A few brilliant passages in ‘Eat Pray Love’

 

There are many brilliant passages in ‘Eat Pray Love’. Here’s a link to just a few of my favourites. Do go and read the book.

[1] Depression and Loneliness [low calibration energy & emotion, your egoic lower self – Andy] track me down after about ten days in Italy… They come upon me all silent and menacing like Pinkerton Detectives, and they flank me- Depression on my left, Loneliness on my right. They don’t need to show me their badges. I know these guys very well. We’ve been playing a cat-and-mouse game for years now. Loneliness, the more sensitive cop, says “I’m sorry ma’am. But I might have to tail you the whole time you’re travelling. It’s my assignment.”

Then they frisk me. They empty my pockets of any joy I had been carrying there. Depression even confiscates my identity; but he always does that. Then Loneliness starts interrogating me, which I dread because it always goes on for hours. He’s polite but relentless. He asks why I am all by myself tonight, yet again. He asks (though we’ve been through this line of questioning hundreds of times already) why I can’t keep a relationship going, why I ruined my marriage, why I messed things up. He asks why I can’t get my act together, and why I’m not at home living in a nice house and raising nice children like any respectable woman my age should be. He asks where I think I’ll end up on my old age, if I keep living this way. “It’s not fair for you come here,” I tell Depression. “I paid you off already. I served my time back in New York.”

But he just gives me that dark smile, settles into my favourite chair, puts his feet on my table and lights a cigar, filling the place with his awful smoke. Loneliness watches and sighs, then climbs into my bed and pulls the covers over himself, fully dressed, shoes and all. He’s going to make me sleep with him again tonight, I just know it.

[2] The Yogic path is about disentangling the built-in glitches of the human condition, which I’m going to over-simply define here as the heartbreaking inability to sustain contentment .  Taoists call it imbalance, Buddhism calls it ignorance, Islam blames our rebellion against God and Judeo-Christian tradition attributes it to original sin. The Yogis say that human discontentment is a simple case of mistaken identity.  We’re miserable because we think of ourselves as mere individuals, alone with our fears and flaws and resentments and mortality.  We wrongly believe that our limited little egos constitute our whole entire nature.

Yoga is the effort to experience one’s divinity personally and then to hold on to that experience forever.  Yoga is about self-mastery and the dedicated effort to haul your attention away from your endless brooding over the past and your non-stop worrying about the future so that you can seek, instead, a place of eternal presence from which you may regard yourself and your surroundings with poise.  Only from that point of even-mindedness will the true nature of the world (and yourself) be revealed to you.

[3] Like most humanoids, I am burdened with what the Buddhists call the ‘monkey mind’– the thoughts that swing from limb to limb, stopping only to scratch themselves, spit, and howl. From the distant past to the unknowable future, my mind swings wildly through time, touching on dozens of ideas a minute, unharnessed and undisciplined… Your emotions are the slaves to your thoughts, and you are the slave to your emotions… The other problem with swinging through the vines of thought is that you are never where you are.

[4] Your ego’s job isn’t to serve you. Its only job is to keep itself in power. And right now, your ego’s scared to death cuz it’s about to get downsized… Pretty soon your ego will be out of a job and your heart’ll be making all the decisions.

[5] My sense of helplessness was overwhelming. What I wanted to do was pull some massive emergency break on the universe… I just wanted to call time out, to demand that everybody STOP until I could understand everything… what Richard called ‘control issues’… There’s only two questions that human beings have ever fought over: “How much do you love me?” and “Who’s in charge?” (love and control).