Sy Safransky

April 2008

When I depend on what I know, I never get very far. As the meditation teacher Stephen Levine writes, “The mind creates an abyss, but the heart crosses it.”

Friend Of The Sun

February 2008

I didn’t want to go to the antiwar rally last night; I had too many things to do. But I always have too many things to do. I asked myself: Am I really too busy to exercise my right of dissent? Use it or lose it, Democracy whispered.

Who Hears This Sound?

Adyashanti On Waking Up From The Dream Of “Me”

One day, when I was thirty-three, something happened without any emotion, which, for me, was absolutely necessary: I heard the call of a bird outside, and a thought came up from my gut, not from my head: Who hears this sound? The next thing I knew, I was the bird, and I was the sound, and I was the person listening; I was everything. I thought, I’ll be damned. I had tasted this at twenty-five, but there had been so much energy and spiritual byproduct. This time I didn’t get elated. It was just factual. I got up and went into the kitchen to see if I was the stove, too. Yeah, I was the stove. Looking for something more mundane, I went into the bathroom. What do you know: I was the toilet, too. Paradoxically I also realized that I am nothing, less than nothing. I am what is before nothingness. And in the next moment even that disappeared. The “I” disappeared completely. All of this — the oneness, the nothingness, and beyond both oneness and nothingness — was realized in quick succession. It all exists simultaneously.

Before She Sends It

I dreamt that I was in London, offering my business card to English women in exchange for a hug. They seemed pleased to hug an American; I was satisfied with the arrangement, too. Then I met a woman who was visiting from North Carolina. I didn’t come all this way to hug someone from North Carolina, I thought. But I gave her my card, too.

November 2007

My father’s parents, who lived with us throughout my childhood, fled Russia in 1905 to escape poverty and the state-sponsored massacres of Jews, called pogroms. They told me about the elation they’d felt when, after an arduous three-week ocean journey, they’d glimpsed the majestic statue in New York Harbor for the first time.

October 2007

If I sit here waiting for the perfect sentence to show up, I’ve got a long wait ahead of me. Maybe the perfect sentence doesn’t want me to wait. Maybe the perfect sentence is tired of one-night stands with writers who fall in love too easily, who can’t be trusted to stick around when the perfect sentence turns out to be not so perfect after all.

September 2007

When I try too hard to get my life into order, I forget the order that gives rise to this life — an order born of mystery, but an order nonetheless.

August 2007

Waking in the dark this morning, I’m grateful that the sun will soon be up; now, there’s something I don’t question, no matter how convincingly the light fled the night before.

July 2007

No, I don’t like demonstrations. But, to my mind, showing up for a march like this is the civic equivalent of doing the dishes or emptying the trash: the dirty, unglamorous work of living in a democracy.