Today is a day for thoughts. Here are some which seem relevant to me, as of now.
"Many solemn nights
Blond moon, we stand and marvel...
Sleeping our noons away”
-Teitoku
“Everyone of us is shadowed by an illusory
person: a false self..We are not very good at
recognizing illusions, least of all the ones we
cherish about ourselves. (34)
Contemplation is not and cannot be a
function of this external self. There is an
irreducible opposition between the deep
transcendent self that awakens only in
contemplation, and the superficial, external
self which we commonly identify with the
first person singular.(7)
Our reality, our true self, is hidden in what
appears to us to be nothingness....We can rise
above this unreality and recover our hidden
reality....(281)"
― Thomas Merton, New Seeds of
Contemplation
“The painter Kramskoy has a remarkable
painting entitled The Contemplator: it depicts
a forest in winter, and in the forest, standing
all by himself on the road, in deepest solitude,
a stray little peasant in a ragged caftan and
bast shoes; he stands as if he were lost in
thought, but he is not thinking, he is
"contemplating" something. If you nudged
him, he would give a start and look at you as
if he had just woken up, but without
understanding anything. It's true that he
would come to himself at once, and yet, if he
were asked what he had been thinking about
while standing there, he would most likely
not remember, but would most likely keep
hidden away in himself the impression he
had been under while contemplating. These
impressions are dear to him, and he is most
likely storing them up imperceptibly and even
without realizing it--why and what for, he
does not know either; perhaps suddenly,
having stored up his impressions over many
years, he will drop everything and wander off
to Jerusalem to save his soul, or perhaps he
will suddenly burn down his native village, or
perhaps he will do both.
There are a good many "contemplatives"
among our peasants. And Smerdyakov was
probably one of them. And he was probably
greedily hoarding up his impressions, hardly
knowing why.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers
Karamazov
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