Steve Staviski
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Consciousness presents itself no longer as an extra-cosmic mystery but as the crucial factor that, by making choices, resolves possibility into actuality and gives to the universe its discrete determinations.
I am conscious not because I am miraculously different from all other material entities; rather, I am conscious precisely because I am, in my process of coming into being, structurally similar to all other material entities. Sentience goes all the way down.
—Eric M. Weiss
The Long Trajectory
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If there were a spiritual journey, it would be no more than a quarter of an inch long, though many miles deep.—John O'Donohue
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We can live any way we want. People take vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience - even of silence - by choice. The thing is to stalk your calling in a certain skilled and supple way, to locate the most tender and live spot and plug into that pulse. This is yielding, not fighting.
I think it would be well, and proper, and obedient, and pure, to grasp your one necessity and not let it go, to dangle from it limp wherever it takes you. Then even death, where you’re going no matter how you live, cannot you part. Seize it and let it seize you up aloft even, till your eyes burn out and drop; let your musky flesh fall off in shreds, and let your very bones unhinge and scatter, loosened over fields, over fields and woods, lightly, thoughtless, from any height at all, from as high as eagles.
—Annie Dillard
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And the world cannot be discovered by a journey of miles, no matter how long, but only by a spiritual journey, a journey of one inch, very arduous and humbling and joyful, by which we arrive at the ground at our feet, and learn to be at home.
It is a journey we can make only by the acceptance of mystery and of mystification – by yielding to the condition that what we have expected is not there.
—Wendell Berry
The Unforeseen Wilderness, excerpt
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