thatwhichdoesnotsuffer

[thatwhichdoesnotsuffer]

But while everyone’s engrossed in appearances and money and themselves, here is a man who attends so little to those things that he actually sees the people around him.

— Sarah Damoff, The Bright Years (Simon & Schuster, April 22, 2025)

[thatwhichdoesnotsuffer]

“To find out what one is fitted to do, and to secure an opportunity to do it, is the key to happiness.”

— John Dewey, Democracy and Education

[thatwhichdoesnotsuffer]

“I am not born for one corner; the whole world is my native land.”

— Seneca, Moral Letters to Lucilius

[thatwhichdoesnotsuffer]

[thatwhichdoesnotsuffer]

— Fyodor Dostoevsky (via lunamonchtuna)

[thatwhichdoesnotsuffer]

Colossal desire to escape, retreat, not talk to anybody.

Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath ⁠— July 1950 - July 1953

[thatwhichdoesnotsuffer]

[thatwhichdoesnotsuffer]

Identity would seem to be the garment with which one covers the nakedness of the self; in which case, it is best that the garment be loose, a little like the robes of the desert, through which robes one’s nakedness can always be felt, and, sometimes, discerned. This trust in one’s nakedness is all that gives one the power to change one’s robes.

James Baldwin, The Devil Finds Work

[thatwhichdoesnotsuffer]

Emptiness is your ultimate protection against all enemies, both internal and external, and against the suffering that they inflict.

No matter how many enemies that you experience, no matter who or what they are, whether they are other beings, or an environment, or an afflictive emotion, or an illness, or whatever, not one of them truly exists without being dependent upon your mind's internal enemy.

For as long as your mind ignorantly grasps at an inherently existent 'self', there will always be an inherently existent 'other', and therefore you will always ignorantly perceive truly existent enemies, and you will suffer accordingly.

The moment that your mind is rid of this ignorance, by instead perceiving the reality of the emptiness of self, in other words, the lack of an inherently existent self, all internal and external enemies will disappear, and no matter what you encounter, you will always experience the pure bliss of reality.

~ Chamtrul Rinpoche

[thatwhichdoesnotsuffer]

[thatwhichdoesnotsuffer]

“I should not like my writing to spare other people the trouble of thinking. But if possible, to stimulate someone to thoughts of his own.”

— Ludwig Wittgenstein, “Preface”, Philosophical Investigations

[thatwhichdoesnotsuffer]

“Ever more people today have the means to live, but no meaning to live for.”

— Viktor Frankl

[thatwhichdoesnotsuffer]

Where does peace arise? Peace arises whenever we let something go.

Ajahn Chah

[thatwhichdoesnotsuffer]

Please don’t say: I discovered there is still a large part of me that is alive. No, my darling! You are entirely alive. It’s just that you’ve lived an irrational life, a life that doesn’t resemble you.

— Clarice Lispector, from a letter to Tânia Kaufmann wr. c. January 1948 

[thatwhichdoesnotsuffer]

“In Dzogchen, a great deal of meditation is done with open eyes so that meditation doesn't reaffirm a split between oneself and the world. Meditation is an opportunity to appreciate the world as rippling between two points of nothingness: inside nothing, out there nothing, and in the middle this shimmering moment of co-presence.”

James Low

[thatwhichdoesnotsuffer]

"Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer." - Rainer Maria Rilke

[thatwhichdoesnotsuffer]

“Love goes very far beyond the physical person of the beloved. It finds its deepest meaning in its spiritual being, his inner self. Whether or not he is actually present, whether or not he is still alive at all, ceases somehow to be of importance.”

— Viktor Frankl, “From Death-camp to Existentialism: A Psychiatrist's Path to a New Therapy”