Quynh Nguyen

“Enlightenment is a destructive process. It
has nothing to do with becoming better or being happier. Enlightenment is the
crumbling away of untruth. It's seeing
through the facade of pretence. It's the
complete eradication of everything we
imagined to be true.”
― Adyashanti

“Friends and our parasympathetic nervous system”: I had a few friends visiting us yesterday and I noticed how quickly my nervous system settled down once we all sat on the couch and started talking. Upon reflecting, here are two point of what I took from this: 1. When we have (good) friends around, we cant check our emails, talk to our partners about financial issues, worry about the future or get busy. Our friends ask us to bring our attention to the here and now experience. 2. Our friends help us to remember our interdependent nature. That we belong to something that is bigger then just our spouse and children. That we are tribal. Both these points have to do with our “social” part of our parasympathetic nervous system, especially the Ventral Vagal complex- which is how we slow ourselves enough to Establish connections.”
― Shahar Rabi, Spiritual Misfits: Collaboration and Belonging in a Divisive World

“We live together, we act on, and react to, one another; but always and in all circumstances we are by ourselves. The martyrs go hand in hand into the arena; they are crucified alone. Embraced, the lovers desperately try to fuse their insulated ecstasies into a single self-transcendence; in vain. By its very nature every embodied spirit is doomed to suffer and enjoy in solitude. Sensations, feelings, insights, fancies - all these are private and, except through symbols and at second hand, incommunicable. We can pool information about experiences, but never the experiences themselves. From family to nation, every human group is a society of island universes. Most island universes are sufficiently like one another to Permit of inferential understanding or even of mutual empathy or "feeling into." Thus, remembering our own bereavements and humiliations, we can condole with others in analogous circumstances, can put ourselves (always, of course, in a slightly Pickwickian sense) in their places. But in certain cases communication between universes is incomplete or even nonexistent. The mind is its own place, and the Places inhabited by the insane and the exceptionally gifted are so different from the places where ordinary men and women live, that there is little or no common ground of memory to serve as a basis for understanding or fellow feeling. Words are uttered, but fail to enlighten. The things and events to which the symbols refer belong to mutually exclusive realms of experience.”
― Aldous Huxley, The Doors of Perception & Heaven and Hell

“To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson