“Genuine love is rarely an emotional space where needs are instantly gratified. To know genuine love we have to invest time and commitment. As John Welwood reminds us in Journey of the Heart: The Path of Conscious Love, ‘dreaming that love will save us, solve all our problems or provide a steady state of bliss or security only keeps us stuck in wishful fantasy, undermining the real power of love–which is to transform us.’ Many people want love to function like a drug, giving them an immediate and sustained high. They want to do nothing, just passively receive the good feeling. In patriarchal culture men are especially inclined to see love as something they should receive without expending effort. More often than not they do not want to do the work that love demands. When the practice of love invites us to enter a place of potential bliss that is at the same time a place of critical awakening and pain, many of us turn our backs on love.”
— bell hooks, All About Love: New Visions
‘The evils of racism and, much later, sexism, were easier to identify and challenge than the evils of classism.We live in a society where the poor have no public voice. No wonder it has taken so long for many citizens to recognize class—to become class conscious.’
bell hooks, Where We Stand: Class Matters
“The first act of violence that patriarchy demands of males is not violence toward women. Instead patriarchy demands of all males that they engage in acts of psychic self-mutilation, that they kill off the emotional parts of themselves. If an individual is not successful in emotionally crippling himself, he can count on patriarchal men to enact rituals of power that will assault his self-esteem.”
— bell hooks, quoted by Clementine Ford, Boys Will Be Boys
We are trying to find out if there is, or is not, a permanent state, not what we would like, but the actual fact, the truth of the matter. Everything about us, within as well as without -our relationships, our thoughts, our feelings- is impermanent, in a constant state of flux. Being aware of this, the mind craves permanency, a perpetual state of peace, of love, of goodness, a security that neither time nor events can destroy; therefore it creates the soul, the Atman, and the visions of a permanent paradise. But this permanency is born of impermanency, and so it has within it the seeds of the impermanent. There is only one fact: impermanence.
- Jiddu Krishnamurti, The Book of Life
