“EDEN is that old-fashioned House
We dwell in every day,
Without suspecting our abode
Until we drive away.”
–Emily Dickenson

In a Moveable Feast, Hemingway remarks on the difference between his telling a story and the story telling itself.  When he begins to tell the story, he knows it is time to quit for the day.  This is a true echo of the temple tradition.  SIT DOWN WHEN YOU CAN HEAR YOURSELF SPEAK.

The Zohar masters understood Eros to be the essential goal of the spiritual journey.  Often in Hebrew mystical texts the erotic is called “a messiah experience.”  For the masters, the messiah was not a historical happening as much as an inner event.  The Hebrew word for “messiah” derives from the root word siach.  Siach means no more and no less than “conversation.”  The core of the Zohar text is basically a series of sacred conversations.  The messiah, they taught, lingers whenever we so fully enter conversation that the boundaries of ego fall away and we are left only with the raw joy of fellowship.”

“Holiness is eroticism.  Sin is superficiality.”

“The German writer Goethe was right when he defined addiction as anything you cannot stop doing.  We are all addicts.”

“One of the defining characteristics of the Zohar mystics was that illumination happens not in solitary retreat but in groups engaged in sacred conversation.”

“The biblical text describes the pit into which Joseph was thrown by his jealous brothers:  “The pit was empty; it had not water,” reads the story.  Of course, the real pit at play in the story is not a pit in the earth.  The pit is in Joseph’s brothers’ ground of being.  Their own gaping sense of emptiness makes them envy Joseph so.  Their inability to walk through their own pit (void) moves them to project a pit into the world, in which they would cast their brother. The snakes and scorpions come from the unacknowledged emptiness of the brothers.”

“And down his mouth comes to my mouth! and down
His bright dark eyes come over me, like a hood
Upon my mind! his lips meet mine, and a flood
Of sweet fire sweeps across me, so I drown
Against him, die and find death good.”
–D.H. Lawrence

“Do not pretend to be working for your core survival (bread) when it is really gold (honor and glory) that you are after.  Know what you want and pursue it.  ‘Have few desires burt have great ones,’ Buddha reportedly said.”

“I want
to do with you what spring does with the cherry trees.”
–Pablo Neruda

“We are not discrete units but rather interconnected indiscrete “unities.” Like a network of rivers that interweave along their way back to the sea, we are beings fully woven into each other and thus able to traverse all the frontiers of separateness, including space and even time.”

“Being in love is the nature of reality.  Survival of the fittest begins to mean what Darwin originally intuited, and not what his teachings were distorted by neo-Darwinists to mean.  Survival of the fittest means that what survives is what fits with all dimensions of reality–interiors and exteriors.  To survive is to fit with both insides and outsides.  That means that to survive is to be connected to the most beauty, the most love, the deepest values of collaboration, and the highest vision of community.”

“Wild Nights–Wild Nights!
Were I with thee
Wild Nights should be
Our luxury!

“Futile–the Winds–
To a Heart in port–
Done with the Compass–
Done with the Chart!

“Rowing in Eden–
Ah, the Sea!
Might I but moor–tonight–
In Thee!”
–Emily Dickinson

“Reality is going somewhere.”

“But love is not only falling in love but also rising in love.  We dare not exile falling in love to the merely sexual or the merely romantic.”

“I have come to drag you out of your self
and take you in my heart.
I have come to bring out the beauty
you never knew you had
and lift you like a prayer to the sky.”
–Rumi

“When you awaken as your Unique Self, you are, in effect, awakening as evolution in person.”