore donât require you to trust them or take anything they say on faith, because you can immediately examine everything theyâre pointing your attention toward for yourself in your own experience.â
~ Margaret Tetherwood
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âAuthentic spirituality is scarcely even recognizable as spirituality. It doesnât give you new beliefsâââit strips your old beliefs away. It doesnât uplift you from the muck and mess of this worldâââit plunges you headfirst right into it. It doesnât help you become a better personâââit dispels the illusion that there was ever a person to begin with.â
~ Margaret Tetherwood
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âBeauty is just the experience of having truly seen something. If youâre not seeing beauty somewhere, youâre not really seeing what youâre looking at. Everything has beauty. The failure to recognize it lies always with the beholder.â
~ Quincy Harrington-Cho
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âPsychedelics are useful not for the hallucinations they give you but for the hallucinations they take away.â
~ Alice Cave
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âIâve killed off so many Hanks along this crazy path. Angry Hank. Hank the victim. Hank the cage fighter. Tough guy Hank, and then spiritual guy Hank after him. One of the last ones to leave was Cool Hank, but he had to go, because, man, you really do not get to be cool on this path. You really, really donât. Being radically truthful on every level leaves you raw and undisguised, right out in the open, in all your dorky awkwardness. If you really let old lady Truth have her way with you, youâll never get to feel cool again. How could anyone be cool with their fuckinâ ribcage splayed open to the whole entire world?â
~ Hank âBonesawâ Lucille
â
âLoveâââthe real kindâââis simply having a deep and intimate âyesâ to something. If you have a deep and intimate âyesâ to everything about your partner, then you may say that you fully love your partner. If you have a deep and intimate âyesâ to everything about your own body and mind and all their expressions, then you may say that you fully love yourself. If you have a deep and intimate âyesâ to everything that arises in your experience of the world, then you may say that you are fully living in unconditional love.
âAnd really, what else is there? Why be in argument with anything that already is? You can work toward positive changes in our world while holding a deep and intimate âyesâ to everything that already is here and now. If you start an argument with the present moment, youâve already lost the debate anyway. Unconditional love is just being real about reality, and then doing what comes naturally.â
~ Louisiana Fetterman
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âThe human organism seemingly creates the ego out of a desire to feel in control of life, but the joke of it all is that the ego has never really existed, and that life is never, ever under control. There has never at any time been an actual self anywhere who could exert any kind of control over any of this; itâs just an imaginary construct that gets imbued with the power of belief out of the organismâs concern for safety and security, and then all your personal dramas and conflicts and anxieties and fears arose out of the contracted energy of that belief. But the whole thing was based on a complete fiction! Thatâs why awakening is so often immediately followed by laughter: because that whole mess never even happened. It was all an imaginary clown show for ghosts who never bought tickets.
âOther animals donât have this problem. Because they donât have the capacity for abstract thought, when those organisms experience frightening events in their lives they arenât able to kind of pop their attention out of their bodies and enter a mental fantasy world starring an imaginary âmeâ character to help them feel as though things are more manageable and controlled. So instead they just shake the fear out of their bodies and move on.Â
âThe human organism can learn to do this too, but its immense capacity for abstract thought tends to get in the way. All that newly evolved brain matter has in many ways made humans quite stupid.â
~ âAndromedaâ, as channeled by Cynthia M Scott
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âTime is a mirage.Â
Life is impersonal energy masquerading as personal experiences.Â
Reality is made of unknowing.Â
I am nothing but a welcome matÂ
for anything that could possibly be.â
~ Alice Cave
â
âEnlightenment will cost you everything, but after youâve paid the toll you realize that the big pile of cash youâd been protecting your entire life was just a bunch of worthless Monopoly board game money that whole time.â
~ Omshanti Ramananda Kowalski
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Originally Published: 2024-07-10 09:08:21
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