Watts: “There are two ways of understanding an experience. The first is to compare it with the memories of other experiences, and so to name and define it. This is to interpret it in accordance with the dead and the past. The second is to be aware of it as it is, as when, inContinue reading “Out of the Box”
Category Archives: Conversations Across Time
Always Here
Heschel: “It takes three things to attain a sense of significant being: God, a soul, and a moment. And the three are always here. Just to be is a blessing. Just to live is holy.” A sign is something that, by definition, points beyond itself. A curved arrow on a sign alongside the road indicatesContinue reading “Always Here”
An Apology for What’s Next
Nietzsche: “When the highest and strongest drives, breaking passionately out, carry the individual far above and beyond the average and lowlands of the herd conscience, the self-confidence of the community goes to pieces, its faith in itself, its spine as it were, is broken: consequently it is precisely these drives which are most branded andContinue reading “An Apology for What’s Next”
Giving Up Security
Watts: “To understand that there is no security is far more than to agree with the theory that all things change, more even than to observe the transitoriness of life. The notion of security is based on the feeling that there is something within us which is permanent, something which endures through all the daysContinue reading “Giving Up Security”
Breakpoint for Religion
Heschel: “You can affect a person only if you reach his [or her] inner life, the level where every human being is insecure and feels his [or her] incompleteness, the level of awareness that lies beyond articulation. “The soul is discovered in response, in acts of transcending the self, in the awareness of ends thatContinue reading “Breakpoint for Religion”
Faith For Today
Heschel: “Faith in the sense of being involved in the mystery of God and [humanity] is not the same as acceptance of definitive formulations of articles of belief. Even [one] who merely strives for faith in the living God is on the threshold of faith. The test is honesty and stillness. “Our error is inContinue reading “Faith For Today”
What Would Nietzsche Do?
Nietzsche: “That which is done out of love always takes place beyond good and evil.” Given that Nietzsche titled his book Beyond Good and Evil, we can assume a higher importance in his mind for what he connects to this phrase. But … love? Really? Nietzsche? Didn’t he espouse the obliteration of all values, despiseContinue reading “What Would Nietzsche Do?”
Two Small, Really Big Words
Watts: “If we want to keep the old language, still using such terms as ‘spiritual’ and ‘material’, the spiritual must mean ‘the indefinable’, that which, because it is living, must ever escape the framework of any fixed form. Matter is spirit named.” Question: Why would we want to keep the “old language”? If it’s increasinglyContinue reading “Two Small, Really Big Words”
From Having Answers to Having to Answer
Heschel: “How to save the inner [life] from oblivion – this is the challenge we face. To achieve our goal, we must learn how to activate the soul, how to answer the ultimate, how to relate ourselves to the spirit.” The cultural atmosphere of the 1960s, as it relates to religion and spirituality, was galvanizedContinue reading “From Having Answers to Having to Answer”
Letting Go of God
Nietzsche: “Why atheism today? It seems to me that the religious instinct is indeed in vigorous growth – but that it rejects the theistic answer with profound mistrust.” Nietzsche is perhaps best known for his literary persona as the madman, who ran into the marketplace with his lantern looking for God. It’s in that parableContinue reading “Letting Go of God”
Tracts of Revolution 