Dharma Bum

Killing the Hero's Journey

"But I was talking today to a friend of mine, and it came to me that Christ's image is just the perfect symbol for our civilization. It's a perfect event for us - you have to die to survive. Because the personality is crucified in our society. That's why so many people collapse, why the mental hospitals are full. Nobody can survive with the personality that they want, which is the hero of their own drama."
 - Leonard Cohen

"For me, I am driven by two main philosophies, know more today about the world than I knew yesterday. And lessen the suffering of others. You’d be surprised how far that gets you." - Neil deGrasse Tyson

If you want to identify me, ask me not where I live, or what I like to eat, or how I comb my hair, but ask me what I am living for, in detail, ask me what I think is keeping me from living fully for the thing I want to live for.

— Thomas Merton

"I don't know what I'm doing most of the time. There's a certain humor in realizing that. I can never figure out the kind of tie to put on in the morning. I don't have any strategy or plan to get through the day. It is literally a problem for me to decide which side of the bed to get out on. These are staggering problems. I remember talking to this Trappist monk in a monastery. He's been there twelve years. A pretty severe regime. I expressed my admiration for him and he said 'Leonard, I've been here twelve years and every morning, I have to decide whether I'm going to stay or not.' I knew exactly what he was talking about."
- Leonard Cohen

The truth will set you free. But not until it is finished with you.
— David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest

“I often recall these words when I am writing, and I think to myself, ‘It’s true. There aren’t any new words. Our job is to give new meanings and special overtones to absolutely ordinary words.’ I find the thought reassuring. It means that vast, unknown stretches still lie before us, fertile territories just waiting for us to cultivate them.”

—Haruki Murakami

"Remembering not to identify with the story has been crucial - and very hard to do, because, in anger the story carries such obsessive power. But this for me really is, most fundamentally, what it means to be "religious." It means remembering, again and again, that the stories we tell ourselves - all those stories about loss, failure, shattered hope, betrayal, blame - are not what is most true about who we are. This is for me the true meaning of "taking refuge," this residing in the vast only don't know of practice."
- Noelle Oxenhandler

Nowadays, I don’t have a plan, an exit strategy, or a career arc in mind. So it’s like: keep working on things. Don’t sit and play PlayStation and wait for the phone to ring. Go out and see music, see art, participate. Then you just cross your fingers and hope it will work out OK. - Craig Finn

I think I hold on to this for my writing...

“The advice I like to give young artists, or really anybody who’ll listen to me, is not to wait around for inspiration. Inspiration is for amateurs; the rest of us just show up and get to work. If you wait around for the clouds to part and a bolt of lightning to strike you in the brain, you are not going to make an awful lot of work. All the best ideas come out of the process; they come out of the work itself. Things occur to you. If you’re sitting around trying to dream up a great art idea, you can sit there a long time before anything happens. But if you just get to work, something will occur to you and something else will occur to you and somthing else that you reject will push you in another direction. Inspiration is absolutely unnecessary and somehow deceptive. You feel like you need this great idea before you can get down to work, and I find that’s almost never the case.”

-Chuck Close

"I'm for mystery, not interpretive answers.
The answer is never the answer. What's really interesting is the mystery. If you seek the mystery instead of the answer, you'll always be seeking. I've never seen anybody really find the answer, but they think they have. So they stop thinking. But the job is to seek mystery, evoke mystery, plant a garden in which strange plants grow and mysteries bloom. The need for mystery is greater than the need for an answer."
- Ken Kesey

“Art enables us to find ourselves and lose ourselves at the same time.” -Thomas Merton

Dystopias

This Reminded me of my work with adolescents...

“ Consider the dystopia: a world where polite society has vanished, where you have to fend for yourself against impossible tyranny, where you have all the responsibilities of being an adult but almost none of the privileges. Sound familiar? Teenagers don’t see dystopias as dystopias; they see them as barely fictional representations of their day-to-day lives… Why do teenagers like dystopias? Simple. They’re looking for proof that there’s a way to survive the one in which they are already living. — Patrick Ness reviewing Ship Breaker for The Guardian. Via

“The salvation of this human world lies nowhere else than in the human heart, in the human power to reflect, in human meekness and human responsibility.”

—Václav Havel, from the Czechoslovakian president’s address to the Joint Session of the U.S. Congress on February 21, 1990.

"Learning how to think" really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think.
It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience.
Because if you cannot or will not exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed."
- David Foster Wallace
This Is Water
Some Thoughts, Delivered on a Significant Occasion, about Living a Compassionate Life

"I had a discussion with a great master in Japan, and we were talking about the various people who are working to translate the Zen books into English, and he said, "That's a waste of time. If you really understand Zen, you can use any book. You could use the Bible. You could use Alice in Wonderland. You could use the dictionary, because the sound of the rain needs no translation."
- Alan Watts

via

"If a writer is so cautious that he never writes anything that cannot be criticized, he will never write anything that can be read. If you want to help other people you have got to make up your mind to write things that some men will condemn."
- Thomas Merton

What do you think an artist is? An imbecile who only has eyes, if he is a painter, or ears if he is a musician, or a lyre in every chamber of his heart if he is a poet, or even, if he is a boxer, just his muscles? Far from it: at the same time he is also a political being, constantly aware of the heartbreaking, passionate, or delightful things that happen in the world, shaping himself completely in their image. How could it be possible to feel no interest in other people, and with a cool indifference to detach yourself from the very life which they bring to you so abundantly? No, painting is not done to decorate apartments. It is an instrument of war.

Pablo Picasso

Remember your name. Do not lose hope—what you seek will be found. Trust ghosts. Trust those that you have helped to help you in their turn. Trust dreams. Trust your heart, and trust your story.

— Neil Gaiman