ECKHART TOLLE: “You can write a PhD about honey, or you can write poems about honey, but if you’ve never tasted honey, in other words, if honey has not merged with you, then you don’t really know honey. But the moment you taste honey, then you know honey. And all the other stuff beforehand, even your PhD about honey if you wrote one, is not knowing, not true knowing.”
I explained this quote to my therapist several weeks ago. We were talking about my tendency to intellectualize my experiences–to rationalize, explain, resolve, label, categorize my experiences instead of touching them directly. I went through several long months of feeling nothing. I called it apathy. And I didn’t know where it came from or how to deal with it. He suggested I had been under so much stress that my mind had switched to a kind of survival mode which numbed my senses. It felt like a plastic wrap separated me from the world, and it was starting to make me feel disillusioned and dissociated. A lot of our work together has been using techniques to move my experiences from the ivory tower of my analytical mind into direct contact with my emotions, to move my engagement with the world from aloof rationality to direct sensual and emotional contact, to stop analyzing “honey” and start tasting it.
When I used Tolle’s quote to explain my progress, my therapist laughed and said, that’s your Zen wisdom: the taste of honey!
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