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Thought of the Week Archives
July 1998
July 6
For the greater part of human activity is designed to make permanent
those experiences and joys which are only lovable because they are changing.
Music is a delight because of its rhythm and flow. Yet the moment you
arrest the flow and prolong a note or chord beyond its time, the rhythm
is destroyed. Because life is likewise a flowing process, change and death
are its necessary parts. To work for their exculsion is to work against
life.
~ Alan Watts ~
The Wisdom of Insecurity
July 13
An individual soul or spirit exists in a realm apart, beyond the
confines of ordinary time and space. Far from being personal, the soul
may participate in the soul of the world itself, the anima mundi. Every
natural presence in the world -- rivers, trees, animals, birds, plants
-- is perceived to have consciousness, a spiritual essense that living
things can share and exchange. When we recognize that the world is "ensoulded",
our relationship with the environment and all its inhabitants is transformed
into respect and appreciation for a shared life. Conversely, when the
world is seen as separate from the individual self, feelings of emptiness
and disillusion set in -- a spiritual listlessness known to tribal peoples
as "loss of soul" and familiar in Western technological socieites as ennui.
~ James Hope ~
The Secret Language of the Soul
July 20
Thomas Merton once remakred that in considering any important decision
in life, it's imperative to "consult your death" because, as the English
writer Samuel Johnson once put it, "When a man knows he is to be hanged
in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully." Death is a strip
search. It points the barrel of mortality at your head and demands to
see what you have hidden under your garments. It also asks the question
"What do you love?" As you listen for callings keep such a question poised
in your mind to help tune out some of the static. In fact, "What do you
love" is the question that callings pose.
~ Gregg Levoy ~
Callings
July 27
The myth is the foundation of life, the timeless "schema," the pious
formula into which life flows when it reproduces its traits out of the
consciousness.
~ Sigmund Freud ~
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