Tastes of magic

We all long, at some point, for a profound awakening. We travel with the expectation that the places we see and the encounters we have will transform us. We go to theaters and museums and holy sites in the hope of discovering something that will have a new and permanent resonance in our lives. It’s a human hunger. We want transformative things and

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The meditation was making Xuefeng notice the visual oddity of ordinary things, their tendency to tilt into the nonordinary. His friend’s eyes looked beautiful, not quite human, in the dim light. “Well, since you ask, yes, I do worry, I get anxious, my life is going past me like a galloping horse. I get depressed, I don’t feel that I’m of any use. B

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Having lost that original identity of the ordinary and the special, we typically give up on the ordinary and look to new special experiences to compensate for our loss. Although what we’ve lost is the most ordinary thing in the world, we go looking for something special to replace it. And thus, by pursuing the special, we are, in effect, forever co

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It’s like taking a hallucinogenic drug, without all the bad stuff, like it being illegal and maybe killing you. You come back from the “trip” with a different perspective. A different sense of who you are, and why we’re all here.