Excerpt: How was this General able to sleep peacefully knowing he was in the midst of war? It has everything to do with conquering moments…
“Eternity is not the hereafter. Eternity has nothing to do with time… This is it. If you don’t get it here, you won’t get it anywhere. The experience of eternity right here and now is the function of life. Heaven is not the place to have the experience; here’s the place to have the experience.”
Joseph Campbell, via Sunbeams (Page 114)
“How much better this world would be if more of us would cultivate the sacred in our daily lives. Our busyness is often our enemy, making it hard for us to slow down long enough to breathe in the ethers of the spiritual planes.”
Marianne Williamson, The Shadow Effect (Page 155)
“Contemplating a flower for three seconds can be a captivating solitary journey back to original geometry, which is always revitalizing.”
Henry Skolimowski, via Sunbeams (Page 112)
“The grand show is eternal. It is always sunrise somewhere; the dew is never all dried at once; a shower is forever falling; vapor is ever rising. Eternal sunrise, eternal dawn and gloaming, on sea and continents and islands, each in its turn, as the round earth rolls.”
John Muir, via Sunbeams (Page 99)
“I shall tell you a great secret, my friend. Do not wait for the last judgement. It takes place every day.”
Albert Camus, The Fall, via Sunbeams (Page 95)
“Though no two centuries are very much like each other, some hours perhaps are; moments are; critical moments nearly always are. Emotions are the same. We are the same. The man, not the day, is the lasting phenomenon.”
Eudora Welty, via Sunbeams (Page 93)
“The moment one gives close attention to anything, even a blade of grass, it becomes a mysterious, awesome, indescribably magnificent world in itself.”
Henry Miller, via Sunbeams (Page 78)
“The most beautiful music of all is the music of what happens.”
Irish Proverb, via Sunbeams (Page 70)
“Were you to live three thousand years, or even a countless multiple of that, keep in mind that no one ever loses a life other than the one they are living, and no one ever lives a life other than the one they are losing. The longest and the shortest life, then, amount to the same, for the present moment lasts the same for all and is all anyone possesses. No one can lose either the past or the future, for how can someone be deprived of what’s not theirs?”
Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, via The Daily Stoic (Page 85)
“Mind invented contradictions, invented names; it called some things beautiful, some ugly, some good, some bad. One part of life was love, another murder. How young, foolish, comical this mind was. One of its inventions was time. A subtle invention, a refined instrument for torturing the self even more keenly and making the world multiplex and difficult. For then man was separated from all he craved only by time, by time alone, this crazy invention! It was one of the props, one of the crutches that you had to let go, that one above all, if you wanted to be free.”
Hermann Hesse, Klein And Wagner, via Sunbeams (Page 48)
“Beyond today your projections of life are conceptual. You don’t have to not drink for twenty years today. You don’t have to give up white bread for all eternity, right now. And if you do make it through today, and wake up tomorrow, what does it really matter that you didn’t act out yesterday? I mean, you’re not accumulating tokens for punitive pleasure. This ‘one day at a time’ cliché when taken plainly is no less profound than any ‘be in the moment’ Eastern wisdom I’ve since encountered. Today is all I have.”
Russell Brand, Recovery (Page 25)
“No one imagines that a symphony is supposed to improve in quality as it goes along, or that the whole object of playing it is to reach the finale. The point of music is discovered in every moment of playing and listening to it. It is the same, I feel, with the greater part of our lives, and if we are unduly absorbed in improving them we may forget altogether to live them.”
Alan Watts, Sunbeams (Page 23)
“Everyone automatically assumes that the present is the result of the past. Turn it around, and consider whether the past may not be a result of the present. The past may be streaming back from the now, like the country as seen from an airplane.”
Alan Watts, Sunbeams (Page 14)
Seeing the past as being the cause of your present steals from you the accountability that’s needed to take ownership of your future. For, you can’t change the outcome of your future if you’re busy blaming what happened in the past. You have to realize, as Watts outlines above, that it’s the present that caused the past, not the past that caused the present.
Read More »Alan Watts Quote on The Present and How It’s Not A Result Of The Past“I now live in woke mode. For me, every moment is a reawakening, a chance to meet myself exactly as I am. I’m finally allowing myself to just be. Be giddy. Be irritable. Be vulnerable. Be silly. Be exhilarated. Be whomever and however I am. That is my practice, my daily meditation. It’s also my daily prayer for all of us—that we allow others the same freedom of expression that we are learning to grant to ourselves.”
Alicia Keys, More Myself (Page 216)
“For if we open our eyes and see clearly, it becomes obvious that there is no other time than this instant, and that the past and the future are abstractions without any concrete reality. Until this has become clear, it seems that our life is all past and future, and that the present is nothing more than the infinitesimal hairline which divides them. From this comes the sensation of ‘having no time,’ of a world which hurries by so rapidly that it is gone before we can enjoy it. But through ‘awakening to the instant’ one sees that this is the reverse of the truth: it is rather the past and future which are the fleeting illusions, and the present which is eternally real.”
Alan Watts, The Way of Zen, via Sunbeams (Page 12)
