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The Pure In Heart

The voice is unmistakable. At the first intonation, the first rolling syllable, Swain wakes, feeling the murmuring life of each of a million cells. Each of them all at once. He feels the line where his two lips touch, the fingers of his left hand pressed against his leg, the spears of wet grass against the flat soles of his feet, the gleaming half-circles of tears that stand in his eyes. His own bone marrow hums inside him like colonies of bees. He feels the breath pouring in and out of him, through the damp, red passages of his skull. Then in the slow way that fireworks die, the knowledge fades. He is left again with his surfaces and the usual vague darkness within. He turns back around to see if Julie has heard.

The Hero’s Journey

A Talk By Joseph Campbell

There comes a point, a threshold crossing, where everything that you’ve been taught is of no use to you whatsoever. This is the moment of dismemberment, of divestiture. It is symbolized in such mythological images as Jonah swallowed by the whale, the god Osiris torn to pieces, the crucifixion of Christ. The trip is going to take you, if it is really your trip, to the moment of decision: follow your way or follow the way of prudence. That is the breakthrough. And what follows are trials which become greater and greater and greater until you come down to an ultimate abyss, and the experience you were seeking.

A Paul Griffith Reader

I may well be wrong in my impression that people exist who have not had to earn their spiritual lives by means of suffering. It is difficult if not impossible to know enough about a person to be able to make such a judgement on such a matter with any certainty.

Literal-Mindedness And Its Cure

For about fifteen minutes every day I worry about AIDS or herpes or Pentagon cost overruns. It’s not that they have any great effect on me, it’s just that I am a broad-based, categorical worrier.

Lost And Found

Finding then losing then finding again a pocketknife, losing yourself in a bookstore, losing your sex drive

Doing Something Wrong

Selected Poems

Sunbeams

Man with wooden leg escapes prison. He’s caught. They take his wooden leg away from him. Each day he must cross a large hill and swim a wide river to get to the field where he must work all day on one leg. This goes on for a year. At the Christmas party they give him back his leg. Now he doesn’t want it. His escape is all planned. It requires only one leg.

James Tate

A Christmas Carol

Living With Integrity

An Interview With Tara Singh

The action has to take place in the individual. He first has to see the deceptions. Just seeing that frees him. There are no techniques to it. He sees the ego would like to improve, but that is the deception.