Alejandro Jodorowsky is a creative of the highest order, acclaimed movie director, and inventor of a form of psychotherapy called “psychomagic.”
His art — controversial, spiritual, and surreal — spans life’s spectrum in full. His personal story could be described similarly and reads near mythical. His films were banned for causing riots in Mexico and ushered into the United States by John Lennon and Yoko Ono. His “Psychomagic” a conscious reverse-engineering of the unconscious forces wielded by a famous medicine woman he apprenticed and decades of “acts” aimed at the unconscious level.
For a few years now, I’ve been experimenting in experiences. Experiences like Knights of the Round Stool and WONDER WANDER. Experiences that evoke depth, aliveness, meaning — and at their best — maybe even revelation and transformation.
When I began, I had no idea what I was doing. But through trial and error and by following intuition, started figuring some things out. Last fall, a month before the third annual WONDER WANDER, emailing back and forth with cameraman Paul Shelton, he wrote:
I like your idea of creating specific experiences for the group. It's actually pretty similar to a book I'm reading now called “Turn Your Life into Art: Lessons in Psychomagic from the San Francisco Underground” all about experience design.
It seems so naive to me now, but I didn’t know anyone else was doing this sort of thing. I had never head of experience design. Or psychomagic. I’d soon realize I did know of an experience the “San Francisco Underground” puts on. You probably have too. It’s called “Burning Man”… somehow I had never looked deeper into what Burning Man was about.
I ordered the book. And it turns out, all this new and interesting ground I thought I was breaking in hosting these participatory experiences had already been traversed. It was already known! Turn Your Life Into Art is a literal how-to guide for doing what I have been trying to do! People have been designing out-of-this-world experiences for decades in San Francisco. Burning Man was an eighty-thousand person gathering based on many of the same principles I thought I was discovering! I felt like a wizard inventing magic, only to discover Hogwarts already exists and enrolls eighty-thousand students each year.
If hosting deep, participatory, transformative experiences interests you, read this book. It is phenomenal, and a whole lot more than an instruction manual. Part how-to, part history lesson, and part memoir, Turn Your Life Into Art paints a picture of an underground scene that created experiences designed to blow minds, breakdown psychological barriers, and open people up to the possible. The ideas and principles are powerful and totally legit (I have spent the past few years figuring out some of this stuff on my own and have come to many of the same conclusions). The fun you can have with this stuff can change lives, including your own.
“They go to bars because they want to have an experience, and more than just an experience of pleasure or friendship or dancing… they want an experience in which something unexpected can happen and they can play a role in it.”
“Chicken would tell the crowd that since this was a circus with no talent, anybody could join. They had the opportunity, tonight, before the bus left in the wee hours of the morning, to run away and join the circus. This was really happening. They could really do that, if they wanted.”
“Our personal mythologies are subjectively real to us as the laws of physics, and to the extent that they change, we’re used to them changing very slowly, over time. To have a sudden change to your inner notions of what is possible is not traumatic, even if it makes you fell vulnerable and baffled, is equally powerful, but wondrous. When effective experiences like this can leave you with the opposite of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (Post-Transcendence Serenity Discovery), a sense of awe and wonder that infuses the rest of your life and that you cannot shake easily.”
“In the 21st century, religion isn’t the opium of the masses - being entertained without being engaged and challenged is.”
“And this is my bet with you: no matter how amazing Disney World can make the experience, there is no experience Disney World can create that will be as thrilling as breaking into Disney World.”
“People who don’t see their choices having an impact withdraw from the process. Once they do that, it is exponentially more difficult to reach their unconscious. Their daimonic selves will not see any growth potential in a scenario in which they do not really matter. At this point people are just putting one foot in front of the other until the experience is over and they can go home.”
“Burning Man creates infinite psychomagical gardens. Participants literally co-create a city together, based on their idiosyncratic passions, and then get to explore it. You never know what’s going to happen when you cross the street.”
“One of the reasons psychomagical experiences are so important is precisely that most of us reach a stasis point in our lives where we have taken all the kinds of risks we are able to convince ourselves to take, and are not able to convince ourselves to take the remaining risks that would be good for us. We protect ourselves with complexes, with projections, we cannot see what is standing right in front of us. Deep down we usually know what we need to do. We just buried the urges under piles of anxiety and dread masquerading as sensible fears and precautions. The urge to psychological integration gets hidden below the toxic manifestations of our inner mythology. Going through psychomagical experiences, even the absurd and silly and pointless (sometimes especially those) puts us in vulnerable positions where we would not put ourselves; it motivates our daimonic impulses to grow and self-healing to take the risks we’ve been avoiding; and makes sure our unconscious psyches are paying rapt attention.”
“Trying to make meaningful art in a society that doesn’t believe in anything requires breaking down the rigidity of specialization, the segregation of functions and activities, both within the personality and within the community as a whole. It means reintroducing the artist in his role as shaman - a mystical priestly, and political figure in prehistoric cultures, who, after coming close to death through accident or severe illness, because a visionary and a healer. The shaman’s function is to balance and center society, integrating many planes of life-experience, and defining the culture’s relationship to the cosmos. When these various domains (the human and divine) fall out of balance, it is the shaman’s responsibility to restore the lost harmony and reestablish equilibrium. Only an individual who successfully masters his actions in both realms is a master shaman.”
“That’s because Burning Man has a participatory ethos instead — everybody contributes. It is an amateur ethos which means that while some people are better at things than others there is no exclusively “professional class” who are the only people allowed to create or do certain kinds of work. That doesn’t refer to just psychomagic, but it applies there all the same: Burning Man doesn’t anoint artists as a priestly class, because it wants everybody to be doing art.”
The Wisdom of Insecurity is the book that I (as a scientifically-trained, agnostic human with an inkling there might be “something more” but was put off by the dogma of most religions) was looking for.
It uproots many western culture’s most foundational assumptions, from individualism and future focus to our egoic sense of soul, and offers to point the flashlight of our awareness in a very different way at this here eternally present moment (which, as Watts so poignantly points out, is really all there is).
Following the “red pill or blue pill” metaphor of The Matrix, The Denial of Death is hands down the most “red pill” book I have ever read.
Ernest Becker takes us on a philosophical journey through the perspectives of some of history’s greatest minds — Kierkegaard, Maslow, Freud, Rank, and others — on the human situation and the “why” of human existence, exposing our most fundamental illusions. As we grow up, we narrow our perceptions and adopt a few vital lies to shield ourselves from the awesome mystery and terror of being temporary, living, breathing, eating, pooping creatures. Becker exposes and deeply examines the “vital lies” and illusions central to our collective ways of life. This is a legitimate risk for the reader as once an illusion is seen through, the illusion no longer works.
In addition to being one of the best written novels I’ve ever read, The Overstory is an invitation to reconnect to something huge we lost long ago. While told through the tales of humans, the real, overarching story is that of trees, ecosystems, and life itself on planet Earth.
As a novel, I found it an astonishing complex, brilliant weave of the lives of human characters touched and forever altered, by trees. A captivating read rife with wisdom and deep in philosophy. What really mattered to me, though, was that it felt like a five hundred page homage to the hard-to-see-today truth my favorite Ed Abbey quote points to:
If you, like me, have lived your life with a largely unquestioned concept of “the soul” — the separate, eternal spirit inherent in each human being — The Book will shake at the very foundations of your reality. Whether The Book will shift the very foundations of your reality, I do not know, but I finished it a month ago and grow increasingly confident it did mine.
The subtitle, “On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are,” refers to the “sensation of the self” and our unwillingness to examine it. In his typical flowery yet tight, brilliant yet simple word and metaphor, Alan Watts explores the implications of this tiny yet titanic shift in the idea of “self” — a true linchpin to our understanding of the world in which change radiates out in the most profound and jarring of ways throughout all aspects of life.
Whether you feel this blasphemous or righteous, frightening or riveting, I encourage you to give The Book and the “self” some examination. At minimum, it is fascinating. And trippy. But more important: the more schools of thought you lose yourself in exploration of and feel you have found the answer and then lose that feeling again, the deeper connection you sow to the insurmountable mystery of existence. Whether or not you jive with the “universal perspective” is less important than the willingness to entertain other perspectives, to get beyond the dogma of perspectives, and live in recognition of the inherent mystery of being that all perspectives attempt to explain.
“We do not need a new religion or a new bible. We need a new experience—a new feeling of what it is to be “I.” The lowdown (which is, of course, the secret and profound view) on life is that our normal sensation of self is a hoax, or, at best, a temporary role that we are playing, or have been conned into playing—with our own tacit consent, just as every hypnotized person is basically willing to be hypnotized. The most strongly enforced of all known taboos is the taboo against knowing who or what you really are behind the mask of your apparently separate, independent, and isolated ego.”
“The sensation of “I” as a lonely and isolated center of being is so powerful and commonsensical, and so fundamental to our modes of speech and thought, to our laws and social institutions, that we cannot experience selfhood except as something superficial in the scheme of the universe. I seem to be a brief light that flashes but once in all the aeons of time—a rare, complicated, and all-too-delicate organism on the fringe of biological evolution, where the wave of life bursts into individual, sparkling, and multicolored drops that gleam for a moment only to vanish forever. Under such conditioning it seems impossible and even absurd to realize that myself does not reside in the drop alone, but in the whole surge of energy which ranges from the galaxies to the nuclear fields in my body. At this level of existence “I” am immeasurably old; my forms are infinite and their comings and goings are simply pulses or vibrations of a single and eternal flow of energy.”
“Why not sit back and let things take their course? Simply because it is part of “things taking their course” that I write. As a human being it is just my nature to enjoy and share philosophy. I do this in the same way that some birds are eagles and some doves, some flowers are lilies and some roses.”
“It is a fight — a fight haunted by a sense of chronic frustration, because we are doing something as crazy as trying to keep the mountains and get rid of the valleys.”
“However, there is a third possibility. The individual may be understood neither as an isolated person nor as an expendable humanoid working machine. He may be seen, instead, as one particular focal point at which the whole universe expresses itself — as an incarnation of the Self, of the Godhead, or whatever one may choose to call IT. This view retains and, indeed amplifies our apprehension that the individual is in some way sacred. At the same time it dissolves the paradox of the personal ego, which is to have attained the “precious state” of being a unique person at the price of perpetual anxiety for one’s survival.”
“Thus bamboozled, the individual — instead of fulfilling his unique function in the world — is exhausted and frustrated in efforts to accomplish self-contradictory goals. Because he is now so largely defined as a separate person caught up in a mindless an alien universe, his principle task is to get a one-up on the universe and conquer nature. This is palpably absurd, and since the task is never achieved, the individual is taught to live and work for some future in which the impossible will at last happen, if not for him, then at least for his children. We are thus breeding a type of being incapable of living in the present — that is, of really living.””
“For if you know what you want, an will be content with it, you can be trusted. But if you do not know, your desires are limitless and no one can tell you how to deal with you. Nothing satisfies an individual incapable of enjoyment. I am not saying that American and European corporations are run by greedy villains who live off the fat of the land at everyone else’s expense. The point becomes clear only as one realizes, with compassion and sorrow, that many of our most powerful and wealthy men are miserable dupes and captives in a treadmill, who — with the rarest of exceptions — have not the ghost of a notion how to spend and enjoy money.”
“If, then, after understanding, at least in theory, that the ego trick is a hoax and that, beneath everything, “I” and “universe” are one, you ask, “So what? What is the next step of practical application” — I will answer that the absolutely vital thing is to consolidate your understanding, to become capable of enjoyment, of living in the present, and of the discipline which this involves. Without this you have nothing to give — to the cause of peace or racial integration, to starving Hindus and Chinese, or even your closest friends. Without this, all social concern will be muddlesome meddling, and all work for the future will be planned disaster.”
““When this new sensation of self arises, it is at once exhilarating and a little disconcerting. It is like the moment when you first got the knack of swimming or riding a bicycle. There is the feeling that you are not doing it yourself, but that it is somehow happening on its own, and you wonder whether you will lose it — as indeed you may if you try forcibly to hold on to it. In immediate contrast to the old feeling, there is indeed a certain passivity to the sensation, as if you were a leaf blown along by the wind, until you realize that you are both the leaf and the wind. The world outside your skin is just as much you as the world inside: they move together inseparably, and at first you feel a little out of control because the world outside is so much vaster than the world inside. Yet you soon discover that you are able to go ahead with ordinary activities — to work and make decisions as ever, though somehow this is less of a drag. Your body is no longer a corpse which the ego has to animate and lug around. There is a feeling of the ground holding you up, and of hills lifting you when you climb them. Air breathes itself in and out of your lungs, and instead of looking and listening, light and sound come to you on their own. Eyes see and ears hear as wind blows and water flows. All space becomes your mind. Time carries you along like a river, but never flows out of the present: the more it goes, the more it stays, and you no longer have to fight or kill it.””
“As it is, we are merely bolting our lives — gulping down undigested experiences as fast as we can stuff them in — because awareness of our own existence is so superficial and so narrow that nothing seems to us more boring than simple being. If I ask you what you did, saw, heard, smelled, touched and tasted yesterday, I am likely to get nothing more than the thin, sketchy outline of the few things that you noticed, and of those only what you thought worth remembering. Is it surprising that an existence so experienced seems so empty and bare that its hunger for an infinite future is insatiable? But suppose you could answer, “It would take me forever to tell you, and I am much too interested in what’s happening now.” How is it possible that a being with such sensitive jewels as the eyes, such enchanted musical instruments as the ears, and such a fabulous arabesque of nerves as the brain can experience itself as anything less than a god? And, when you consider that this incalculably subtle organism is inseparable from the still more marvelous patterns of its environment — from the minutest electrical designs to the whole company of the galaxies — how is it conceivable that this incarnation of all eternity can be bored with being?”
Along with many other books that winter, I read The Last Temptation of Christ in the silent, fluorescent, faded breakroom of a Flagstaff, Arizona motel. Often with only a dozen or so guests to check-in each three to eleven PM shift, there was a lot of downtime.
At the time, I was particularly feeling the weight of the path I had chosen to walk in life. This depressing motel, splitting a bedroom and rent with my in-college brother, the heaviness of winter — this innate call into the unknown I had answered with the past five years of my life, “it brought me here?” I couldn’t help but ask myself.
But the way Kazantzakis’s Jesus profoundly struggles, doubts, and ultimately overcomes in those five hundred pages… it was a molotov cocktail defiantly hucked into the waning fires of my spirit. I closed that book for the final time and looked up and suddenly loved those rusty, white-aging-to-yellow lockers on the wall, my soggy peanut butter and jelly sandwich, and all that my journey touched.
Initially, I assumed it was my situation at that moment that triggered such a powerful response in me. But well over a year later, and my eyes run across that book on my (actual) bookshelf, and I ring with this crazy emotional charge and want the whole of my path, not just the sunny side of it.
I include The Last Temptation of Christ among the best I’ve ever read.
““The Last Temptation of Christ fanned the inquisitional flames all the more, but by this time Kazantzakis—who had experienced thirty years of non-recognition and then, when recognition came, the complete misrepresentation of his aims—had learned the Nietzschean lesson that the struggle for freedom must be fought not only without fear but without hope.
He saw Jesus, like Odysseus, as engaged in this struggle, and as a prototype of the free man. In The Last Temptation of Christ Jesus is a superman, one who by force of will achieves a victory over matter, or, in other words, is able, because of his allegiance to the life force within him, to transmute matter into spirit. But this overall victory is really a succession of particular triumphs as he frees himself from the various forms of bondage—family, bodily pleasures, the state, fear of death. Since, for Kazantzakis, freedom is not a reward for the struggle but rather the very process of struggle itself, it is paramount that Jesus be constantly tempted by evil in such a way that he feel its attractiveness and even succumb to it, for only in this way can his ultimate rejection of temptation have meaning.””
““Judas, my brother,” the youth repeated, “the crucifier suffers more than the crucified.””
““The Lord puffs and wants to incinerate the world, and up come the snakes to make love! For a moment the old man’s mind succumbed to the enticement and wandered. But suddenly he shuddered. Everything is of God, he reflected; everything has two meanings, one manifest, one hidden. The common people comprehend only what is manifest. They say, “this is a snake,” and their minds go no further; but the mind which dwells in God sees what lies behind the visible, sees the hidden meaning. These snakes which crept out today in front of the doors of the cell and began to hiss at precisely this moment, just after the son of Mary’s confession, must assuredly have a deep, concealed meaning. But what is that meaning?””
““Where? Toward what? They themselves did not know; all they knew was that they were suffocating.””
““The more he approached the people and perceived their anger-filled eyes and the dark, tortured fierceness of their expressions, the more his heart stirred, the more his bowels flooded with deep sympathy and love. These are the people, he reflected. They are all brothers, every one of them, but they do not know it—and that is why they suffer. If they knew it, what celebrations there would be, what hugging and kissing, what happiness!””
““Look at the faith of the birds in the air. They neither sow nor reap, and yet the Father feeds them. Consider the flowers of the earth. They do not spin or weave, but what king could ever dress in such magnificence? Do not be concerned about your body, what it will eat, what it will drink or wear. Your body was dust and will return to dust. Let your concern be for the kingdom of heaven and for your immortal soul!””
““Jesus smiled and looked into the old man’s eyes. This was not the first time he had seen rapacious jaws, the fat naps and quickly-moving eyes of the glutted. They made him shudder. These people ate, drank and laughed, thought the whole world belonged to them; they stole, danced, whored—and had not the slightest idea that they were burning in the fires of hell. It was only at rare times, in sleep, that they opened their eyes and saw… Jesus looked at the old glutton, looked at his flesh, his eyes, his fear—and once more, the truth inside him became a tale.””
““He who drinks of the water of this well will thirst again,” Jesus answered, “but he who drinks the water that I shall give him will not thirst again for all eternity.””
““The old law instructs you to honor your father and your mother; but I say, Do not imprison your heart within your parents’ home. Let it emerge and enter all homes, embrace the whole of Israel from Mount Hermon to the desert of Idumea and even beyond: east and west—the entire Universe. Our father is God, our mother is Earth. We are half soil and half sky. To honor your father and your mother means to honor Heaven and Earth.””
““Do not fear death, comrades. May it be blessed! If death did not exist, how could we reach God and remain with him forever? Truly I say to you, death holds the keys and opens the door.””
““Life on earth means: to eat bread and transform the bread into wings, to drink water and transform the water into wings. Life on earth means: the sprouting of wings.””
This is a review of the entire body of work of my greatest heroes. I doubt these words about him and his will do either any justice. Yet, they point in a profound direction, so we’ll continue.
Jack Gilbert was an ascetic, a poet who attempted to live poetry. He found immediate fame in his first work. Rather than relish in it, he headed for Europe and obscurity. Living a simple life in near poverty among common folk, twenty years would pass before he published a second book of poems, again to great acclaim.
Seneca is generally regarded as one of the three great Stoics (along with Marcus Aurelius and Epictetus). Born right around the time our calendar flipped from B.C. to A.D., Seneca’s writings have timelessly echoed throughout the past two-thousand years. The Stoic Philosophy of Seneca, a collection of his words on adversity, thrift, mortality, virtue, and other pillars of the human experience, points a straightforward, practical path towards an unflappable kind of contentment.
Lila is Robert Persig’s follow-up to one of my all-time favorite books, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. While “Zen” enjoyed massive commercial success, Lila didn’t. For years, I falsely assumed this book wasn’t worth the read. Curiosity eventually prevailed and I picked a copy of Lila up last spring to read on a west coast of the USA road trip. Utterly enrapt, I was unable to put the book down, reading the last 100 pages straight on a rainy day at a Burger King in Oregon.
The Power of Now is a straightforward introduction to what we in the western world refer to as “eastern philosophy,” or what I've come to recognize as a set of basic truths we can experience firsthand that nobody ever told us about. If you've never encountered the concepts of Buddhism, Taoism, or the thought that we might be something other than an individual brain or soul separate from all else, this book is a great place to start.
The subtitle “A Brief History of Humankind” describes the subject of this book quite well. However, it doesn't convey the fascination, philosophy, and impact contained in this bird’s eye view of human history. Rather than focus on what happened, Sapiens is about how and why our history unfolded the way it did. Armed with ingenious metaphors, wit, and an eye for the big picture, Yuval Noah Harari delivers what I’m tempted to call a ‘masterpiece’ with unparalleled clarity.
At sixteen, I nearly died from a mosquito bite that resulted in this profound realization of time's value and the fragility of life. No event echoes louder through my days. Yet, I still often get caught up in trivial and lose sight of the remarkable opportunity of being. Reading When Breath Becomes Air is like going through that realization for the first time all over again.
The book's written by cancer-ridden neurosurgeon Paul Kalanithi, a gifted thinker and wordsmith dying as the medical career he put a decade of devoted preparation into is about to begin. It's a gift, wholeheartedly cast back to the living, from a dying man.
“Throughout college, my monastic, scholarly study of human meaning would conflict with my urge to forge and strengthen human relationships that formed that meaning. If the unexamined life was not worth living, was the unlived life worth examining?”
“I spent the next year in classrooms in the English countryside, where I found myself increasingly often arguing that direct experience of life-and-death questions was essential to generating substantial moral opinions about them. Words began to feel as weightless as the breath that carried them. Stepping back, I realize that I was confirming what I already knew: I wanted that direct experience. It was only in practicing medicine that I could pursue serious biological philosophy. Moral speculation was puny compared to moral action.”
“Indeed this is how 99% of people select their jobs: pay, work environment, hours. But that’s the point. Putting lifestyle first is how you find a job—not a calling.”
“Had the confirmation of my fears—the CT scan, in the lab results, both showing not merely cancer but a body overwhelmed, nearing death—released me from the duty to serve, from my duty to patients, to neurosurgery, to the pursuit of goodness? Yes, I thought, and therein was the paradox: like a runner crossing the finish line only to collapse, without that duty to care for the ill pushing me forward, I became an invalid.”
““Don’t you think saying goodbye to your child will make your death more painful?” “Wouldn’t it be great if it did?” I said. Lucy and I both felt that life wasn’t about avoiding suffering. Years ago, it had occurred to me that Darwin and Nietzsche agreed on one thing: the defining characteristic of the organism is striving. Describing life otherwise was like painting a tiger without stripes. After so many years of living with death, I’d come to understand that the easiest death wasn’t necessarily the best.”
“During the pastor’s scripture reading, I suddenly found myself chuckling. It featured a frustrated Jesus whose metaphorical language receives little interpretation from his followers.”
“We build scientific theories to organize and manipulate the world, to reduce phenomena to manageable units. Science is based upon reproducibility and manufactured objectivity. As strong as that makes its ability to generate claims about matter and energy, it also makes scientific knowledge inapplicable to the existential, visceral nature of human life, which is unique and subjective and unpredictable. Science may provide the most useful way to organize empirical, reproducible data, but its power to do so is predicated on its inability to grasp the most central aspects of human life: hope, fear, love, hate, beauty, envy, honor, weakness, striving, suffering, virtue.”
“In the end, it cannot be doubted that each of us can see only a part of the picture. The doctor sees one, the patient sees another, the engineer a third, the economist a fourth, the pearl diver a fifth, the alcoholic a sixth, the cable guy a seventh, the sheep farmer an eighth, the Indian beggar a ninth, the pastor a tenth. Human knowledge is never contained in one person. It grows from the relationships we create between each other and the world, and is still never complete. And Truth comes somewhere above all of them.”
“… two people huddled together, as one faces the abyss.”
“Everyone succumbs to finitude. I suspect I am not the only one who reaches this pluperfect state. Most ambitions are either achieved or abandoned; either way they belong to the past. The future, instead of the ladder toward the goals in life, flattens out into a perpetual present. Money, status, all the vanities the preacher Ecclesiastes described hold so little interest: a chasing after wind, indeed.”
The true account of a biological excursion into the Himalayas, outwardly searching for the illusive snow leopard, which becomes an overarching metaphor for the author's inward search for enlightenment. It's an adventure in the high mountains of philosophy—the outer and inner journey of a curious spirit interspersed with explanations of the most profound perceptions of the eastern religions.
The Snow Leopard deepened my awe for life, stoked my love of wandering through wilderness for both the external and internal experience, and reinforced my understanding of how little we need to be perfectly content.
“Compare the wild, free paintings of the child with the stiff, pinched “pictures” these become as the painter notices the painting and tries to portray “reality” as others see it; self-conscious now, he steps out of his own painting and, finding himself apart from things, notices the silence all around and becomes alarmed by the vast significations of Creation. The armor of the “I” begins to form, the construction and desperate assertion of separate identity, the loneliness: “Man has closed himself up, till he sees all things through the narrow chinks of his cavern.””
“The fact that many a man who goes his own way ends in ruin means nothing… He must obey his own law, as if it were a daemon whispering to him of new wonderful paths… There are not a few who are called awake by the summons of the voice, whereupon they are at once set apart from the others, feeling themselves confronted with a problem about which the others know nothing. In most cases it is impossible to explain to the others what has happened, for any understanding is walled off by impenetrable prejudices. “You are no different from anybody else,” they will chorus, or “there’s no such thing,” and even if there is such a thing, it is immediately branded as “morbid.” … He is at once set apart and isolated, as he has resolved to obey the law that commands him from within. “His own law!” everybody will cry. But he knows better: it is the law… The only meaningful life is a life that strives for the individual realization—absolute and unconditional—of its own particular law… To the extent that a man is untrue to the law of his being… he has failed to realize his life’s meaning.
The undiscovered vein within us is a living part of the psyche; classical Chinese philosophy names this interior way “Tao,” and likens it to the flow of water that moves irresistibly to one’s goal. To rest in Tao means fulfillment, wholeness, one’s destination reached, one’s mission done; the beginning, end, and perfect realization of the meaning of existence innate in all things.”
“Do not imagine that the journey is short; and one must have the heart of a lion to follow this unusual road, for it is very long… One plods along in a state of amazement, sometimes smiling, sometimes weeping.”
“As in the great religions of the East, the native American makes small distinction between religious activity and the acts of every day: the religious ceremony is life itself.”
“And it is true that everywhere dangers and difficulties are exaggerated by the local people, if only as a good excuse for extortion or malingering: one must go oneself to know the truth.”
“Amazingly, we take for granted that instinct for survival, fear of death, must separate us from the happiness of pure interpreted experience, in which body, mind, and nature are the same. And this debasement of our vision, the retreat from wonder, the backing away like lobsters from free swimming life into safe crannies, the desperate instinct that our life passes unlived, is reflected in proliferation without joy, corrosive money rot, the gross befouling of the earth and air and water from which we come.”
“But the courage-to-be, right here and now and nowhere else, is precisely what Zen, at least, demands: eat when you eat, sleep when you sleep! Zen has no patience with “mysticism,” far less the occult although its emphasis on the enlightenment experience (called kensho or satori) is what sets it apart from other regions and philosophies.”
“You never enjoy the world alright, till the Sea itself flows in your veins, till you are clothed with the heavens, and crowned with the stars: and perceive yourself to be the sole heir of the world, and more than so, because men are in it who are every one sole heirs as well as you.”
“The secret of the mountains is that the mountains simply exist, as I do myself: the mountains exist simply, which I do not. The mountains have no “meaning,” they are meaning; the mountains are. The sun is round. I ring with life, and the mountains ring, and when I can hear it, there is a ringing that we share. I understand all this, not in my mind but in my heart, knowing how meaningless it is to try to capture what cannot be expressed, knowing that mere words will remain when I read it all again, another day.”
“GS murmurs, “Unless it moves, we are not going to see it, not even on the snow—these creatures are really something.” With our binoculars, we study the barren ridge face, foot by foot. Then he says, “You know something? We’ve seen so much, maybe it’s better if there are some things we don’t see.” He seems startled by his own remark, and I wonder if he means this as I take it—that we have been spared the desolation of success, the doubt: is this really what we came so far to see? When I say, “That was the haiku—writer speaking,” he knows just what I mean, and we both laugh. GS strikes me as much less dogmatic, more open to the unexplained then he was two months ago. In Kathmandu, he might have been suspicious of this haiku, written on our journey by himself:
Cloud-men beneath loads.
A dark line of tracks in the snow.
Suddenly nothing.”
Siddhartha is a short novel chalk-full of understanding in the broadest sense. It’s about the life of a boy who sets out to seek truth, gets lost along the way, and through his folly becomes a wise man. Similar to The Alchemist in length and style, I was awed by the variety and depth of wisdom contained in so few words.
I read Siddhartha at a time of loss and transition. It helped reawaken me to my path and expanded my view of the stream of events of my life beyond a heart-wrenching moment.
“What is meditation? What is abandonment of the body? What is fasting? What is holding of breath? It is a flight from the Self, it is a temporary escape from the torment of the Self. It is a temporary palliative against the pain and folly of life. The driver of oxen makes this same flight, takes this temporary drug when he drinks a few bowls of rice wine or cocoanut milk in the inn. He then no longer feels his Self, no longer feels the pain of life; he then experiences temporary escape. Falling asleep over his bowl of rice wine, he finds what Siddhartha and Govinda find when they escape from their bodies by long exercises and dwell in the non-self.”
“All this, colored and in a thousand different forms, had always been there. The sun and moon had always shone; the rivers had always flowed and the bees had always hummed, but in previous times all this had been nothing to Siddhartha but a fleeting and illusive veil before his eyes, regarded with distrust, condemned to be disregarded and ostracized from the thoughts, because it was not reality, because reality lay on the other side of the visible. But now his eyes lingered on this side; he saw and recognized the visible and he sought his place in the world. He did not seek reality; his goal was not on any other side. The world was beautiful when looked at in this way — without any seeking, so simple, so childlike.”
“Both thought and the senses were fine things, behind both of them lay hidden the last meaning; it was worth while listening to them both, to play with both, neither to despise nor overrate either of them, but to listen intently to both voices. He would only strive after whatever the inward voice commanded him, not tarry anywhere but where the voice advised him. Why did Gotama once sit down beneath the bo tree in his greatest hour when he received enlightenment? He had heard a voice, a voice in his own heart which commanded him to seek rest under this tree, and he had not taken recourse to mortification of the flesh, sacrifices, bathing or prayers, eating or drinking, sleeping or dreaming; he had listened to the voice. To obey no other external command, only the voice, to be prepared—that was good, that was necessary. Nothing else was necessary.”
“Listen, Kamala, when you throw a stone into the water, it finds the quickest way to the bottom of the water. It is the same when Siddhartha has an aim, a goal. Siddhartha does nothing; he waits, he thinks, he fasts, but he goes through the affairs of the world like the stone through the water, without doing anything, without bestirring himself; he is drawn and let’s himself fall. He is drawn by his goal, for he does not allow anything to enter his mind which opposes his goal. That is what Siddhartha learned from the Samanas. It is what fools call magic and what they think is caused by demons. Everyone can perform magic, everyone can reach his goal, if he can think, wait and fast.”
“Most people, Kamala, are like a falling leaf that drifts and turns in the air, flutters, and falls to the ground. But a few others are like stars which travel one defined path: no wind reaches them, they have within themselves their guide and path.”
“It is a good thing to experience everything oneself, he thought. As a child I learned that pleasures of the world and riches were not good. I have known it for a long time, but I have only just experienced it. Now I know it not only with my intellect, but with my eyes, with my heart, with my stomach. It is a good thing that I know this.”
“From that hour Siddhartha ceased to fight against his destiny. There shone in his face the serenity of knowledge, of one who is no longer confronted with conflict of desires, who has found salvation, who is in harmony with the stream of events, with the stream of life, full of sympathy and compassion, surrendering himself to the stream, belonging to the unity of all things.”
““When someone is seeking,” said Siddhartha, “it happens quite easily that he only sees the thing that he is seeking; that he is unable to find anything, unable to absorb anything, because he is only thinking of the things he is seeking, because he has a goal, because he is obsessed with his goal. Seeking means: to have a goal; but finding means: to be free, to be receptive, to have no goal. You, O worthy one, are perhaps indeed a seeker, for in striving towards your goal, you do not see many things that are under your nose.””
“There is one thought that I have had Govinda, which you will again think is a jest or folly: that is, in every truth, the opposite is equally true. For example, a truth can only be expressed and enveloped in words if it is one-sided. Everything that is thought or expressed in words is one-sided, only half the truth; it all lacks totality, completeness, unity. When the Illustrious Buddha taught about the world, he had divided it into Samsara and Nirvana, into illusion and truth, into suffering and salvation. One cannot do otherwise, there is no other method for those who teach. But the world itself, being in and around us, is never one-sided. Never is a man or a deed wholly Samsara or wholly Nirvana; never is a man wholly a saint or sinner. This only seems so because we suffer the illusion that time is something real. Time is not real, Govinda. I have realized this repeatedly. And if time is not real, then the dividing line that seems to lie between this world and eternity, between suffering and bliss, between good and evil, is also an illusion.”
“Quite frankly, I do not attach great importance to thoughts either. I attach more importance to things. For example, there was a man at this ferry who was my predecessor and teacher. He was a holy man who for many years believed only in the river and nothing else. He noticed that the river’s voice spoke to him. He learned from it; it educated and taught him. The river seemed like a god to him and for many years he did not know that every wind, every cloud, every bird, every beetle is equally divine and knows and can teach just as well as the esteemed river. But when this holy man went off into the woods, he knew everything; he knew more than you and I, without teachers, without books, just because he believed in the river.”
