What is Real Life?
You are the beginning of the transformed world.
— Eckhart Tolle
“In your light I learn how to love. In your beauty, how to make poems. You dance inside my chest where no-one sees you, but sometimes I do, and that sight becomes this art.”
— Rumi
*
“Each of us, as we journey through life, has the opportunity to find and to give his or her unique gift.
Whether this gift is quiet or small in the eyes of the world does not matter at all-not at all; it is through the finding and the giving that we may come to know the joy that lies at the center of both the dark times and the light.”
-Helen M. Luke
*
“The world is not a problem to be solved; it is a living being to which we belong. The world is part of our own self and we are a part of its suffering wholeness. Until we go to the root of our image of separateness, there can be no healing. And the deepest part of our separateness from creation lies in our forgetfulness of its sacred nature, which is also our own sacred nature.”
~ Thich Nhat Hanh, Spiritual Ecology: The Cry of the Earth
*
“We are living in a culture entirely hypnotized by the illusion of time ….. We are therefore out of touch with reality…. We are sick with a fascination for the useful tools of names and numbers, of symbols, signs, conceptions and ideas.”
― Alan W. Watts
We are unconsciously captured by ways of viewing reality that reinforce our culture of separation from ourselves. There do exist people who spend their lives trying to penetrate that veil of illusion and even more numerous are the souls caught between conventional thinking and a hankering after something more nourishing. I’ve spent a lot of time trying to understand those people. I want to understand what stops them from following their heart’s desire. I saw that battle up close growing up in my family. I saw how a person can be inspired to be themselves when young but end up defeated.
It takes courage to devote oneself to something deeper than survival in our society. America promotes the myth of a dog eat dog world where it’s only the privileged who can afford…
