Love and laughter

[chelidon]

...two topics about which I've written much in my journal.

Some stuff from Rob Brezsny's site (thanks, kira_april!) I am a quote junky, and am happy to pass 'em on.

On Love:

Rainer Maria Rilke: "For one human being to love another is the most difficult task of all. It’s the work for which all other work is mere preparation."
Teilhard de Chardin: "Someday after we have mastered the winds, the waves, and gravity, we will harness for God the energies of love; and then for a second time in the history of the world, human beings will have discovered fire."
Leo Tolstoy: "Love is life. All, everything that I understand, I understand only because I love. Everything is, everything exists, only because I love."
Blaise Pascal: "If you do not love too much, you do not love enough."
Emily Dickinson: "Until you have loved, you cannot become yourself."

On laughter:

"The anonymous celebrity with whom you have most in common is the jester who followed Buddha around and kept him loose"

Which reminds me of one of the many excellent Ken Wilber quotes:

"Transcendence restores humor. Spirit restores humor. Suddenly, smiling returns. Too many representatives of too many movements-- even many good movements, such as feminism, environmentalism, meditation, spiritual studies--seem to lack humor altogether. In other words, they lack lightness, they lack a distance from themselves, a distance from the ego and its grim game of forcing others to conform to its contours. There is self-transcending humor, or there is the game of egoic power. No wonder Mencken wrote that "Every third American devotes himself to improving and lifting up his fellow citizens, usually by force; this messianic delusion is our national disease." We have chosen egoic power and politically correct thought police; grim Victorian reformers pretending to be defending civil rights; messianic new paradigm thinkers who are going to save the planet and heal the world. They should all trade two pounds of ego for one ounce of laughter."
-- Ken Wilber, _One Taste_

May our lives be filled with love and laughter -- two things you don't want to do without. And may both the love and the laughter be spontaneous, genuine, joyous, life-sustaining, and healthy. Both love and laughter can be a choice, both love and laughter can seem hard to find sometimes, and both love and laughter are your birthright. Be open to them when they come your way, and do what you can to spread them to others, and I guarantee that the world will be a much, much better place for it.

Comments

Different strokes, I guess

[christeos-pir.livejournal.com]

I don't know why - and I've tried, really - but I just cannot connect with Wilbur's writing. It always seems to me to be either facile newage guruspeak, or you-could-never-understand-because-you're-not-advanced-like-me, or both. I can't even put my finger on what it is about his writing that elicits that response in me, but every time I think that perhaps I'm missing something, I have the same experience.

Re: Different strokes, I guess

[chelidon.livejournal.com]

heh. Well, as you say, different strokes. I by no means like all of his stuff, nor do I agree with everything he says -- he can indeed come across as facile, guruish, and arrogant, but some of that I figure is just the wages of being a philosopher discussing big-picture topics. What hubris to think have any idea how It All Works! But that is his chosen profession ;> And I will never, ever, forgive him for even half-heartedly supporting Bush (apparently we needed to pay more attention to the "infrastructure" of this country...yeah, what*eveR*, asshole...)

I think the thing that impresses me most about his writing, though, is that he at times manages to bridge that gap between ontological philosophical mumbo-jumbo (which can often be obfuscatingly dense, even when it's not daft as well), and poetry -- in other words, the best of his stuff jumps that right-brain/left-brain divide, for me, anyway.

Here's an example, expecially the final paragraph...
-------
As Plotinus knew: Let the world be quiet. Let the heavens and the
earth and the seas be still. Let the world be waiting. Let the
self-contraction relax into the empty ground of its own awareness,
and let it there quietly die. See how Spirit pours through each and
every opening in the turmoil, and bestows new splendor on the setting
Sun and its glorious Earth and all its radiant inhabitants. See the
Kosmos dance in Emptiness; see the play of light in all creatures
great and small; see finite worlds sing and rejoice in the play of
the very Divine, floating on a Glory that renders each transparent,
flooded by a joy that refuses time or terror, that undoes the madness
of the loveless self and buries it in splendor.

Indeed, indeed: let the self-contraction relax into the empty ground
of its own awareness, and let it there quietly die. See the Kosmos
arise in its place, dancing madly and divine, self-luminous and
self-liberating, intoxicated by a Light that never dawns nor ceases.
See the worlds arise and fall, never caught in time or turmoil,
transparent images shimmering in the radiant Abyss. Watch the
mountain walk on water, drink the Pacific in a single gulp, blink and
a billion universes rise and fall, breathe out and create a Kosmos,
breathe in and watch it dissolve.

Let the ecstasy overflow and outshine the loveless self, driven mad
with the torments of its self-embracing ways, hugging mightily
samsara's spokes of endless agony, and sing instead triumphantly with
Saint Catherine, "My being is God, not by simple participation, but
by a true transformation of my Being. My *me* is God!" And let the
joy sing with Dame Julian, "See! I am God! See! I am in all
things! See! I do all things!" And let that joy shout with
Harkuin, "This very body is the Body of Buddha! and this very land
the Pure Land!"

And this Earth becomes a blessed being, and every I becomes a God,
and every We becomes God's sincerest worship, and every It becomes
God's most graceous temple.

And comes to rest that Godless search, tormented and tormenting. The
knot in the Heart of the Kosmos relaxes to allow its only God, and
overflows the Spirit ravished and enraptured by the lost and found
Beloved. And gone the Godless destiny of death and desperation, and
gone the madness of a life committed to uncare, and gone the tears
and terror of the brutal days and endless nights where time alone
would rule.

And I-I rises to taste the dawn, and find that love alone will shine
today. And the Shining says: to love it all, and love it madly, and
always endlessly, and ever fiercely, to love without choice and thus
enter the All, to love it mindlessly and thus be the All, embracing
the only and radiant Divine: now as Emptiness, now as Form, together
and forever, the Godless search undone, and love alone will shine
today."

-- Ken Wilber, _Sex, Ecology, Spirituality_

Re: Different strokes, I guess

[skygypsy.livejournal.com]

fabulous!
put like that, how could i fear the glory of surrender? ;)

i thought _No Boundary_ was brilliant but had yet to tackle the formidable SES tome ;) someone recommeded i read the _theory of everything_ i think

Re: Different strokes, I guess

[chelidon.livejournal.com]

Ah, yeah, SES is quite a slog. As an intermediate step ;>, I could suggest _One Taste_ (from his journals), or The Essential Ken Wilber: An Introductory Reader (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/1570623791/qid=1120000840/sr=1-1/ref=sr_1_1/002-2199556-7557656?v=glance&s=books), kind of a "best of" taken from a number of his other writings. As a matter of fact, if I remember right, that lovely bit above is the very first entry in the book.

[skygypsy.livejournal.com]

i love the jester quote :)