Quote: Ken Wilber
Two Ken Wilber Quotes -
If you are having a dream and you think it’s real, it can get very scary. Say you are dreaming you are tightrope walking across Niagara Falls. If you fall off, you plunge to your death. So you are walking very slowly, very carefully. Then suppose you start lucid dreaming, and you realise it’s all a dream. What do you do? Become more cautious and careful? Noo, you start jumping up and down on the tightrope, you do flips, you bounce around, you have a ball - precisely because you know isn’t real. When you realize it’s a dream you can afford to play.
The same thing happens when you realize that ordinary life is a dream, just a movie, just a play. You don’t become more cautious, more timid, more reserved. You start jumping up and down and doing flips, precisely because it’s all a dream, it’s all pure Emptiness. You don’t feel less, you feel more - because you can afford to. You are no longer afraid of dying, and therefore you are not afraid of living. You become radical and wild, intense and vivid, shocking and silly. You let it all come pouring through, because it’s all your dream.
Life then assumes its true intensity, its vivid luminosity, its radical effervescence.
and
But, egoless does not mean “less than personal”; it means “more than personal.” Not personal minus, but personal plus–all the normal qualities, plus some transpersonal ones. Think of the great yogis, saints, and sages–from Moses to Christ to Padmasambhaya. They were not feeble-mannered milquetoasts, but fierce movers and shakers–from bullwhips in the Temple to subduing entire countries. They rattled the world on its own terms, not some pie-in-the-sky piety; many of them instigated massive social revolutions that have continued for thousands of years. And they did so, not because they avoided the physical, emotional, and mental dimensions of humanness, and the ego that is their vehicle, but because they engaged them with a drive and intensity that shook the world to its very foundations.
I have often felt at odds with the conventional view of the meekly smiling enlightened one who allows all to be as it is, and is unmoved by the world to lift a finger. I am not sure where that image crept into my assumptions and stories about people with spiritual development, but I do know that such a person strikes me as fundamentally ineffectual and at odds with the dynamics of my Western upbringing. I much prefer Ken Wilber’s take on the subject. Who was Gandhi if not a 78 pound man who shook the world to its foundations?
Live free, and as big & mighty as you are called to do so. If life happens such that you live a quiet life of serene contemplation, spreading a message of possibility with a sweet half-smile, so be it. But, such women & men will not climb to being CEO of Fortune 500 companies with strong dedications to social activism and environmental protection.
Live as you are, not as you think you should be.
