The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes. -- Marcel Proust
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Laurie sez:
My old Zen Master teacher used to say, "Keep Clear Mind, Only Go Straight. Put down all the thinking. When red comes, red. When blue comes, blue."
He also used to say, "A tree's job is tree; a dog's job, dog. Human being's job, love."
13 comments:
"Honey, I shrunk the kids!" was about little more than that. "What if you saw your backyard with the eyes of a tiny insect?"
There you go. The maxim is much more universally applicable than one thinks at first. :)
seeking new landscapes takes desire and money
seeing with new eyes takes humility
That's why you rarely hear anyone wanting the latter
Laurie
I didn't think humility came into it. It's the simple things like having someone else drive, or walking on the opposite side of the street, then you suddenly notice all those things. Also try different positions of the sun and new cloud arrangements.
Or are they new landscapes, just located close to the old ones.
I think its just a matter of leaving yourself open to the beauty in the otherwise mundane. Its hard to experience the majesty of the universe when you think you're the center of it.
seeing with new eyes takes humility
not hardly. humility has nothing to do with it. the world as a whole is basically the same everywhere. mountains are mountains and dirt is dirt, concrete is concrete. it's all the same.
wow, Not Fooled, that is brilliantly clear. Thank you.
Have you studied Zen Buddhism?
My old Zen Master teacher used to say, Keep Clear Mind, Only Go STraight. Put down all the thinking. When red comes, red. When blue comes, blue.
He also used to say, "A tree's job is tree; a dog's job, dog. Human beings job, love."
Thank you for your dirt teaching!
you've given me new eyes.
love,
Laurie
Well said up there, Laurie.
It is easier to part with one's money than one's hollow pride.
Sort of echoing Leviathud there.
Not Fooled,
the sometimes acrimonious disputes on this very blog constantly illustrate that one person's eyes will see great wisdom where another's will see utter nonsense (to remain polite ;-). It's not all the same to everybody, and it's not always the same to one person either. What you call dirt, a farmer will call a field, and tomorrow's harvest.
A very relevant example is the place where I live. I'm currently quite unsure whether I can call it "home", and in a matter of months (weeks?) I'll probably have to choose whether I still view it as my country, or a mere land of cold exile and hot hatred. Home is where the heart is. My heart wonders whether it can keep living in Lebanon. For example, would you have stayed in Berlin in 1944, seeing the Reds about to replace the Nazis?
If your world is stable and reassuring, I congratulate you on such a peace of mind. You're lucky to have it.
Meanwhile, I keep seeking new eyes to focus on the beautiful things instead of the ugly ones. There are both kinds. Everywhere.
Humility means that one will have a hard time changing their attitude and perceptions, because first they'll have to admit to themselves they weren't always right about everything. The ego is a self-made invisible prison. "The best prison is that from which people do not WISH to escape."
I wouldn't want to live in a non-peaceful country. Life is fearful enough without exacerbating it.
"dirt teaching" That is going into my repetroire of phrases.
If a dog's job is to dog, then why isn't a human's job to human? I don't like the thing about adding an extra entity, to love. I mean, I don't object to love, but sometimes I think the whole business is a bit overrated. Kind of like a cultural obsession. Our job is also to hate, for example: to hate injustice, to hate the oppressor when his behavior is unnecessary toward the oppressed, etc. That might be a "kind of love" in reverse, but then you're just begging the question: if all things can be semantically reduced to a form of love, and our job is to love, then why bother mentioning love or our job at all.
Jeff Klinkowitz, a pretty good columnist who writes on "real Florida" (what it was like before the tourists, and still is in the back woods places that maintain a little character), said once, of trying to swim immediately behind a school of mullet in a very cold fresh water spring: mullet are better at being mullet than people are at being people.
"mullet are better at being mullet than people are at being people."
First there was the foot race.
Then the arms race.
Then the minds race.
Hopefully, this'll conclude when we reach the human race.
"Hopefully, this'll conclude when we reach the human race."
There is still one more phase: disgrace.
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