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Jack Kerouac: The Dharma Bums, (1958)

"Here, this, is, It. The world as it is, is Heaven, I'm looking for a Heaven outside what there is, it's only this poor pitiful world that's Heaven." (p. 139).

I remember a group 'retreat' at a psychology lecturer's house in York. A couple of days in and getting nowhere with the slog of meditation after meditation and discretely hiding within my expression the 'fail' of each and every one, until that kind of moment seemingly described by Kerouac half a century earlier (meditating in a wood at the back of his mum's house) when the ridiculous expectation of experiencing something divine, or special, finally collapses and in the wreckage that remains just being in the no-thingy moment and finding everything is all OK and this is what it was all about after all. It was hard not to laugh.