"Saint Anthony once wrote about having gone into the desert on silent retreat and being assaulted by all manner of visions⎯devils and angels, both. He said, in his solitude, he sometimes encountered devils who looked like angels, and other times he found angels who looked like devils. When asked how he could tell the difference, the saint said that you can only tell which is which by the way you feel after the creature has left your company. if you are appalled, he said, then it was a devil who had visited you. If you feel lightened, it was an angel."
"The Yogic sages say that all the pain of a human life is caused by words, as is all the joy. We create words to define our experience and those words bring attendant emotions that jerk us around like dogs on a leash. We get seduced by our own mantras and we become monuments to them. To stop talking for a while, then, is to attempt to strip away the power of words, to stop choking ourselves with words, to liberate ourselves from our suffocating mantras."
"But I was always coming here. I thought about one of my favorite Sufi poems, which says that God long ago drew a circle in the sand exactly around the spot where you are standing right now. I was never not coming here. This was never not going to happen."
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2 comments:
i loved this book! started reading it...got halfway through, then gone. i think someone stole it, maybe then needed it more than me. i'm listening to the crayola song right now and everytime i hear it i think of our early morning conversation. see you soon! :)
so fantastic. i'm glad you've gotten to read it. i feel like we would be friends with her.
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