We Are Verbs
We are not nouns, we are verbs. I am not a thing — an actor, a writer — I am a person who does things — I write, I act — and you never know what I’m going to do next. I think you can be imprisoned if you think of yourself as a noun.
— Stephen Fry
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By bad company I don’t mean only bad, vicious or destructive people… I am referring above all to the company of amorphous people, people whose souls are dead, even though their bodies are alive; people whose thoughts and conversation are trivial; who gossip instead of talking, and who express clichés instead of thinking.
— Erich Fromm, The Art of Loving
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…western mystics have written works like “The Cloud of Unknowing” or “Dark Night of the Soul,” not to depress us, but to help us let go of the confusion that gives us a false sense of separation and permanence.
Awakening can initially feel like a great loss.
In the book of Job, after everything has been stripped from him, Job settles into the insight, “Naked I came into the world and naked I shall return.” Such negative imagery can be a reminder that our life does not consist in possessions, achievements, or even beliefs. Negative religious imagery strips away everything we are holding onto that is giving us a false sense of permanence and separate…
