Daily Quote, Monday March 16, 2009
Good morning everyone,
This morning is lovely as the sun comes up.
Here is today's quote:
An ideal is merely a distraction.
...to understand something, I must give it full attention, and an ideal is merely a distraction which prevents my giving that feeling or that quality full attention at a given time. If I am fully aware, if I give my full attention to the quality I call greed without the distraction of an ideal, then am I not in a position to understand greed and so dissolve it? You see, we are so accustomed to postponement, and ideals help us to postpone; but if we can put away all ideals - because we understand the escapes, the postponing quality of an ideal - and face the thing as it is, directly, immediately, give our full attention to it, then, surely, there is a possibility of transforming it.
Collected Works, Vol. V - 290
It's so true, isn't it- ideals are just a way of putting things off- it gives us an excuse to not really pay attention to why we need ideals in the first place! Giving up our ideals will allow us to understand what we are and 'there begins a spontaneous process of transformation' as the quote from yesterday says.
ReplyDeleteThanks for this, Robert!
FYI.....
ReplyDeleteTo grok (pronounced /ˈgrɒk/) is to share the same reality or line of thinking with another physical or conceptual entity. Author Robert A. Heinlein coined the term in his best-selling 1961 book Stranger in a Strange Land. In Heinlein's view of quantum theory, grokking is the intermingling of intelligence that necessarily affects both the observer and the observed.
From the novel:
“ Grok means to understand so thoroughly that the observer becomes a part of the observed—to merge, blend, intermarry, lose identity in group experience. It means almost everything that we mean by religion, philosophy, and science—and it means as little to us (because of our Earthly assumptions) as color means to a blind man.