John Dolan Quotes

I waited for the Earth to stop spinning, for the rift to open and swallow us. Yet the ash tree remained framed in the window, refused to fall. Rain streaked the glass. Blood throbbed in my ears. Preternatural silence. The cruellest April.I was not deceived. What I saw was samsara, illusion. The world had ended. I was sure of it.

Time. So much of our human experience is bound up in time, I muse. It reflects in our everyday colloquialisms, and drives so much of our activities. Yet this obsession with the passing of the hours is a relatively modern phenomenon; an inevitable product of the Industrial Revolution, and its fixation on efficiency. A new master exported by England across the globe, so that in the developed world at least everyone has one wrist on which is clamped the new and unforgiving shackle we call a watch. In less pressurised days, men observed the ageing of the universe through the more sedate changing of the seasons. But no more. Now the hour is king, or the minute and sometimes even the second. We are all people in a rush, where speed is of the essence, and slow is often deployed as a term of abuse.

Karma means ‘action’. Like many, you misunderstand its nature. Past misdeeds can be corrected before your karma ripens: it is not some pre-determined fate. It is what you do now that counts.

Everyone burns, as the Buddha says, in their own way. Some burn with anger, some with lust, some with a desire for vengeance, some with fear. But inside us burn many fires, not just one. We are legion, we contain a multitude.

You have compassion but by itself it is not enough. It is almost as if you carry around inside you some dead thing. Some heavy black cinder in your heart that burdens you; a ponderous anchor that tethers you to the past. Until you can burn it away, you can never truly live in the present, in the now. Until you can live in the now, you cannot see things as they really are. Meantime you are a man who is wilfully blind. You have eyes and yet you will not use them.

I took the plug out of the chemical bath of lust that my wits were soaking in and waited for it to empty. I smoked a cigarette while I contemplated the return of reason.

Do you know, by the way, that German is the only language in the world that has a word for ‘pleasure derived from the misfortune of others’? Schadenfreude.

My job is to assist you in finding the answer that is right for you. Not the answer that would be right for me.