ALEX NOBLE - Your Happiness Journal 2012

No One Deserves Love More Than You

 

“You can search throughout the entire universe for someone who is more deserving of your love and affection than you are yourself, and that person is not to be found anywhere. You yourself, as much as anybody in the entire universe deserve your love and affection.”

- Buddha

The Sole Purpose of Our Existence

 

"As far as we can discern, the sole purpose of human
existence is to kindle a light in the darkness of mere being."
- Carl Jung

 

Who Are You? Quotations from Erich Fromm

"If I am what I have, and I lose what I have, who then am I?"

- Erich Fromm

Journal Assignment:  The works of Erich Fromm are filled with inspiring and provocative thoughts, such as the one above. If you need a catalyst for some introspection and reflection, use your journal to write something in response to the quote above, or pick one from  the collection of quotes from Fromm, below.  You might ask yourself: "What am I afraid of losing? What would I be if I lost this thing (or these things) that seem so important?"   What if a forest fire was approaching your home, and you had to walk out and leave everything? Who would you be if it all turned to ashes?  What would be left?

Poet Antonio Machado writes that "What the poet seeks is the deep YOU."  What is the 'deep you'?

Spend a few minutes writing a poem or passage which describes what would be left if you lost everything?  Write Now!  GO!

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More wisdom from Erich Fromm:

“Love is a decision, it is a judgment, it is a promise. If love were only a feeling, there would be no basis for the promise to love each other forever. A feeling comes and it may go. How can I judge that it will stay forever, when my act does not involve judgment and decision.”
― Erich Fromm, The Art of Loving

“A person who has not been completely alienated, who has remained sensitive and able to feel, who has not lost the sense of dignity, who is not yet "for sale", who can still suffer over the suffering of others, who has not acquired fully the having mode of existence - briefly, a person who has remained a person and not become a thing - cannot help feeling lonely, powerless, isolated in present-day society. He cannot help doubting himself and his own convictions, if not his sanity. He cannot help suffering, even though he can experience moments of joy and clarity that are absent in the life of his "normal" contemporaries. Not rarely will he suffer from neurosis that results from the situation of a sane man living in an insane society, rather than that of the more conventional neurosis of a sick man trying to adapt himself to a sick society. In the process of going further in his analysis, i.e. of growing to greater independence and productivity,his neurotic symptoms will cure themselves. ”
― Erich Fromm

Surviving Our Initiation Into a New Level of Consciousness

 

 

Quotations for our Times from Cultural Historian William Irwin Thompson

We are experiencing the initiation of the human race into a new level of consciousness, and that is a very terrifying experience. It does no good to turn and run from the terror of our darkness into light; we must sit it out: zazen. We must take our counsel from The Tibetan Book of the Dead and realize that these frightening projections of famines, economic disasters, ecological catastrophes, floods, earthquakes, and wars are all only the malevolent aspects of beneficent deities. If we sit and observe them, do not identify with them, but remember our Buddha-nature, we will not be dragged down by them into an incarnation of the hell they prefigure. If we run from them, we validate them; we give the projections the very psychic energy they need to overtake us. Then, as Jung has pointed out, the situation will happen outside as fate.
William Irwin Thompson, Evil and World Order

 

More quotes from William Irwin Thompson...

 

Hemingway's Top 5 Tips for Writing Well

 

 

Many business people faced with the task of writing for marketing purposes are quick to say:

Hey, I’m no Hemingway!

But really, who better than Hemingway to emulate? Rather than embracing the flowery prose of the literati, he chose to eschew obfuscation at every turn and write simply and clearly.

So let’s see what Ernest can teach us about effective writing.

1. Use short sentences.

Hemingway was famous for a terse minimalist style of writing that dispensed with flowery adjectives and got straight to the point. In short, Hemingway wrote with simple genius.

Perhaps his finest demonstration of short sentence prowess was when he was challenged to tell an entire story in only 6 words:

For sale: baby shoes, never used.

 

QUOTES TO INSPIRE

 

Photo: Andi Holder

 

Out of ideas?  See if any of these quotes jiggle your imagination.  They are from a delightful blog that a friend of mine, Andi Holder, writes: Dumb Blonde Adventures.  This particular entry chronicles the family's arrival in the Bahamas, "Bahamamania." If you are freezing in Minnesota or even Tucson,  it will provide you with a sense of empathy.  Andi's blog is a model of great blog writing, and illustrates what a cheer up a good travel blog can be.  And she is funny!  Enjoy!

http://www.dumbblondeadventures.blogspot.com.

 

"I wish you a very good journey to an unknown you've never seen."

Pieter V Admiraal

"Your first 10,000 photographs are your worst." Henri Cartier-Bresson

"Jealousy is all the fun you think they had." Erica Jong.

"For the execution of the voyage to the Indies, I did not make use of intelligence, mathematics or maps." Christopher Columbus.

 

 

Write Now!: A Blessing for My Journey

Write Now!

What does this blessing below call forth in you? Write a blessing for yourself, for your journey ahead, into the Unknown of 2012, in all its mystery and promised changes. Love the things you cannot know. Welcome the Sacred Path, and celebrate your new birth into the cosmos!

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Catalyst:

“May your trails be crooked, winding, lonesome, dangerous, leading to the most amazing view. May your mountains rise into and above the clouds. May your rivers flow without end, meandering through pastoral valleys tinkling with bells, past temples and castles and poets' towers into a dark primeval forest where tigers belch and monkeys howl, through miasmal and mysterious swamps and down into a desert of red rock, blue mesas, domes and pinnacles and grottos of endless stone, and down again into a deep vast ancient unknown chasm where bars of sunlight blaze on profiled cliffs, where deer walk across the white sand beaches, where storms come and go as lightning clangs upon the high crags, where something strange and more beautiful and more full of wonder than your deepest dreams waits for you - beyond that next turning of the canyon walls.”

- Edward Abbey, "Benedicto"