To escape your prison invest in it.
Study the walls built around you.
Feel the heavy door keeping you inside.
Lay down on its floor holding your weight.
Look through the bars preventing a wider view.
Unless you know your limitations,
escape is possible.
| — | Louise Eldrich |
| — | Ram Dass (via lazyyogi) |
333 photos of Jack White:
47/333
(Source: fallenangelsarmy)
Theater is standing up terrified and convincing people you know what you’re doing. Theater is going to bars with strangers whose incomes are four times your own; it’s wearing denim when everyone around you is wearing silk, or silk when they’re all wearing leather. Theater is talking about sex with enormous enthusiasm when you’ve never had a one night stand in your life. Theater is pretending you know what you’re doing when you don’t know anything for certain and what you do know seems to be changing all the time.
Six days out of seven I am a creation, someone who relies on luck, lust, and determination.
I know the place where courage and desire come together, where pride ad joy push lust through the bloodstream, right to the heart.
It was not a break.
There was a place in between her ventricles that simply throbbed quicker, a vein that trembled in transmission. She felt the emotion seep into her in the form of inaction, through clammy fingers, numbed senses, and an overall hollowness. None of her broke in the process. Her heart just lived faster.
The place only ached in the presence of those she loved most, who she began to fear for that very reason. Men swept bed sheets back and laid her on her stomach, lips trailing across torsos, hands taking and giving, but she had lost emotion there. Sometimes she feared she’d lose it altogether, but for memories of aches and the palpitations that bruised her spirits.
One time, someone brought it back, kissed it into her neck, and made it blush on her skin again. He told her he did not know what he could do without her. The vein seized and she felt as though she might die; instead she held back tears and spread a smile across her face for him. It began to bloom, and it was the truth— someone could still care. Someone could bring color to her cheeks, obscure her naked body in diamond afternoons, and felt her as a whole composure of a human being. The bruise she’d felt disappeared.
She had not been broken.
Photo by Lisse Ellee
Just as a piece of matter detaches itself from the sun to live as a wholly new creation, so I have come to feel about my detachment from buying any clothes that are not second hand. This has been a trend in my life for the past three years, but I did not realize just how committed I was until I realized that I did not want to buy yoga clothes from Victoria’s secret the other day when they were having a sale.
Once the separation is made a new orbit is established, and there is no turning back. For me the sun had ceased to exist; I had myself become a blazing sun. I have worked up to twenty minutes of mediation a day, and any visions that I have had always come back to one thing: hope.
I speak in cosmological terms because it seems to me that is the only possible way to think if one is truly alive.
I am sitting at my computer facing east. No backward glances over the shoulder. Once I was confronted with a choice—either to remain a satellite of that dead thing or create a new world of my own, with my own satellites. I made my choice. Having made it there is no standing still. A new man is made out of the whole cloth, by a change of heart which alters every living cell of the body. Unless there can be a change of heart, there can be no act of will.
“One needs either a heaven or a hell in which to flourish—until one arrives at that paradise of his own creation, that middle realm which is not a bread-and-butter Utopia of which the masses dream but an interstellar realm in which one rolls along his orbit with sublime indifference.”
—Henry Miller
Everything tries to sell you by telling you that you are lacking. Not sexy enough, not social enough, not rich enough, not smart enough. But if you buy this then BAM! You’ve got what you needed…for now. Until they just hook and reel you in using another insecurity.
People love to blame corporations, advertisers, and media for brainwashing us into the consumer society that we are. But while that may be so, if we weren’t looking for the right things in all the wrong places then we wouldn’t be so easily exploited and manipulated. Sexiness, social connection, success, intelligence, you should be able to realize and experience all of these things if you so desire. But without paying to be willingly enslaved.
The spiritual path has this single selling point: you have everything you need. While consumerism tells you that you are lacking, spiritualism shows you that there is nothing to lack.
Feel free to try and obtain anything your heart desires. But until you understand why you have those desires then you will simply be a slave to your longing. The objects of your desire are harmless. It is the desire itself that deludes your sanity.
Religion, as it is commonly regarded today, also provides a consumerist paradigm. Religion tells you that you are not in accord with the Divine, you are not walking in the Grace of God, unless you believe this. Unless you do that. Religion conditions you to think that you are lacking God. That God can only be found in churches and temples and ceremonies and hymns.
Spirituality isn’t the opposite of religion. There are many people who have brought their religion to life because they had Spirit. But spirituality helps the seeker to stand on his or her own two feet. The spiritual path puts you in direct contact, in direct communion, with the Divinity that is within you and all things. There are no priests, no middlemen to go through. There are only teachers to help us remember what they have remembered: your own Being.
The spiritual paths cannot be consumed. In fact, when you try to consume a spiritual path, the path ends up consuming you. And that is exactly what happened to me. I became consumed.
It is tempting to live in a way that is at odds with our society, to place blame on The Man and power systems. This is not to say such things are blameless. But no true and lasting outer change can and will occur until we have established our own inner freedom and peace and unity.
Namaste, sangha.
| — | Master Nome |
