It was a miserable machine, an inefficient machine, she thought, the human apparatus for painting or for feeling; it always broke down at the critical moment; heroically, one must force it on.
When anyone apologizes to us he has to do it very expertly: otherwise we might easily come to see ourselves as the guilty party and experience unpleasant feelings.
I have no desire to dress up my poetry and make it fancy. I want the poem to be as true as humanly possible to the feeling that inspired it. That's my only concern. Everything else seems wrong.
Awakening to the truth is a deep realization of what you are as an experience. What is it that is listening? What is it that is feeling? Feel it. Sense it. Welcome it.
Odinary people don't have a feeling of being loved by the people who manage to get into positions of leadership. They get in there, they make a lot of money, and then they play games with us.
We all have some experience of a feeling, that comes over us occasionally, of what we are saying and doing having been said and done before, in a remote time - of our having been surrounded, dim ages ago, by the same faces, objects, and circumstances.
When you feel that you are a lonely, put-upon, isolated little stranger confronting all this, you are under the influence of an illusory feeling, because the truth is quite the reverse. You are the whole works, all that there is, and always was, and always has been, and always will be.
With the unknown, one is confronted with danger, discomfort, and care; the first instinct is to abolish these painful states. First principle: any explanation is better than none. . . . The causal instinct is thus conditional upon, and excited by, the feeling of fear. The "why?" shall, if at all possible, not give the cause for its own sake so much as for a particular kind of cause -- a cause that is comforting, liberating, and relieving.
We suffer from a hallucination, from a false and distorted sensation of our own existence as living organisms. Most of us have the sensation that "I myself" is a seperate center of feeling and action, living inside and bounded by the physical body-a center which "confronts" an "external" world of people and things, making contact through the senses with a universe both alien and strange.
We all have some experience of a feeling, that comes over us occasionally, of what we are saying and doing having been said and done before, in a remote time - of our having been surrounded, dim ages ago, by the same faces, objects, and circumstances.