My favorite passage: “Conspiritualists romanticize a past that never was while pecking out biblical gravitas over coffee enemas and IV drips.” It’s absolutely perfect. Thank you.
"The art doesn't make the man, the man makes the art". That's a quote from a Karate sensi, but it is equally applicable to any spiritual tradition. A spiritual rap session like the one above could be written about anything. Pick the best of one and the worst of the other, change the names and you get the same breezy discussion.
When I was a young man I lived in a spiritual retreat centre and the teacher saw me getting a drink of water after a few hot hours in the kitchen garden. He said---through a translator---that when he was my age he'd gone into the kitchen at his temple for a similar drink. His teacher told him that he shouldn't take another sip until he'd dug a new well and drank the water from it. In my callow youth I thought he was talking about how hard he had it. But years later I realized he was talking about the source of our own wisdom.
He also commonly said "you have to figure it out for yourself". That was the lesson I learned from him. No matter how good the teaching, or how attentive the student---he or she will always have to 'figure it our for themself".
One of my favorites yet
My favorite passage: “Conspiritualists romanticize a past that never was while pecking out biblical gravitas over coffee enemas and IV drips.” It’s absolutely perfect. Thank you.
"The art doesn't make the man, the man makes the art". That's a quote from a Karate sensi, but it is equally applicable to any spiritual tradition. A spiritual rap session like the one above could be written about anything. Pick the best of one and the worst of the other, change the names and you get the same breezy discussion.
When I was a young man I lived in a spiritual retreat centre and the teacher saw me getting a drink of water after a few hot hours in the kitchen garden. He said---through a translator---that when he was my age he'd gone into the kitchen at his temple for a similar drink. His teacher told him that he shouldn't take another sip until he'd dug a new well and drank the water from it. In my callow youth I thought he was talking about how hard he had it. But years later I realized he was talking about the source of our own wisdom.
He also commonly said "you have to figure it out for yourself". That was the lesson I learned from him. No matter how good the teaching, or how attentive the student---he or she will always have to 'figure it our for themself".
A good read , thanks Derek. I'll return to it.