This week quote is from a movie I saw many years ago which I thought was funny, but really did not get much out of it. However after watching it recently I realized this was a movie with a big lesson(s) and profound meaning(s). I then stumbled across a very rich, deep, meaningful, long quote that I thought explains the meaning of the first quote and the point of the movie.
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“I've killed myself so many times, I don’t even exist anymore.”
Bill Murray as Phil Connors in Groundhog Day (written by Harold Ramis and Danny Rubin)
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"DYING BEFORE YOU DIE. Dying before you die was referring to the death of one’s attachment to a narrow view of life centered on one’s own ego, that self-preoccupied, self-constructed story-lens of at best dubious accuracy through which we see everything within the inflated context of our own self-cherishing habit that features us, although we would be reluctant to admit it, as the undisputed center of the universe.
Dying before you die meant waking up to a larger reality beyond the small view through one’s own ego and self-preoccupation, a reality that is not knowable through one’s limited ideas and opinions and highly conditioned preferences and aversions, especially those that remain unexamined. It meant becoming conscious, not in the sense of intellectually knowledgeable but more in the sense of directly feeling and keeping in mind the fleeting nature of life and of all our relationships and its ultimately impersonal nature. Within such coordinate system, one could then choose purposefully, to whatever degree one could manage it, to live outside the routinized automaticity that frequently seduces us through small-minded ambitions and fears and thereby numbs us to the beauty and the mystery of life and prevents us from looking most creatively into the deep nature of things, including ourselves, behind all the surface appearances and the stories we tell ourselves."
Dr. Jon Kabat-Zinn
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Also from the movie this verse from the poem, There Breathes the Man...
The wretch, concentrated all in self,
Living, shall forfeit fair renown,
And, doubly dying, shall go down
To the vile dust, from whence he sprung,
Unwept, unhonoured, and unsung.
Wishing you a most beautiful day, wherever this may find you!
There is a way back, a way through the imprisoning mystery of yourself, a way back into life.
