Mountains and Seas

I'm partial to both of them -

"Seen from the shore the sea is very beautiful - streaked with brilliant colors.  It is opaque at the edges, mingling the blue of the sky with the shining green of the coco and palm trees on the shore, and fringed with foam - a rainbow fringe.  Farther out, it has a pearly lustre.  The islands of coco trees, which float in the distance, in a slightly misted, vaporous radiance, have such fresh, delicate shades that one is enchanted by the sight.  A slight breeze from the open sea tempers the heat of the town."

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"I was enchanted with the succession of peaks and precipices, torrents and cascades of water, wooded slopes and deep valleys.  Water gushed and flowed everywhere, animating everything.  It was a wonderful spectacle.  A little terrifying too, whenever the train seemed to get close to the edge of the precipice."

Camara Laye
The Dark Child

The Sea

"Suddenly at the end of the avenue, I saw it.  I stood a long time observing its vastness, watching the waves roll in, one after another, to break against the red rocks of the shore.  In the distance, despite the mist around them, I saw some very green islands.  It was the most astonishing spectacle that had ever confronted me.  At night, from the train, I had only glimpsed the sea.  I had formed no real idea of its size, nor even less of its movement, of the kind of fascination one feels towards its endless movement.  Now that the whole spectacle lay before me I could scarcely come away."

Camara Laye
The Dark Child

Those of us who grew up far from shore understand the emotions of catching sight of the sea for the first time.  Laye evokes those feelings eloquently.

Satori and Insight

"Its [Satori's] semblance or analogy in a more or less feeble and fragmentary way is gained when a difficult mathematical problem is solved, or when a great discovery is made, or when a sudden means of escape is realized in the midst of most desperate complications; in short, when one exclaims 'Eureka! Eureka!'  But this refers only to the intellectual aspect of satori, which is therefore necessarily partial and incomplete and does not touch the very foundation of life considered one indivisible whole.  Satori as the Zen experience must be concerned with the entirety of life.  For what Zen proposes to do is the revolution, and the revaluation as well, of oneself as a spiritual unity.  The solving of a mathematical problem ends with the solution, it does not affect one's whole life.  So with all other particular questions, practical or scientific, they do not enter the basic life-tone of the individual concerned.  But the opening of satori is the remaking of life itself.  When it is genuine - for there are many simulacra of it - it's effects on ones moral and spiritual life are revolutionary, and they are so enhancing, purifying as well as exacting.  When a master was asked what constituted Buddhahood, he answered, "The bottom of a pail is broken through."  From this we see what a complete revolution is produced by this spiritual experience.  The birth of a new man is really cataclysmic."

D. T. Suzuki
Zen Buddhism

Language and Spiritual Experience

"You mustn't take these and similar meditations too literally; they are only attempts to capture something from the flow of my feelings and inner thought processes; sometimes I map it out with these formulations, at other times I may use completely different ones.  I'm no philosopher and it is not my ambition to create a conceptually fixed system; anyone who tries to understand it that way will soon discover that I am perpetually contradicting myself, that I leave many things unexplained or explain them differently each time, etc."

Vaclav Havel
Letters to Olga

Havel is doing the same thing that believers have had to do since the beginning, using the language and concepts at hand to try to express our noetic experiences.  However unsatisfactory this process is, I'm glad Havel did not settle for the other alternative, staying silent.  I take strength from the words of others who have trod this path before me.

Havel - Responsibility and Identity 2

"For me the fundamental flaw in the many different positivistic 'explanations' lies in the fact that it reduces human responsibility - as it does everything else - to a mere relationship of something relative, transitory, and finite to something else relative, transitory, and finite (for example, the relationship of a citizen to the legal code, or of the unconscious to the 'superego').  By its very nature, however, such an understanding hides, and must hide, what is most important and, in my opinion, as clear as day: what we have here is not the mutual relationship of two relativities to each other, but the relationship of relativity to 'non-relativity,' the relationship of finiteness to 'infinity,' of a unique existence to the totality of Being.  It is true that responsibility usually finds expression as the relationship of something in us to something around us or something else in us, but essentially it is always a relationship between us, as 'relativity' - and our only genuine antithesis, that which alone permits us to experience our relativity as relativity; that is to an omnipresent, absolute horizon as the 'final instance' that lies behind everything and above everything, which as it were provides everything with a framework, a measure and a background and which ultimately qualifies and defines everything relative.  This superabstract and superimaginary horizon is, at the same time, something confoundedly concrete - for do we not experience it today and every day, through all our particular experiences of the world of relativities, as a constantly present limiting element, and in fact as a dimension that touches us most compellingly?"

"In other words, as an ability or a determination or a perceived duty of man to vouch for himself completely, absolutely, and in all circumstances (in other words, as the only true creator of freedom), human responsibility is precisely the agent by which one first defines oneself as a person vis-à-vis the universe, that is, as a miracle of Being that one is.  On the one hand, it is only thus that one defines and so infuses meaning into one's dependency on the world; on the other hand, it is only thus that one definitively separates oneself from the world as a sovereign and independent being; it is only thus that one, as it were, stands on one's own two feet.  I would say that responsibility for oneself is a knife we use to carve out our own inimitable features in the panorama of Being; it is the pen with which we write into the history of Being that story of fresh creation of the world that each new human existence always is."

"In short, it seems to me that just as there can be no matter without space, and no space without matter, their can be no transitory human existence without the horizon of permanence against which it develops and to which - whether it knows it or not - it constantly relates."

Vaclav Havel
Letters to Olga

The Gentle Heart

II - Initiation
     2 - The Meeting with the Goddess

"The goddess guardian of the inexhaustible well...requires that the hero should be endowed with what the troubadours and minnesingers termed the 'gentle heart.'  Not by the animal desires of an Actaeon, nor by the fastidious revulsion of such as Fergus, can she be comprehended and rightly served, but only by gentleness: aware ("gentle sympathy") it was named in the romantic courtly poetry of tenth-to-twelfth-century Japan."

"....The meeting with the goddess (who is incarnate in every woman) is the final test of the talent of the hero to win the boon of love (charity: amor fati), which is life itself enjoyed as the encasement of eternity.

And when the adventurer, in this context, is not a youth but a maid, she is the one who, by her qualities, her beauty, or her yearning, is fit to become the consort of an immortal.  Then the heavenly husband descends to her and conducts her to his bed - whether she will or no.  And if she has shunned him, the scales fall from her eyes;  if she has sought him, her desire finds its peace."

Joseph Campbell
The Hero with a Thousand Faces

A thought provoking question

"Now tell me, O human:  What do you think you were when you were not yet in soul and body?"

Hildegard of Bingen
Scivias