The greatest trap in our life is not success, popularity or power
but self-rejection
Henri Nouwen
Sunday Quote: What traps us
Tag: Meditation
Reassurance
The reason why men are so anxious to see themselves,
instead of being content to be themselves,
is that they do not really believe in their own existence.
Thomas Merton, A Search for Solitude: Pursuing the Monk’s True Life
Nothing fixed
A monk asked “What is the substance of a true person?”
The Master said “Spring, Summer, Autumn, Winter”
The monk said “Put like that, it is hard for me to understand”
The Master said “You asked about the substance of a true person, didnt you?”
Traditional Zen koan dialogue
The accumulation of unnecessary goods
As the author says, we need to change our stories.
[The] four stories at the heart of western imperial civilisation….have profound ecological implications.
There is the ‘prosperity story’ which promotes worship of material acquisition and money, the ‘biblical story’ which focuses on the afterlife rather than the world around us, the ‘security story’ which builds up the military and police to protect relationships of domination, and the ‘secular meaning story’ which reduces life to matter and mechanism.
These are not, however, stories in the usual sense of narratives. They exist behind and between the lines of the texts that surround us – the news reports that describe the ‘bad news’ about a drop in Christmas sales, or the ‘good news’ that airline profits are up…
[…] underneath common ways of writing and speaking in industrial societies are stories about unlimited economic growth as being not just possible but the goal of society, of the accumulation of unnecessary goods as a path towards self-improvement, of progress and success defined narrowly in terms of technological innovation and profit, and of nature as something separate from humans, a mere stock of resources to be exploited.
Arran Stibbe, Ecolinguistics: Language, Ecology and the Stories We Live By
Unexpected
We must sense that we live in a world which in some respects is mysterious; that things happen and can be experienced which remain inexplicable; that not everything which happens can be anticipated.
The unexpected and the incredible belong in this world.
Only then is life whole.
Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections
Materialism
Our world, so we see and hear on all sides, is drowning in materialism, commercialism, consumerism. But the problem is not really there. What we ordinarily speak of as materialism is a result, not a cause. The root of materialism is a poverty of ideas about the inner and the outer world. Less and less does our contemporary culture have, or even seek, commerce with great ideas, and it is that lack that is weakening the human spirit. This is the essence of materialism. Materialism is a disease of the mind starved for ideas.
Jacob Needleman, 1934 – 2022, American philosopher, author, and religious scholar, The American Soul: Rediscovering the Wisdom of the Founders
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