The Invitation - Oriah Mountain Dreamer

It doesn’t interest me what you do for a living.
I want to know what you ache for
and if you dare to dream of meeting your heart’s longing.
It doesn’t interest me how old you are.
I want to know if you will risk looking like a fool
for love
for your dream
for the adventure of being alive.
It doesn’t interest me what planets are squaring your moon…
I want to know if you have touched the centre of your own sorrow
if you have been opened by life’s betrayals
or have become shrivelled and closed
from fear of further pain.

I want to know if you can sit with pain
mine or your own
without moving to hide it
or fade it
or fix it.

I want to know if you can be with joy
mine or your own
if you can dance with wildness
and let the ecstasy fill you to the tips of your fingers and toes
without cautioning us
to be careful
to be realistic
to remember the limitations of being human.

It doesn’t interest me if the story you are telling me
is true.
I want to know if you can
disappoint another
to be true to yourself.
If you can bear the accusation of betrayal
and not betray your own soul.
If you can be faithless
and therefore trustworthy.

I want to know if you can see Beauty
even when it is not pretty
every day.
And if you can source your own life
from its presence.

I want to know if you can live with failure
yours and mine
and still stand at the edge of the lake
and shout to the silver of the full moon,
“Yes.”

It doesn’t interest me to know where you live
or how much money you have
I want to know if you can get up
after the night of grief and despair
weary and bruised to the bone
and do what needs to be done
to feed the children.

It doesn’t interest me who you know
or how you came to be here
I want to know if you will still stand
in the centre of the fire
with me
and not shrink back

It doesn’t interest me where or with whom
you have studied
I want to know what sustains you
from the inside
When all else falls away

I want to know if you can be alone with yourself
and if you truly like the company you keep
in the empty moments

Source - Prerna. Mini (Aradhana) on shekharkapur.com

Trainspotting

Mark "Rent-boy" Renton:Choose Life. Choose a job. Choose a career. Choose a family. Choose a fucking big television, choose washing machines, cars, compact disc players and electrical tin openers. Choose good health, low cholesterol, and dental insurance. Choose fixed interest mortgage repayments. Choose a starter home. Choose your friends. Choose leisurewear and matching luggage. Choose a three-piece suit on hire purchase in a range of fucking fabrics. Choose DIY and wondering who the fuck you are on Sunday morning. Choose sitting on that couch watching mind-numbing, spirit-crushing game shows, stuffing fucking junk food into your mouth. Choose rotting away at the end of it all, pissing your last in a miserable home, nothing more than an embarrassment to the selfish, fucked up brats you spawned to replace yourselves. Choose your future. Choose life... But why would I want to do a thing like that? I chose not to choose life. I chose somethin' else. And the reasons? There are no reasons.

Shekhar Kapur

"Neither prejudiced by the past, nor in fear of the future. The moment, only the moment."

Jerzy Kasinski - Quote

"What we remember lacks the hard edge of fact. To help us along we create little fictions, highly subtle and individual scenarios which clarify and shape our experience. The remembered event becomes a fiction, a structure made to accomodate certain feelings. This is obvious to me. If it weren't for these structures, art would be too personal for the artist to create, much less for the audence to grasp. Even film, the most literal of all arts, is edited."

Contribution: ZB

"Atlas Shrugged" - Ayn Rand

"Independence is the recognition of the fact that yours is the responsibility of judgement and nothing can help you escape it -- that no substitute can do your thinking, as no pinch-hitter can live your life -- that the vilest form of self abasement and self destruction is the subordination of your mind to the mind of others, the acceptance of an authority over your brain, the acceptance of his assertions as facts, his say as truth, his edicts as middlemen between your consciousness and your existence."

Contribution: ZB

Instructions For Freedom - No. 9

When the karma of a relationship is done, only love remains. It's safe. Let go.

Eat, Pray, Love - Chapter India aka Congratulations to meet you!

The Yogic path is about disentangling the built-in glitches of the human condition, which I'm (the author) going to over-simply define here as the the heartbreaking inability to sustain contentment. Different schools of thought over the centuries have found different explanations for man's apparently inherently flawed state. Taoists call it imbalance, Buddhism calls it ignorance, Islam blames our misery on rebellion against God, and the Judeo-Christian tradition attributes all our suffering to the original sin. Freudians say that unhappiness is the inevitable result of the clash between our natural drives and civilization's needs. (As my friend [again, the author's] Deborah the psychologist explains it: "Desire is the design flaw.") The Yogis, however, say that human dis-contentment is a simple case of mistaken identity. We're miserable because we think we are mere individuals, alone with our fears and flaws and resentments and mortality. We wrongly believe that our limited little egos constitute or whole entire nature. We have failed to recognize our deep divine character. We don't realize that, somewhere within us all, there does exist a supreme Self who is eternally at peace. The supreme Self is our true identity, universal and divine. Before you realize this truth, say the Yogis, you will always be in despair, a notion nicely expressed in this exasperated line from the Greek stoic philosopher Epictetus: "You bear God within you, poor wretch, and know it not."

Note from blogger: Please do not let this post throw you off. This is not a forum dedicated to spirituality or the discovery of the higher/inner/true self. I just happened to be half-way through the book (whose philosophies, by the way, I find very interesting) when the idea for the blog came to me. Hence, a rather thought-provoking first post!

So feel free to quote from anything you are reading, listening to or watching now.