James Eagle

“When all is said and done, most of the stages of spiritual practice are stages of grief work. We have to let go of our deeply cherished dreams and illusions. And there’s no way we’re going to let them go until we have pretty much worn ourselves out trying to make them work. As Trungpa Rinpoche said, “The shoe of ego is only worn out by walking on it.” The moment of raising the white flag, then, is a precious one, one that usually comes only as the fruit of exhaustion. Finally, we step deeper and deeper into the reality project not because we should or because we want to, but because we have to. The shoe is worn out.”
― Stephen Cope, Yoga and the Quest for the True Self

“There are no solutions. There are only trade-offs.”
― Thomas Sowell, A Conflict of Visions: Ideological Origins of Political Struggles