Tony Vigorito: Nine Kinds of Brilliant

Tony Vigorito is a young(ish?) novelist. His novel Nine Kinds of Naked is a delightful read and loaded with brilliant quotable lines on the nature of spiritual reality. Hence this post. Considering this site is about cannabis and spirituality, I should point out that I have no knowledge of the author’s relationship with entheogenic substances other than a couple of glancing references in the novel that might lead one to suspect at least a degree of familiarity with those realms of investigation. I’ve created this post because I found some great wisdom teachings in the novel and I wanted to share some of it. I don’t believe Tony Vigorito’s work is very well known yet and I do believe it deserves to be.

Although as far as I can determine there are no copyright restrictions on collecting short quotes from a particular source like this, I felt that since I have so many here I would at least try to reach the author and ask how he feels about it. Since the quotes below were originally in a supportive context in the novel, I also wanted to check that Tony felt okay about having them separated out like this. I did get a hold of him and he replied with his blessing.

Note: Most of the following quotes were mouthed by characters in the novel in conversation. Some of them were said by Billy Pronto, who is essentially the disembodied voice of Spirit. Most of the others come from Diablo, who might be called the main protagonist, along with a few from Elizabeth, the other principal player (apart from J.J. Speed, who acts as a kind of unenlightened foil to these saner voices.) There’s a passing nod to context with these quotes in the sense that they’re listed below in the order they’re found in Nine Kinds of Naked. If you find that some of these insights don’t immediately reveal their meaning to you, I’d like to suggest you chew them over a few times. I’m confident that there is reliable and valuable wisdom to be gleaned herein for the awakening journey.

“This infuriated his sense of expectation, and began to persuade him that perhaps there was a reality beyond measurement, a reality so complex that intuition was the only possible door to its perception.”

“It is rumored that the enlightened mind perceives the world with neither attachment nor expectation, that all experience is received unmitigated, unmediated, and unmuddled.”

“ . . . for Bridget was possessed by the most elemental force in the universe, that which animates existence and compels life. Hiah! Here was a force that knew its purpose, could be neither reasoned with nor judged, and disregarded all attempts at control and prediction.”

“Creation is love, and love finds its greatest expression in the act of Creation itself. Creation is ecstatic, and the Big Bang is a beatific, radiant requiem of rapture that yodels the illusion of all-that-is only so that it may rediscover itself and continue to love.”

“Creation is sexual, uninhibited, immodest, and imprudent. Creation so enjoys itself that it’s no wonder at all that the universe is infinite, and there is nothing else to do anywhere ever but perpetuate the pleasures of eternity.”

“Frustration is the opposite of enthusiasm, and enthusiasm derives from the Greek entheos, meaning “the god within.” Frustration, then, is a spirit grasping in the absence of the divine.”

“I want for nothing, the stranger [Billy Pronto] immediately answered, “Desire is the root of all unhappiness.”

“The present is here, whether or not you are, and the only mystery is where else there is to be. Here it is, the gift of the moment, the present. To speak of anything else is make-believe.”

“We’re all of us just the same, reverberations of the same thunderclap, echoes of the same Bang. That bang delights in spinning fractal iterations of itself, countless vantages and viewpoints, just because it is possible.”

“I am the rust on your iron cage. I am the unstuttered song that sings behind the razor wire of your timidity.”

“Elizabeth smiled. “The beauty beneath the blindfold.” The words murmured themselves through her.”

“Synchronicity is your tether to the universe,” Billy Pronto had explained. “Tune into it, and the path of your life opens before you like the Red Sea.”

“You can’t handle the truth.” [says Billy] “What truth? [asks Diablo]” “That you are not in control . . . that you abandon ecstasy, sacrifice the superlative, and trade the tremendous for the trivial.”

“You think you are in control, that you rule the world, but in fact the only domain you master is that of your own illusions.”

“The most obstinate illusion is your own sense of an individual identity, the order you impose on the impulses of your spirit. All other illusions cascade from that singular confusion.”

“The spontaneity of the spirit is far more trustworthy than the deliberations of the intellect.”

“Intuition is the prompting of the universal mind, and there is nothing remarkable about this when your realize your mind is of the world and vice versa.”

“Free will is the cutting edge of Creation.”

“The voice of synchronicity is your buried impulse.”

“True confidence derives from the awareness that you are playing hide-and-seek with yourself in the shade of the Tree of Knowledge. The unself-conscious enthusiasm of play.”

“The bus has room enough for everybody, it’s just not going to slow down.”

“There is no adventure without uncertainty.”

“There is nothing but synchronicity,” Elizabeth said again. “It’s only our attention that tunes in and out of it.”

“Basically, each of us taps out our own rhythm, clumsy and alienated and confused, until we fall into sync with the universe around us, and then presto! Divine timing. Everything cascades into place, every grief-stricken mishap makes perfect sense, and life sparkles with good fortune.”

“And what our world is witnessing lately, the collapse of all order, structure, and predictability, this is precisely what is required for us to wake up to the truth of our own love for one-a-lonely-other.”

“And the naked truth is that life is an adventure in the imagination of God. Providence at play, and to the extent that we release control, we experience grace. And the minute you close your heart, the instant you presume to protect yourself from hurt or heartache, or the moment you try to control the insecurity of life with routine and structure, you have already lost that which you are trying to protect.”

“The heart is made of love, and love is indestructible, and only the arrogance of ego would presume that it needs protection.”

“To open your heart is to reduce your ego, and this is the only magic that is ever required to experience the naked truth.”

“Love is the only reality, and it’s the perfect opposite of everything our social structures encourage.”

“You cannot capture chaos with an answer,” he continued, The realization of this leads to freedom.”

“You like to imagine you are in control, but I assure you you’re not . . . Freedom comes only from the embrace of chaos, the embrace of death.”

“Abandon your head and unwind your mind. How can you pray if you can’t even dance?”

“. . . he became we and we are so free for we are spirit embodied . . .”