Actors Spiritual Quotes

We all are actors of our own destiny, some good and evil, some beautiful and others just ugly.

We may seem to forget a person, a place, a state of being, a past life, but meanwhile what we are doing is selecting new actors, seeking the closest reproduction to the friend, the lover, the husband we are trying to forget, in order to re-enact the drama with understudies. And one day we open our eyes and there we are, repeating the same story. How could it be otherwise? The design comes from within us. It is internal. It is what the old mystics described as karma, repeated until the spiritual or emotional experience was understood, liquidated, achieved.

Beauty can break a heart and make it think about something more spiritual than the mindless routine we go through day after day to get by. Francis was a singer, a poet, an actor. He knew that the imagination was a stealth way into people's souls, a way to get all of us to think about God. For him, beauty was its own apologetic. That's why a church should care about the arts. They inspire all of us to think about the eternal.

Singers, actors or artists who touch on sorrow are trying to give comfort to aggrieved souls by giving some meaning to their sorrows.

I bring you the dance. I bring you the idea that is going to revolutionise our entire epoch. Where have I discovered it? By the Pacific Ocean, but the waving pine-forests of Sierra Nevada. I have seen the ideal figure of youthful American dancing over the top of the Rockies. The supreme poet of our country is Walt Whitman. I have discovered the dance that is worthy of the poem of Walt Whitman. I am indeed the spiritual daughter of Walt Whitman. For the children of America I will create a new dance that will express America. I bring to your theatre the vital soul that it lacks, the soul of the dancer. For you know...that the birth of the theatre was the dance, that the first actor was the dancer. He danced and sang. That was the birth of the tragedy, and until the dancer in all his spontaneous great art returns to the theatre, your theatre will not live in its true expression!

Partake in reality as an actor in a theatrical play: with attention, dedication and an open heart. But never believe yourself to be your character, for characters spend their lives chasing their own shadows, whereas actors embody the meaning of existence.

An actor gets into his role when he reaches the film set. But every corner of this world is a film set. As the sets change, you switch from one role to another spontaneously. From family roles to office roles, from lead role to side role, you play them all as per the set around you, In temple you are in the role of a devotee, in meditation you are in the role of a seeker. When you are not in a role, who are you?

Nobody is listening to you. Your dialogue is just a cue for them to say their dialogue, and act their part. If everyone plays their part well, you feel that it’s all real. Be grateful to the bad actors who ruined this illusion for you and turned you inward.

The only power lies in the awareness of soul. An actor turned politician once told a monk, "Life makes us feel powerless every moment. People think that we (celebrities, politicians and elites) are powerful so we have to keep pretending that we are powerful. It's like sucking an empty milk bottle. It's so frustrating.

When singers, actors or artists touch on sorrow, they are trying to give comfort to aggrieved souls by giving some meaning to their sorrows. The job of the singer, actor or artists ,in general, is to make us comfortable with our feelings or emotions―be it pain, hurt, anger, hatred, sadness, pleasure, love, cheerfulness or joy.

If you don't want to sleep your life away like most people do. you have to train yourself to wakefulness. Vigilance is the key. You should be shifting from character to actor many times every hour, in all types of situations, so that it happens smoothly and easily and doesn't detract from your performance." Maggie takes notes and asks for clarification now and then. I wait and proceed when she's ready. "Second." I say. "it trains you to disidentify from the character you're playing. There's a you behind the character you project out into the world, and you can't make any progress as long as you identify with your stage persona. You're an actor playing a character on a stage. That's what the Bhagavad-GIta is all about.

Have you heard the saying by the actor Lily Tomlin, ‘The road to success is always under construction’? I like this concept. My spiritual journey has certainly been messy and uncomfortable at times. I had several emotional breakdowns before experiencing an emotional breakthrough. In essence, layers of deep denial and negative thought-patterns had to be unravelled and replaced with new and greater self-awareness.

WE HAVE COME here to learn about spirituality. I trust the genuine quality of this search but we must question its nature. The problem is that ego can convert anything to its own use, even spirituality. Ego is constantly attempting to acquire and apply the teachings of spirituality for its own benefit. The teachings are treated as an external thing, external to “me,” a philosophy which we try to imitate. We do not actually want to identify with or become the teachings. So if our teacher speaks of renunciation of ego, we attempt to mimic renunciation of ego. We go through the motions, make the appropriate gestures, but we really do not want to sacrifice any part of our way of life. We become skillful actors, and while playing deaf and dumb to the real meaning of the teachings, we find some comfort in pretending to follow the path.

When I first read The Rebel, this splendid line came leaping from the page like a dolphin from a wave. I memorized it instantly, and from then on Camus was my man. I wanted to write like that, in a prose that sang like poetry. I wanted to look like him. I wanted to wear a Bogart-style trench coat with the collar turned up, have an untipped Gauloise dangling from my lower lip, and die romantically in a car crash. At the time, the crash had only just happened. The wheels of the wrecked Facel Vega were practically still spinning, and at Sydney University I knew exiled French students, spiritually scarred by service in Indochina, who had met Camus in Paris: one of them claimed to have shared a girl with him. Later on, in London, I was able to arrange the trench coat and the Gauloise, although I decided to forgo the car crash until a more propitious moment. Much later, long after having realized that smoking French cigarettes was just an expensive way of inhaling nationalized industrial waste, I learned from Olivier Todd's excellent biography of Camus that the trench coat had been a gift from Arthur Koestler's wife and that the Bogart connection had been, as the academics say, no accident. Camus had wanted to look like Bogart, and Mrs. Koestler knew where to get the kit. Camus was a bit of an actor--he though, in fact, that he was a lot of an actor, although his histrionic talent was the weakest item of his theatrical equipment--and, being a bit of an actor, he was preoccupied by questions of authenticity, as truly authentic people seldom are. But under the posturing agonies about authenticity there was something better than authentic: there was something genuine. He was genuinely poetic. Being that, he could apply two tests simultaneously to his own language: the test of expressiveness, and the test of truth to life. To put it another way, he couldn't not apply them.

My basic profession is as an actor, and I have learnt much about life through working as an actor. Working as an actor is really a spiritual profession, since it means to create life on the stage. It means to play a role totally, while at the same time you know deep down inside yourself that you are not the role that you are playing. Working as an actor gave me early a spiritual discipline, which taught me a lot about awareness and meditation. Life is also about learning to play different roles, and learning to change between different roles with the same easiness that you change shirt.

A farmer’s son brought a black powder from city. Gifting it to his father, he said, “This powder is called Hair Dye. It can make you look young like the movie actors.” The farmer could not sleep that night. In the morning, he returned the powder to his son and said, “I can’t use this powder. If I become young, I will stop getting the monthly old age pension.” Your soul can shift to a better version of you or a completely different character. Your question, “But what will happen to this character” is like the apprehensions of that farmer. If your attachment to this character is strong, you will come back in this character. You will not shift permanently to some other character.

Forces, visible and hidden, stretching back into one's past; migrations; religious conversions — our self discoveries make us each a microcosm of the larger pattern of history. The inertia of introspection leads toward recollection, for only through memory is the past recaptured and understood. In the fact of experiencing and making the present, we are all actors.

The city of Los Angeles—dirty, motley, teeming with immigrants and actors—was only an hour away. Notionally, it was the anchor of the region, but it existed at such a spiritual and sociological remove that it could have been the moon. Most likely, people settling in the San Jacinto Valley hoped not to make their way closer to Los Angeles but to make their way farther from it.

We in the West regard the universe as a creation of God; like an invention or a product. After he created the universe, God set himself to oversee it and manage it. We see God as our boss. He created the universe, he is present in it, he manages every part of it, but he is still separate from it. It's like he installed video cameras all over the universe, so he can see everything that happens, and he can cause this or that to happen, but he is not a part of what happens. The Eastern view is very different. To the Hindu, for example, God didn't create the universe, but God became the universe. Then he forgot that he became the universe. Why would God do this? Basically, for entertainment. You create a universe, and that in itself is very exciting. But then what? Should you sit back and watch this universe of yours having all the fun? No, you should have all the fun yourself. To accomplish this, God transformed into the whole universe. God is the Universe, and everything in it. But the universe doesn't know that because that would ruin the suspense. The universe is God's great drama, and God is the stage, the actors, and the audience all at once. The title of this epic drama is "The Great Unknown Outcome." Throw in potent elements like passion, love, hate, good, evil, free will; and who knows what will happen? No one knows, and that is what keeps the universe interesting. But everyone will have a good time. And there is never really any danger, because everyone is really God, and God is really just playing around.

A public service announcement from that era, designed to combat littering, featured an Indian man (the actor Iron Eyes Cody, who was actually Sicilian) in full dress walking through a modern United States covered in litter. In the final frame, he sheds a single tear. All of this fit with the hippie-themed back-to-the-land movement that romanticized Indigenous people as much as taking them seriously. It was also of a piece with earlier responses to Native Americans. After removing them from their land, preventing them from becoming a threat, Americans often claimed to admire the special virtues of Native peoples, who were supposed to possess a unique spirit. They named towns after them, states, later sports franchises. That iconic commercial with the “Crying Indian” played to the idea that Indigenous people have a spiritual connection to the land that others do not possess. The people who took their land did not appreciate it, or care for it properly. This was almost a half-hearted confession that what had happened was wrong. That didn’t mean the land would be given back to them, of course.

People in the West need to know that most of the spiritual, intellectual, and cultural products of South Asia are tainted by Brahmanism. What may have offered you liberation and healing also causes caste-oppressed people to suffer. You don't have to give up those practices or concepts, but the call is to be intentional and acknowledge the caste harm. Your faith is bound to the violence it sanctions. For practitioners of Brahminical traditions, this reckoning may be painful. It's hard to admit the gulf between your values and the history of your spiritual practice, but if you do not wish to be complicit in the suffering of others, then you must confront these truths. When we exalt some aspects of spiritual practices, we cannot be fully aware and present. People enter spiritual practices and surrender everything without critical judgment and informed consent. Any faith is a practice of teachings that come from an ego, and those can then be interpreted by bad actors. To my mind, part of being a seeker is to interrogate all teachings and practices, to stay soft and flexible as opposed to rigid and dogmatic, to move slowly enough to be able to see when we're being blinded to the truth.

The writer must make himself, in the text, the spiritual actor either of his sufferings, those dragons he has nurtured, or of some happiness. Floor, lamp, clouding of cloths and melting of mirrors, real even down to the exaggerated jerking of our gauzy form around the virile stature stopped upon one foot; a Place comes forth, a stage, the public enhancement of the spectacle of Self; there, through the mediation of light, flesh, and laughter, the sacrifice of personality made by the inspirer is complete; or else in some foreign resurrection, he is finished: his word from then on, reverberating and useless, is exhaled by the orchestral chimera.

We celebrate the dedication of Olympic athletes who diet and train and exercise daily for years in order to prepare for the games. They give up not only physical comfort but also any hope of a normal social and family life. When police officers or firefighters die, often thousands turn out for their funerals. We honor our children who die in military service in much the same way—often arranging public ceremonies and holidays. We expect television celebrities such as actors, news correspondents and musicians to sacrifice any kind of normal life in order to entertain us around the clock—and they are paid millions of dollars to do so. The names of astronauts become household words because they risk their lives in order to forward the conquest of space. But the minute a Christian young person starts to fast and pray, consider the mission field or give up career or romance for Christ—concerned counselors, family and friends will spend hours trying to keep him or her from “going off the deep end on this religious stuff.” Even devout Christian parents will oppose Christian service when their own son or daughter is about to give up all for Christ. Discipline, pain, sacrifice and suffering are rewarded with fame and fortune in the world. Why then do we refuse to accept it as a normal part of giving spiritual birth in the kingdom of our Lord?

We live in a world where we have to sacrifice our comfort for the sake of others. Where we have to go an extra mile to meet others' needs. Where we have to dig deep in our resources to please others. I have gone out of my comfort zone for some people. Some people have gone out of their comfort zone for me. And I'm grateful. It's life. It's a common thing. There is no right or wrong to this behaviour. We do it because either we want to or that we must. By the way, our self-sacrificing service can be unhealthy to us. Some people burn themselves down trying to keep others warm. Some break their backs trying to carry the whole world. Some break their bones trying to bend backwards for their loved ones. All these sacrifices are, sometimes, not appreciated. Usually we don't thank the people who go out of their comfort zone to make us feel comfortable. Again, although it's not okay, it's a common thing. It's another side of life. To be fair, we must get in touch with our humanity and show gratitude for these sacrifices. We owe it to so many people. And sometimes we don't even realise it. Thanks be to God for forgiving our sins — which we repeat. Thanks to our world leaders and the activists for the work that they do to make our economic life better. Thanks to our teachers, lecturers, mentors, and role models for shaping our lives. Thanks to our parents for their continual sacrifices. Thanks to our friends for their solid support. Thanks to our children, nephews, and nieces. They allow us to practise discipline and leadership on them. Thanks to the doctors and nurses who save our lives daily. Thanks to safety professionals and legal representatives. They protect us and our possessions. Thanks to our church leaders, spiritual gurus and guides, and meditation partners. They shape our spiritual lives. Thanks to musicians, actors, writers, poets, and sportspeople for their entertainment. Thanks to everyone who contributes in a positive way to our society. Whether recognised or not. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you!

It is very impressive, to notice that whatsoever you make a person believe about you, that person will rush to represent within his role, as if he or she was mentally programmed to play the drama being offered. People are so trapped within their mind, that they end up always acting inside a theatre, in which their part has been foreseen long before they entered the roles they represent. Likewise, they become easily predictable, programmable, influenceable, manipulated, played like a string puppet. And these puppets become funnier, when mentioning mental programming, fearing mental programing and attacking mental programming, while not realizing that they are doing it, using the words, and gestures, and even phrases, that they were programmed to do, by those who program them. The one with a poor conscience is always a poor actor within his own life. He perfectly represents it, without any awareness. If he had any, he would probably not do it. But what else could he do? As prisoners in a cell with an open door, they ask when presented with freedom: “What shall I do if all I know is this?” And so, they remain inside of it, waiting for someone to tell them an answer they cannot ever understand before they see it for themselves.

Thus the fundamental illusion from which we must be disentangled, or “undone,” is that the proper definition of the life of faith itself is first and foremost a belief system with behavioral consequences, rather than a way of being in the world whose behavior consequences make clear the things we believe. In other words, we are not acting upon beliefs so much as we are believing through action—we are not believers who act but actors who believe.

Instead of the bottom-up emphasis on worship as our expression of devotion and praise, historic Christian worship is rooted in the conviction that God is the primary actor or agent in the worship encounter. Worship works from the top down, you might say. In worship we don’t just come to show God our devotion and give him our praise; we are called to worship because in this encounter God (re)makes and molds us top-down.

Whoa,” Becky said, because the baby kicked her hard in the bladder. Felix startled, backing up and nearly falling over a chair. “Sorry, I was whoa-ing because right when you came in, the baby kicked, not because you’re Felix Callahan. Oh, you know what it reminded me of ? When Elisabeth’s baby kicks just as Mary greets her? Isn’t that funny? As if I had some spiritual sign when I saw you.” Annette smiled, her eyebrows raised. Felix glared handsomely. Becky stamped down a desire to squirm. “No, it’s not terribly funny,” Felix said, “particularly as I have no idea what you’re talking about.” “Elisabeth, wife of Zacharias, cousin to Mary, mother of Jesus? No? Nothing?” Felix looked at her with a careful lack of amusement. “Oh, maybe you don’t have the Bible in England. See, there’s this guy named Jesus and his mother is named Mary, and well, it’s a really interesting read if you don’t mind parables.

an action is good when it promotes interests, material or spiritual, as intended by the actor in his motive; and it is bad when it injures interests, material or spiritual, as intended by the actor in his motive.' According

The left-hand path considers the position of humanity as it is; it takes into account the manifest and deep-seated desire of each human being to be a free, empowered, independent actor within his or her world.

People look at the actors on their television, and think their more than they are, they are not. We tend to look at gifted singers as they touch our heart with emotion, and think their more than they are, they are not. These gifted athletes we love to watch compete. People think their more than they are, they are not. Thank you Jesus for allowing me to place words on paper that people enjoy. I am just a man, and not any more than that. When we understand this, we can start looking at ourselves as unique in kind. For all of us, it will our spirit, and Godhood that raises us up, and makes us realize God is in control of all things. In Jesus name. Amen.

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We are all comedians in this world, which is why no one is immune to laughter. However, it's not given to every actor to make people laugh.

would have described myself as the spiritual director of my first marriage. I had the vision for our plot, and Craig fucked it up. I now understand that this is because each person has their own plot. No one can be a supporting actor in someone else’s storyline. They can pretend to, but they will always have subplots brewing inside and unfolding outside.

The British actor who starred in the Jesus film should also receive an Oscar. Simply because his photo is widely idolized by many people around the world.

Myth—God Will Rescue Me Following 40 days of fasting, Jesus was tempted three times by Satan. The second temptation is recorded in the New Testament as follows, “Then the devil taketh him up into the holy city, and setteth him on a pinnacle of the temple, And saith unto him, If thou be the Son of God, cast thyself down: for it is written, He shall give his angels charge concerning thee: and in their hands they shall bear thee up, lest at any time thou dash thy foot against a stone. Jesus said unto him, It is written again, Thou shalt not tempt the Lord thy God.”80 Satan’s temptation was an appeal to man’s desire to be miraculously delivered from the consequences of an action. We tend to seek divine intervention to rescue us from consequences with little or no effort on our part. This tendency was illustrated by Ancient Greek dramatists’ use of the “deus ex machina,” meaning “God from a machine.” This was a machine in which actors portraying the gods would suddenly be lowered on the scene to save the mortal characters from the consequences of their choices. Satan’s use of this temptation continues today and can easily be seen manifested by the student who fails to study and then prays for an “A” during the examination, or the person who violated the divine laws of health and then prays for deliverance from resulting sickness or the person who purchases an expensive plasma screen television and then prays for help to pay the rent. We also see this tendency manifested by those who have incurred larges amounts of debt and then seeks to be delivered from the bondage and obligation of repayment through bankruptcy, or those who seek deliverance from a disease of choice by taking a pill to treat the symptoms instead of changing the behavior that causes the symptoms. We should respond to such temptations as did the Savior by saying, “Thou shalt not tempt the Lord thy God.”81 We must accept responsibility, which is the willingness and ability to recognize and accept the consequences of our actions

It’s neutral creative territory; it’s where we meet when we really want to connect and elevate the game. We’re not here to impose our brand on each other, but to experience, like embodied spiritual hedonists, the richness of what it means to be — well, what it means to exist, period.

Let’s revisit my conversation with Theater Director, Teacher, and Actor Terry Martin and the Meisner Technique. According to Terry, he encourages his students to seek a pivotal place when they are truly present in the moment and access their emotional impulses. He does this by describing emotions as E-motion. Energy in motion. Because they are constantly changing, emotions are powerful but momentary. By accessing these emotions, his actors find a way to tell a story in their unique way. He cautions that emotions only create a block if they are restrained. For example, my attempts to silence my emotions prevented me from accessing my mind and held me in a painful state. He teaches his students to understand the emotional journey by accepting their emotions.

Christian actors must recover a theology of the body that accepts its unity with their spirit, they must also recognize their fallenness, especially as people whose instrument is their body. "Because we are embodied souls, and spirited bodies, the physical senses can themselves be spiritual senses, when rightly used and enjoyed."3Z

It was rare for Walter Brennan to express more than satisfaction at work well done. But Three Godfathers (March 6, 1936) was something special. With its combination of an unusual director, Richard Boleslawski, and an ensemble of actors—Chester Morris, Lewis Stone, and Brennan— inspired by what has to be called a spiritual western, Three Godfathers told the story of how three outlaws come to care for and save the infant of a dying mother they find in the desert.

On the surface, we come to understand that who we are is something separate from all other objects in the world. This is the first and primary of illusions we are taught to believe after having been welcomed to the human world. I do not use the word “illusion” in a negative sense, but in a necessary one. Just as the enjoyment of a film or theatrical play may depend upon the ability of the actors to woo the audience into believing the world they are portraying; the enjoyment of life may also be found in our own ability to wield the power of illusion.

When an actor plays a scene exactly the way a director orders, it isn’t acting. It’s following instructions. James Dean

people] can see only the human actors upon the stage of history. Wicked rulers, ruthless dictators, tyrants, oppressors, kings, governments, and presidents are, to them, the real and only characters in the great drama of life as it affects the political realm. They have no idea at all of the unseen realm of evil personalities, energizing and motivating their human agents…

After Julius Caesar, Marlon became, in the words of his friend Billy Redfield, “the only American actor to be seriously thought of as Hamlet,” the great hope of American theater enthusiasts to finally measure up against the English. “We who saw him in his first, shocking days,” said Redfield, “believed in him not only as an actor, but also as an artistic, spiritual and specifically American leader. We flung him at the English as though we owned him and we all but shouted, ‘He does without your damned elocution lessons, your fruity voices, your artificial changings of pitch and stress, your bleeding love of words, words, words, and your high-toned, fustian, bombace technique. He throws away your books and burns your academies. He does it from within. And he is better than all of you!

I have referred to the air of drama which meets you everywhere in the pages of Sainte-Beuve. He sometimes gets the credit for having dramatized the situation. I wonder, was it he who dramatized the situation or was it the people who were actors in the story? And in particular, was it not Mother Angelique? That great woman was not without her faults; Bremond (who compares her unfavourably throughout with her sister Agnes) writes of her imperiousness, her prodigious freedom in passing judgements on her neighbour; there was no dealing with a woman who was at once up in the clouds and scrupulous. 1 But it is not of her faults that I would write here; they were personal to herself What is more important, it seems to me, is a single weakness which she contrived to hand on to her spiritual children. She was incurably self-conscious; she was always dramatizing situations. She herself said that the object of humiliations was to destroy self and my own will, and the I and the my; St. Cyran, Pascal, Nicole did the same. Of their supernatural achievements it is not for us to judge; but as a matter of plain earthly fact it seems clear that no one of the four ever got rid of that self-consciousness which makes you see yourself out of the comer of your eye at every turn in life.

Consider yourself to be a hero actor and continue to play your hero part in the unlimited drama.

For the actor, everything seems real; whether it is in acting or by carrying out his daily tasks.

The city of Los Angeles - dirty, motley, teeming with immigrants and actors - was only an hour away. Notionally, it was the anchor of the region, but it existed at such a spiritual and sociological remove that it could have been on the moon.

Anand Gerard. Anand means bliss; gerard mean brave, courageous, and it also means a loyal heart - a blissful, courageous, loyal heart. And these are the basic qualities of a religious consciousness. Religion has nothing to do with seriousness; seriousness is pathology. Religion is playful, sportlike, it is fun. Prayer is playing with God, and it is possible only if one remembers that one has to continuously choose to be cheerful. Mind tends to be serious and sad. Mind exists and lives in misery; misery is food for it. The moment you are blissful, mind disappears - hence the beauty of laughter. Laughter has something intrinsically spiritual in it: when you really laugh, mind disappears, and time also disappears. In total laughter you are herenow. There is no ego, nobody is laughing in you - it is pure laughter. The actor disappears, the doer disappears, only the happening remains. That is the beauty of blissfulness, and its benediction. It is possible only for a courageous person because it needs guts to lose the mind. It needs guts to get out of the calculative mechanism of the mind, and unless you get out of the mind you can't enter into the heart. Mind is doubt; the heart is trust, and trust is the door to the divine. Hate is part of our unconsciousness: the more unconscious we are, the more hateful. The moment one starts waking up, becomes more alert, more aware, more conscious, one starts changing from darkness to light. That is real transformation - not the change in your character but the change in your very consciousness. And the moment you are full of light, your life is full of love. That love is real character - not the so-called cultivated virtue. This inner light is possible only through being more alert. That's what meditation is all about: the art of alertness. Ordinarily we live like robots: mechanically, repetitively. We have to de-automatize ourselves, we have to make each act conscious. Small, ordinary acts, walking, sitting, standing, they all have to be changed into awareness. Walk, but remain a witness to it. Eat, and remain a witness to it. Think, and remain a witness to it. Slowly slowly you start accumulating great reservoirs of awareness in you. At a certain point awareness changes into light. Just as at one hundred degrees' heat water evaporates, when your being is full of light your actions are full of love. Then love is spontaneous. You are not even thinking of it, you are not doing it: it is happening. You become just a medium to God.

On earth, we can all be heroes— not in the sense of being solitary actors brandishing swords, but by daring to put down our defenses and take off the armor to really experience and feel what is happening in any given moment, without fighting or fleeing.

And so, I think, there is a collective depression among us, not so much dealt with as glossed over and suppressed. Each of us, as individual actors in a larger drama, carries an imprint of a larger despair. We are coping with intense amounts of chaos and fear, both personally and together. We are all being challenged, in one form or another, to recreate our lives.

The actor and agent here is the Lord, the church’s Bridegroom, and their lives as husband and wife (and as mother- and father-to-be) are here being taken up into that life.

The most spiritual human beings, if we assume that they are the most courageous, also experience by far the most painful tragedies: but just for that reason they honor life because it pits its greatest opposition against them. 18 On the "intellectual conscience." — Nothing seems rarer to me today than genuine hypocrisy. I greatly suspect that the soft air of our culture is insalubrious for this plant. Hypocrisy belongs in the ages of strong faith when, even though constrained to display another faith, one did not abandon one's own faith. Today one does abandon it; or, even more commonly, one adds a second faith — and in either case one remains honest. Without a doubt, a very much greater number of convictions is possible today than formerly: "possible" means permissible, which means harmless. This begets tolerance toward oneself. Tolerance toward oneself permits several convictions and they get along with each other: they are careful, like all the rest of the world, not to compromise themselves. How does one compromise oneself today? If one is consistent. If one proceeds in a straight line. If one is not ambiguous enough to permit five conflicting interpretations. If one is genuine. I fear greatly that modern man is simply too comfortable for some vices, so that they die out by default. All evil that is a function of a strong will — and perhaps there is no evil without strength of will — degenerates into virtue in our tepid air. The few hypocrites whom I have met imitated hypocrisy: like almost every tenth person today, they were actors.

Being an actor is one of the hardest and easiest jobs a person can do. It is hard because you are always living as someone else. It is easy because your always living as someone else.

Here's the reality, guys: you save up for years to go 'Out West' and you spend everything you have in six months living in a roach infested hole in K-town, paying for "casting workshops" so you can meet managers and casting directors who don't give two shits about you. You cut your hair a little bit or grow a moustache and you have to get new headshots because people in Hollywood fundamentally lack imagination and can't even begin to fathom 'who you are as an actor' unless your headshot looks exactly like you do on the day of. And headshots cost $300 to shoot (on the cheap end) and $100 for make-up artists and $100 to retouch and $100 to print. Plus, you need a car to get around because mass transit in Los Angeles is a goddam joke. You need to get into class so you can learn how to unlearn all the shit you learned in college theater. Meanwhile, you're in love with the city because it's new and warm all the time and there are beautiful women everywhere. But you start getting this creeping sensation like everyone is a facade of a human being and beneath every beautiful face is spiritual rot, careerism, graft, nepotism, bull shit, lies, fakery, a need to be seen and an overwhelming whorism. But don't worry, guys, because you can always get a job working as a bartender where you can sneak booze from the well and forget for a few minutes what it's like to be on the bottom of the totem pole. That's a lot of fun, especially when you discover that cocaine means you can drink forever and not get too wasted until later. You'll get a DUI eventually, but fuck it, right? Around this time you start to get bitter. Really bitter, which you'll mistake as an 'evolution of your art.' You start looking for edgy rolls. You get a dumb haircut and try to make yourself look ugly. Maybe you hit the gym or start doing improv. Something to give you an edge. You start seeing young kids coming into town all bright eyed and bushy tailed and you say 'good luck' when you mean 'eat shit and die.' You wake up one day after endless commercial auditions that you really need to make rent but can't seem to book because you 'come off as an asshole' or don't smile enough...

There were two kinds of hungering, I told them, hungering in the body and hungering in the soul. I wanted to bring together the actor who was hungry in the stomach and the people I knew best, the people of the Virginia highlands, because I had a hunch they were hungry for the spiritual nourishment the theater could bring them.

Finally, be strong in the Lord and in the strength of his might. Put on the whole armor of God, that you may be able to stand against the schemes of the devil. For we do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against the rulers [archons] against the authorities [exousia], against the cosmic powers [kosmokrators] over this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil

Change your name to Miles, Dean, Serge, and /or Leonard, baby, she advised her reflection in the hall; light of that afternoon's vanity mirror. Either way, they'll call it paranoia. They. Either you have stumbled indeed, without the aid of LSD or other indole alkaloids, onto a secret richness and concealed density of dream; onto a network by which X number of Americans are truly communicating whilst reserving their lies, recitations of routine, arid betrayals of spiritual poverty, for the official government delivery system; maybe even onto a real alternative to the exitlessness, to the absence of surprise to life, that harrows the head of everybody American you know, and you too, sweetie. Or you are hallucinating it. Or a plot has been mounted against you, so expensive and elaborate, involving items like the forging of stamps and ancient books, constant surveillance of your movements, planting of post horn images all over San Francisco, bribing of librarians, hiring of professional actors and Pierce Inverarity only knows what-all besides, all financed out of the estate in a way either too secret or too involved for your non-legal mind to know about even though you are co-executor, so labyrinthine that it must have meaning beyond just a practical joke. Or you are fantasying some such plot, in which case you are a nut, Oedipa, out of your skull. Those, now that she was looking at them, she saw to be the alternatives. Those symmetrical four. She didn't like any of them, but hoped she was mentally ill; that that's all it was. That night she sat for hours, too numb even to drink, teaching herself to breathe in a vacuum. For this, oh God, was the void. There was nobody who could help her. Nobody in the world. They were all on something, mad, possible enemies, dead. Old fillings in her teeth began to bother her. She would spend nights staring at a ceiling lit by the pink glow of San Narciso's sky. Other nights she could sleep for eighteen drugged hours and wake, enervated, hardly able to stand. In conferences with the keen, fast-talking old man who was new counsel for the estate, her attention span could often be measured in seconds, and she laughed nervously more than she spoke. Waves of nausea, lasting five to ten minutes, would strike her at random, cause her deep misery, then vanish as if they had never been. There were headaches, nightmares, menstrual pains. One day she drove into L.A., picked a doctor at random from the phone book, went to her, told her she thought she was pregnant. They arranged for tests. Oedipa gave her name as Grace Bortz and didn't show up for her next appointment.

Ka method is designed to habilitate the ethnic entrepreneur and the entrepreneur in the informal economy to better fight, and not just failing to cope with emergencies, in a globalized economy. It draws its essence from the traditional forms of expression related to animism. Economic actors can thus learn from their own spirituality to develop strategies, tactics, and actions to run their business.

To be sure, there were all these maddening permutations of what could be that were not to be ignored—possibilities that were still too many to consider to one’s satisfaction. Yet, there was also a stunning beauty to all of this that was so profound that one could not help but love every facet of every conceivability, whether realized or beyond reach. There was so much to capture even in stillness that was akin to grasping at grains of sand so fine as to elude the grip—it was all so intricate, so overwhelming and so rapid, and nothing ever ceased in its glorious transformation that it could be sufficiently arrested and processed and thoroughly acknowledged. But still, there was an exhilaration in being engrossed in the details that evaded capture and in being oneself ensconced in constant flux so as to surrender without recourse to what was to come. A train whistle blows and a new door is to open: the tracks have many junction points and no shortage of stopovers and destinations. Yet, there is no instance that ever becomes the destination, no circumstance the definitive possibility, and one, for that very fact, could scarcely help but be filled with a heartening love for all of creation, if, indeed, it could be called ‘creation’ and such a word held reasonable accuracy. The Moment, after all, was Always and thus there was no ‘before,’ no instance preceding the instance. There was no infinite regression of causality, no ‘hello’ or ‘goodbye’ and certainly no ‘take care of yourself’ that need wrench one’s heart. There was simply the EverToward: the shifting of Now and the reformulation of Then, wherein the form and essence engendered instantaneously a sculpting of arbitrary and historic juxtapositions—which, themselves, were composed of retroactively-shaped illusions. In spite of this, there still emerges a yearning for those prehistoric elements now faded, those characters for whom one has felt an affection and who nourished one’s growth and one’s formulations of what exists—if ‘exist’ indeed suffices as a descriptor. There is twinge of loss for what was, even if it has never been or has otherwise taken on new and ersatz constructions in mind. Notwithstanding this, one cannot help but perseverate upon the hypothetical stories of a speculative childhood that presumably nurtured imagination, the scoldings that established assumptive boundary, the conjectural sacrifices that ostensibly granted sustenance. So much of one’s respiration had been populated of this air and of this interplay of actors and elements. And yet, one’s breath cycles ceaselessly through many phases on a given day. In the morning, it is yet purging itself of that mythspell of yesterday; by afternoon, it consumes the horsefeathers of new dynamics, halted again by that which passes by too fast and which can never be frozen; as evening descends, it grows slow and pensive, sometimes coughing up senescent horsefeathers and fatigued by the persistent irregularities introduced by the day itself.

In what ways do our current patterns of “contemporary worship” effectively make us the only “actors” in worship—not only failing to appreciate the primacy of God’s action in worship but failing even to see God as active in our worship? Have we not fallen prey once again to the static medieval paradigm that is focused on “presence”?