Sunbeams October 2007 | issue 382 (abridged)
If the doors of perception were cleansed, everything would appear to man as it is, infinite.
-William Blake
The most striking contradiction of our civilization is the fundamental reverence for truth that we profess, and the thoroughgoing disregard for it that we practice.
-Vilhjalmur Stefansson
In order to live with integrity, we must stop fragmenting and compartmentalizing our lives. Telling lies at work and then expecting great truths in meditation is nonsensical.
-Sharon Salzberg
Emotions, in my experience, aren’t covered by single words. I don’t believe in “sadness,” “joy,” or “regret.” . . . I’d like to have at my disposal complicated hybrid emotions, Germanic train-car constructions, like, say, “the happiness that attends disaster.” Or: “the disappointment of sleeping with one’s fantasy.” I’d like to show how “intimations of mortality brought on by aging family members” connects to “the hatred of mirrors that begins in middle age.” I’d like to have a word for “the sadness inspired by failing restaurants” as well for “the excitement of getting a room with a minibar.”
-Jeffrey Eugenides
We say, “Seeing is believing,” but actually . . . we are all much better at believing than at seeing. In fact, we are seeing what we believe nearly all the time and only occasionally seeing what we can’t believe.
-Robert Anton Wilson
You don’t see things as they are. You see things as you are.
-Talmud
Once, when a GI was visiting Pablo Picasso during the liberation of France, he said that he could not understand the artist’s paintings: “Why do you paint a person looking from the side and from the front at the same time?” Picasso asked, “Do you have a girlfriend?” “Yes,” replied the soldier. “Do you have a picture of her?” The soldier pulled from his wallet a photograph of the girl. Picasso looked at it in mock astonishment and asked, “Is she so small?”
-Richard Kehl
There are very few human beings who receive the truth, complete and staggering, by instant illumination. Most of them acquire it fragment by fragment, on a small scale, by successive developments, cellularly, like a laborious mosaic.
-Anaïs Nin
If a thousand old beliefs were ruined in our march to truth, we must still march on.
-Stopford Augustus Brooke
Say not, “I have found the truth,” but rather, “I have found a truth.”
-Kahlil Gibran
The world is too dangerous for anything but truth and too small for anything but love.
-William Sloane Coffin
-William Blake
The most striking contradiction of our civilization is the fundamental reverence for truth that we profess, and the thoroughgoing disregard for it that we practice.
-Vilhjalmur Stefansson
In order to live with integrity, we must stop fragmenting and compartmentalizing our lives. Telling lies at work and then expecting great truths in meditation is nonsensical.
-Sharon Salzberg
Emotions, in my experience, aren’t covered by single words. I don’t believe in “sadness,” “joy,” or “regret.” . . . I’d like to have at my disposal complicated hybrid emotions, Germanic train-car constructions, like, say, “the happiness that attends disaster.” Or: “the disappointment of sleeping with one’s fantasy.” I’d like to show how “intimations of mortality brought on by aging family members” connects to “the hatred of mirrors that begins in middle age.” I’d like to have a word for “the sadness inspired by failing restaurants” as well for “the excitement of getting a room with a minibar.”
-Jeffrey Eugenides
We say, “Seeing is believing,” but actually . . . we are all much better at believing than at seeing. In fact, we are seeing what we believe nearly all the time and only occasionally seeing what we can’t believe.
-Robert Anton Wilson
You don’t see things as they are. You see things as you are.
-Talmud
Once, when a GI was visiting Pablo Picasso during the liberation of France, he said that he could not understand the artist’s paintings: “Why do you paint a person looking from the side and from the front at the same time?” Picasso asked, “Do you have a girlfriend?” “Yes,” replied the soldier. “Do you have a picture of her?” The soldier pulled from his wallet a photograph of the girl. Picasso looked at it in mock astonishment and asked, “Is she so small?”
-Richard Kehl
There are very few human beings who receive the truth, complete and staggering, by instant illumination. Most of them acquire it fragment by fragment, on a small scale, by successive developments, cellularly, like a laborious mosaic.
-Anaïs Nin
If a thousand old beliefs were ruined in our march to truth, we must still march on.
-Stopford Augustus Brooke
Say not, “I have found the truth,” but rather, “I have found a truth.”
-Kahlil Gibran
The world is too dangerous for anything but truth and too small for anything but love.
-William Sloane Coffin
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