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The Tao of Equanimity

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G. Scott Graham

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“Love, respect, and value yourself. Your mental, emotional, and physical health are important. Make yourself a priority and know that it’s okay! Don’t feel guilty for taking care of yourself first. Your worth is invaluable… Believe it, own it, and protect it! Make a commitment to celebrate yourself and to live life fearlessly. You matter!”

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Author:Stephanie Lahart
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“Tears of merriment flow from the eyes, so too do tears of grief and pain. Hence tears are symbols of the spirit: it is as though something of me is lost with them. For this reason people have since ancient times felt the impulse to collect their tears in lachrymatories. Psalm 56, v. 8, laments to God ‘Thou tellest my wanderings, put Thou my tears in Thy bottle; are they not in Thy Book?’ Tears are like pains: they cannot be voluntary, even if you can do something else in order to produce them. Although there are actors and hypocrites who can produce tears at will, that does not make tears into intentional actions; it just means that there are ways of making the eyes water without producing ‘real tears’. But laughing and smiling can be willed, and when they are willed they have a ghoulish, threatening quality, as when someone laughs cynically, or hides behind a knowing smile. Voluntary laughter may also be a kind of spiritual armour, with which a person defends himself against a treacherous world. Similar observations apply to blushes, which are more like tears than laughter in that they cannot be intended. What Milton says about smiles could equally be said of blushes. Blushes from reason flow, to brute denied, and are of love the food. Only a rational being can blush, even though nobody can blush voluntarily. Even if, by some trick, you are able to make the blood flow into the surface of your cheeks, this would not be blushing but a kind of deception. And it is the involuntary character of the blush that conveys its meaning. Mary’s blush upon meeting John, being involuntary, impresses him with the sense that he has summoned it – that it is in some sense his doing, just as her smile is his doing. Her blush is a fragment of her first person perspective, called up onto the surface of her being and made visible in her face. In our experience of such things our sense of the animal unity of the other combines with our sense of his unity as a person, and we perceive those two unities as an indissoluble whole. The subject becomes, then, a real presence in the world of objects.”

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Book:Face of God: The Gifford Lectures
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“The mask shows that the individualized face of the other is, in a certain measure, our own creation: remove the mask and beneath it you find a mask. This observation leads to a certain anxiety, since it suggests that the other’s presence in his face may be no more real than his presence in the mask. Perhaps we are even mistaken in attributing to persons the kind of absolute individuality that we unavoidably see in their features. Maybe our everyday interactions are more ‘carnivalesque’ than we care to believe, the result of a constant and creative imagining that behind each face lies something like this – namely, the inner unity with which we are acquainted and for which none of us has words. Maybe the individuality of the other resides merely in our way of seeing him, and has little or nothing to do with his way of being.”

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Book:Face of God: The Gifford Lectures
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“Writers who see the existential loneliness of man as I see it – as a longing to be dissolved in the subjectivity of God – have written in ways so obscure that I have real doubts whether I can do any better. I am thinking of Kierkegaard, Levinas and Berdyaev, and also of Hegel, in whose shadow they wrote, and whose vision they confirmed by the very vehemence of their attacks on it. Hegel argued that we self-conscious beings become what we essentially are, through a process of conflict and resolution. Self-consciousness is implanted in us as a condition to be realized, and we acquire it through Entäusserung – through building the public arena in which the dialogue between self and other can occur. The self becomes real through the recognition of the other. Language, institutions, laws are the vehicles through which we achieve Selbstbestimmung, the certainty of self, which is also a limiting of self and a recognition of the boundary between self and other. The process that leads me to see myself as other to others also makes me other to myself, and this is the ‘moment’, to use Hegel’s language, of self-alienation, in which subjects become strangers to themselves, bound by external laws, hampered in their freedom and in rebellion against the constraints that press on them from outside. It is in this way that the fatal fracture splits our world – the fracture between subject and object that runs through me. Healing that fracture means reconciling my own view from somewhere with the competing views by which I am surrounded, so that how I am in the eyes of others matches how I am for myself. For Hegel this is achieved objectively through law and institutions, subjectively through art and religion. These are ways in which we re-connect with the world from which our own struggle for freedom and self-knowledge had separated us. Hölderlin expressed some of this in his great invocations of home and homecoming – the journey outwards, which is also a journey back. And Hölderlin’s spiritual journey has been traced in our time, and through a changed emotional geography, by T. S. Eliot in Four Quartets.”

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Book:Face of God: The Gifford Lectures
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“that incredible feeling of wholeness and aliveness is an emotional state of being that comes from deep within ourselves. that deep, blissful pure love we feel when we're falling in love is simply a reminder of the love and joy we're capable of experiencing. it reveals the love and passion that are already inside of us, waiting to be recognized and awakened, with or without the presence of a romantic partner.”

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Book:It Begins with You: The 9 Hard Truths About Love That Will Change Your Life
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“It only now broke through Henrietta's consciousness how much of love was about touch -- and how destabilizing. All she wanted was to be with him, and this desire washed away everything else like the sea. The world was now surface landscape, mere background to her want and need: -he- was its gravitational pull, its chemical center. In their few moments of intimacy together, she had never felt less alone -- or more at home with herself. This must be the true power of love: the willingness to leave one's world behind for a place that had been hiding deep inside you all along, another lost island. She was stunned to realize she didn't mind the prospect....”

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Book:Austen at Sea
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