Way of the Peaceful Warrior Versions of Reality Quotes

"How do you know you haven't been asleep your whole life? How do you know you're not asleep right now?" he said, watching me intently. (P.63)

"I want to be a champion gymnast. I want my team to win the national championships. I want to graduate in good standing, and that means books to read and papers to write. What you seem to be offering me instead of staying up half the night in a gas station, listening to—I hope you won't take this as an insult—a very strange man who wants to draw me into his fantasy world. It's crazy!"

"Yes," he smiled sadly, "it is crazy." [...]

I realized then that the crazy world that Socrates had referred to was not his world at all, but mine. (P.197-204)

I lost myself in the semester's last classes. My hours in the gym were spent in the hardest training I'd ever done. Whenever I stopped pushing myself, my thoughts and feelings began to stir uneasily. I felt the first signs of what was to become a growing sense of alienation from my everyday world. For the first time in my life, I had a choice between two distinct realities. One was crazy and one was sane—but I didn't know which was which, so I committed myself to neither. (P.268)

Something kept me from telling her about Socrates. He was of another world, a world in which she had no part. How could she understand when I couldn't even fathom what was happening to me? (P.281)

After that, when I wasn't cleaning toilets, I was learning new and more frustrating exercises, like meditating on internal sounds until I could hear several at once. One night, as I practiced that exercise, I found myself drawn into a state of profound peace unlike any I'd known before. For a period of time—I don't know how long—I felt as if I was out of my body. This marked the first time that my own efforts and energy resulted in a paranormal experience; I hadn't needed Soc's fingers pressing into my head, or hypnosis, or whatever he'd done.

Excited, I told him about it. Instead of congratulating me, he said, "Don't get distracted by your experiences. Experiences come and go [...] Meditate all day, if you like; hear sounds and see lights, or see sounds and hear lights. But don't get seduced by experience. Let it all go!" (4.310-11)

"Every infant lives in a bright Garden where everything is sensed directly, without the veils of thought—free of beliefs, interpretation, and judgments.

You "fell" from grace when you began thinking, about—when you became a namer and a knower." (6.21-22)

We entered a giant greenhouse. The air was warm and humid, contrasting with the cool morning air outside. Soc pointed to the tropical foliage that towered over us. "As a child, all this would appear before your eyes and ears and touch as if for the first time. But now you've learned names and categories for everything: "That's good, that's bad, that's a table, that's a chair, that's a car, a house, a flower, dog, cat, chicken, man, woman, sunset, ocean, star." You've become bored with things because they only exist as names to you. The dry concepts of the mind obscure your direct perception." (6.26)

Socrates waved his arm in a sweeping gesture, taking in the palms high above our heads that nearly touched the Plexiglas canopy of the geodesic dome. "You now see everything through a veil of associations about things, projected over a direct, simple awareness. You've "seen it all before": it's like watching a movie for the twentieth time. You see only memories of things, so you become bored, trapped in your mind. This is why you have to "lose your mind" before you can come to your senses." (6.27)

"There are no well-defined edges of reality, Dan. The earth isn't solid. It is made of molecules and atoms, tiny universes filled with space. It is a place of mystery, light, and magic, if you only open your eyes." (6.129)

Lao Tzu fell asleep and dreamed he was a butterfly. Upon awakening, he asked himself, "Am I man who has just been dreaming that he was a butterfly, or a sleeping butterfly, now dreaming that he is a man?" (7.123)