"If you don't take it out into the world, you didn't get it in the first place." ... |
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I've been to many of these locations in my own travels. For years, traveling to one paradise after another was enough. Paradise itself was enough. Something happens to me, something wonderful happens to me in a paradise (I assume it happens to everyone). In this conversation I'd like to propose this distinction: what happens in a paradise, the bliss, the joy, the celebration, happens purely as a function of our senses and not as a function of what we're responsible for creating and expressing, and I say it's not enough. Please be with me now and allow me to expand on this idea. In a paradise, vistas are stunningly beautiful to look at. Ocean spray and tropical fragrant vegetation tantalize the nostrils. Balmy air and warm lagoon waters caress the skin. Sounds of the wind, waves, and exotic birds sing a symphony for the ears. And as for taste: until you've picked your own ripe bananas, coconuts, and papayas from a tree, until you've grilled the fish you caught yourself over the coals of a driftwood fire on a beach at sunset, you can't even begin to consider yourself to be a gourmet. Not really. This is paradise, yes? A treat - no, a banquet for the senses. And along with this treat, along with this banquet for the senses comes the feeling of well being, no worries mate, the spirit of Aloha, and the ecstasy and ease of friendship and romance blooming and thriving in this environment in these conditions. After years of traveling I began to notice paradise is not enough. To be sure, I didn't articulate it that way at first. It was something which came on me later gradually, a feeling I was having which I wasn't supposed to be having, an unexpressed feeling which (had I spoken it out loud) would have said "There's got to be more than this ...". Paradise should be enough, right? But actually no: it wasn't. Eventually I came right out and admitted it. Yet it wasn't until a few more years had passed before I figured out why it wasn't enough. It wasn't until my arrival in these United States and subsequently a chance encounter with Werner Erhard when I started to let in the possibility that no part of my appreciation of paradise had anything to do with me at all. All of what I thought was my appreciation of paradise was simply neurons firing in my brain automatically. I saw for the first time (which is to say I was willing to look at for the first time) there was nothing created or Self expressed at all about my experience of paradise. And that's why paradise is not enough. |
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