What little time is left in this century is rehearsal time for the chief psychological chore of the 21st century: letting go, with dignity.

- Kevin Kelley, Out Of Control, A William Patrick Book, 1994

Once we let go of the obsessive idea of a single center and the idea of order as unity, things can't really fall apart. They simply go on performing their variety acts, each according to its kind - jugglers, clowns, tigers and horses and daredevil leaps on the flying trapeze; round and round, the mind endlessly entertaining, and being entertained by, ideas.

- The final words of Kinds of Power: A Guide to Its Intelligent Uses, by James Hillman, A Currency Book, 1995

Let go the goal of unnecessary riches at others' expense. Give up the goal of wealth. You probably have as much money as you need. Much more may bring more trouble, not less.

Let go the goal of total self-sufficiency. You will never achieve it, and you will destroy your relationships with others while trying.

Give up the goal of independence. The world does not work that way. The sublime is relational and interdependent; and anyway, your friends want to help you.

Give up the goal of true love. Love, if it is romantic, is never, strictly speaking, true. And if it is not romantic, it is not true love.

Let go the goal of happiness. That sweet bird lights only when least expected.

Let go the goal of fame. Its concave mirror distorts as it amplifies.

Treat these goals and others like them as powerful medicines, useful as prescribed, but dangerous if misused. Keep out of the reach of children.

- The final words of Living Without A Goal, by James Ogilvy, A Currency Book, 1995.

Q: What do you feel are the deepest truths in your work, for yourself and others?

The most important idea is that it's not as easy to open up to spiritual experience as we would like. There are some psychological breakthroughs that need to happen. Learning how not to control others and how not to contol our lives so intensely are two of those breakthroughs. We have to let go. That has been a spiritual truism for a long time. What we're putting together now is the psychological process involved in letting go, to understand the steps we have to to through inside to open up to our fullest spiritual potential.

- James Redfield, interviewed in Magical Blend, Issue #48, September, 1995

The secret, then, is that we must alter our civilization from one of answers to one which feels satisfaction, not anxiety, when doubt is established. To be comfortable with panic when it is appropriate. If ours is the advanced civilization we pretend it is, there should be no need to act as if all decisions were designed to establish certainties. Grandiose issues should not need to be reduced to the simplistic state of for or against and then decided in a set period. ...A civilization of answers cannot help but be a civilization of swirling fads and facile emotions.

Voltaire pointed out that for the Romans, sensus communis meant common sense but also humanity and sensibility. It has been reduced to only good sense, "a state half-way between stupidity and intelligence." We have since reduced it farther, as if appropriate only for manual labour and the education of small children. That is the narrowing effect of a civilization which seeks automatically to divide through answers when our desperate need is to unify the individual through questions.

- The final words of Voltaire's Bastards, by John Ralston Saul, First Vintage Books, 1993

i did not realise that people would see what I write as letting go but as you elaborate the idea i see that it is indeed close to what i've been thinking and doing for a long time. i've not read any of the books you quote but i'm reminded of other writings (e.g. six books, or ten) and particularly of john cage's writings from whom i've learnt much.

- John Chris Jones in an email message, October 10th, 1995.

The norms of myth...will enable the individual to anticipate and activate in himself the centers of his own creative imagination, out of which his own myth and life-building "Yes because" may then unfold. But in the end, as in the case of Parzival, the guide within will be his own noble heart alone, and the guide without, the image of beauty, the radiance of divinity, that wakes in his heart amor: the deepest, inmost seed of his nature, consubstantial with the process of the All, "thus come." And in this life-creative adventure the criterion of achievement will be, as in every one of the tales here reviewed, the courage to let go the past, with its truths, its goals, its dogmas of "meaning," and its gifts: to die to the world and to come to birth from within.

- The final words of The Masks of God: Creative Mythology, by Joseph Campbell, Penguin, 1968

Q: In some of your potentially thicker compositions, people often complain that they can't pick out anything because so much is going on. Is that a failure of their ears, or an attempt to lay an expectation on what they are hearing?

I think so. I myself enjoy a complex situation in which I can place my attention one place or another. I am drawn inevitably to the nature of my experience as coming from my own center rather than from some other center. I think each person should listen in his own way, and if there are too many things for him to listen to, and if in that complex he then listens to whatever, he will have his own experience, and there will be a strength and validity in that which is much greater than, say, listening to one thing and not knowing at the end what it was that you heard or whether you were listening properly.

- John Cage, interviewed by Tom Darter in Keyboard (September 1982)

The great intellectual and emotional change accompanying the paradigm shift will be in people's ability to accept not having full explanations; they will understand that the depth of the mystery exceeds explanations.

- Terence McKenna in Trialogues at the edge of the West, Bear and Company, 1992

Surrender is the secret of everything. The secret of poetry, the secret of life, the secret of sex. You never learn anything unless you surrender yourself to it."

- Erica Jong in an interview with Susie Bright, in Susie Bright's Sexwise, Cleis Press Inc., 1995

It is only late that one musters the courage for what one really knows...When one moves toward a goal it seems impossible that "goallessness as such" is the principle of our faith.

Fredrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, ed. and trans. Walter Kaufman, New York, Vintage, 1968

There's a point in your process of minding, of awareness, when you let go of something and let something else come up. It's a discontinuity. Normally, when we look at our minds, we have the feeling that there is great continuity. That it is a solid thing. But the creative process, and for that matter the spiritual process, is partly I think, a learning to have a much lighter touch about what is happening in your mind, so that there is a moment when you just, pop! let go...literally, put it down, drop it, and at that moment there is a break, a discontinuity, a gap, and within that gap is an open ground, which is what you can call Being, with a capital B. And out of that there is the eternal source of novelty. An insight. In fact, insight is what happens at that point of discontinuity...Artists know this very well. People always say relax your mind. Don't manipulate your state of mind. If you want to do something really well, you cannot be in control. You have to put it down: let go.

And, of course, love is the greatest moment when that happens, because you put things down and let yourself be touched.

- Francisco Varela, Art Meets Science and Spirituality Conference, Amsterdam, 1993

Lazen means "to let" or "to let be." It connotes a leaving things to themselves, a removal of bindings, a letting go.

...Eckhart was a Dominican, and that order did not advocate a contemplative withdrawal...Even if it had, however, such a withdrawal would be impossible, for even eating and praying are activities of a sort: "Even if he is given to a life of contemplation, still he cannot refrain from going out and taking an active part in life." No, the withdrawal Eckhart advocates is not from the world but from an attachment to things.

"Whatever state we find ourselves in, whether in strength or in weakness, in joy or in sorrow, whatever we find ourselves attached to, we must abandon."

- Robert Forman describing and quoting the words of Meister Eckhart in Meister Eckhart: Mystic as Theologian, Element Books, 1991

NR - Last updated: September 17th, October 10th, 24th, 28th, 29th, 30th, 31st, November 16th, 20th 1995