You don’t need to leave your room.
Remain sitting at your table and listen.
Don’t even listen, simply wait.
Don’t even wait.
Be quite still and solitary.
The world will freely offer itself to you.
To be unmasked, it has no choice.
It will roll in ecstasy at your feet.Franz Kafka
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2 replies on “Quote #27”
No I disagree. I don’t think most people don’t know how to sit still and hear the world. If people stay alone they just become isolated, as more & more our society allows you to go for days, maybe weeks & months without true human contact (see internet shopping). This, as you said before, leads to fundamentalism. I think the idea of the hermit, in transedent isolation is something of a myth. Hermits or the proverbial “man on the mountain” are people already on a spiritual jounrey before they isolated themselves and had the tools to cope with it. We have all become hermits of a sort, emotionall cut off from our community around us. But as we have made no concious decision to be such, we have no direction and no meaning in it, and thus our yearning for contract and meaning leads some to fundamentalism of all kinds, religous or politcal. Without emosional contact we become sociopaths and even less able to experience the wonder and beauty of the world.
BYW, if your ears haven’t stopped bleeding yet, I’d go and see someone about it.