Our practice should be based on the ideal of selflessness. Selflessness is very difficult to understand. If you try to be selfless, that is already a selfish idea. Selflessness will be there when you do not try anything.
I prefer the gradual path My feeling is that mythic forms reveal themselves gradually in the course of your life if you know what they are and how to pay attention to their emergence. My own initiation into the mythic depths of the unconscious has been through the mind, through the books that surround me in this library. I have recognized in my quest all the stages of the hero's journey. I had my calls to adventure, my guides, demons, and illuminations.
I've learned that selflessness is a practice, not a place; a journey much more than a destination.
I figure if someone calls something a 'Draugr,' people can figure out that it's a monster or some sort of mythic creature, and if they want to know more, there's plenty of information out there about those mythic creatures.
I think 'The Searcher' is a departure from my first because it's less grounded in religion and is far more rooted in the mythic tradition: more of an existential thriller where the main character is actually the central mystery, and his journey is all about trying to figure himself out.
When I ask people to contemplate selflessness, the sometimes react as if I've asked them to put their house on the market or give away all their money. If there was a self that existed in the way we think, discovering selflessness would be like putting our house on the market. But in the Buddhist tradition, the discovery of selflessness is called "completely joyful." It's not called "the raw end of the deal," or "I'd rather go back to bed," or "This is scary and depressing."
I always call my journey into sobriety, my journey into queerdom, because I really did hate everything about myself.
Change is a journey and the journey is always about change. And if there is no change, why bother with the journey? And the best journeys require lots of space of one sort or another. So for great journeys - just open space.
I talk only about my journey because that's all I know. That's what the audience always pulls me back to. There's a hunger out there for the spoken journey, just to share the experience, the strength, the hope.
A good story is always a journey. It is about taking the journey, the people the hero meets along the way and how they change him or her. All stories are journeys. They don't have to be shocking or outrageous: they simply have to be interesting.
Real spiritual journey in life is the discovery of self. I think once you take all the religious bullshit away from Jesus Christ, it's saying it's about this journey of discovering who you are, and what's really important in life is simply love. That the journey of civilization, the journey of understanding, is forgiveness, is empathy. And that's what humanity is striving for.
There's no journey worth taking except the journey through one's self. That's the most important journey you take. I found that out as I went around the world many times: I was learning about me.
I think closeness to death would be pretty exhilarating in a way, and friendship, yeh, and selflessness, a kind of selflessness, a sense of your own worthlessness, I think, is pretty exhilarating.
There's a difference between, as I always say, the destination, the end point, and the journey. The journey has a lot of twists and turns. It isn't always pretty.
Theres a difference between, as I always say, the destination, the end point, and the journey. The journey has a lot of twists and turns. It isnt always pretty.
There is the expression of selfishness and there is the expression of selflessness - but economists or theoreticians never touched that part. They said: 'Go and become a philanthropist.' I said, 'No, I can do that in the business world, create a different kind of business - a business based on selflessness.'