When I have something partial presented to me as if it were true or entire, why should I listen with much more than just curiosity?
I have no trouble with belief systems, but what I really want to hear is the intimacy of someone’s individual encounter with the world. Then I begin to trust them. . . .
This is a complicated question. There’s a rhythm, like breathing in and out. For me, the ideal would be the losing of self followed by the return to self with a changed or renewed sense of connection, an awareness of the gravity of one’s existence, and, therefore, a fuller sense of responsibility.
Losing of the self may happen when we’re least conscious of ourselves. And we are most fully ourselves but least conscious of ourselves when engaged in the truest activities. Don’t you think that all ecstatic activity, which finally teaches us who we can be, takes place in the moment when the self is lost and therefore permanently changed, in ways that resonate later, by having been lost? I would say that in the moment when we’re not aware of being self, we are more deeply into being than at any other time. Then part of the self develops an awareness that grows around the knowledge of our capacity for what we might call “deep being.” A new kind of self grows out of this deep being. It’s the serious self that is aware of the significance and gravity of every one of its gestures, and yet it has enough trust in the world outside, in the plenitude of that world, to be able to laugh.