Clark Strand > Quotes

“The availability of cheap effective lighting alone, following Thomas Edison’s invention of the incandescent bulb in 1879, greatly extended the range of waking human consciousness, effectively adding more hours onto the day—for work, for entertainment, for study, for discovery, for consumption. Subsequently, one development led to another, and to yet another, fueled by a corporate economy in developed nations, and then later by the arms race, and then the space race, as human ambition literally outgrew the planet. It seemed that there was no limit on what humanity could achieve. But there was a flaw at the heart of that expansive optimism—namely, that humanity cannot exist as a thing apart from nature; it has no destiny but annihilation apart from the land that gave it birth.”
― Clark Strand, Waking the Buddha: How the Most Dynamic and Empowering Buddhist Movement in History Is Changing Our Concept of Religion

“Turn off the news, forget Facebook and Twitter. Don't read the paper. Let the world turn, and the seasons pass on their own. Then wake up in the middle of the night a year later and ask yourself if anything is amiss. If so, let go of more media. Let go of more light. Wake again and ask if anything is lacking. Repeat as necessary until you have remembered what it means to be a person, because this is the one thing everyone forgets.”
― Clark Strand

“In the dark, every voice could be the voice of an ancestor or a spirit guide. In the darkness, who can tell the living from the dead?”
― Clark Strand, Waking Up to the Dark: Ancient Wisdom for a Sleepless Age

“Any human being on the planet today can take off their shoes and stand in the dirt and instantly know everything there is to know.”
― Clark Strand, The Way of the Rose: The Radical Path of the Divine Feminine Hidden in the Rosary

“Perhaps what those who meditate today are seeking is a state that our ancestors would have considered their birthright, a nightly occurrence.”
― Clark Strand, Waking Up to the Dark: Ancient Wisdom for a Sleepless Age

“According to the logic of that old, deluded world, freedom means being at liberty to come and go as we please. Such a definition of freedom is often very useful to an oppressive regime. That is because freedom, if so defined, becomes something that can then be taken away. Tsunesaburo Makiguchi said no when offered his freedom because the offer itself was deluded. His captors, who thought they were free but in reality were the “thought prisoners” of an oppressive government and the victims of a degraded religious culture that had long since capitulated on the matter of basic human rights, therefore had nothing to offer him. He was free already.”
― Clark Strand, Waking the Buddha: How the Most Dynamic and Empowering Buddhist Movement in History Is Changing Our Concept of Religion

“We have demonized the dark along with half of what is good within us, and half of the human race besides.”
― Clark Strand, Waking Up to the Dark: Ancient Wisdom for a Sleepless Age

“A man I barely knew told me, “When the grid goes down, the mythical creatures return.”
― Clark Strand, Waking Up to the Dark: Ancient Wisdom for a Sleepless Age

“And the lights are everywhere. They are so pervasive in modern life we’ve stopped seeing them. In turning them off, it’s hard to know where to begin. There are house lights and garage lights, fluorescent lights and halogen lights. There are streetlights and stoplights, headlights, taillights, dashboard lights, and billboard lights. There are night-lights to stand sentinel against the dark of our rooms and hallways, and reading lights for feeding our addiction to words and images and information, even in the middle of the night. There are warning lights and safety lights, and the lights of our cell phones and televisions and computer screens. No wonder our larger towns and cities are so bright you can see them from space. Nor does that urban and suburban light stay put. It seeps into the nearby plains and hills and mountains, casting shadows from trees and telephone poles. It throws off the rhythms of insects and animals and confuses the migrations of birds.”
― Clark Strand, Waking Up to the Dark: Ancient Wisdom for a Sleepless Age

“Everything walks—leaves, stones, rivers. Nothing is still.”
― Clark Strand, Waking Up to the Dark: Ancient Wisdom for a Sleepless Age

“The houses that trouble me most are the ones with a lamp on all night and people living inside. I don’t look at those lamps and think what a waste of electricity or money they are. It’s another waste I see. For every watt that shines in the darkness, I see restless sleepers drifting further and further from their souls.”
― Clark Strand, Waking Up to the Dark: Ancient Wisdom for a Sleepless Age

“We don’t know the value of darkness until we have destroyed it.”
― Clark Strand, Waking Up to the Dark: Ancient Wisdom for a Sleepless Age

“Every organized religion created after the dawn of agriculture placed a premium on human destiny. Thus, every religion in the world today, with the exception of those rare outliers among indigenous peoples, was created to answer a question the very asking of which betrays a bias so vast we can scarcely see around it: What is the meaning of human life?”
― Clark Strand, Waking Up to the Dark: Ancient Wisdom for a Sleepless Age

“Put simply, all religion is anthropocentric.”
― Clark Strand, Waking Up to the Dark: Ancient Wisdom for a Sleepless Age

“In all likelihood, we will not have oil one hundred years from now. Realistically, the world’s easily obtainable petroleum will be gone much sooner than that—by mid-century at the latest. There will be nothing of comparable versatility to replace it. As hard as that will be, good riddance. Fueling the light-driven engine of corporate capitalism, petroleum has swollen the human population and destroyed our communities, our atmosphere, and our world. Good riddance, I say, even if I die. I will die anyway. Everything does. The petroleum bubble briefly allowed us to live in denial of that most fundamental of all fundamental facts: that all things return to their Mother.”
― Clark Strand, Waking Up to the Dark: Ancient Wisdom for a Sleepless Age

“Every plant and animal cell on the planet is the result of an unbroken biological lineage going back to the beginning of all life. And even that beginning had another beginning. The Earth, the Sun, the Moon: all have ancestors. Even our universe—the mother of a hundred billion galaxies—must surely have had a mother and father of her own.”
― Clark Strand, Waking Up to the Dark: Ancient Wisdom for a Sleepless Age

“The point of life has little to do with the getting and spending that occupies the greater portion of our days. If we want to know the value of life—the real value, not the monetary or social value—we have to wake up in the middle of the night and see what is happening in the dark. Are there dreams and visions? Are there symbols and signs? Is the night palpable with hopes and longings, pregnant with intimations and desires? Can we hear the peepers in the woods? The quiet of the snowfall? The rise and fall of someone’s breath? Or is our impulse to turn on the lights, watch television, or medicate ourselves back into unconsciousness?”
― Clark Strand, Waking Up to the Dark: Ancient Wisdom for a Sleepless Age

“When we realize that our lives are one with the great and eternal life of the universe, we are the Buddha. The purpose of Buddhism is to enable all people to come to this realization.”
― Clark Strand, Waking the Buddha: How the Most Dynamic and Empowering Buddhist Movement in History Is Changing Our Concept of Religion

“will collapse and temperatures will rise—and then the waters will. Global agricultural production will level off and then fall. What food remains will be local and not enough. And all these things will come to pass while people continue to argue about them. Until there is no more argument, because there is no more doubt.”
― Clark Strand, Waking Up to the Dark: Ancient Wisdom for a Sleepless Age

“Yet in my rural town I almost never run into anyone on my nightly walks—except for one eccentric, a man everyone calls Jogger John.”
― Clark Strand, Waking Up to the Dark: Ancient Wisdom for a Sleepless Age

“Like our simian ancestors, we are born clinging to our mothers, and for the rest of our lives we will reenact that first embrace, reaching out for something to hold on to—both in moments of joy and in moments of distress.”
― Clark Strand, The Way of the Rose: The Radical Path of the Divine Feminine Hidden in the Rosary

“inconceivable.”
― Clark Strand, Waking Up to the Dark: Ancient Wisdom for a Sleepless Age

“When you understand where the words dirty and holy intersect, you will have found the secret to everything.”
― Clark Strand, The Way of the Rose: The Radical Path of the Divine Feminine Hidden in the Rosary

“Another is the paradox of media reports, which transform terrible events into a form of nightly entertainment while pretending to inform.”
― Clark Strand, Waking Up to the Dark: Ancient Wisdom for a Sleepless Age

“That is why, in order to arrive at a suitable message for the coming millennium, Buddhism has reached clear back to its beginnings to reclaim a belief in the fundamental equality and dignity of all life and bring that teaching back to the fore.”
― Clark Strand, Waking the Buddha: How the Most Dynamic and Empowering Buddhist Movement in History Is Changing Our Concept of Religion

“Simplicity is always the answer”
― Clark Strand, Waking Up to the Dark: The Black Madonna's Gospel for An Age of Extinction and Collapse

“What we do to our bodies with antibiotics, we do to consciousness with light.”
― Clark Strand, Waking Up to the Dark: Ancient Wisdom for a Sleepless Age

“the religious models that had existed up until then did not adequately prepare us. Only through a process of radical self-empowerment—which Ikeda, expanding upon a term used by Toda, called Human Revolution—could human beings address issues that big. They couldn’t be dealt with effectively by any one people, nation, or religion, but only by humanity as a whole.”
― Clark Strand, Waking the Buddha: How the Most Dynamic and Empowering Buddhist Movement in History Is Changing Our Concept of Religion

“We all carry the question in the deepest part of our being. We turn on the lights, power up our brains, and fill every crack and crevice with illumination and distraction. But in what shadows remain, there is still that question, waiting for us. Death is waiting for us. Paradoxically, the less space we allot to it, the larger it grows. Perhaps that is why so many of us fear the dark.”
― Clark Strand, Waking Up to the Dark: Ancient Wisdom for a Sleepless Age

“Few of us know how saturated our minds and bodies are with light. Even fewer realize how profoundly modern media poisons the soul.”
― Clark Strand, Waking Up to the Dark: Ancient Wisdom for a Sleepless Age