Words....

"Words, after speech, reach into the silence."

(T.S. Eliot, Burnt Norton)

if you wish to read online, then e.g.  thanks to this:

T.S.Eliot

Lewis Carroll, quote

'If you limit your actions in life to things that nobody can possibly find fault with, you will not do much!'

quote, love, sex, Victor Frankl, Man's Search for Meaning, Dostoyevsky

"THE MEANING OF LOVE"

 Love is the only way to grasp another human being in the innermost core of his personality.
 No one can become fully aware of the very essence of another human being unless he loves him.
By his love he is enabled to see the essential traits and features in the beloved person; and even more, he sees that which is potential in him, which is not yet actualized but yet ought to be actualized.

Furthermore, by his love, the loving person enables the beloved person to actualize these potentialities. By making him aware of what he can be and of what he should become, he makes these potentialities come true.

In logotherapy, love is not interpreted as a mere epiphe-nomenon  of sexual drives and instincts in the sense of a so-called sublimation.

 Love is as primary a phenomenon as sex.

Normally, sex is a mode of expression for love.

Sex is justified, even sanctified, as soon as, but only as long as, it is a vehicle of love.

Thus love is not understood as a mere side-effect of sex; rather, sex is a way of expressing the experience of that ultimate togetherness which is called love.

The third way of finding a meaning in life is by suffering."

Victor Frankl, Man's Search for Meaning

"To love somebody means to see them as God intended them."

Fyodor Dostoyevsky


Reduktionismus

"Hier begegnete Frankl erstmals dem Reduktionismus, einem Thema, das er ein Leben lang bekämpfen sollte. Wenn Psychotherapie die Ebene der menschlichen Begegnung aus methodischen Gründen verlassen muss, und wenn im Zentrum des Interesses die Pathologie steht und nicht mehr die Person, und wenn diese Pathologie als alles bestimmend angesehen wird, dann wollte er nicht Psychotherapeut sein. Durch diese persönliche Erfahrung von Reduktionismus und Pathologismus fiel es ihm wie „Schuppen von den Augen“ (Frankl), und er wusste, dass Psychoanalyse für ihn nicht die Methode sei.

Er wandte sich der Individualpsychologie Alfred Adlers zu und absolvierte dort seine Ausbildung und Examen. Doch auch dort sollte ihn schon bald dasselbe Schicksal ereilen. Anläßlich eines Vortrags beim 3. Internationalen Kongress der Individualpsychologie vertrat Frankl die Ansicht, dass das neurotische Arrangement und der sekundäre Krankheitsgewinn nicht die einzige Motivationskraft des neurotischen Menschen sein können, sondern dass er auch als Person zu sehen sei, die ihr Dasein zu verstehen trachtet und auch nach einem Sinn im Leben sucht."

man's search for meaning.pdf

Master Joshu, quote

Joshu said, "I can make one blade of grass a sixteen foot golden Buddha, and I can make a sixteen foot gold Buddha into one blade of grass.
Buddha is compulsive passions.
Compulsive passions are Buddha." A monk asked, "How can compulsive passions be escaped?" Joshu said, "What's the use of escaping?"

A poet's advice to students, E.E.Cummings

"A poet is somebody who feels, and who expresses his feelings through words.

This may sound easy. It isn’t.

A lot of people think or believe or know they feel — but that’s thinking or believing or knowing; not feeling. And poetry is feeling — not knowing or believing or thinking.

Almost anybody can learn to think or believe or know, but not a single human being can be taught to feel. Why? Because whenever you think or you believe or you know, you’re a lot of other people: but the moment you feel, you’re nobody-but-yourself.

To be nobody-but-yourself — in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else — means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight; and never stop fighting."

..

"As for expressing nobody-but-yourself in words, that means working just a little harder than anybody who isn’t a poet can possibly imagine. Why? Because nothing is quite as easy as using words like somebody else. We all of us do exactly this nearly all of the time — and whenever we do it, we’re not poets.

If, at the end of your first ten or fifteen years of fighting and working and feeling, you find you’ve written one line of one poem, you’ll be very lucky indeed.

And so my advice to all young people who wish to become poets is: do something easy, like learning how to blow up the world — unless you’re not only willing, but glad, to feel and work and fight till you die.

Does that sound dismal? It isn’t.

It’s the most wonderful life on earth.

Or so I feel."

e.e.cummings, brainpickings.org

Albert Camus, quote

An intellectual is someone
whose mind watches itself.

Albert Camus, quote

Die höchste Form der Hoffnung ist die überwundene Verzweiflung.

Albert Camus

Liillian R. LIeber, Human Values and Science, Art and Mathematics, quote

"Now what about
the postulates themselves?
How can THEY be “proved”?
Obviously they
CANNOT be PROVED at all —
since there is nothing preceding them
from which to derive them!
This may seem disappointing to those who
thought that in
Mathematics
EVERYTHING is proved!
But you can see that
this is IMPOSSIBLE,
even in mathematics,
since EVERY SYSTEM must necessarily
START with POSTULATES,
and these are NOT provable,
since there is nothing preceding them
from which to derive them."

Lieber,Mathematics

Albert Camus, The Almond Trees, 1940, quote

"We have not overcome our condition, and yet we know it better. We know that we live in contradiction, but we also know that we must refuse this contradiction and do what is needed to reduce it. Our task as [humans] is to find the few principles that will calm the infinite anguish of free souls. We must mend what has been torn apart, make justice imaginable again in a world so obviously unjust, give happiness a meaning once more to peoples poisoned by the misery of the century. Naturally, it is a superhuman task. But superhuman is the term for tasks [we] take a long time to accomplish, that’s all.

Let us know our aims then, holding fast to the mind, even if force puts on a thoughtful or a comfortable face in order to seduce us. The first thing is not to despair. Let us not listen too much to those who proclaim that the world is at an end. Civilizations do not die so easily, and even if our world were to collapse, it would not have been the first. It is indeed true that we live in tragic times. But too many people confuse tragedy with despair. “Tragedy,” [D.H.] Lawrence said, “ought to be a great kick at misery.” This is a healthy and immediately applicable thought. There are many things today deserving such a kick."

Albert Camus, The Almond Trees

note:

some posts before i quoted Ferdinand Pessoa and Henry Miller,
i could have quoted Nietzsche, i mentioned Kafka.

i remember i juxtaposed Pessoa and Kafka to Miller in contrast,

and i thought of Camus then.

All of them were driven by a passion for inner freedom, all of them

went on a quest for truth, looking through the big lies of their time,

for all of them there has been this same strife, how to walk out of

decadence( a word loaded with the idea and implication that all had been better before, untrue) 

and how to walk through the cruelty of human kind with

open eyes through the continuous question: what good will and can remain?

should we abscond from living within society and remain observers, 

shall we create a superhuman and a new bible, shall we prefer our dreams to

what me must assume as reality and see this same reality as nightmares,

can keeping our spirit and heart transform our life and others, will reason

ever help in the blind human struggle. are we allowed to just enjoy life all the same

or is this a sin and just too boring and stagnation? is love a word or a truth?

i appreciate Camus better than all others coming out of existentialism. is this because i like 

to hear courage and persistence and hope and life having a voice? yes.

one must acknowledge despair, this way it can kick us into transformation and growth.

all the above mentioned were great writers. all wrote with blood.all cared.

and this way none of them said: nothing matters.

big snowflakes outside coming down.

all the world is white, here.

i don't know anything.

i write, think, reflect, meditate.

i am not so important.

i understand that some people tap themselves into the universal flow 

of life and love and think they can make a difference from inside there, meditating, re-radiating, 

still not understanding what a small part they are, maybe a delusion of grandeur kept in the holiness of nothing, the last stand of individuality.

no, i don't think i will make a great difference here.

and anyway, i am breathing under the snow.

On turning eighty, Henry Miller,brainpickings.org, quotes, Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet, quote, notes

 On turning eighty, Henry Miller

"....If you can fall in love again and again, if you can forgive your parents for the crime of bringing you into the world, if you are content to get nowhere, just take each day as it comes, if you can forgive as well as forget, if you can keep from growing sour, surly, bitter and cynical, man you’ve got it half licked."..

________________________________________________________________

.."Perhaps it is curiosity — about anything and everything — that made me the writer I am. It has never left me…

With this attribute goes another which I prize above everything else, and that is the sense of wonder. No matter how restricted my world may become I cannot imagine it leaving me void of wonder. In a sense I suppose it might be called my religion. I do not ask how it came about, this creation in which we swim, but only to enjoy and appreciate it."..

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

..."Perhaps the most comforting thing about growing old gracefully is the increasing ability not to take things too seriously. One of the big differences between a genuine sage and a preacher is gaiety. When the sage laughs it is a belly laugh; when the preacher laughs, which is all too seldom, it is on the wrong side of the face."...
_______________________________________________________________
personal note:

I like him to say 'if you can fall in love again and again".
Somebody important in my life keeps saying it is not important to be in love
and it is a stupid thing to fall in love.

i feel this so different, so very much.
i can fall in love with a flower, a stone, a tree..and i can fall in love with a woman,
it is the moment of total presence and  the recognition of essence ,it happens, 

and to do this with the mind alone is not the same as falling into a moment of seeing.
the longing for union with the essence is not born in the head.
to be in love and to fall means an act of falling, of opening to vulnerability,
it means soft knees and a readiness to give your blood.
it is something going totally beyond being 'adult', beyond controlled behaviour,

it has nothing to do this moment with love as an idea, it is love, it is still innocent and
untouched by conditioned gates of perception as far as this can be possible for a human.
because to fall in love with just this one may have roots we never knew nor ever will know.

without falling in love with a woman or the sea or the sky or  music life would be boring
and depressing, wings grow out of this, the moment of true seeing, still out of all  wanting.

to love is another kind of human experience and more so doing, it does take real blood and work and patience. 
and sometimes i ask me why falling and rising is such an act, and i see love as the
overcoming of gravity, as release into kindness and as the composition of a long song. and  yes, i cannot say that i like the music to stop. and somewhere somehow it never will.

so i will never say all is nothing but all is no-thing.

______________________________________________________________________

Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet:

"I.

I was born in a time when the majority of young people  had lost faith in God, 
for the same reason their elders had had it
-without knowing why.

And since the human spirit tends to make naturally judgements based on feeling
instead of reason, most of these young people chose Humanity  to replace God.

I, however, am the sort of person who is always on the fringe of what he belongs to,
seeing not only the multitude he's a part of but  also the wide open space around it.
That's why I didn't give up God as completely as they did, and I never accepted Humanity.

I reasoned that God, though improbable, might exist, in which case he should be worshipped; wheras Humanity being a mere biological idea  and signifying nothing 
more than the animal species we belong to, was no more deserving of worship than
any other animal species.

The cult of Humanity, with its rites of Freedom and Equality, always stuck me 
as a  revival of those ancient cults in which Gods were like animals or had animal heads.


  And so, not knowing how to believe in God and unable to believe in an aggregate of animals, I, along with other people on the fringe, kept a distance from things, a distance
commonly called Decadence.
Decadence is the total loss of unconsciousness, which is the very basis of life.
Could it think, the heart would stop beating."
____________________________________________________________________

note:
why to follow up Henry Miller and my last notes with Fernando Pessoa?

i understand this 'decadence" well, it is a distance to oneself and others
in a cultured estrangement from the roots of life itself. It is a way of staying
thinking non-stop, it took him several personalities to keep it up, 
and i cannot see Fernando Pessoa with a belly laugh.
would i have liked to meet him? yes, for curiosity,
not for a real conversation as i couldn't have known who is talking and who is listening.

he is profoundly honest-"Humanity being a mere biological idea  and signifying nothing 
more than the animal species we belong to"- i really appreciate this.
The idea on worshipping ´though appears irrelevant to my perspective.

Less observation and more falling and meeting may make all the difference.

when we observe, we judge , classify-and we all know how conditioned 
the observer is and how the results of his or her research and opinions depend on herself/himself. observing is not living. we end up with a collection of  dead butterflies.

Pessoa and Kafka appear not so far from each other in some ways,
but they are totally different. but both share and give the experience 
of honest fight and truthful stress of soul in the quest for freedom.

What is freedom there?
Is it freedom they achieve? 
or only a strife for freedom from patterns and the sharpening of the saw
to cut bonds and false perception? i hear the saw shrieking.
i heard it for so long.

give us a break, a laugh.
give us not only blood , give us a heart to find.
can i do this?
i don't know.

Buddha, quote, The Way

The way is not in the sky.
The way is in the heart.

Buddha

Paracelsus, quote, the power of imagination

"The power of imagination is a great factor in medicine. It may produce diseases in man and in animals and it may cure them. But this is not done by the powers of symbols or characters made in wax or being written on paper, but by an imagination, which perfects the will. All the imagination of man comes from the heart. The heart is the seed of the microcosm, and from that seed the imagination proceeds into the macrocosm. Thus the imagination of man is a seed that becomes materialized or corporeal."

Thomas Merton,quote

'A tree gives glory to God by being a tree. For in being what God means it to be it is obeying God. It “consents,” so to speak, to God's creative love. It is expressing an idea which is in God and which is not distinct from the essence of God, and therefore a tree imitates God by being a tree.'

Alejandra Pizarnik , Fragmentos para dominar el silencio, quote

"Cuando a la casa del lenguaje se le vuela el tejado y las palabras no guarecen, 
yo hablo."

Layman P'ang, quote, nothing to be left behind

Food and clothes sustain 
Body and life; 

I advise you to learn 
Being as is. 

When it's time, 
I move my hermitage and go, 

And there's nothing 
To be left behind.
 
Layman P'ang

Suzuki, quote, the most important thing

The most important thing is

to find out 

what is

the most important thing.

Suzuki

Osho, quote

“Falling in love you remain a child; 
rising in love you mature. 
By and by love becomes not a relationship, 
it becomes a state of your being. 
Not that you are in love – now you are love.”


note:
though i collected a lot of critical thoughts,
looked at Osho often with aversion
and feel no deep respect (would he have wanted it?),
i like this quote, and i often
can enjoy the fun he has....
after all, one good thing, he can make me laugh
more times than not...

Anne Truitt, Daybook,quote

"Unless we are very, very careful, we doom each other by holding onto images of one another based on preconceptions that are in turn based on indifference to what is other than ourselves. 

This indifference can be, in its extreme, a form of murder and seems to me a rather common phenomenon. 

We claim autonomy for ourselves and forget that in so doing we can fall into the tyranny of defining other people as we would like them to be. 

By focusing on what we choose to acknowledge in them, we impose an insidious control on them.

I notice that I have to pay careful attention in order to listen to others with an openness that allows them to be as they are, or as they think themselves to be. 

The shutters of my mind habitually flip open and click shut, and these little snaps form into patterns I arrange for myself. 
The opposite of this inattention is love, is the honoring of others in a way that grants them the grace of their own autonomy and allows mutual discovery."

Anne Truitt,Daybook

this hits right in the centre of many failings for deeper understanding...

James, Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, quote, music

“The music passed in an instant, as the first bars of sudden music always did, 
over the fantastic fabrics of his mind, 
dissolving them painlessly and noiselessly 
as a sudden wave dissolves the sandbuilt turrets of children.” 

see also:
Djuna Barnes, James Joyce

Leo Tolstoy,quote

The two most powerful warriors 

are patience and time.