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Quote by C.J. Cooke

“...the ocean, the perpetual shapeshifter: one day a disc of hammered gold, the next wild and rearing, like a thousand white horses. I noticed how the ocean had moods, just like a person.”

Quote by C.J. Cooke

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The Lighthouse Witches

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C.J. Cooke

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“The lighthouse was called The Longing. Pitched amidst tessellations of rock black as coke, thrashed for over a hundred years by disconsolate squalls, it needled upwards, spine-straight, a white bolt locking earth, sky, and ocean together. It was lovely in its decrepitude, feathery paint gnawed off by north winds and rust-blazed window frames signatures of use and purpose. -The Lighthouse Witches, C.J. Cooke”

“Don't tell me you believe in ghosts, Finn.' 'Ghosts, not exactly. Traces, yeah. Sort of.' 'Traces?' 'Here's my theory. Everything is energy. We all leave something behind. Now, there's folk who'll swear on their granny's last breath that they've seen a ghost. And I reckon some of them have. Or rather, they've seen traces of a past energy.' ... Finn was talking with his hands now, trying to make some sense. 'We think that time moves forward, in a linear fashion. Yeah? But sometimes you get deja vu, or there's some mad coincidence that you can't explain. I think time doesn't move in a linear fashion, but in a spiral, and sometimes there's echoes from the past. And a ghost is just an echo of someone.”

“In a world where nothing exists by itself, where every division of one thing from another is a misperception - or misconception - of the way things really are, there are no eyes, ears, nose, tongue, body, or mind. We cannot, for example, draw a line around the eyes that is not necessarily arbitrary. There is no point at which the eyes begin or end, either in time or in space or conceptually. The eye bone is connected to the face bone, and the face bone is connected to the head bone, and the head bone is connected to the neck bone, and so it goes down to the toe bone, the floor bone, the earth bone, the worm bone, the dreaming butterfly bone. Thus, what we call our eyes are so many bubbles in a sea of foam. This is not only true of our eyes but of our other powers of sensation as well, including the mind.”

“For Persons are selves and, in one respect at least, I was now a Not- self, simultaneously perceiving and being the Not-self of the things around me. To this new-born Not- self, the behavior, the appearance, the very thought of the self it had momentarily ceased to be, and of other selves, its one-time fellows, seemed not indeed distasteful (for distastefulness was not one of the categories in terms of which I was thinking), but enormously irrelevant.”

“To seek the self, one must first have a clear idea of what one is looking for. Thus, some meditation manuals advise actively cultivating the sense of self, despite the fact that this sense is the target of the analysis. Our sense of identity is often vaguely felt. Sometimes, for example, we identify with the body, saying, "I am sick." At other times, one is the owner of the body, "My stomach hurts." It is said that by imagining a moment of great pride or imagining a false accusation, a strong and palpable sense of the "I" appears in the center [of] the chest: "I did it," or, "I did not do that." This sense of self is to be carefully cultivated, until one is convinced of its reality. One then sets out to find this self, reasoning that, if it exists, it must be located somewhere in the mind or the body.”