I imagine prudence as the antipode of passion, a pale aura of anxiety keeping us at a healthy distance from the blood soul.

Thomas Moore, Original Self

The man who is detached in this way is the friend of God, “as a stranger is the friend of another stranger on account of their strangeness on earth”. There are moments in which he sees the Shekhina face to face in human form, as the zaddick saw it in the holy land “in ths shape of a woman who weeps and laments over the husband of her youth.”

Martin Buber, The Legend of the Baal-Shem

But a third response is possible. Not withdrawal, not stewardship based on the hypothesis of a future reward, but the fullest collaboration with the world as a harmonious system of contained conflicts–based on the realization that the only real “I” is the endless process.

Alan Watts, The Book

avdi on December 26th, 2009 | File Under Uncategorized | Comments -