Eat, Pray, Love...always good advice

I read Elizabeth Gilbert's Eat, Pray, Love and was inspired and changed. Go, now and buy your own copy so that you can highlight and write in it as you travel with Gilbert through countries and her own self-discovery. Following are my favorite "soundbites" from the book. In the weeks to come, I will be addressing some of them in upcoming blogs. In the meantime, which ones do you like? Why? Hit comment...and do just that!

The Bhagavad Gita – that ancient Indian Yogic text – says that it is better to live your own destiny imperfectly than to live an imitation of somebody else’s life with perfection.

We were taught to be dependable, responsible, the top of our class at school, the most organized and efficient babysitters in town, the very miniature models of our hardworking farmer/nurse of a mother, a pair of junior Swiss army knives, born to multitask.

Ours is an entertainment seeking nation, but not necessarily a pleasure seeking one.

His is a sweet expression. Il Bel far niente means “the beauty of doing nothing.”

There’s another wonderful Italian expression: l’arte d’arrangiarsi –the art of making something out of nothing.

The great Sufi poet and philosopher Rumi once advised his students to write down the three things they most wanted in life. If any item on the list clashes with any other item, Rumi warned, you are destined for unhappiness. Better to live a life of single-pointed focus, he taught.

I wanted worldly enjoyment and divine transcendence – the dual glories of a human life. I wanted what the Greeks called kalos kai agathos, the singular balance of the good and the beautiful.

There’s a difference between meditation and prayer, though both practices seek communication with the divine. I’ve heard it said the prayer is the act of talking to God, while mediation is the act of listening.

My friend Bob, who is both a student of yoga and a neuroscientist, told me that he was always agitated by this idea of the chakras, that he wanted to actually see them in a dissected human body in order to believe they existed. But after a particularly transcendent meditative experience, he came away with a new understanding of it. He said, “Just as there exists in writing a literal truth and a poetic truth, there also exists in a human being a literally anatomy and a poetic anatomy. One, you can see; one, you cannot. One is made of bones and teeth and flesh; the other is made of energy and memory and faith. But they are both equally true.”

I met an old lady once, almost one hundred years old, and she told me, “There are only two questions that human beings have ever fought over, all through history. How much do you love me? And Who’s in charge? Everything else is somehow manageable. But these two questions of love and control undo us all, trip us up and cause war, grief and suffering.

… the Zen masters say that you cannot see your reflection in running water, only in still water.

Virginia Wolff wrote, “Across the broad continent of a woman’s life falls the shadow of a sword.” On one side of that sword, she said, there lies convention and tradition and order, where “all is correct.” But on the other side of that sword, if you’re crazy enough to cross it and choose a life the does not follow convention, “all is confusion. Nothing follows a regular course.” Her argument was that the crossing of the shadow of that sword may bring a far more interesting existence to a woman, but you can bet it will also be more perilous.

Prayer is a relationship; half of the job is mine. If I want transformation, but can’t even be bothered to articulate what, exactly, I’m aiming for, how will it ever occur? Half the benefit of prayer is in the asking itself, in the offering of a clearly posed and well-considered intention. If you don’t have this, all your pleas and desires are boneless, floppy, inert; they swirl at your feet in a cold fog and never lift.

…I’m never going to be a wallflower, but that doesn’t mean I can’t take a serious look at my talking habits and alter some aspects for the better – working within my personality. Yes, I like talking, but perhaps I don’t have to curse so much, and perhaps I don’t always have to go for the cheap laugh, and maybe I don’t need to talk about myself quite so constantly. Or here’s a radical concept – maybe I can stop interrupting others when they are speaking. Because no matter how creatively I try to look at my habit of interrupting, I can’t find another way to see it that this: “I believe that what I am saying is more important than what you are saying.” And I can’t find another way to see that that: “I believe that I am more important that you.” And that must end.

Your treasure – your perfection – is within you already. But to claim it, you must leave the busy commotion of the mind and abandon the desires of the ego and enter into the silence of the heart. The kundalini shakti – the supreme energy of the divine – will take you there.

Your job, then, should you choose to accept it, is to keep searching for the metaphors, rituals and teachers that will help you move ever closer to divinity.

“You want to stay near the core of the thing – right in the hub of the wheel – not out of the edges where all the wild whirling takes place, where you can get frayed and crazy. The hub of calmness – that’s your heart. That’s where God lives within you. So stop looking for answers in the world. Just keep coming back to the center and you’ll always find peace.”

The child is taught from the earliest consciousness that she has these four brothers with her in the world wherever she goes, and that they will always look after her. The brothers inhabit the four virtues a person needs in order to be safe and happy in life: intelligence, friendship, strength and (I love this one) poetry. The brothers can be called upon in any critical situation for rescue and assistance. When you die, your four spirit brothers collect your soul and bring you to heaven.

Happiness is the consequence of personal effort. Fight for it, strive for it, insist on it, and sometimes even travel around the world looking for it. You have to participate relentlessly in the manifestations of your own blessings. And once you have achieved a state of happiness, you must never become lax about your maintaining it, you must make a mighty effort to keep swimming upward into that happiness forever, to stay afloat on top of it.

Clearing out all your misery gets you out of the way. You cease being an obstacle, not only to yourself but to anyone else. Only then are you free to serve and enjoy other people.

Hindus see the universe in terms of karma, a process of constant circulation, which is to say that you don’t really “end up” anywhere at the end of your life – not in heaven or hell – but just get recycled back to the earth again in another form, in order to resolve whatever relationships or mistakes you left uncompleted last time. When you finally achieve perfection, you graduate out of the cycle of entirely and melt into The Void. The notion of karma implies that heaven and hell are only to be found here on earth, where we have the capacity to create them, manufacturing either goodness or evil depending n our destinies and our characters.

Karma is a notion I’ve always liked. Not so much literally. Not necessarily because I believe that I used to be Cleopatra’s bartender – but more metaphorically. The karma philosophy appeals to me on a metaphorical level because even in one lifetime it’s obvious how often we must repeat our same mistakes, banging our heads against the same old addictions and consequence, until we can finally stop and fix it. This is the supreme lesson of karma (and also of Western psychology, by the way) – take care of the problems now, or else you’ll just have to suffer again later when you screw everything up the next time. And that repetition of suffering – that’s hell. Moving out of that endless repetition to a new level of understanding – there’s where you’ll find heaven.
“To lose balance for love is part of living a balanced life.”