Joseph

It’s that great leadership is presence, not absence.

learning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience.

But if you really learn how to pay attention, then you will know there are other options. It will actually be within your power to experience a crowded, hot, slow, consumer-hell type situation as not only meaningful, but sacred, on fire with the same force that made the stars: love, fellowship, the mystical oneness of all things deep down.

But if you've really learned how to think, how to pay attention, then you will know you have other options.

great leadership is presence, not absence.

Complete attention,” Weil declared, “is like unconsciousness.” As such, it is a state that does not entail a particular action or stance, but instead suggests a form of reception, open and nonjudgmental, of the world.

If you want everybody to have the same truth, or to believe in the same things, then you’re talking about the loss of tension and the collapse of the world.

The best reason for the layman to spend time studying culture is th at he can learn something useful and enlighten-ing about himself. This can be an interesting process, at times harrowing but ultimately rewarding. One of the most effective ways to learn about oneself is by taking seriously the cultures of others. It forces you to pay attention to... See more

The Pueblo Indians, for example, who li ve in the Southwest, have a sense of time which is at complete variance with the clock-bound habits of the ordinary American citizen. For the Pueblos events begin when the time is ripe and no sooner.