The premonition of death may for many be a stimulus to novelty of experience: the imminence of death serves to sweep away the inessential preoccupations for those who do not flee from the thought of death into triviality.
I have always found that actively loving saves one from a morbid preoccupation with the shortcomings of society.
To be identified with your mind is to be trapped in time: the compulsion to live almost exclusively through memory and anticipation. This creates an endless preoccupation with past and future and an unwillingness to honor and acknowledge the present moment and allow it to be. The compulsion arises because the past gives you an identity and the future holds the promise of salvation, of fulfillment in whatever form. Both are illusions.
Go to the object. Leave your subjective preoccupation with yourself. Do not impose yourself on the object. Become one with the object. Plunge deep enough into the object to see something like a hidden glimmering there.
The Zionists'. . . main preoccupation is not to save Jews alive out of Europe but to get Jews into Palestine.
My preoccupation has been from the very beginning that I believe that the "Brexit" referendum result is the most disastrous peacetime result that we've seen in Britain.
We all suffer from the preoccupation that there exists. . . in the loved one, perfection.
Your love for Jesus Christ and your discipleship in His cause must be the consuming preoccupation and passion of your mortality.
Go to the pine if you want to learn about the pine, or to the bamboo if you want to learn about the bamboo. And in doing so, you must leave your subjective preoccupation with yourself. Otherwise you impose yourself on the object and you do not learn.
A priest is a man vowed, trained, and consecrated, a man belonging to a special corps, and necessarily with an intense esprit de corps. He has given up his life to his temple and his god. This is a very excellent thing for the internal vigour of his own priesthood, his own temple. He lives and dies for the honour of his particular god. But in the next town or village is another temple with another god. It is his constant preoccupation to keep his people from that god. Religious cults and priesthoods are sectarian by nature; they will convert, they will overcome, but they will never coalesce.
What is the thread of western civilization that distinguished its course in history? It has to do with the preoccupation of western man with his outward command and his sense of superiority.
You are wrong. The state and its existence are essential before everything else. All this preoccupation with liberty is not serious.
The point isn't to deny our Egos, but to extricate ourselves from our exclusive preoccupation with them.
In a culture of domination, preoccupation with victimage is inevitable.
Nature is millions of things. And there are millions of ways of understanding its preoccupations.
I love work because it keeps sex in perspective. Otherwise, it can become a preoccupation.
Joy is all there is. The rest is a preoccupation of the ego, unworthy of your holy mind.
At some point preoccupation with safety can get in the way of living full lives.
Beware of Destination Addiction. . . a preoccupation with the idea that happiness is in the next place, the next job and with the next partner. Until you give up the idea that happiness is somewhere else, it will never be where you are.
And of course, in my writing, there is the constant theme of music, love of, preoccupation with, music. Music is the single thread making my life into a coherency.