someone has some time on their hands

This blog is not meant to be a list of quotes, no matter how illuminating. Every so often, though, I come across quotes that I find speak directly to what I'm thinking about or working on at the moment. Putting them on the blog is a way of sharing them with others, to see what they think about it, and also a way of filing the quote safely in the Great Collective Memory, the Internet.

About six years ago I found a book called Loving What Is by a woman named Byron Katie. Normally I'm allergic to the self-help section of bookstores, so I can't really explain how I found it. I just kept walking by it and the title kept calling to me, so finally, with a sigh, I caved and picked it up and read it. Then I had a brief argument with myself about buying it, then I bought it, then I ignored it for a few years. Basically, of all the books out there about Zen, meditation, and Buddhism, this was the one (and it's not Zen or Buddhist) that actually helped me to release myself from obsessive, stressful thoughts. Katie's thing--for lack of a better word--is called The Work and I encourage you to check it out. So, as usually happens, I keep coming across things that support the ideas I'm working on and with. Here, for example, is a quote from Michel Foucault--not my favorite philosopher, and not one necessarily associated with Zen, shall we say:

"We must free ourselves from the sacralization of the social as the only reality and stop regarding as superfluous something so essential in human life and in human relations as thought. Thought exists independently of systems and structures of discourse. It is something that is often hidden, but which always animates everyday behavior. There is always a little thought even in the most stupid institutions; there is always thought even in silent habits.

Criticism is a matter of flushing out that thought and trying to change it: to show that things are not as self-evident as one believed, and to see that what is accepted as self-evident will no longer be accepted as such. Practicing criticism is a matter of making facile gestures difficult...

To say to oneself at the outset: what reform will I be able to carry out? That is not, I believe, an aim for the intellectual to pursue. His role, since he works specifically in the realm of thought, is to see how far the liberation of thought can make those transformations urgent enough for people to want to carry them out and difficult enough for them to be profoundly rooted in reality."