“While I generally find that great myths are great precisely because they represent and embody great universal truths, the myth of romantic love is a dreadful lie. Perhaps it is a necessary lie in that it ensures the survival of the falling-in-love experience that traps us into marriage. But as a psychiatrist I weep in my heart almost daily for the ghastly confusion and suffering that this myth fosters. Millions of people waste vast amounts of energy desperately and futilely attempting to make the reality of their lives conform to the unreality of the myth.”
M. Scott Peck, via Sunbeams (Page 72)
Quotes from Sunbeams
“All that we do
Is touched with ocean, yet we remain
On the shore of what we know.”
Richard Wilbur, via Sunbeams (Page 72)
“Our minds want clothes as much as our bodies.”
Samuel Butler, via Sunbeams (Page 71) (Read Matt’s Blog On This Quote)
“Tell me to what you pay attention and I will tell you who you are.”
José Ortega y Gasset, via Sunbeams (Page 70)
“The purpose is to identify not with the body which is falling away, but with the consciousness of which it is a vehicle. This is something I learned from my myths. Am I the bulb that carries the light, or am I the light of which the bulb is the vehicle? If you can identify with the consciousness, you can watch this thing go like an old car. There goes the fender, etc. But it’s expected; and then gradually the whole thing drops off and consciousness rejoins consciousness. I live with these myths—and they tell me to do this, to identify with the Christ or the Shiva in me. And that doesn’t die, it resurrects. It is an essential experience of any mystical realization that you die to your flesh and are born to your spirit. You identify with the consciousness in life—and that is the god.”
Joseph Campbell, via Sunbeams (Page 70)
“The most beautiful music of all is the music of what happens.”
Irish Proverb, via Sunbeams (Page 70)
“If there is a sin against life, it consists perhaps not so much in despairing of life as in hoping for another life in eluding the implacable grandeur of this life.”
Albert Camus, via Sunbeams (Page 70)
“The foot feels the foot when it feels the ground.”
Buddha, via Sunbeams (Page 69) (Read Matt’s Blog On This Quote)
“It’s not the length but the quality of life that matters to me. It has always been important to me to write one sentence at a time, to live every day as if it were my last and judge it in those terms, often badly, not because it lacked grand gesture or grand passion but because it failed in the daily virtues of self-discipline, kindness, and laughter. It is love, very ordinary, human love, and not fear, which is the good teacher and the wisest judge.”
Jane Rule, via Sunbeams (Page 67)
“A man must die; that is, he must free himself from a thousand petty attachments and identifications… He is attached to everything in his life, attached to his imagination, attached to his stupidity, attached even to his sufferings, possibly to his sufferings more than to anything else… Attachments to things, identifications with things, keep alive a thousand useless ‘I’s in a man. These ‘I’s must die in order that the big I may be born. But how can they be made to die? They do not want to die. It is at this point that the possibility of awakening comes to the rescue. To awaken means to realize one’s nothingness.”
G. I. Gurdjieff, via Sunbeams (Page 67)
“The more a person is able to direct his life consciously, the more he can use time for constructive benefits. The more, however, he is conformist, unfree, undifferentiated, the more, that is, he works not by choice but by compulsion, the more he is then the object of quantitative time… The less alive a person is—”alive” here defined as having conscious direction of his life—the more is time for him the time of the clock. The more alive he is, the more he lives by qualitative time.”
Rollo May, via Sunbeams (Page 67)
“Idealistic reformers are dangerous because their idealism has no roots in love, but is simply a hysterical and unbalanced rage for order amidst their own chaos.”
William Irwin Thompson, via Sunbeams (Page 67)
“I fear nothing, I hope for nothing, I am free.”
Nikos Kazantzakis, via Sunbeams (Page 67)
“In the face of suffering, one has no right to turn away, not to see. In the face of injustice, one may not look the other way. When someone suffers, and it is not you, he comes first. His very suffering gives him priority… To watch over a man who grieves is a more urgent duty than to think of God.”
Elie Wiesel, via Sunbeams (Page 66)
“Do you change people first or do you change society? I believe this is a false dichotomy. You have to change both simultaneously. If you’re changing only yourself and have no concern for changing the society, something goes awry. If you’re changing only society but not changing yourself, something goes awry, as tended to happen in the late 1960s. Now, ‘simultaneously’ may be an overstatement, because I think there are periods when one has to concentrate on one or the other. And there are periods in a society, in a culture, when the emphasis is appropriate only on one or the other. What I’m trying to say is, never lose sight of either the internal world or the external world, the peace within and the peace based on justice on the outside.”
David Dellinger, via Sunbeams (Page 66)
“We’re all doing time. As soon as we get born, we find ourselves assigned to one little body, one set of desires and fears, one family, city, state, country, and planet. Who can ever understand exactly why or how it comes down as it does? The bottom line is, here we are. Whatever, wherever, whenever we are, this is what we’ve got. It’s up to us whether we do it as easy time or hard time.”
Bo Lozoff, via Sunbeams (Page 65)
“Man’s mind is a mirror of a universe that mirrors man’s mind.”
Joseph Chilton Pearce, via Sunbeams (Page 65)
“At the innermost core of all loneliness is a deep and powerful yearning for union with one’s lost self.”
Brendan Francis, via Sunbeams (Page 65)
“A dog is not considered a good dog because he is a good barker. A man is not considered a good man because he is a good talker.”
Chuang Tzu, via Sunbeams (Page 64)
“To a worm in horseradish, the whole world is horseradish.”
Yiddish proverb, via Sunbeams (Page 64) (Read Matt’s Blog On This Quote)