2 quotes

Current library find: one book that connects and contrasts the two countries that pique my interest the most right now. I did not know, before picking up this book, that Octavio Paz was Mexico's ambassador to India for most of the 60's. In just over 200 pages he's attempting to give a historical overview, a brief travel memoir, and a social-political-cultural-spiritual comparison with his own land, all at once. I won't even try to summarize this fascinating book, beyond that. These are just a couple quotes from a section exploring the roles of free will, spiritual worldviews and one's place in society: as usual, whatever I'm reading pitches in its two cents' worth (or more) on my current most relevant conversations with friends. An activist friend just tried, I think, to suggest some of these same things to me earlier this week. Love how that happens. (Paz begins here from the Hindu viewpoint, and some of these thoughts are specific to that, but I think his observations expand rapidly into some larger questions of existence. At least, they fired this Aquarian imagination in that direction.)

"He who seeks liberation does not see his body as an obstacle, but rather as an instrument. Ascetic practices, even the most severe, are a progressive mastering of the body. The yogi does not seek to separate his soul from the body, like the Platonic mystic; he wants to convert it into a weapon of liberation. Or, more exactly: into a trampoline that will spring him into the Absolute."

"...For us in the West, freedom has a political dimension. We are always asking ourselves what is the nature of our relations with the divinity or with the environment that surrounds us, whether biological or social. Are we truly free, or is our freedom conditional? Is it divine grace, or is it an act in which the mystery of the human person is revealed? These questions and others of their kind lead us to situate our freedom in the world. Freedom is not an ideal for abandoning the world but, rather, for making the world habitable."

-- Octavio Paz, In Light Of India