THE QUESTERS’ JOURNAL

*(denotes unknown source)

 

[As suggested in the Remedy home page, the Questers’ Journal comprises literary, psychological and philosophical insights gleaned from our search for understanding of self and our world across time. Through tracking the processes and products of noteworthy East and West minds, we aspired to the acquisition of a functional measure of understanding and enlightenment for ourselves. The selections are not streamed nor ‘packaged’ by chronology, author nor subject matter, nor were they ever intended to be. There is no ‘teaching’ goal nor agenda in the Journal, so enter it anywhere, anytime, and allow strengthening insight to flow through you. Enjoy.]

 

“The time has come,” The Walrus said, “to talk of many things: Of shoes – and ships – and sealing wax – Of cabbages – and kings – And why the sea is boiling hot – And whether pigs have wings.” (Lewis Carroll)

 

A person without humour has little wisdom.                                                                    (Lama Govinda)

 

In reality, every ego –so far from being a unity, is in the highest degree a manifold world, a constellated heaven, a chaos of forms, of states and stages, of inheritances and potentialities. As a body everyone is single, as a soul never.                                                                                                                       (Hermann Hesse)

 

I am an experiment on the part of nature, a gamble within the unknown, perhaps for a new purpose, perhaps for nothing, and my only task is to allow this game on the part of the primeval depths to take its course, to feel its will within me and make it wholly mine.                                                                                    (ibid)

 

Go, eat your bread in gladness and drink your wine in joy, for your action was long ago approved by God. Let your clothes always be freshly washed and your head never lack ointment. Enjoy happiness with a woman you love all the fleeting days of life that have been granted you under the sun. Whatever it is in your power to do, do with all your might. For there is no doing, no learning, no wisdom in the grave to which you are going.         (Eccles. 9: 7-10)

 

Twelve basic characteristics of creative people:

*  They are more observant

*  They express only part-truths

*  In addition to seeing things as others do, they see things others do not

*  They are independent in their cognitive faculties, which they value highly

*  They are motivated by their talent and values

*  They are more capable of holding many ideas at once, and comparing new ideas, hence making a richer synthesis

*  They have more sexual drive and are more vigorous from a physical point of view, and more sensitive

*  They have more complex lives, and see a more complex universe

*  They become more aware of unconscious motives and fantasy life

*  They have strong egos that permit them to regress and return to normality

*  They allow the distinction between subject and object to disappear for certain periods of time, as in love and mysticism

*  The objective freedom of their organism is at a maximum, and their creativity is a function of that objective freedom

(Source- Frank Barron as quoted by Silvano Arieti “Creativity: The Magic Synthesis”)

 

Once you leave your own knowledge of God, your own sentiment, and take secondary knowledge such as St. Paul’s or George Fox’s, you get wider from God with every year this secondary form lasts. Let me admonish you, - first of all - to go alone.                                                                                               (Ralph Waldo Emerson)

 

Each of us rides his personal universe, his own travelling box of space and time, and what they have in common is the same structure and coherence.                                                            (Jacob Bronowski)

 

Every animal leaves traces of what it was; man alone leaves traces of what he created.

                                                                                                                             (Bronowski  “The Ascent of Man”)

 

I very much doubt if anyone of us has the faintest idea of what is meant by the reality of existence of anything but our own egos.                                                                                 (Sir Arthur Eddington)

 

We were in search of matter, but now all new insight into matter shows that there is no matter; it looks more and more like a thought, and less and less like a thing.                             (ibid)

 

Above and below are bound to one another. The word of him who wishes to speak with men without speaking to God is not fulfilled; but the word of him who wishes to speak with God without speaking with men goes astray.                                                                                                        (Martin Buber “Dialogue”)

 

Plato has repeatedly called “Thinking” a voiceless colloquy of the soul with itself. Everyone who has really thought knows that within this remarkable process there is a stage at which an “inner court” is questioned and replies.                                                                                                   (Buber  “Dialogue”)

 

Each of us is encased in an armour which we soon, out of familiarity, cease to notice. There are only moments which penetrate it and stir the soul to sensibility.                         (Martin Buber  “The Way of Response”)

 

No action is ever lost - nothing we do is without result. We can’t know the quality or the results of our actions except in the most limited way. All we can do is to try to be as sure as we can of what we are doing so far as it relates to ourselves. In fact, not to flail about and be deluded victims of our passions. If you’re going to do something that looks evil, don’t smear it with icing and pretend it’s good; just bloody well do it and keep your eyes peeled. That’s all.                                                                                                       (Robertson Davies)

 

This is the Great Theatre of Life. Admission is free but the taxation is mortal. You come when you can, and leave when you must. The show is continuous.                                     (ibid)

 

The world we see is only that part of it that registers on the senses.      (Democritus)

 

Why is it when we talk to God, we are said to be praying, but when God talks to us we’re said to be schizophrenic?                                                                                                             (Lily Tomlin)

 

Selves are not independently existing soul-pearls, but artifacts of the social processes that create us and, like other artifacts, subject to sudden shifts in status. The only “momentum” that accrues to the trajectory of a self, or a club, is the stability imparted to it by the web of beliefs (memes) that constitute it, and when those beliefs lapse, it lapses, either permanently or temporarily.                                 (Daniel C. Dennett)

Concerning discourse, Dennett quotes:

                   E.M. Forster “ How can I tell what I think until I see what I say?”

                   J.H. Jackson “We speak, not only to tell others what we think, but to tell ourselves what we think.”

 

Lord make me chaste - but not yet.                                                       (St. Augustine, as a young man)

 

God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, change the things I can and the wisdom to know the difference.                                                                                                (Reinhold Niebuhr)

 

Oh, no: I had never wished to teach. I had nothing to teach. I wished only to learn, to be always the student, never the pro­fessor. And with being eternally a student went the idea of be­ing free to move, to pass from one town and one country to another, at least while enough youth and energy remained for me to love exploration and to profit by it.

                                                                                                        (Santayana)

 

Prayer, among sane people, has never superseded practical efforts to secure the desired end; a proof that the sphere of expression was never really confused with that of reality.                        (Santayana)

“I do not know what I may appear to the world, but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the seashore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.”                    (Isaac Newton)

 

Those who do not remember their history are condemned to repeat it.        (Santayana)

 

People will forget what you said. People will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.                                                                                                                  *

 

The mass of mankind is divided into two classes - the Sancho Panzas who have a sense for reality, but no ideals, and the Don Quixotes with a sense for ideals, but mad.                                        (Santayana)

 

The true philosopher, who is not one chiefly by profession, must be prepared to tread the wine-press alone. He may indeed flourish like the bay-tree in a grateful environment, but more often he will rather resemble a reed shaken by the wind. Whether starved or fed by the accidents of fortune he must find his essential life in his own ideal.                                                                                                                     (Santayana)

 

There is nothing cheaper than idealism. It can be had by merely not observing the ineptitude of our chance prejudices, and by declaring that the first rhymes that have struck our ear are the eternal and necessary harmonies of the world.                                                                                                  (Santayana)

 

Intuition runs equally into truth and into error, and can settle nothing if not controlled by experience

                                                                                                        (Santayana)

 

From the Bhagavad-Gita:

 For the Soul, there is neither birth nor death. Nor, having once been alive, does it  ever cease to exist. It is unborn, eternal, ever-existing, undying and primeval. It is not slain when the body is slain.    (1-20)

 

The mind is restless, turbulent, obstinate and very strong, and to subdue it is more difficult than controlling the wind.                                                                                                                                     (6-34)

[from the Vedas  –  ‘An individual is the passenger in the carriage of the material body, and intelligence is the driver. Mind is the driving instrument (reins) and the five senses are the horses. The self is thus the enjoyer or sufferer in the association of mind and senses.’]

Christianity, even in its orthodox forms, covers various kinds of morality, and its philosophical incoherence betrays itself in dis­ruptive movements, profound schisms, and total alienation on the part of one Christian from the inward faith of another. Trappist or Calvinist may be practicing a heroic and metaphysical self-surrender while the busy-bodies of their respective creeds are fos­tering, in God's name, all their hot and miscellaneous passions.

                                                                                                        (Santayana)

 

When we extend ourselves, our self enters new and unfamiliar territory. We do things that we are unaccustomed to and it is frightening. It always has been and it always will be but the fear is inescapable if we are to advance. Courage is not the absence of fear, it is the advancing on the Hero's Journey in spite of fear, the extension despite the resistance.                                                                   (Joseph Campbell)

 

Every idea which is formed in the human mind, every activity and emotion, has some relation, direct or indirect, to pain and pleasure.                                                                              (Santayana)

 

The first time I saw him, he was walking down Lover's Lane holding his own hand.

                                                                                                                             (Fred Allen)

 

No language can be ugly to those who speak it well, no religion unmeaning to those who have learned to pour their life into its moulds. Of course these forms vary in intrinsic excellence; they are by their specific character more or less fit and facile for the average mind. But the man and the age are rare who can choose their own path; we have generally only a choice between going ahead in the direction already chosen, or halting and blocking the path for others.                                                                                           (Santayana)

 

Dream not of Utopias but be content if the least thing go forward, and count the outcome of the matter in hand as a small thing. For who can change another’s conviction? Failing a change of conviction, we merely get men pretending to be persuaded and chafing like slaves under coercion.   (Marcus Aurelius “Meditations”)

 

Parental functions in nature are limited to nursing the extremely young. This phase of the instinct, being the most primitive and fundamental, is most to be relied upon even in man. Especially in the mother, care for the children's physical well-being is unfailing to the end. She understands the vegetative soul, and the first lispings of sense and sentiment in the child have an absorbing interest for her. In that region her skill and delights are miracles of nature; but her insight and keenness gradually fade as the children grow older. Seldom is the private and ideal life of a young son or daughter a matter in which the mother shows particular tact or for which she has instinctive respect. Even rarer is any genuine community in life and feeling between parents and their adult children. Often the parents' influence comes to be felt as a dead constraint, the more cruel that it cannot be thrown off without unkindness; and what makes the parents' claim at once unjust and pathetic is that it is founded on passionate love for a remembered being, the child once wholly theirs, that no longer exists in the man.                 (Santayana)

 

We must not only cast asunder the snare of the mind and the senses, but flee also from the snare of the thinker, the snare of the theologian and the church-builder, the meshes of the WORD and the bondage of the IDEA. All these are within us waiting to wall in the spirit with forms;  but we must always go beyond, always renounce the lesser for the greater, the finite for the Infinite; we must be prepared to proceed from illumination to illumination, from experience to experience, from soul-state to soul-state…Nor must we attach ourselves even to the truths we hold most securely, for they are but forms and expressions of the Ineffable who refuses to limit Itself to any form or expression.                         (Sri Aurobindo – “Synthesis of Yoga”)

 

There are four main standards of human conduct which make an ascending scale:

First            Personal need, preference and desire

Second      The law and good of the many

Third          The ideal ethic

Fourth        The highest divine law of Nature.                                         (ibid)

 

Truly, we do not think, will or act but thought occurs in us, will occurs in us, impulse and act occur in us; our ego sense gathers around itself, refers to itself all this flow of natural activities. It is cosmic FORCE, it is NATURE which forms the thought, imposes the will, imparts the impulse. Our body, mind and ego are a wave of the sea of force in action and do not govern it, but by it are governed and directed.        (ibid)

 

A hunt for supernatural powers leads to a fatal self-inflation into an unnatural, inhuman and undivine bigness of magnified ego; the larger the being, the more danger of large-scale disaster.    (ibid)

 

The supreme state of human love is the unity of one soul in two bodies.          (ibid)

 

If the realization, fulfillment, service of the one Self demands from us an action that seems to others self-service or self-assertion in the egotistic sense or seems egotistic enjoyment or self-indulgence, that action we must do; we must be governed by the guide within rather than by the opinions of men. The influence of the environment is all delusion and vanity.                                                                                      (ibid)

 

The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing.          (Edmund Burke)

 

There are always two methods of securing harmony: one is to unify all the given elements, and another is to reject and expunge all the elements that refuse to be unified. Unity by inclusion gives us the beautiful; unity by exclusion, opposition, and isolation gives us the sublime. Both are pleasures: but the pleasure of the one is warm, passive, and pervasive; that of the other cold, imperious, and keen. The one identifies us with the world, the other raises us above it.                                                                                                   (Santayana)

 

We inhabit a vast ocean of energy which is outside the reach of our senses and our measuring instruments.                                                                                   (David Bohm - Physicist and friend of Krishnamurti)

 

The phenomenal world that we observe in our ordinary state of consciousness represents only one aspect of reality – the ‘explicate’ or unfolded order. Its generative matrix – the ‘implicate’ or enfolded order – exists on another level of reality and cannot be directly observed, except possibly in episodes of non-ordinary consciousness, such as deep meditative, mystical or psychedelic states.          (ibid)

 

The ‘ implicate domain’ could equally well be called Idealism, Spirit, Consciousness; the separation of matter and spirit is an abstraction. The ground is always one.                                            (ibid)

 

Matter is like a small ripple on this tremendous ocean of energy [implicate domain] having some relative stability and being manifest.                                                                                                (ibid)

 

This ocean of energy could be thought of as an ocean of light – light being the fundamental activity in which existence has its ground.                                                                                                (ibid)

 

No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main; if a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friends or thine own were; any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind; and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.                                                            (John Donne)

 

Intense magnification shows our bodies are only oscillating fields of energy – a void, in other words.

(Itzhak Bentov)

 

A disease may be an out-of-tune behaviour of one or another of our organs. When a strong harmonizing rhythm is applied, the interference pattern of waves, which is the organ, may start pulsing in tune again. This may be the principle behind psychic healing.                                                                        (ibid)

 

Energy in pendulums causes them to entrain and if one is set at an odd beat, it will be brought back to the original entrainment by the energy of the other pendulums. Similarly, when a person deviates from the “rhythm” of the group, the group tries to bring him back into entrainment with them.                         (ibid)

 

When a man knows that his life is over, he can look back upon it from a universal standpoint. He has nothing more to live for, but if the energy of his mind remains unimpaired, he will still wish to live, and, being cut off from his personal ambitions, he will impute to himself a kind of vicarious immortality by identifying himself with what is eternal. He speaks of himself as he is, or rather as he was. He sums himself up, and points to his achievement. This I have been, says he, this I have done.                                                                     (Santayana)

 

The young man who has not wept is a savage, and the old man who will not laugh is a fool.  (ibid)

 

“Enlightenment is the goal; Healing is the by-product.   As the darkness fades, the transformation process becomes one of creativity rather than healing”.

                                                (Source –“Heyoan” an entity channelled thru Barbara Ann Brennan)

 

Learning the contexts of life is a matter that has to be discussed – not internally – but as a matter of external relationship between two creatures. Relationship is always a product of ‘double description’; think of the two parties to the interaction as two eyes, each given a monocular view of what goes on (with each’s respective peripherals), and, together, giving a binocular view in depth. This double view IS the relationship.        (Gregory Bateson)

 

Miracles are dreams and imaginings whereby materialists hope to escape from their materialism…The introduction of the supernatural into the scheme of explanation destroys all belief and all disbelief, leaving only a state of mind, completely gaga, but which some find pleasant…Harboring one kind of superstition tends to lead to another.                                                                                                                         (ibid)

 

One of the important things about depression is to not get caught in the notion that entertainment will cure it.                                                                                                                    (ibid)

 

Meditation is often proposed as a way of handling stress – but it is also a way of unlearning the addiction to entertainment and its accompanying vulnerability to boredom.                                 (ibid)

 

The greatest artist is he who expresses what is felt by everybody. But how does he do it? By being more subjective than others. The more he expresses HIMSELF, i.e. his innermost being, the nearer he comes to others.                                                                                                           (Lama Govinda)

 

The universe resembles the shape of the electrical fields around an egg or a seed. In, say, a tree seed, the vibrating molecules of the genes carrying the information about the form of the tree have somehow coded the spatial and temporal form of the tree, so that we can say that the seed carries not only information as to shape of the tree, but also its unfoldment in time. The spatial coding is given by the amino acid sequence; the temporal perhaps by the relationships in the frequencies of vibration of the molecular segments with respect to each other. The seed’s space/time has been condensed and stored, awaiting the proper objective time for its unfoldment. It is the representation of the tree in an altered and higher state of consciousness.                                                                                                                                                   (Itzhak Bentov)

 

Keep me away from the wisdom which does not cry, the philosophy which does not laugh, and the greatness which does not bow before children.                                                             (Kahlil Gibran)

 

As one’s gifts increase, his friends decrease.                                           (ibid)

 

Keep me from the man who says “I am a candle to light people on their way”. But to the one who seeks to make his way through the light of the people, bring me nearer.                                (ibid)

 

Friendship with the ignorant is as foolish as arguing with a drunkard.         (ibid)

 

Some people act continually in ways that other - society or individuals - impose. “What do I think OUGHT to be done?” “What does my society say SHOULD be done?” They do not always act in accord with the opinions of others; indeed may act as to contradict those opinions, but are still acting in terms of those opinions.                                                                                                                                                 (Carl Rogers)

 

Most people tend not to listen; we instead evaluate another’s statements because listening is too dangerous – we might be changed and this is one of the most frightening prospects many of us face.         (ibid)

 

“Brief were my days amongst you, and briefer still the words I have spoken. But should my voice fade in your ears, and my love vanish in your memory, then I will come again, and with a richer heart and lips more yielding to the spirit will I speak. Yes, I shall return with the tide, and though death may hide me, and the greater silence enfold me, yet again will I seek your understanding… Know, therefore, that from the greater silence I shall return… Forget not that I shall come back to you… A little while, and my longing shall gather dust for another body. A little while - a moment of rest upon the wind - and another woman shall bear me”.     (Kahlil Gibran – epilogue to “The Prophet”)

 

A child in the womb, no sooner born than returned to the earth - such is the fate of man, the fate of nations and of the sun, the moon, and the stars.                                                     (Gibran)

 

Nature is a living unity of living units, in each of which the power of the whole is present …we ourselves, and the things we call our own, come and vanish and return again.                            (Giordano Bruno)

 

If two people who love each other let a single instant wedge itself between them, it grows – it becomes a month, a year, a century; it becomes too late.                                                  (Jean Giraudoux)

 

They say dying animals go into hiding; and I could understand that instinct. There are phases of distress when help is neither possible nor desired. It is simpler, easier, more honest to be seasick alone, and to die alone. The trouble then seems something fated, not to be questioned, like life itself; and nature is built to face it and to see it out.

                                                                                                                             (Santayana)

 

That the end of life should be death may sound sad: yet what other end can anything have? The end of an evening party is to go to bed; but its use is to gather congenial people together, that they may pass the time pleasantly. An invitation to the dance is not rendered ironical because the dance can not last for ever; the youngest of us and the most vigorously wound up, after a few hours, has had enough of sinuous stepping and prancing. The transience of things is essential to their physical being, and not at all sad in itself; it becomes sad by virtue of a sentimental illusion, which makes us imagine that they wish to endure, and that their end is always untimely; but in a healthy nature it is not so.                                                                              (Santayana)

 

You don't get to choose how you're going to die, or when. You can only decide how you're going to live. Now.                                                                                                                                *

 

To find your own way is to follow your own bliss. This involves analysis, watching yourself and seeing where the real deep bliss is – not the quick little excitement, but the real, deep, life-filling bliss.   (Joseph Campbell)

 

Schopenhauer points out that when you reach an advanced age and look back over your lifetime, it can seem to have had a consistent order and plan, as though composed by some novelist. Events that when they occurred had seemed accidental and of little moment turn out to have been indispensable factors in the composition of a consistent plot. So who composed the plot?

Schopenhauer suggests that just as your dreams are composed of an aspect of yourself of which your consciousness is unaware, so too, your whole life is composed by the will within you. And just as people whom you will have met apparently by mere chance become leading agents in the structuring of your life, so too will you have served unknowingly as an agent, giving meaning to the lives of others. The whole thing gears together like one big symphony, with everything unconsciously structuring everything else … one great dream of a single dreamer in which all the dream characters dream too … Everything arises in mutual relation to everything else, so you can’t blame anybody for anything. It is even as though there were a single intention behind it all, which always makes some kind of sense, though none of us knows what the sense might be, or has lived the life that he quite intended.                                                                                                                      (Joseph Campbell)

 

When the imagination and will power are in conflict .... it's almost always the imagination which wins.      *

 

The happy filling of a single hour is so much gained for the universe at large, and to find joy and sufficiency in the flying moment is perhaps the only means open to us for increasing the glory of eternity.     (Santayana)

 

We must welcome the future, remembering that soon it will be the past; and we must respect the past remembering that once it was all that was humanly possible.                                                            (ibid)

 

Friendship is almost always the union of a part of one mind with a part of another; people are friends in spots.                                                                                                                                    (ibid)

 

When the Tao is lost, there is goodness.

When goodness is lost, there is kindness.

When kindness is lost, there is justice.

When justice is lost, there is ritual.

Now ritual is the husk of faith and loyalty,

and the beginning of confusion.                                                   (Tao Te Ching - v 18 – Lao Tzu)

 

Truth is a jewel which should not be painted over; but it may be set to advantage and shown in a good light.                                                                                                         (Santayana)

 

A bore is a person who deprives you of solitude without providing you with company.

                                                                                                                             (Gian Gravina)

 

A form of immortality exists in man in that memory, while it confirms mortality (in recognizing the death of past relatives) also extends our existence via the virtual reality of past events and historical truths – e.g. the memory of father/grandfather can enhance/context/enrich the present moment. The form of immortality issuing from memory is that expression of our own individual mortality by sharing in the species life-line, again via learning/wisdom derived from shared experiences and memories.                                          (Santayana)

 

The truth is cruel, but it can be loved, and it makes free those who have loved it.         (ibid)

 

Cultivate imagination, love it, give it endless forms, but do not let it deceive you.        (ibid)

 

Nature never intended for us to pat ourselves on the back. If she had, our hinges would have been different.                                                                                                                                                                   *

 

Motivation is food for the brain. You mightn't get enough in one sitting, but need continual and regular top ups.                                                                                                                                                               *

 

The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read or write but those who cannot learn, unlearn and relearn.                                                                                                                                              *

 

Christianity persecuted, tortured, and burned. Like a hound it tracked the very scent of heresy. It kindled wars, and nursed furious hatreds and ambitions. It sanctified, quite like Mohammedanism, extermination and tyranny. All this would have been impossible if, like Buddhism, it had looked only to peace and the liberation of souls. It looked beyond; it dreamt of infinite bliss and crowns it should be crowned with before an electrified universe and an applauding God. These were rival baits to those which the world fishes with, and were snapped at, when seen, with no less avidity. Man, far from being freed from his natural passions, was plunged into artificial ones quite as violent and more disappointing. Buddhism had tried to quiet a sick world with anesthetics; Christianity sought to purge it with fire.                                                                                                  (Santayana)

 

                                LOVE

"Love her."

"I told you the feeling isn't there anymore."

"Love her."

"You don't understand. The feeling of love just isn't there."

"Then love her. If the feeling isn't there, that's a good reason to love her."

"How do you love when you don't love?"

"My friend, love is a verb. Love - the feeling - is fruit of love, the verb.

"So love her. Serve her. Sacrifice. Listen to her. Empathize. Appreciate. Affirm her. Are you willing to do that?"

   In the great literature of all progressive societies, love is a verb - not a noun.                 *

 

Some people can be so gracious in person, but so tactless with the aid of distance.             *

 

We shall not cease from exploration

And the end of all our exploring

Will be to arrive where we started

And know the place for the first time.                                                                     (T.S. Eliot)

 

“Between the desire and the spasm” –each of us owes his being to the fact that at some moment a man and a woman leapt the gap.                                                          (Quote by T S Eliot, commentary by Rollo May)

 

Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, who are we to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented and fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be? You playing small doesn't serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so other people won't feel insecure around you..... And as we let our light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others!"                                                                                (Nelson Mandella)

 

Any path is only a path, and there is no affront, to oneself or to others, in dropping it if that is what your heart tells you…Look at every path closely and deliberately. Try it as many times as you think necessary. Then ask yourself…“Does this path have heart?” If it does, the path is good; if it doesn’t, it is of no use.

          (Carlos Castenada)

                               

I always wanted to be somebody. I should have been more specific.          (Lily Tomlin)

 

Having the presence of mind to do nothing is the crucial part of a spiritual crisis.

Doing nothing is tremendous wisdom in the face of madness.

And madness can be felt clearly. We know we are losing it and we go ahead with the insanity.

So doing nothing becomes gigantic in its importance.

Wait for your mud to settle. Wait for calmness and clarity.

Waiting is the hardest thing to do when we are flipping out. The urge to break, fix, smash, strike a blow is a powerful impulse. It feels uncontrollable.

Everything depends on what we believe. So make this your belief: I can control my actions until I am calm again.

It is true.

You can't do it forever. But you can do it for one minute. And then another minute. And then another minute.

If you keep doing it, you've done it for an hour.

Emotional storms come in waves. Each one you survive without acting out strengthens your “wait” muscles.

There is beautiful peace at the end of this path. But don't think about that.

You're not ready for peace. Right now, just make it through the next moment and the next, and the next without doing anything at all.    Just be.

The ultimate answer to everything.

Right here in your own laboratory of the soul.                                   (John MacEnulty - Eman8tions)

 

I have observed the power of the watermelon seed. It has the power of drawing from the ground and through itself 200,000 times its weight. When you can tell me how it takes this material and out of it colours an outside surface beyond the imitation of art, and then forms inside of it a white rind and within that again a red heart, thickly inlaid with black seeds, each one of which in turn is capable of drawing thru itself 200,000 times its weight - - - when you can explain to me the mystery of a watermelon, you can ask me to explain the mystery of God.                                                                                                                          (William Jennings Bryan)

 

The mad thing about love is that one wants to hurry and lose the interim. In this way, one wants to get closer to the end. In this way, love in one of its aspects coincides with death.         (Albert Camus)

 

The primary activity of the psyche is imaging. --- What we are, REALLY, and the reality we live, the psychic reality, is the poetic imagination going on day and night. We really do live in dream time; we really are such stuff as dreams are made of. --- If at the soul’s core we are images, then we must define life as the actualization over time of that originating seed image - and that image, not the time that actualized it, is the primary determinant in your life.                                                                                                               (James Hillman)

 

Your life is the ongoing operation of imagination; you imagine yourself into existence, or, let’s say, an image is continuing to shape itself into the oak tree you consider your reality.                      (ibid)

 

MICHAEL VENTURA’S concept of  THE WATCHER - that sense of a constant companion, who is you yet more than you, and who seems always with you, watching from a slight distance --- always a bit older than you, usually silent, features indistinct - not actually passive but rarely active. Its action is to watch. It’s outside of you (glimpsed in the mirror sometimes). Anyone who travels alone is aware of this companion - the sense of being in the company of oneself, - the presence from which comes the mood of your solitude. It is necessary to befriend one’s Watcher - not make an enemy of it, nor judging ‘conscience’. Then despite one’s own dislike of oneself (for one’s tabooed actions and thoughts) your Watcher will be calm, non-judgmental and a friend to one’s solitude.

Notwithstanding the lack of formal recognition for the ‘Watcher’ entity as a cultural concept, the sense of it is so common that it is taken as a given. During bad times one’s relationship with one’s Watcher is critical. It may be all one has then. The Watcher does not appear to care about society or morality or the idea of good or evil. The Watcher cares about YOU, and if it’s on your side to begin with, it’s all the way on your side. When we do look into our own eyes in the mirror we have the inescapable impression, so powerful and astonishing, that someone is looking back at us---that experience of being looked back at sobers us immediately---someone looks back questioningly, serious, alert and without intent to comfort; and we feel more depth in the eyes looking at us than we ordinarily sense in our own eyes as we stare out at the world. How strange! Who could it be that is looking at us? We conclude that it is another part of us, the half that we don’t allow to pass out of our eyes when we glance at others - and that darker and more serious half looks back at us only at rare times.

 

Ventura queries “In the madness contexting/running sexual relationships, one asks oneself ‘What are the people saying? Do my friends like her, can they talk to her? Does she like them? Does my family like her – or, if I’m trying to break with my family, do they NOT like her? If we’re thinking of children, do I really want something of her father in my son? How do I feel when I walk down the street with her? What are the people saying?’”

Hillman’s response – “There’s a communal aspect to love. Love does not simply exist as a private tryst or trust between two people in a personal relationship; it’s a communal event.” and “The people are thinking/saying ‘Is this good for us all?’ and this is different from ‘Is it good for you?’ They ask ‘Is this good for us? Is this going to bring fruit and benefit to us? Or is this going to bring new disturbances to us?’”

 

Try as we may, we cannot make insights with reason or will. Something imaginative is needed.

                                                                                                                                                (Santayana)

 

Lillith glared at God

“I’ll not go back”

She hissed at him –

“Adam is such a bore.”

 

“That was my plan
You willful wench,

Lie down –

I’ll tell you more.”

 

Long before the goddess became part of the feminist consciousness, the women’s movement celebrated Lillith, whose story is found in biblical Apocrypha. Lillith , the first wife of Adam and the original wild woman, rejected her second-class status symbolized by the “missionary position’, and disappeared into the Void to be replaced by the submissive (but manipulative) Eve. Under patriarchal interpretation, Lillith became a demon, who haunted children and pregnant women, thus inverting the “good mother” role. Lillith became a dark destroyer in Judaism and “Queen of the Witches” in Christian tradition. Recent scholarship relates Lillith to goddess worship, to “wind” or “breath” or “spirit”, connecting her to the African goddess Oya as well as to the “space” aspect of the Eastern goddess Kwan Yin and the Tibetan feminist spirits known as dakinis. Feminist psychological interpretation sees Lillith as the “breath of life”, the symbol of women’s wisdom and power which has become a source of evil under patriarchy: in short a fitting patron saint for the women’s movement.                                                        (Starhawk)

 

Our biography is our biology. Thoughts that carry emotional, mental, psychological or spiritual energy produce biological responses that are then stored in our cellular memory.    (Medical Intuitive Caroline Myss)

 

My Lord God, I have no idea where I am going, I do not see the road ahead of me. I cannot know for certain where it will end. Nor do I really know myself, and the fact that I think I am following Your will does not mean that I am actually doing so. But I believe that the desire to please You does in fact please. And I hope that I have that desire in all that I am doing. I hope that I will never do anything apart from that desire. And I know that if I do this You will lead me by the right road, though I may know nothing about it. Therefore I will trust You always, though I may seem to be lost in the shadow of death. I will not fear, for You are ever with me and You will never leave me to face my perils alone.                                                       (Thomas Merton  -Thoughts in Solitude)

 

--- everything here apparently needs us, this fleeting world, which in some strange way keeps calling to us. Us, the most fleeting of all.                                                                          (Rilke)

 

What is necessary, after all, is only this: solitude, vast inner solitude. To walk inside yourself and meet no one for hours - that is what you must be able to attain.                                      (ibid)

 

For one human being to love another human being: that is perhaps the most difficult task that has been entrusted to us, the ultimate task, the final test and proof, the work for which all other work is merely preparation.                                                                                           (ibid)

 

The phrase “I Love You” parroted between child and parent, without ideas, indignation, anxiety, fantasy, but only as an anesthetic, may have a subtext that means many things, but it definitely does not mean love, for when you love someone you are filled with fantasies, ideas and anxieties.  There would be an avenging sensibility, a sense of real moral right and wrong, of judgment of good or bad weighing over the family. In families lacking love, the members have no fears, no desires, no strong angers or ambitions, no pity and no terror, no images nor language for their expression. They do share one fantasy: denial. It is not ultimately parental control or parental chaos that children run away from: they run from the void of living in a family without any fantasy other than shopping, keeping up the car and routines of NICENESS.                                                           (Santayana)

 

– from “The Diary of Adam and Eve”

Eve – It is my prayer, it is my longing, that we may pass from this life together – a longing which shall never perish from this earth, but shall have a place in the heart of every wife that loves, until the end of time; and it shall be called by my name.

But, if one of us should go first, it is my prayer that it shall be I; for he is strong, I am weak; I am not so necessary to him as he is to me – life without him would not be life; how could I endure it? This prayer is also immortal, and will not cease from being offered up while my race continues. I am the first wife; and in the last wife I will be repeated.

 

Adam (at Eve’s grave) - Wheresoever she was, THERE was Eden.               (Mark Twain)

 

So sorry!! My karma just ran over your dogma.                                                                                 *

 

SETH re ‘FALSE HUMILITY’ False humility tells you that you are nothing. It often hides a distorted, puffed up, denied self-pride, because no man or woman can really accept a theory that denies personal self-worth.

Fake humility can cause you to tear down the value of others, because if you accept no worth in yourself you cannot see it in anyone else either. True self-pride allows you to perceive the integrity of your fellow human beings and permits you to help them use their strengths. Many people make a great show out of helping others, for example, encouraging them to lean upon them. They believe this to be quite a holy, virtuous enterprise. Instead they are keeping other people from recognizing and using their own strengths and abilities.

There is nothing more pompous than false humility. Many people who consider themselves truth seekers and spiritual are filled with it. They often use religious terms such as, "I am nothing, but the spirit of God moves through me, and if I do any good it is because of God's spirit and not my own.”       (Jane Roberts)

 

EGO JUDGMENT  Who's the egotist? The guy dancing with the lampshade on his head? Or the guy sitting in the corner thinking everybody's watching him? There's a strange twist in the way that letting your light shine can actually be an act of humility.

     You have to be willing to look foolish to some people. And you will. Even the wisest, most sensible things are criticized mercilessly. So when you step up to the altar of public display, it takes humility. Playing safe is often ego afraid to take a chance. It takes spiritual courage to ask the question, to give the answer. Ego's judge is ego. The gentle voice of the divine, heard in the still­ness, guides humility.                      *

 

HUMILITY AND ACCEPTANCE are pure spiritual experiences; no room for resentment in even the smallest fractions. Love, acceptance, surrender, and humility intertwine beautifully in a spiritual harmony that is exquisite and complete. Often we mistake control for a bad thing, associating it with attachment and resentment, but control and discipline are neither good nor bad. Control in the hands of the master is exquisite and beautiful. That control is really a way of allowing sacred energy to flow freely in harmony with all things. That control is control of yourself and is surrender to the divine.                                                                *

 

Perspective - use it or lose it. If you turned to this page, you're forgetting that what is going on around you is not reality. Think about that. Remember where you came from, where you're going, and why you created the mess you got yourself into in the first place. You're going to die a horrible death, remember. It's all good training, and you'll enjoy it more if you keep the facts in mind. Take your dying with some seriousness, however. Laughing on the way to your execution is not generally understood by less-advanced life-forms, and they'll call you crazy.                                                                                                                                    (Richard Bach)

 

Argue for your limitations, and sure enough, they're yours.                        (ibid)

 

We lie in the lap of immense intelligence, which makes us receivers of its truth and organs of its activity. When we discern justice, when we discern truth, we do nothing of ourselves, but allow a passage to its beams. If we ask whence this comes, if we seek to pry into the soul that causes, all philosophy is at fault. Its presence or its absence is all we can affirm.                                                                           (Emerson)

 

Change.    The universal nature out of the universal substance, as if it were wax, now molds a horse, and when it has broken this up, it uses the material for a tree, then for a man, then for something else. Nature which governs the whole will soon change all things which you see, and out of their substance will make other things, and again other things - in order that the world may be ever new.

The nature of the Universe loves nothing so much as to change the things that are, and to make new things like them. For everything that exists is in a manner the seed of that which will be.     (Marcus Aurelius)

 

A contented life.     If you work at that which is before you, following right reason seriously, vigorously, calmly, without allowing anything else to distract you, but keeping your divine part pure, as if you might be bound to give it back immediately; if you hold to this, expecting nothing, fearing nothing, but satisfied with your present activity according to nature, you will be happy. And there is no man who is able to prevent this.

                                                                                                        (ibid)

 

Facing death.   You have embarked, you have made the voyage, you have come to the shore: get out. You have existed as a part. You shall disappear in that which produced you; or rather, you shall be received back into its seminal principle by transmutation. Pass then through this little space of time conformably to nature, and end your journey in content, just as an olive falls off when it is ripe, blessing nature who produced it, and thanking the tree on which it grew.

Every part of me will be reduced by change into some part of the universe, and that again will change into another part of the universe, and so on forever. And by consequence of such a change I too exist, and those who begot me, and so on forever in the other direction.                                           (ibid)

 

Why should we be in such desperate haste to succeed, and in such desperate enterprises?   If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer: Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away.                                       (Henry David Thoreau)

 

If you CAN be, then JUST BE. If you can’t, then cheer up and keep going about other people’s business until you drop.

                                                                                                                (e.e. cumings)

 

People who tell the truth need good memories.                                          *

 

A paradox is truth standing on its head to attract attention.                             (Larry Dossey)

 

TO BE A SLAVE OF INTENSITY              (Kabir)

Friend, hope for the Guest while you are alive.

Jump into experience while you are alive!

Think...and think...while you are alive.

What you call "salvation" belongs to the time before death.

If you don't break your ropes while you're alive, do you think ghosts will do it after?

 

The idea that the soul will join with the ecstatic just because the body is rotten –

that is all fantasy.  What is found now is found then.

If you find nothing now, you will simply end up with an apartment in the City of Death.

If you make love with the divine now,

in the next life you will have the face of satisfied desire.

So plunge into the truth, find out who the Teacher is :   Believe in the Great Sound!

Kabir says this: “ When the Guest is being searched for, it is the intensity of the longing for the Guest that does all the work. Look at me, and you will see a slave of that intensity.”

 

My father taught me to work, but not to love it. I never did like work, and I don’t deny it. I’d rather read, tell stories, crack jokes, talk, laugh, anything but work.                                              (Abe Lincoln)

 

You can fool all of the people some of the time, and some of the people all of the time, but you cannot fool all of the people all of the time.                                                                        (Abe Lincoln)

 

I don’t believe for a moment that one life makes another life - - Take our bodies: I believe they are composed of myriads and myriads of infinitesimally small individuals, each in itself a unit of life, and that these units work in squads – or swarms, as I prefer to call them – and that those infinitesimally small units live forever. When we “die”, the swarms of units, like a swarm of bees, betake themselves elsewhere, and go on functioning in some other form or environment.                                                   (Thomas Edison, from his diary)

 

Science without religion is lame. Religion without science is blind.             ( Einstein )

 

“If I knew they were going to do this, I would have become a shoemaker.” (Einstein – after Hiroshima)

 

The most beautiful and most profound emotion we can experience is the sensation of the mystical. It is the sower of all true science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead.                                                                                               (Einstein)

 

The more I penetrated into the mystery of existence, the more and more I felt that the mystery is eternal, unending, infinite. The more I came to know, the less I became certain about my knowledge.        (Einstein, at the end)

 

Know your own true worth, and you shall not perish. Reason is your light and your beacon of Truth. Reason is the source of Life. God has given you Knowledge so that by its light you may not only worship him, but also see yourself in your weakness and strength.                                                   (Gibran)

 

The terror that scares us from self-trust is our consistency; a reverence of our past act or word because the eyes of others have no other data for computing our orbit than our past acts, and we are loathe to disappoint them. - - But why should you keep your head over your shoulder? Why drag about this corpse of your memory - - A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds. With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do. He may as well concern himself with a shadow on the wall. Speak what you think now in hard words and tomorrow speak what tomorrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict everything you said to-day –‘Ah, so you shall be sure to be misunderstood’– Is it so bad then to be misunderstood? Pythagoras was misunderstood, and Socrates, and Jesus, and Luther, and Copernicus, and Galileo, and Newton, and every pure and wise spirit that ever took flesh. To be great is to be misunderstood.    (Emerson “ Self- Reliance”)

 

Food for the mind is like food for the body: the inputs are never the same as the outputs.

                                                                                                (Marshall McLuhan)

 

The new electronic interdependence recreates the world in the image of a global village.

                                                                                                        (ibid)

 

- - “nor do I see how the most marvellous wife (do you recognize yourself?) could do much to alter this. But she could undoubtedly do a very great deal to help a man along the road to excellence. I am very aggressive, very ardent in anything I do: but I need DRIVE. There are a number of ways in which you could help me. But I hope you know that I would never ask nor require it. It is quite obvious, though, that if you were not to help me, but simply expected things to happen by magic, we would fail miserably.” (in Marshall McLuhan’s proposal letter to his future wife Corinne)

 

(With telephone, TV, etc.) It is not so much the message as the sender which is being sent. The message is the medium.                                                                                        (McLuhan )

       

The Law of Undulation : Humans are amphibians - half spirit and half animal. As spirits they belong to the eternal world, but as animals they inhabit time. This means that while their spirit can be directed to an eternal object, their bodies, passions and imaginations are in continual change. Their nearest approach to constancy, therefore, is undulation - the repeated return to a level from which they repeatedly fall back - a series of troughs and peaks. - - to get permanent possession of a soul, God relies on the troughs even more than the peaks. The devil’s cause is never in more danger than when a human - no longer desiring but still intending to do God’s will - looks round upon a universe from which every trace of Him seems to have vanished, and asks why he has been forsaken, and still obeys.                                             (C. S. Lewis – “The Screwtape Letters”)

 

To corrupt a human, keep him always thinking of the past and the future. Never let him live in the present. The past and the future are in time. The present is timeless and eternal.                 (ibid)

 

The SPIRIT is the life, MIND is the builder, and the PHYSICAL is the result.     (Edgar Cayce)

 

Through MIND, thoughts act as the builder. The thinking process is like a spider constantly spinning, constantly adding to its web. Every moment of our lives we are creating the images and patterns that give our future energy and shape.                                                                                                       (ibid)

 

Apparently, I am one of the few who can lay aside their own personalities sufficiently to allow their souls to make this attunement to the universal source of knowledge – but I say this without any desire to brag about it. I am certain all human beings have much greater powers than they are ever conscious of – if they would only be willing to pay the price of detachment from self-interest that it takes to develop the abilities. Would you be willing, even once a year, to put aside – pass out entirely from – your own personality?        (ibid)

 

On the path to Enlightenment:

First       you start balancing yourself in the centre;

Second   you start becoming aware of the Witness, the soul;

Third      you start becoming aware of the presence, some unknown mysterious presence, the Wind of the Gentle

                  [from Lao Tzu]

Fourth    your duality, your fundamental polarity starts disappearing (neither man-woman, yin nor yang); you

                  transcend the duality of the positive / negative;

       

        When you have fulfilled the first two steps, the Master arrives.

        When you have fulfilled the next two higher steps, God arrives; and the

Fifth secret - the secret of secrets - is that now things start happening on their own.

                                                                                                               (‘Osho’ Rajneesh)

 

This ordinary life is ordinary only because you are dull, because you are thick and ‘asleep’. It is ordinary only because you don’t have the perception to see its depth. You can't see the colours of life and the forms of life and the eternal benediction that goes on showering every moment of it. It is a continuum. Because you can’t see the beauty of the stars in the night, and because you can’t see the beauty of human eyes, hence out of this poverty arises the desire for some transcendental experience – experiencing God, heaven, paradise, experiencing the serpent power in your spine. Experiencing these things - or desiring to experience these things - is all mind games. The true religion is always of the here and now.                                                                                             (ibid)

 

To be HERE NOW means to be very alert, aware, conscious, so that this moment is no more burdened with past, no more burdened with future; so this moment is unburdened of all garbage and is clear, pure, innocent. And in this innocence you will find the door into ‘God’. But remember always: you can turn, change the meaning, impose your own ideas on the greatest of teachings and destroy them. ALL depends on you.                 (ibid)

 

It’s not that I’m afraid to die, I just don’t want to be there when it happens.         (Woody Allan)

Be Here Now.                                                                     (Baba Ram Dass - aka Richard Alpert)

There is much to say for the consciousness of the behaviour change agent – to be able to make contact with another human being where he is, without getting stuck where he’s stuck.                (ibid)

One day, Marpa’s eldest son was killed. By himself, alone with his grief, Marpa wept. One of his students approached him and said, “I don’t understand. You teach that all this is illusion, created by clinging, desire and resistance. Yet here you are weeping. If all this is illusion, why do you grieve so deeply?” Marpa replied “ Yes – everything here is an illusion. And the loss of a child is the greatest of all illusions.”                  (ibid)

The philosophy of the common man is an old wife who gives him no pleasure, yet he cannot live without her, and resents any aspersions that strangers may cast on her character.           (Santayana)

Man develops along two lines - the line of knowledge and the line of being, and both lines must develop in balance. People who have not evolved in the line of being do not have the understanding whereby such knowledge as they acquire can be contexted and put to use. Their being is either asleep, or impaired (unable to contextually expand), or immature. A person may have knowledge but no power to do, i.e. to bring his knowledge into use, or for sound results. On the other hand, if being outweighs knowledge a man has the power to do, but does not know it nor, functionally, know how to proceed. (His being is aimless and unsupported by knowledge thus his efforts are useless as in the case of the uneducated shepherd anointed king). A weak yogi is one who knows a great deal but can do nothing, i.e. a man who does not understand what he knows, or who cannot discern between one kind of knowledge and another.  Development of being without knowledge results in a stupid saint, i.e. one who could do a great deal but doesn’t know what to do, nor the cause and effect of actions, thus he will act in accordance with subjective feelings rather than informed understanding. When understanding cannot bridge knowledge and being, both lines will be impaired. The thinking apparatus (one centre) may possess knowledge, but understanding (three centres) only appears when man’s essence (being) also feels and senses what is connected with the knowledge.

                (P.D. Ouspensky - “In Search of The Miraculous” [report of his 7 years understudy of Gurdjieff])

All psychic processes are material. There is not a single process that does not require the expenditure of a certain substance corresponding to it.  If this substance is present, the process goes on. When the substance is exhausted, the process comes to a stop. Bad moods, worry, doubt, fear, irritation, the expectation of something unpleasant  - each of these emotions in reaching a certain intensity can, in half an hour, consume all the substances required for tomorrow's main work, and leave man inwardly arid for a long time.                 (ibid)

The struggle against lying to oneself and others, and the struggle against fears are the first positive works which a man  begins to do.                                                                                        (ibid)

If a man sees his fault but continues to justify himself, a small offense may destroy the result of whole years of work and effort.                                                                         (P.D. Ouspensky on Gurdjieff)

People frequently fear silence, more than anything else. Our tendency to talk arises from self-defense and is based on a reluctance to see something, a reluctance to confess something to oneself, a sense of feeling/fearing the chaos encircling unless one can hear the echo of one's existence.                         (ibid)

 

Four Commandments:

1.    Love one’s parents.   

2.    Remain chaste.

3.    To be outwardly courteous to all without distinction, whether they be rich or poor, friends or enemies, power-possessors or slaves, and to whatever religion they may belong; but inwardly to remain free and never put much trust in anyone or anything.

4.    To love work for work’s sake and not for its gain.                             (Gurdjieff)

 

                   ‘If you are not yet at ease with your father and mother,

                   then go away. I cannot help you.’                            (sign on wall of Gurdjieff’s office)

 

Let God kill him who himself does not know and yet presumes to show others the way to the doors of His kingdom.                                                                                   (Gurdjieff, quoting a Persian saying)

 

Since we tend to see ourselves primarily in the light of our intentions – which are invisible to others – whereas we see others mainly in the light of their actions – which are visible to us, we have a situation in which misunderstanding and injustice are the order of the day.

(John Bennett – Gurdjieff student – “The Crisis in Human Affairs”)

 

A fool’s ignorance eventually harms, however much his heart is one with yours.             (Rumi)

 

Epitaph:

– When we are dead, seek not our tomb in the earth, but find it in the hearts of men.          (ibid)

 

You have a duty to perform. Do anything else, do any number of things, occupy your time fully, and yet, if you do not do this task, all your time will have been wasted.                                                             (ibid)

 

Let the beauty we love be what we do. There are a hundred ways to kneel and kiss the ground.        (ibid)

 

The whole cosmos laughs, for it is wet, not dry, and says;

I am the breeze that nurtures all things green

I encourage blossoms to flourish with ripening fruits

I am the rain coming from the dew

That causes the grasses to laugh

With the joy of life.                                                             (Hildegard of Bingen)

 

An individual’s human existence should be like a river – small at first, narrowly contained within its banks and rushing passionately past boulders and over waterfalls. Gradually, the river grows wider, the banks recede, the waters flow more quietly, and in the end, without visible break, they become merged in the sea and painlessly lose their individual being.                                                                                                (Bertrand Russell)

 

Of all forms of caution, caution in love is perhaps the most fatal to true happiness.     (ibid)

 

Power tends to corrupt; absolute power corrupts absolutely.                            (Lord Acton)

 

NEVER SAY THESE WORDS -‘I do not know this, therefore it is false’.  One MUST study to know; know to understand; understand to judge.                                                                     (Apothegm of Narada)

 

(Physical and intellectual) capital is our precious stock of stored flexibility for performing an orderly social transition to adapt to new conditions, just as a chrysalis uses its stored energy to turn itself into a butterfly.

                                                                  (Gregory Bateson - “Steps to an Ecology of Mind”)

 

 (BUDDHA’ s realization at time of enlightenment)

“Wonder of wonders – all men are Buddhas [enlightened] – they just don’t know it.”

 

Four Noble Truths:

1-   Suffering is an essential part of existence [birth/sickness/old age/death/getting what you don’t want/ attachment to what you do want, and fearing its loss]

2-   The cause of  suffering is craving/ desire for sensory pleasure.

3-   Release from suffering involves elimination of desire.

4-   Elimination of desire is achieved thru following ---

 

The Eight Fold  Path:

1-   Right view = seeing things as they really are i.e 4 Noble Truths+ impermanence

2-   Right thought = right renunciation of former attachment perspectives

3-   Right speech                ( unless 3, 4, and 5 are dealt with, there are a lot

4-   Right action                  of hindrances (conscience/desires ) which preclude

5-   Right livelihood            the mind from settling into 6, 7, 8 )

6-   Right effort

7-   Right mindfulness

8-   Right concentration

 

                    The Eight Fold Path, as sequenced, leads to:

                               9-Right knowledge

                             10-Right release (liberation)                 [Source- Pali scholar Peter Masefield]

 

There is a something that is not born, not produced, not compounded nor created. Were there not, there would be no possible exit for what is born.                                        (Buddha)

 

The Buddha compared the universe to a vast net woven of a countless variety of brilliant jewels, each with a countless number of facets. Each jewel reflects in itself every other jewel in the net and is, in fact, one with every other jewel…Everything is inextricably inter-related; We come to realize that we are responsible for everything we do, say, or think – responsible in fact for ourselves, everyone and everything else, and the entire universe.                                                                                         (Sogyal Rinpoche)

 

(Buddha’s last teaching before his death at age 80)

“I have shown you the way to liberation – now you must take it for yourself.

Do not believe on the strength of the sages of old times; Do not believe that which you yourself imagined, thinking a god has inspired you. Believe nothing which depends only on the authority of your priests. After investigation, only believe that which you have yourselves tested in your personal experience and found reasonable”.

 

There is nothing. There is no God and no Universe. There is only empty space. And in it a lost, and homeless, and wandering, and companionless, and indestructible Thought – and I am that Thought. And God, and the Universe, and time, and life, and death, and joy, and sorrow, and pain only a grotesque and brutal dream – evolved from the frantic imagination and that insane Thought.

(from Mark Twain’s diary, written shortly before his death and after a series of financial and family tragedies– Sourced from Missouri State shrine)

 

To see a World in a Grain of Sand

And a Heaven in a Wild Flower,

Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand

And Eternity in an hour.                                                                (William Blake)

 

Irish Blessing:    May the road rise up to meet you;

                             May the wind be always at your back;

                             May the sun shine warm upon your face;

                             And the rains fall soft upon your field;

                             And until we meet again

                             May God hold you in the palm of His hand.

 

What brings true friends together is a mutual belief in each other’s goodness. Remove respect from friendship, and you have taken away the most splendid ornament it possesses.                 (Cicero) 

 

He who does not know history is destined to remain a child.                     (ibid)

 

Readers may be divided into 4 classes:

1.    Sponges, who absorb all they read and return it nearly in the same state, only a little dirtier.

2.    Sand-glasses, who retain nothing and are content to get thru a book for the sake of getting thru the time.

3.    Strain-bags, who retain merely the dregs of what they read.

4.    Mogul diamonds, equally rare and valuable, who profit by what they read, and enable others to profit by it also.                                                                                       (Samuel Taylor Coleridge)

 

In consulting others, be wary of a tendency or motive to evade responsibility, to give others indiscriminate credence. Lost is the opportunity to arrive at a personal decision, to risk, to strengthen the will, to gain useful experience.                                                                              (Roberto Assagioli)

 

The dreams of ancient and modern man are written in the same language as the myths whose authors lived in the dawn of history. I believe that symbolic language is the one foreign language that each of us must learn. Its understanding brings us in touch with one of the most significant sources of wisdom. Indeed, both dreams and myths are important communications from ourselves to ourselves.    (Erich Fromm-“The Forgotten Language”)

 

Not to teach a man who can be taught, is to waste a man; to teach a man who can’t be taught, is to waste words. The wise man will lose neither men nor words.                         (Confusius)

 

There are four essential qualities of the superior man:

He is humble.

He is deferential to superiors.

He is generously kind.

He is always just.                                                                                     (ibid)

 

Choose a job you love, and you will never have to work a day in your life.       (ibid)

 

In my first dealings with a man, I listen to his avowals and trust his conduct; after that I listen to his avowals and watch his conduct.                                                                                                         (ibid)

 

(The difference between the Sage’s mind and that of others):It has really nothing to do with knowledge, or continuity of intuition, or frequency of intuitions. It’s that the mind has been made over ‘into’ the Peace in an irreversible way. No form that the mind can take can alter the Peace. You could say it’s a kind of knowledge, in this sense – if the mind takes the form of truth, the sage knows it’s the truth. If it doesn’t, then he knows that it’s not. He’s never in doubt about whether the mind has knowledge or not. But whether it does or not, his Peace is not disturbed. As to helping others, sometimes the intuition comes, sometimes it doesn’t; when it doesn’t come, the sage knows he has nothing to do for that person.

The continuity of the frequency of the intuitions has to do with the sage’s mission, not with what makes a sage a sage. You must understand that there is no condition in which the Overself is at your beck and call. But there is a condition in which you are continuously at the Overself’s beck and call. That is the condition to strive for.

The key of access is deep humility. In the inability to do that, then you need to be able to Do Nothing (not the same as not doing anything. Go about normal affairs but refrain from any decision or action on the specific issue about which you’re seeking guidance. Wait – indefinitely – and when the guidance comes there will be no doubt about it – it will be vividly clear and the strength needed to follow it will also be there).        (Paul Brunton)

 

Do not be merciful, but be just, for mercy is bestowed upon the guilty criminal, while justice is all that an innocent man requires.                                                                                                           (Gibran)

 

As long as you are not aware of the continual law of ‘die and be again’, you are merely a vague guest on a dark earth.                                                                                                                             (J.W. von Goethe)

 

The Parable of “CARE”

 

Once when 'Care' was crossing a river, she saw some clay; she thoughtfully took up a piece and began to shape it. While she was meditating on what she had made, Jupiter (Zeus) came by. 'Care' asked him to give it spirit, and this he gladly granted. But when she wanted her name to be bestowed upon it, he forbade this, and demanded that it be given his name instead. While 'Care' and Jupiter were disputing, Earth arose and desired that her own name be conferred on the creature, since she had furnished it with part of her body. They asked Saturn (Time) to be their arbiter, and he made the following decision, which seemed a just one: 'Since you, Jupiter, have given its spirit, you shall receive that spirit at its death; and since you, Earth, have given its body, you shall receive its body. But since ‘Care’ first shaped this creature, she shall possess it as long as it lives. And because there is now a dispute among you as to its name, let it be called "homo," for it is made out of humus (earth).'

 

     [This fascinating parable illustrates the important point brought out by the arbiter Saturn, (Time) that though Man is named Homo after the earth, he is still constituted in his human attitudes by Care. She is given charge of him in the parable during his temporal sojourn in this world. This also shows the realization of the three aspects of time: past, future, and present. Earth gets man in the past, Zeus in the future; but since "Care first shaped this creature, she shall possess it as long as it lives," i.e., in the present. Rollo May observes that Care is a state in which something does matter: Care is the opposite of apathy (the gradual letting go of involvement until one finds that life itself has gone by)---Life comes from physical survival; but the good life comes from what we care about.]

                                                                             (Source: Rollo May (Love and Will)

 

Extensive as the “external” world is, with all its sidereal distances it hardly bears comparison with the dimensions, the depth-dimensions, of our inner being, which does not even need the spaciousness of the universe to be, in itself, almost unlimited. It seems to me more and more as though our ordinary consciousness inhabited the apex of a pyramid whose base in us (and, as it were, beneath us) broadens out to such an extent that the farther we are able to let ourselves down into it, the more completely do we appear to be included in the realities of earthly and, in the widest sense, worldly, existence, which are not dependent on time and space. From my earliest youth I have felt the intuition that at some deeper cross-section of this pyramid of consciousness, mere being could become an event, the inviolable presence and simultaneity of everything that we, on the upper, "normal," apex of self-consciousness, are permitted to experience only as entropy.                                                            (Rilke)

 

Excerpts from LAO TZU’s “TAO TE  CHING”  (Translation by Stephen Mitchell)

Do you want to improve the world? I don't think it can be done.
The world is sacred. It can't be improved.
If you tamper with it, you'll ruin it.
If you treat it like an object, you'll lose it.
There is a time for being ahead, a time for being behind;
a time for being in motion, a time for being at rest;
a time for being vigorous, a time for being exhausted;
a time for being safe, a time for being in danger.
The Master sees things as they are, without trying to control them.
She lets them go their own way, and resides at the center of the circle.         (Verse 29)

The great Tao flows everywhere.
All things are born from it, yet it doesn't create them.
It pours itself into its work, yet it makes no claim.
It nourishes infinite worlds, yet it doesn't hold on to them.
Since it is merged with all things and hidden in their hearts, it can be called humble.
Since all things vanish into it and it alone endures, it can be called great.
It isn't aware of its greatness; thus it is truly great.                                        (Verse 34)

Every being in the universe is an expression of the Tao.
It springs into existence, unconscious, perfect, free,
takes on a physical body, lets circumstances complete it.
That is why every being spontaneously honors the Tao.
The Tao gives birth to all beings, nourishes them, maintains them,
cares for them, comforts them, protects them, takes them back to itself,
creating without possessing, acting without expecting, guiding without interfering.
That is why love of the Tao is in the very nature of things.                             Verse 51)

The best athlete - wants his opponent at his best.
The best general - enters the mind of his enemy.
The best businessman - serves the communal good.
The best leader - follows the will of the people.
All of them embody the virtue of non-competition.
Not that they don't love to compete, but they do it in the spirit of play.
In this they are like children and in harmony with the Tao.                              Verse 68)

When they lose their sense of awe, people turn to religion.
When they no longer trust themselves, they begin to depend upon authority.
Therefore the Master steps back - so that people won't be confused.
He teaches without a teaching, - so that people will have nothing to learn.               (V 72)

If you realize that all things change,  - there is nothing you will try to hold on to.
If you aren't afraid of dying,  - there is nothing you can't achieve.

Trying to control the future is like trying to take the master carpenter's place.
When you handle the master carpenter's tools, chances are that you'll cut your hand. (V 74)

 

Life is not only a universal phenomenon, but also consciousness has a fundamental role in the cosmos. Consciousness actually creates the Universe, forcing reality into being out of a quantum mechanical haze of possibilities. “A little bit of God operates in all of us. We are his observing instruments. He observes the Universe through us.                                                                                                   (Fred Hoyle)

 

I have to believe it’s an intellectual structure we’re looking at, not mere chance.         (ibid)

                                                                               

The ‘Brood of Night’ comprises:

the twin brothers Hypnos (sleep) and Thanatos (death), along with their siblings - Old Age, Envy, Strife, Doom, Lamentation, Destiny, Deceit and Dreams.                                                          (Hesiod)

 

The power of a glance has been so much abused in love stories, that it has come to be disbelieved. Few people dare now to say that two beings have fallen in love because they have looked at each other. Yet it is in this way that love begins, and in this way only. The rest is only the rest, and comes afterwards. Nothing is more real than these great shocks which two souls give each other in exchanging this spark. (Victor Hugo)

 

The Greeks believed that HUBRIS was always followed by NEMESIS, that if you went too far, you would get a knock on the head to remind you that the gods will not tolerate insolence on the part of mortal men.        (Aldous Huxley)

 

The Three Degrees Of Silence

Silence of the mouth, silence of the mind and silence of the will:

v     To refrain from idle talk is hard;

v     To quiet the gibbering of memory and imagination is much harder;

v     Hardest is to still the voices of craving and aversion within the will.                   (ibid)

 

The word ‘prayer’ has 4 distinctions: petition, intercession, contemplation and adoration        (ibid)

 

Being rational and free, human beings are capable of being diabolic. This is a feat which no animal can duplicate, for no animal is sufficiently clever, sufficiently purposeful, sufficiently strong-willed or sufficiently moral to be a devil. (We should note that, to be diabolic on the grand scale, one must, like Milton’s ‘Satan’, exhibit in a high degree all the moral virtues, except charity and wisdom.)                                                                (ibid)

 

Taking my mind at its best, truth and justice would be the idols I should follow; and they would be idols for they would not supply ALL the food that the mind wants, and while worshiping them, reverence and humility and tenderness might very well be forgotten.                                                         (ibid)

 

Confucius was asked “What say you of the remark ‘Repay enmity with kindness’?”

And he replied “ How then would you repay kindness? Repay kindness with kindness and enmity with justice.”

 

A gentleman does not brag about his numerous plunges into the steno pool.               (Richard Needham)

 

‘Iatrogenesis’ – i.e. physician origin illness (physical/ emotional/ cultural). Most of man’s ailments consist of illnesses that are acute and benign – either self-limiting or subject to control thru a few dozen routine interventions. For a wide range of conditions, those that are treated least, probably make the best progress. “For the sick”, Hippocrates said, “ the least is best.” More often than not, the best a learned and conscientious physician can do is to convince his patient that he can live with his impairment, reassure him of an eventual recovery or of the availability of morphine at the time that he will need it, do for him what his grandmother could have done, and otherwise defer to nature.                                                                                                                 (Ivan Illich)

 

Medical practitioners are part-time magicians, and in accordance with tradition the doctor manipulates the setting and the stage to achieve ‘white magic’ via placebo (as opposed to nocebo effect, wherein the patient, not believing, is not healed by legitimate medicine).   [Placebo, i.e. ‘belief’ based healing, is in the 50-70% range.]   (ibid)

 

The modern fear of unhygienic death has broken personal self-confidence in a unique way – by fostering the belief that man today has lost the autonomy to recognize when his time has come and to take his death into his own hands. The doctor’s refusal to recognize the point at which he has ceased to be useful as a healer and to withdraw when death shows on the patient’s face has made him into an agent of evasion or outright dissimulation. The patient’s unwillingness to die on his own makes him pathetically dependent. He now has lost his faith in his ability to die, the terminal shape that health can take, and has made the right to be professionally killed into a major issue.

                                (ibid)

 

If you are lucky enough to have lived in Paris as a young man, then wherever you go for the rest of your life; it stays with you, for Paris is a moveable feast.                                                 (Ernest Hemingway)

 

The Three Dimensions of Consciousness:

TIME:          The measure of our understanding of manifested ideas.

SPACE:        The measure of understanding of the relationships between manifested ideas.

PATIENCE:   The measure of understanding the purpose of manifested ideas (and our responsibility for them)                                                                                        (Everett Irion)

 

As we create and express our concepts, we give life to our desired images. We form each concept, justify it (to ourselves) and give it a part of our life – by having expressed it. It is us! It looks like us, it has our life, it is OURS!

Over and over we repeat the process of presenting our creations to others. Then these images have our life. They, in toto, are incarnate in us. The real self has retreated to the alchemical furnace room where we watch the responses of others as our creations are tested in the fires of fight or flight by the lion of courage.

The point is that OUR IMAGES living in us are being tested, and NOT US; for THEY are the ones living our lives. Thus we become idealistic, worshiping false images of the real us, but which we think IS us. The real us lives in a secret place while we defend, even to death, the right to life of our creatures – our images. The real entity’s self, or the soul, remains hidden as long as we can justify our life thru our ‘children’.           (Everett Irion)

 

The Bardo Thödol (Tibetan book of the Dead) is, first of all, a book for the living; to prepare them, not only for the dangers of death, but to give them an opportunity to make use of the great possibilities which offer themselves in the moment of relinquishing the body – either for a better rebirth or for final liberation. In Buddhist philosophy; birth and death are not phenomena that happen only once in human life, but something that happens uninterruptedly within us. At every moment something within us dies and something is reborn. The different bardos are the different states of consciousness (e.g. the normal consciousness of a being born into our human world); the state of dream-consciousness; in profound meditation; the state of experiencing death; the state of experiencing Reality; and the state of rebirth-consciousness.                                                            (Lama Govinda)

 

In Archibald MacLeish’s recasting of the “Job” story, Job and his wife cease looking outward for justice, for fairness in the world, but rather choose to go on living  (and creating) life. Job’s wife says (pointing to their inward capacities for love as being their necessary path) –

“The candles in the churches are out,

The stars have gone out in the sky,

Blow on the coals of the heart

And we’ll SEE by and by……”                 (Rabbi Harold Kushner)

 

The illusory sense of certainty about the completeness and coherence of our lives leads us to ‘a premature closing of our accounts with reality’.                                                            (William James)

 

The greatest thing in all education is to make the nervous system our ally instead of our enemy.              (ibid)

 

A man’s SELF is the sum total of all that he can call his, not only his body, and his psychic powers, but his clothes and his house, his wife and his children, his ancestors and his friends, his reputation and his works, his land and horse and yacht and bank account. The sudden loss of one’s possessions results in a shrinkage of our personality, a partial conversion of ourselves to nothingness.                                                 (ibid)

 

The James – Lange theory of emotions proposes that we are afraid because we run, rather than that we run because we are afraid. The experiencing of an emotion is our awareness of the inner chemical and muscular changes in the body produced by our action, such as running away.                                       (ibid)

 

To love well demands of us discipline, patience and persistence.    (Roberto Assagioli)

 

It is impossible for the mirror of the soul to reflect in the imagination anything which does not stand before it. It is impossible for the calm lake to show in its depth the figure of any mountain or the picture of any tree or cloud that does not exist close by the lake. It is impossible for the light to throw upon the earth a shadow of an object that has no being. Nothing can be seen, heard, or otherwise sensed unless it has actual being.        (Gibran)

 

In evolution, the more freedom in self-organization, the more order.     (Erich Jantsch)

Theory of Dissipative  Structures

 A given dynamic regime absorbs fluctuations so as to maintain its stability as long as possible, beyond which threshold it may be driven into transition into a new regime wherein its capacity for entropy production (life) is renewed.  The fluctuations continually ‘test’ the stability of the structure until metastasis. Maximum entropy production occurs at the point of new structure formation (no expense is spared for the creative buildup of a new structure); when established, the system goes for security and economizes energy; therefore entropy is low, towards equilibrium.                                                                                  (Erich Jantsch)

 

In phylogeny (species lines), as contrasted with cosmic evolution, it is not matter which is transferred but information for the organization of matter. Thus the cumulative experience of many generations is handed on.

                             (ibid)

 

The existence of a human metabolic memory was confirmed by Wilhelm Reich who showed that traumatic experiences are not only recorded in the human psyche, but also in the form of muscle contractions (muscle memory/armor). To deal with this reality today are techniques of deep massage, e.g. Rolfing (based on breaking up of fascia around muscles and structured patterning/realignment of muscle groups) is a kind of induced self-release of tensions in the body.                                            (ibid)

 

Today there is a wide measure of agreement as to a non-mechanical reality; the universe begins to look more like a great thought than like a great machine. Mind no longer appears as an accidental intruder into the realm of matter; we are beginning to suspect that we ought to hail it as the creator and governor of the realm of matter.

        (Sir James Jeans)

 

An honest heart is the first blessing, a knowing head is the second.        (Thomas Jefferson)

 

Honesty is the first chapter in the book of wisdom.                                     (ibid)

 

Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty.                                                          (ibid)

 

Traveling makes men wiser, but less happy. When men of sober age travel, they gather knowledge which they may apply usefully for their country, but they are subject ever after to recollections mixed with regret, their affections are weakened by being extended over more objects, and they learn new habits which cannot be gratified when they return home. Young men who travel are exposed to all these inconveniences in a higher degree.                                                                                                                (ibid)

 

When you tell your trouble to your neighbor you present him with a part of your heart. If he possesses a great soul, he thanks you; if he possesses a small one, he belittles you.                         (Gibran)

 

Many souls to whom visions have never come are incomparably more advanced in the way of perfection than others to whom many have been given.                                                        (St. John of the Cross)

 

There is a dark night through which the soul passes in order to attain the Divine light.           (ibid

 

When a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully

                                                                                      (Samuel Johnson)

 

The stirring of conflict is a Luciferian virtue in the true sense of the word. Conflict engenders fire, the fire of affects and emotions, and like every other fire it has two aspects, that of combustion and that of creating light. On the one hand, emotion is the alchemical fire whose warmth brings everything into existence and whose heat burns all superfluities to ashes. But on the other hand, emotion is the moment when steel hits flint, and a spark is struck forth, for emotion is the chief source of consciousness. There is no change from darkness to light or from inertia to movement without emotion.                                                                                          (Carl Jung)

 

The psyche is not of today; its ancestry goes back many millions of years. Individual consciousness is only the flower and fruit of a season.                                                                             (ibid)

 

When one principle reaches the height of its power, the counter-principle is stirring within it like a germ.                                                                                                                     (ibid)

 

The dread and resistance which every natural human being experiences when it comes to delving too deeply into himself is, at bottom, the fear of the journey to Hades.                           (ibid)

 

 

If we could see ourselves and other objects as they really are, we should see ourselves in a world of spiritual natures, our community with which neither began at our birth nor will end with the death of the body.

                                      (Emmanuel Kant)

 

Human consciousness arises from pure consciousness and is indistinguishable from it – the Void – universe. The life of the individual is linked to the Formless Self. Man’s life is like a wave of the ocean, apparently separate from it, but having arisen from the sea will return to it to become the sea, then to emerge again as a new life in the next rebirth.

                                                                                                        (Philip Kapleau)

 

Beauty is truth, truth is beauty, - that is all

Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.                             (Keats)

 

If we are strong, our strength will speak for itself. If we are weak, words will be no help.

                                                                                                        (John F. Kennedy)

 

When I open my eyes to the outer world, I feel myself as a drop in the sea; but when I close my eyes and look within, I see the whole universe as a bubble raised in the ocean of my heart.

                                                                                   (Inayat Khan)

 

“Leveling” is that process by which the individual loses himself in the vast emptiness of the collectivist public mind; identifying this abstraction with objective reality (or ‘truth’), he abdicates his own experience and intuition, renounces personal conscience, and is lost.                                                                (Søren Kierkegaard)

 

“Write,” said that voice, and the prophet answered: “For whom?” The voice said: “For the dead, for those you have loved in antiquity.” “Will they read me?” – “Yes, for they will come back as posterity.”              (ibid)

 

The brain is only an apparatus, like a television set, to translate the incredible energy waves of Life coming from the broadcasting station of the Cosmic Mind into moving images and sounds. Without the waves, the instrument would show no animation, think no thoughts and emit no sounds. At the same time, without the instrument the waves – though active all around – would not be perceptible to any of our 5 senses, nor would they manifest themselves in any way cognizable by our mind. When a body is struck down by death, the animating spark of Life continues to live on in its pristine glory and form. Only the broken apparatus now no longer shows the signs of animation.                                                                              (Gopi Krishna)

 

What we call religion is merely organized belief, with its dogmas, rituals, mysteries and superstitions. Each religion has its own sacred book, its mediator, its priests and its ways of threatening and holding people. Most of us have been conditioned to all this, which is considered religious education: but this conditioning sets man against man, it creates antagonism, not only among the believers, but also against those of other beliefs. Though all religions assert that they worship God and say that they love one another, they instill fear thru their doctrines of reward and punishment, and thru their competitive dogmas they perpetuate suspicion and antagonism.

                                                (Jiddu Krishnamurti)

 

Ignorance is lack of knowledge of the ways of the self, and this ignorance cannot be dissipated by superficial activities and reforms; it can be dissipated only by one’s constant awareness of the movements and responses of the self in all relationships.                                                                                   (ibid)

 

Because he is devoted solely to the freedom and integration of the individual, the right kind of educator is deeply and truly religious. He does not belong to any sect, to any organized religion; he is free of beliefs and rituals, for he knows that they are only illusions, fancies, superstitions projected by the desires of those who create them. He knows that reality or God comes into being only when there is self-knowledge and therefore freedom.      (ibid)

 

Since, as a matter of fact, birth and death actually occur, and our brief career is surrounded by vacancy, it is far better to live in the light of the tragic fact, rather than to forget or deny it, and build everything on a fundamental lie.                                                                                    (Santayana)

 

We live in the midst of socially shared hallucinations - - our COLLECTIVE MADNESS is what we call sanity.

                                                                                      (R.D. Laing)

 

A great revivalist stage–craftsmen like Billy Graham can count on ‘converting’ about the same percentage (10%) at a performance as a first class hypnotist.                  (R.D. Laing)

 

The GAIA Hypothesis: The Earth has remained a comfortable place for living organisms for the whole 3.5 billion years since life began, despite a 25% increase in output of heat from the sun. The atmosphere is an unstable mixture of reactive gases, yet its composition remains constant and breathable for long periods and for whoever happens to be the inhabitants….living organisms have always, and actively, kept their planet fit for life. In contrast, conventional wisdom saw life as adapting to the otherwise inescapable physical and chemical changes of its environment…The Gaia theory sees the evolution of the species of living organisms so closely coupled with the evolution of their physical and chemical environment that together they constitute a simple and indivisible evolutionary process.

                                                                                (James Lovelock)

 

It is important to remember that few things feel as stressful as struggling with someone you love. We have to remember that long-term relationships are a journey and that the destination is a place called “good enough”. That doesn’t mean settling for something less than passionate. It means understanding and accepting that the intoxication that couples feel early on is a neuro-chemical, psychological thing that doesn’t last. People who thrive renegotiate and update their contracts: I chose you  then and I still choose you now.            *

 

To have and to hold from this day forward, for better, for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness, and in health, to love and to cherish, till death do us part.                             (Book of Common Prayer)

 

Faith in God and faith in religion is supposed to have a purpose in life. Any faith for the sake of faith alone is just a draw on the energy of the people.                                                  (Maharishi)

 

The absolute, impersonal, transcendental Being vibrates and comes into the relative phases of existence as the thought, the thinker and the prana.                                         (ibid)

 

The universe is one unbounded ocean of consciousness in motion. This unbounded ocean, or unified field, is the basic reality of creation. This field interacts with itself, and sets itself in waves of motion, waves of vibration or sound within its infinite structure.                                                               (ibid)

 

Lying is a privilege of poets because they have not reached the level on which truth and error are discernible. Veracity and significance are not ideals for a primitive mind; we learn to value them as we learn to live, when we discover that the spirit cannot be wholly free and solipsistic. To have to distinguish fact from fancy is so great a violence to the inner man that not only poets, but theologians and philosophers still protest against such a distinction.                                                                                               (Santayana)

 

To say that one is apart from the primal source is a pretension; to add that one divested of the ego becomes pure yet retains individuality only to enjoy or serve the Supreme is a deceitful stratagem. What duplicity is this – just to appropriate what is really His, and then pretend to experience and serve Him! Isn’t this all known to Him?                                                                                                (Sri Ramama Maharshi)

 

[In explaining the relative value of sangsaric knowledge vrs. wisdom] – There may come a time when one shall have to forget all that has been learnt. Rubbish that is swept together and heaped up is to be thrown away. No need is there to make any analysis of it.                                                                (ibid)

 

There are no two things such as a good mind and an evil mind. It is one and the same mind. Tendencies cause desires and attractions which may be at times good and at other times bad. The mind when influenced by good tendencies is, for the time being, considered good and, when under the influence of bad or evil tendencies, bad. However bad some may be at times, they ought not to be disliked, nor should we conceive prejudice in favor of those that seem for the time being friendly and beneficent to us. Shun both likes and dislikes.       (ibid)

 

 The HEIRARCHY OF HUMAN NEEDS:   (in ascending order)

1.    Safety      (to-day’s food, clothing, shelter secured)

2.    Security    (future physical requirements under control)

3.    To be esteemed by oneself, and by others

4.    To love … and to be loved

5.    Self-actualization      (living ones highest potential)

6.    Need to ‘KNOW’        (vs. fear of knowing)

7.    Realization of universal harmony, balance and order … AND participation therein.

                                                                                        (Abraham Maslow)

 

At one level or another of consciousness, everyone perceives inter-personal discrepancies in I.Q. The tendency is for the less intelligent to fall into the habit of waiting for the more intelligent to give solutions, working less hard because of a feeling that their contribution is relatively useless and senseless.              (ibid)

 

Very intelligent parents frequently have to absent themselves from overly influencing their children’s lives, in order not to overwhelm them or make them feel inferior, helpless, passive and hopeless about ever rivaling their parents. Self-actualizing people pretty often have had rather unfortunate effects upon their children. If a strong person knows the answer all the time and tries to trick the group into thinking they have discovered it all by themselves, then most often it will not work and only breed resentments. At the same time one has a duty to be honest with the other, and it is considered unloving to let another go on making the same mistake forever just because one doesn’t have love enough and courage enough to take a chance on possibly hurting the other and having the other strike back.                                                                                           (Abraham Maslow)

 

In the “I-Thou” encounter, as one is forced to deal with real guilt and real depression – meaning deserved guilt or depression – and as we realize that part of the function of a helper is to help another realize his guilt and depression (i.e. to bring it into consciousness), the implication is clear that one is going to have to be less ‘tolerant’ and more judgmental. As to ‘tolerance’, if nobody is sure about what is right or wrong, then who could ‘judge’? However there are many things that self-actualizing people are ‘intolerant’ about: phoniness, lying, hypocrisy, disloyalty, swindling, cruelty, etc.                                                                 (ibid)

 

It is believed by all people down thru history that acquiring knowledge gives one a daimonic weapon over other people; - - - but how much self-knowledge can a human being bear?                  (Rollo May)

 

No one of us would actualize himself at all if he did not, sooner or later, become an individual, did not assert his own identity against his mother and father.                                                                   (ibid)

Their marriage is a good one. In our eyes what makes a marriage good? Well, that the tether fray but not break, and that they stay together. One should be watching while the other dies.         (Howard Nemeroy)

 

There is no such thing as coincidence – it’s just God’s way of remaining anonymous.                              *

 

People say to me of mutual acquaintances, “Why do you suppose she said that?” I reply, “Look! I can barely understand my own motives; don’t ask me to analyze those of others.”                (Richard Needham)

 

If he would respect the mysteries and the silences and the complexities within her, and if she would respect the mysteries and the silences and the complexities within him, it is possible that between themselves they might build a simple, open and honest relationship.                                                                       (ibid)

 

When you’ve seen the things a woman will do for love, and the things a man will do for money and the things a politician will do for votes, your education is almost complete.                                 (ibid)

 

Where there is love, no disguise can conceal it for long; similarly no pretence can long impersonate a love that does not exist.                                                                                                         (ibid)

 

It is from understanding that power comes; and the power in the ceremony was in understanding what it meant; for nothing can live well except in a manner that is suited to the way the Sacred Power of the World lives and moves to do its work.                                           (“Black Elk Speaks” by John Neihardt)

 

The growing power is rooted in mystery like the night, and reaches lightward. Seeds sprout in the darkness of the ground before they know the summer and the day. In the night of the womb, the spirit quickens into flesh.                                                                                                               (ibid)

 

Behind the woman’s power of life is hidden the power of man. - - - The woman is the life of the flowering tree, but the man must feed and care for it. - - - The power of man encircles and protects the power of woman.                                                                                                                    (ibid)

Everything the Power of the World does is done in a circle. Even the seasons form a great circle in their changing, and always come back again to where they were. The life of a man is a circle from childhood to childhood – so it is with everything where power moves.                                                    (ibid)

 

Before you try to cast out your devil, be sure he is not the best thing within you.

                                                                                                                   (Nietzsche)

That which does not destroy me, makes me strong.                         (ibid)

Psychologists should reconsider before stating the instinct of self-preservation as the cardinal instinct of an organic being. A living thing seeks above all to DISCHARGE its strength – life itself is WILL TO POWER; self-preservation is only one of the indirect and most frequent RESULTS thereof.            (ibid)

Live so that thou mayest desire to live again! The question which thou will have to answer before every deed that thou doest: “ Is this such a deed as I am prepared to perform an incalculable number of times? ” is the best ballast. Let us stamp the impress of eternity upon our lives! This thought contains more than all the religions which taught us to contemn this life as a thing ephemeral, which made us squint upwards to another and indefinite existence. We must not strive after distant and unknown states of bliss and blessings and acts of grace, but must live so that we must fain live again and live for ever so, to all eternity! Our duty is present with us every instant - we must implant the love of life, the love of every man’s life in every conceivable way! This life is the eternal life! … This doctrine of eternal recurrence is lenient towards those who do not believe in it. It speaks of no hells and contains no threats. He who does not believe in it has but a fleeting life in his consciousness.                                                                                                                       (ibid)

 

You find your genius by looking in the mirror of your life. Your visible image shows your inner truth, so when you’re estimating others, what you see is what you get. It therefore becomes critically important to see generously, or you will only get what you see; to see sharply, so that you can discern the mix of traits rather than a generalized lump; and to see deeply into dark shadows, or else you will be deceived.                   *

 

If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent Him.                         (Voltaire)

 

There always comes a moment when people give up struggling and tearing each other apart, willing at least to like each other for what they are. It’s the kingdom of Heaven.              (Albert Camus)

 

For everything there is a season and a time for every matter under heaven:

A time to be born                  and a time to die

A time to plant                       and a time to pluck up what is planted

A time to kill                           and a time to heal

A time to break down          and a time to build up

A time to weep                      and a time to laugh

A time to mourn                    and a time to dance

A time to cast away stones and a time to gather stones together

A time to embrace                and a time to refrain from embracing

A time to seek                       and a time to lose

A time to keep                       and a time to cast away

A time to rend                       and a time to sew

A time to keep silence          and a time to speak

A time to love                        and a time to hate

A time for war                       and a time for peace.                              (Eccles. 3)

 

Man is only a reed, the weakest thing in nature; BUT he is a thinking reed.        (Pascal)

 

We make an idol of truth itself; for truth apart from charity is not God, but only his image and idol, which we must neither love nor worship.                                                                    (ibid)

 

The Moving Finger writes; and having writ,

Moves on; nor all your piety nor wit

Shall lure it back to cancel half a line,

Nor all your tears wash out a word of it.                          (Omar Khayyam – “The Rubaiyat”)

 

Yesterday this day’s madness did prepare;

Tomorrow’s silence, triumph, or despair:

Drink! For you know not whence you came, nor why:

Drink! For you know not why you go, nor where.                                        (ibid)

 

I have one aim only – to impart a fraction of the meaning of the word “NOW”. To me, nothing exists except the now.     Now = experience = awareness = reality.

The past is no more and the future is not yet.                                         (F. Perls)

 

Even evil is useful in certain ways, and can produce many beautiful things; for instance, it leads to useful inventions, it forces men to prudence, and prevents them from falling asleep in an indolent security. Without evils in the universe, the universe would be imperfect.                                          (Plotinus)

 

A mind is simply a composite stream of thoughts, feelings, perceptions and sensations, held together by a sense of identity. This composite stream we call a mind or a person and project inherent existence onto it.

                                                                                                        (Jeremy Hayward)

 

There’s a way to think about problems so they won’t be that way. [The narrative examples were mosquitoes, bees, snakes, allergies, etc.] If you know how to maintain your good feelings, these attitudes make vibrations, and they have a smell to ‘em. That’s what keeps mosquitoes away – you make a smell they don’t care for. You can control your whole situation by the smell – the vibrations you make. It’s under your whole control – from inside.                                                                           (Rolling Thunder - Shoshonee  shaman)

 

The human body is divided into two halves – ‘plus’ and ‘minus’. Every whole thing is made of two opposite halves. Every energy body consists of two poles, positive and negative. We can control this energy just like we learn to control our physical bodies; and by controlling this energy we produce forces which we can also learn to control. These two hands are connected to the two poles – one side ‘plus’ and the other ‘minus’. All the things that are true about electricity are at work everywhere. Even electricity is a kind of spiritual force. And like all principles and techniques, they can be used for good and bad ends.                 (ibid)

 

Every being has an identity and a purpose. To live up to his purpose every being has the power of self-control, and that’s where spiritual power begins.                                                                 (ibid)

 

When life seems, itself, lunatic – who knows where madness lies? To surrender dreams …. this may be madness. Too much sanity may be madness and, madness of all, to see life as it is and not as it should be.

                                                                                        (Cervantes – ‘Don Quixote’)

 

The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.

                                                                                                                   (Marcel Proust)

 

Facts: You can divide facts into three types: divine, natural, and man-made. The first belong to theology, the second to philosophy, and the others to actual history. All three are open to question.  (Diderot)

 

Life is what’s happening when we’re busy making other plans.                (John Lennon)

 

We may perhaps entangle our friends in their own words, and force them - for the moment - to say what they do not mean, and what it is not in their natures to think; but the bent bow will spring back, perhaps somewhat sharply, and we shall get little thanks for our labour. There would be more profit in taking one another frankly by the arm and walking together along the outskirts of real knowledge, pointing to the material facts which we all can see, nature, the monuments, the texts, the actual ways and institutions of men; and in the presence of such a stimulus, with the contagion of a common interest, the plastic mind would respond of itself to the situation, and we should be helping one another to understand whatever lies within the range of our fancy, be it in antiquity or in the human heart.

                                                                                        (Santayana)

 

Love consists in this, that two solitudes protect and touch and greet each other.              (Rilke)

 

DESIDERATA *

 

Go placidly amid the noise and haste, and remember what peace there may be in silence. As far as possible, without surrender, be on good terms with all persons.  Speak your truth quietly and clearly: and listen to others – even the dull and ignorant; they too have their story.

 

Avoid loud and aggressive persons – they are vexations to the spirit. If you compare yourself with others, you may become vain and bitter; for always there will be greater and lesser persons than yourself. Enjoy your achievements as well as your plans.

 

Keep interested in your own career, however humble; it is a real possession in the changing fortunes of time. Exercise caution in your business affairs, for the world is full of trickery. But let this not blind you to what virtue there is; many persons strive for high ideals; and everywhere life is full of heroism.

 

Be yourself. Especially do not feign affection. Neither be cynical about love; for in the face of all aridity and disenchantment it is as perennial as the grass.

 

Take kindly the counsel of the years, gracefully surrendering the things of youth. Nurture strength of spirit to shield you in sudden misfortune. But do not distress yourself with imaginings. Many fears are born of fatigue and loneliness. Beyond a wholesome discipline, be gentle with yourself.

 

You are a child of the universe, no less than the trees and the stars; you have a right to be here. And whether or not it is clear to you, no doubt the universe is unfolding as it should.

 

Therefore be at peace with God, whatever you conceive Him to be; and whatever your labours and aspirations, in the noisy confusion of life, keep peace with your soul.     With all its sham, drudgery and broken dreams, it is still a beautiful world. Be careful. Strive to be happy.          *

 

Comparing the efficiency of PLACEBO and analgesics  (Morphine/ Aspirin/ Darvon/ Codeine/ Zomax) , placebo is 56% effective.                                                                           (Ernest Lawrence Rossi)

 

The ultradian theory of hypnotherapeutic healing proposes that the source of psychosomatic reactions is in stress-induced distortions of the normal periodicity of ultradian cycles which is 90 minutes  “work”, followed by a 5 – 20 minute “break” for assimilation.                                                       (ibid)

 

Erickson characterized the traditional programming of mind and behaviour as a very uninformed way of attempting to do hypnotherapy. For cure, re-association and reorganization of ideas, memories and understandings are essential. It is the reorganization of one’s own experiential life that eventuates in a cure, not the manifestation of induced responsive behaviour, which can, at best, satisfy only the observer.  (ibid)

 

Memory does not operate like a tape recorder in which we simply play back exactly what we learned. Memory is always a constructive process whereby we actually synthesize a new subjective experience every time we recall a past event.                                                                                                    (ibid)

 

Psycho-immunological research documents how even the simple process of writing about personal traumatic experiences is associated with improvements in physical health.                 (ibid)

 

Essentially the way of the shaman is to use former illness to sensitize oneself to the hidden ills and ways of healing the societies in collision around oneself.                                        (ibid)

 

Most classical forms of psychotherapy, from the rituals of native healers and shaman to encounter groups and 12 step programs, usually involve 2 steps:

1.    An initial stage of sympathetic system arousal with elevated heart rate, respiration, sweating, tears, shouting  [e.g. Subud] that is typical of the emotional catharsis stage that can last from a few minutes to hours, but usually requires about 20 to 30 minutes; and

2.    A relaxation phase then follows with feelings of comfort and thankfulness about new insights received and the emotional blocks worked thru.                                    (ibid)

 

Knowledge is not comparable with intelligence; knowledge is not wisdom. Wisdom is not marketable, it is not a merchandise that can be bought with the price of learning or discipline. Wisdom cannot be found in books; it cannot be accumulated, memorized or stored up. Wisdom comes with the abnegation of the self. To have an open mind is more important than learning; and we can have an open mind, not with cramming it full of information, but by being aware of our own thoughts and feelings, by carefully observing ourselves and the influences about us, by listening to others, by watching the rich and the poor, the powerful and the lowly. Wisdom does not come thru fear and oppression, but thru the observation and understanding of everyday incidents in human relationship.                                                                       (Jiddu Krishnamurti)

 

As greatly as they may differ in theory and practice, all schools of modern psychiatry agree that the question of truth lies at the core of madness. We go crazy when we lie to ourselves, refusing to face painful realities, hiding from our shameful fantasies.                                                                          (Theodore Roszak)

 

Where materialism settled for simple interactions among disparate units, we now perceive a depth of organization and self-regulation, systems that were potentially there at the beginning of time and that reach so deeply into nature that we may yet discover them functioning among the seemingly most chaotic phenomena.              (ibid)

 

Conceive of nature as a machine – any machine, even a “thinking” machine, and you assume one relationship to the world. Conceive of it as a sentient mentality, and you take another stance. To see the world as a realm of interrelated ideas places us in a condition of dialogue; it connects In-here with Out-there as a continuum. It places us on ‘speaking terms’ with the universe.                                                                                (ibid)

 

Hydrogen is a light, odorless gas, which, given enough time, turns into people.                   (ibid)

 

At a certain point of urgency, the search for self-knowledge is neither a public performance nor a literary exercise; it is the hunger of the soul wanting to be acknowledged as a unique event in the universe.             (ibid)

 

The “environment” that matters most is not a social construction; it is given by nature at large. Until civilized society begins to manhandle it, that environment cannot help but be “perfect”, since it is all there is: the evolutionary record left behind by time and matter, a magnificence beyond words, the stuff of high art and worship.  All we can seek to achieve is a perfect response to that environment, one that allows us to grow, move, act within it gracefully. (ibid)

 

The collective unconscious, at its deepest levels, shelters the compacted ecological intelligence of our species, the source from which culture finally unfolds as the self-conscious reflection of nature’s own steadily emergent mind-likeness. The survival of life and of our species would not have been possible without such a self-adjusting, system-building wisdom. It was there to guide that development by trial and error, selection and extinction, as it was there in the instant of the Big Bang to congeal the first flash of radiation into the rudiments of durable matter. It is this id with which the ego must unite if we are to become a sane species capable of greater evolutionary adventures. (ibid)

 

There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.

                                                                                      (Wm. Shakespeare)

 

There is a tide in the affairs of men which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune;

omitted, all the voyage of their life is bound in shallows and in miseries.

On such a full sea are we now afloat.                                                                               (ibid)

                                                         

There is nothing good or bad, but thinking makes it so.                                                 (ibid)

 

All too little attention is paid to the study of ideas that form the very instruments by which thought and observation proceed… We think with, or thru, ideas – and what we call thinking is generally the application of pre-existing ideas to a given situation or set of facts…The way in which we experience and interpret the world obviously depends very much indeed on the kind of ideas that fill our minds. If they are mainly small, weak, superficial and incoherent, life will appear insipid, uninteresting, petty and chaotic. It is difficult to bear the resultant feeling of emptiness, and the vacuum of our minds may only too easily be filled by some big, fantastic notion – political or otherwise – which suddenly seems to illumine everything and give meaning and purpose to our existence  (This is one of the great dangers of our time).

In seeking education, people are really looking for ideas that would make the world, and their own lives, intelligible to them.         [The “lattice” of education/ concepts thru which we observe our world.]

(E.F. Schumacher)

 

The ‘guide’ for a human being’s progress – 3 steps

1.    Learn from society and “tradition” and find one’s temporary happiness in receiving directions from outside.

2.    Interiorize the knowledge one has gained – sift it, sort it out, - keeping the good and jettisoning the bad – a process called individuation, becoming self-directed.

3.    Then, and with the best help one can find, “die to oneself”, to one’s likes and dislikes, to all one’s egocentric preoccupations. To the extent that one succeeds in this, one ceases to be directed from outside, and also ceases to be self-directed. One has gained freedom, or is then God-directed.

What is good is what helps me and others along on this journey of liberation.           (ibid)

The ethics of reverence for life makes no distinction between higher and lower, more precious and less precious lives. It has good reason for this omission….How can we know what importance other living organisms have in themselves and in terms of the universe? To the truly ethical man, all life is sacred, including forms of life that from the human point of view may seem to be lower than ours.                                        (Albert Schweitzer)

 

The witch doctor succeeds for the same reason all the rest of us (doctors) succeed. Each patient carries his own doctor inside him. The patient comes to us not knowing this truth. We are at our best when we give the doctor who resides within each patient a chance to go to work.                                                 (ibid)

 

The organized political, social and religious associations of our time are at work to induce the individual man not to arrive at his convictions by his own thinking , but to make his own such convictions as they keep ready-made for him. Any man who thinks for himself and at the same time is spiritually free, is to them something inconvenient and even uncanny.                                                                                                    (ibid)

 

Most affairs are less trouble than they’re worth.                                        (Richard Needham)

 

The reincarnational structure is a psychological one. The reality, the validity, the immediacy of these lives does exist simultaneously with your present life. The distance between one life and another exists psychologically and not in terms of years and centuries. The psychological distance can be vaster, as there are certain lives (as there are certain events in this life) that you may not want to face or deal with.          (Seth)

 

To thine own self be true, and it must follow as night the day, thou canst not then be false to any man.

                                                                        (Wm. Shakespeare)

 

When a man follows the way of the world, or the way of the flesh, or the way of tradition – when he believes in religious rites and the letter of the scriptures, as though they were intrinsically sacred - knowledge of REALITY cannot arise in him.                                                                                       (Shankara)

 

Life does not cease to be funny when people die anymore than it ceases to be serious when people laugh.

                                                                (George Bernard Shaw)

 

Hypothesis of Formative Causation – The hypothetical properties of the fields of morphic resonance at all complexity levels:

1.    They are self-organizing wholes.

2.    They have both a spatial and a temporal aspect, and organize spatio-temporal patterns of vibratory or rhythmic activity.

3.    They attract the systems under their influence towards characteristic forms and patterns of activity, whose coming into being they organize and whose integrity they maintain. The ends or goals towards which morphic fields attract the systems under their influence are called ATTRACTORS.

4.    They interrelate and co-ordinate the morphic units or ‘holons’, that lie within them, which in turn are wholes organized by morphic fields. Morphic fields contain other morphic fields within themselves in a nested heirarchy or holarchy.

5.    They are structures of probability, and their organizing activity is probabilistic.

6.    They contain a built-in memory given by self-resonance with a morphic unit’s own past and by morphic resonance with all previous similar systems. This memory is cumulative – the more often particular patterns of activity are repeated, the more habitual they tend to become.                                              (Rupert Sheldrake)

 

As caretakers, parents cannot also be mentors. The roles and duties differ. It is enough for a parent to keep a roof over your head and food on the table, and to get you up and off to school. Providing a cave of security, a place for regressions is no small job. Freed of these tasks, the mentor has only one: to recognize the invisible load you carry and to have a fantasy about it that corresponds with the image in the heart. One of the most painful errors we make is to expect from a parent a mentor’s vision and blessing and strict teaching, or expecting from a mentor shelter and concern for our human life.                             (Santayana)

 

Le Shan, in his survey of 500 cancer patients, found that ‘loners’ who had over-invested in another and lost, characteristically ‘bottled up’ their despair. They were unable to let other people know when they felt hurt, angry, hostile. Others frequently viewed the cancer patients as unusually wonderful people, saying of them: “He’s such a good, sweet man.” “She’s a saint.” The benign quality, the ‘goodness’ of these people was in fact a sign of their failure to believe in themselves sufficiently, and of their lack of hope….and there they stayed, waiting for death to release them. Within 6 months to 8 years, the terminal cancer appeared. Le Shan reported that 76% of his survey group shared this basic emotional life history.

                                                                                      (Carl and Stephanie (Matthews) Simonton)

 

When too much energy is tied up defending the ego and the patient’s way of seeing life, the body will not have the necessary vital energy to fight the cancer.                                              (ibid)

 

To make peace with another person’s behaviour, requires you to take a close look at your own. If you can forgive yourself, you can forgive others. If you cannot forgive others, it is usually because you cannot extend forgiveness to yourself.                                                                              (ibid)

 

The West’s reflection of the concept of universal causation as including man’s moral and spiritual life (the equivalent of Karma) is reflected in - -

“Sow a thought and reap an act;

sow an act and reap a habit;

sow a habit and reap a character;

sow a character and reap a destiny.”                                                (Huston Smith)

 

One who takes no thought of the future will soon have to rue the present. Man would do little for God if the devil were dead.                                                                                                       (Kirpal Singh)

 

Everyone these days tries to put the blame or fault for his ills on the ‘times’ and this complaint is the greatest complaint of all times. The present time as well as the time to come is no more ours than the time past. This world is a huge magnetic field and the more we strive to get out of it, the more we are caught and entangled in its meshes. Man dances in the net and thinks that nobody sees him. The wise feel the net but do not know where to sit easy. Thus, silently and ceaselessly, revolves the huge fly-wheel of the Karmic mill, the giant Wheel of Life slowly but surely pounding to pieces all alike. This mill of Nature grinds all, slowly but surely.   (ibid)

 

Consciousness/mind is like a personal membrane through which the outer universal mystery (environment) interflows with the inner universal mystery (self). This suggests the need to know and enrich both universes for optimal inter-penetration.                                                                          (Paolo Soleri)

 

Life (the flesh) is the bridge transmuting matter into spirit – and as a bridge, in life we are an unbreakable mix of both.                                                                                                    (ibid)

 

There is a principle which is proof against all information, which is proof against all arguments, which cannot fail to keep a man in everlasting ignorance; that principle is contempt, prior to investigation.

                                                          (Herbert Spencer)

 

Anyone who seeks for the true causes of miracles, and strives to understand natural phenomena as an intelligent being, and not to gaze at them like a fool, is set down and denounced as an impious heretic by those whom the masses adore as the interpreters of nature and the gods. Such ‘interpreters’ know that – with the removal of ignorance - the wonder which forms their only available means for proving and preserving their authority would vanish also.                                                                                       (Baruch Spinoza)

 

If you don't know the kind of person I am,

and I don't know the kind of person you are -

a pattern that others made may prevail in the world,

and following the wrong god home we may miss our star.

 

For there is many a small betrayal in the mind,

a shrug that lets the fragile sequence break -

sending with shouts the horrible errors of childhood

storming out to play through the broken dyke.

 

And as elephants parade holding each elephant's tail,

But - if one wanders - the circus won't find the park,

I call it cruel and maybe the root of all cruelty

to know what occurs but not recognise the fact.

 

And so I appeal to a voice, to something shadowy,

a remote important region in all who talk:

though we could fool each other, we should consider -

lest the parade of our mutual life get lost in the dark.

 

For it is important that awake people be awake,

or a breaking line may discourage them back to sleep;

The signals we give - yes, no, or maybe -

Should be clear: the darkness around us is deep.                     (William Stafford)

 

Our normal everyday consciousness always has objects, or images, or even our own feelings or thoughts perceived introspectively.        Suppose then, that we obliterate all objects physical or mental.  WHEN THE SELF IS NOT ENGAGED IN APPREHENDING OBJECTS IT BECOMES AWARE OF ITSELF. The self emerges….One may also say that the mystic gets rid of the empirical ego whereupon the pure ego, normally hidden, emerges into the light.  THE EMPIRICAL EGO IS THE STREAM OF CONSCIOUSNESS. THE PURE EGO IS THE UNITY WHICH HOLDS THE MANIFOLD OF THE STREAM TOGETHER.                                                                           (Prof. W.T. Stace)

 

What a man knows at fifty that he did not know at twenty is, for the most part, incommunicable. All the observations about life which can be communicated handily are as well known to a man at twenty who has been attentive as to a man at fifty. He has been told them all, he has read them all, but he has not lived them all. What he knows at fifty that he did not know at twenty is not the knowledge of formulas or forms of words, but of people, places, actions – a knowledge not gained by words but by touch, sight, sound, victories, failures, sleeplessness, devotion, love – the human experiences and emotions of this earth and oneself and other people; and perhaps too a little faith and reverence for things you cannot see.          (Adlai Stevenson)

 

The self is made up of reflected appraisals.                                            (Harry Stack Sullivan)

 

Apathy is a curious state. It is a way used to survive defeat without material damage, although if it endures too long one is damaged by the passage of time. Apathy seems to be a miracle of protection by which a personality in utter fiasco rests until it can do something else.                                                          (ibid)

 

Normal Grieving: The first day after the loss, since intimacies interpenetrate so much of life, it is almost impossible not to be reminded of the loss by any little thing – even the position of the saltcellar on the table, for instance. But each time this happens, the power of that particular association to evoke the illusion of the absent one is lessened….Thus, immediately after a loss, the position of the saltcellar may be reminiscent to you of dear John, because it was always placed halfway between you and John. But the next time you see the saltcellar, you might become a little bored; its power to evoke dear John is diminished by the very fact that you have clarified the associational link with him. And so it goes: by erasing one tie after another, and releasing the personality to move on into life and seek satisfactions by co-operation or collaboration with other people, grief protects us from making a retreat….The experience is, of course, an extremely painful one, but the pain diminishes day by day; fewer and fewer things have the power to evoke this erasing process, which I insist grief is.          (ibid)

 

Morbid Grief: Like all other dynamisms of living, grief can be distorted into a horrible caricature of its functions by certain complex operations. It becomes dangerous and destructive to the extent that the erasing function is abandoned and grief becomes an adequate mode of life….Under those circumstances, the self, of course, is not engaged in erasing processes, for the self-system is solely concerned with maintenance of security. That is, IF THE LOSS THROWS ONE TERRIBLY OPEN TO ANXIETY AND TO THE LOSS OF ONE’S SELF-RESPECT AND PRESTIGE IN THE COMMUNITY, THE ERASING ACTION OF THE SELF WILL NOT APPEAR. Instead, these associational links will become a preoccupation in many ways analogous to any other substitutive process….We find that, instead of progressively losing its power to evoke tragic recollections, the saltcellar is now surrounded by a very elegant doily, or is in some other fashion enhanced and made a symbol, extravagantly fortified in its power to evoke the lost one.     (ibid)

 

In quantum physics, there is neither space, nor time, until  consciousness has chosen to collapse an event

(Amit Goswami-Prof Physics-University of Oregon 32 yrs - now Sr. Resident Researcher, Institute of Noetic Sciences)

 

The picture of the universe that develops is that it is a self-aware creative universe and that we are its co-creators. We are responsible for our environment and for the world, because we literally are the world.        (ibid)

 

The Cartesian legacy of dualistic thinking about consciousness must give way to a monistic thinking in order to understand how consciousness can collapse the quantum waves into actuality. Monistic thinking about consciousness -- the philosophy of monistic idealism -- is the legacy of the transformative experiences of the world’s great spiritual teachers. In monistic thinking, consciousness is all there is, it is the ground of all being, the only ultimate reality. All possibilities are within it. When it chooses, it simply recognizes one of these possibilities, and no mediation by a third substance, no dualistic energy exchange is involved. In this philosophy, there is only one chooser - consciousness is one. You and I have individual thoughts, feelings, dreams, etc., but we don’t have consciousness, let alone separate ones; we are consciousness. And it is the same consciousness for all of us.

Now the crucial question. If our consciousness is one, and in it we are choosing the material world from possibilities moment to moment, why aren’t we aware of our oneness and our power? The answer is that quantum measurement in our brain-minds gives us self- reference -- our ability to distinguish between us (subjects) and the objects we experience -- but there is a price for experience. Experiences condition our self-referential system -- our brain-minds. The influence of conditioning on quantum measurements, is what gives the appearance that our actions arise from an ego/I acting on the basis of past experience, its character. But it is an assumed identity that the free-wheeling consciousness dons in the interest of manifestation. It is this ego-identity that prevents us from recognizing our unitive consciousness and its powers.

However, some experiences do help us penetrate this cloud of conditioning. When we are creative, when we experience ESP, when we love, in those moments we rise above the conditioning and we act in the full identity with the One. And the spiritual teachers of the world bear witness to the fact that everyone of us can undertake the spiritual journey to pierce through the cloud of conditioning, to re-cognize our unity with the One.        (ibid)

 

Physicist David Bohm wrote that thoughts have a quantum-like nature. If you concentrate on a thought you lose track of where thought is going. And if your attention is on where thought is going, you lose track of individual thoughts. This is Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle in action. The brain has a quantum nature.  Observe your own thoughts, and see for yourself.                                                                                                (ibid)

 

Consciousness is as fundamental as matter—in some ways, more fundamental.

Kant argued that space and time are characteristics not of the noumenon, the underlying reality, but of the mind. Quantum theory reveals that the same is true of matter. Matter is not to be found in the underlying reality; atoms turn out to be 99.99999999% empty space, and sub-atomic "particles" dissolve into fuzzy waves. Matter and substance seem, like space and time, to be characteristics of the phenomenon of experience. They are the way in which the mind makes sense of the no-thing-ness of the noumenon.

When we speak of "the material world", we think we are referring to the underlying reality, the object of our perception. In fact we are only describing our image of reality. The materiality we observe, the solidness we feel, the whole of the "real world" that we know, are, like color, sound, smell, and all the other qualities we experience, qualities manifesting in the mind. This is the startling conclusion we are forced to acknowledge; the "stuff" of our world—the world we know and appear to live within—is not matter, but mind.

The old super-paradigm assumed that space, time and matter constituted the basic framework of reality, and consciousness somehow arose from this reality. The truth, it now appears, is the very opposite. As far as the reality we experience is concerned—and this, remember is the only reality we ever know—consciousness is primary. Time, space and matter are secondary; they are aspects of the image of reality manifesting in the mind. They exist within consciousness; not the other way around.

Consciousness is the essence of everything—everything in the known universe. It is the medium from which every aspect of our experience manifests. Every form and quality we ever experience in the world is an appearance within consciousness.                         (Peter Russell - physicist/psychologist/author)

 

For my part, I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. I travel for travel’s sake. The great affair is to move.

                                                                                                (Robert Lewis Stevenson)

 

If this is death, it is easier than life.                                             [RLS’s last words]

 

The 6 cardinal virtues of the  ‘Zen-man’ are:

charity,  precepts,  humility,  energy,  meditation and wisdom.                 (Daisetz Suzuki)

 

The totality of Cosmic consciousness, or divine will, is, when in action, described as directed wisdom – plus love.                                                                                                                            (ibid)

 

One kind of unconscious is called the Cosmic, or Collective Unconscious. It is intimately related to each of us, and when we can draw from it, we are relieved of every form of tension and are thoroughly at rest and peace with ourselves and with the world. The Tao (the unconscious path in our consciousness) is one’s everyday mind.                                                                                                                             (ibid)

 

Remember that Zen always aspires to make us see directly into Reality itself, that is to

BE Reality itself, so that we can say  “Christ is born every moment in my soul” and

“God’s ‘Isness’ is my Isness”.                                             (Daisetz Suzuki - One day prior to his death)

 

I do dimly perceive that whilst everything around me is ever changing, ever dying, there is underlying all that change a living power that is changeless, that holds all together, and that creates, dissolves, and re-creates. That informing spirit or power is God.                                                                       (Gandhi)

Our universe is constantly created and sustained by two wave-like flows, one from heaven and one coming from our own soul or spirit.                                                      (Emanuel Swedenborg)

 

If a man perceived or felt the activity of divine providence he would not act in freedom according to reason, nor would anything appear to be his own doing. It would be the same if he foreknew events. He would thus have no selfhood and nothing could be imputed to him. In a word, he would not be a human being – he would have no liberty to act according to reason. If he knew the effect of the eventuality of divine prediction, his reason would become inactive, and with it, his love.                                                 (ibid)

 

As a knowledge of future events takes away the “human” aspect,  which is to act from freedom in accordance with reason,  a knowledge of the future is granted to no one. Nevertheless, everyone is permitted to form conclusions about the future from reason. In this, the reason with all that pertains to it,  is in its proper life. This is why a man is not permitted to know what his lot will be after life, or to know about any event until he is in it.                                                                                                             (ibid)

 

When one knows Thee, then alien there is none, then no door is shut. Oh, grant my prayer that I may never lose touch of the One in the play of the many.                                       (Rabindraneth Tagore)

 

Considered together, Bohm’s and Pribram’s theories provide a profound new way of looking at the world: Our brains mathematically construct objective reality by interpreting frequencies that are ultimately projections from another dimension, a deeper order of existence that is beyond both time and space: The brain is a hologram enfolded in a holographic universe.                                    (Michael Talbot)

 

LOVE has always been carefully eliminated from realist and positivist concepts of the world; but sooner or later we shall have to acknowledge that it is the fundamental impulse of life, or, if you prefer, the one natural medium in which the rising course of evolution can proceed. With love omitted, there is truly nothing ahead of us except the forbidding prospect of standardization and enslavement – the doom of ants and termites. It is through love and within love that we must look for the deepening of our deepest self, in the life-giving coming together of humankind. Love is the free and imaginative outpouring of the spirit over all unexplored paths. It links those who love in bonds that unite but do not confound, causing them to discover in their mutual contact an exaltation capable, incomparably more than any arrogance of solitude, of arousing in the heart of their being all that they possess of uniqueness and of creative power.                                                                       (Pierre Teilhard de Chardin)

 

Someday, after we have mastered the winds, the waves, the tides and gravity, we shall harness for God the energies of love. Then, for the second time in the history of the world, man will have discovered fire.              (ibid)

 

There are times, you see, when you have to be blind and deaf to what is going on within you and will soon be lost in action, in a passionate and blind abandonment to life’s currents.                                            (ibid)

 

TEN COMMANDMENTS

1.    I am the Lord your God; You shall have no other Gods before me.

2.    You shall not make for yourself a graven image, or any likeness of anything in heaven, earth or water – you shall not bow down to them or serve them; for I am a jealous God.

3.    You shall not take the name of the Lord your God in vain.

4.    Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy.

5.    Honour your father and your mother, that your days may be long in the land which the Lord your God gives you.

6.    You shall not kill.

7.    You shall not commit adultery.

8.    You shall not steal.

9.    You shall not bear false witness against your neighbour.

10.    You shall not covet - - anything that is your neighbour’s.        (Exodus 20)

 

     TWO GREAT COMMANDMENTS

Jesus said unto them “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind; And you shall love your neighbour as yourself. On these two commandments depend all the law and the prophets.                                                                                             (Matthew 22:37/40)

 

Joy is not the absence of suffering, but the presence of God.         (Mother Teresa)

 

If you judge people, you have no time to love them.                                  (ibid)

 

(In speaking of her ministrations to the lepers she finds in the streets of Calcutta, as) – “caring for my beloved Christ in his more distressing disguises.”                                                 (ibid)

 

I have called you by your name. You are mine. Water will not drown you. Fire will not burn you. I will give up nations for you. You are precious to me. I love you.                        [Her vision at the time of her “call”]

 

There is no beginning, there is no end            There is only change.

There is no teacher, there is no student         There is only remembering.

There is no good, there is no evil                  There is only expression.

There is no union, there is no sharing            There is only one.

There is no joy, there is no sadness               There is only love.

There is no greater, there is no lesser            There is only balance.

There is no stasis, there is no entropy           There is only motion.

There is no wakefulness, there is no sleep      There is only being.

There is no limit, there is no chance              There is only a plan.            (Robert Monroe)

 

I have lived some 30 years on this planet, and I have yet to hear the first syllable of valuable or even earnest advice from my seniors.                                                          (Henry David Thoreau)

 

The cost of a thing is the amount of what I will call life which is required to be exchanged for it immediately or in the long run.                                                                                          (ibid)

 

As long as possible live free and uncommitted. It makes but little difference whether you are committed to a farm or the county jail.                                                                        (ibid)

 

However intense my experience, I am conscious of the presence and criticism of a part of me, which, as it were, is not a part of me, but spectator, sharing no experience, but taking note of it; and that is no more I than it is you. When the play, it may be the tragedy, of life is over, the spectator goes his way. It was a kind of fiction, a work of imagination only, so far as he was concerned.                        (ibid)

 

Love virtue, and the people will be virtuous. The virtues of a superior man are like the wind; the virtues of a common man are like the grass; the grass, when the wind passes over it, bends.                   (ibid)

 

I found in myself, and still find, an instinct toward a higher, or, as it is named, spiritual life, as do most men, and another toward a primitive rank and savage one, and I reverence them both.                   (ibid)

 

If you’re not sure what just happened, don’t be the only one smiling.                        (Red Green)

 

Know Thyself:     In order to be able to help others, one must first learn to help oneself. Only a conscious egoist can help others. Nothing is possible as long as a person remains a slave both inwardly or outwardly. Liberation from inner slavery, i.e. ignorance, involves self-knowledge and understanding of one’s own self, how he works/functions. Without this self-understanding he will always be the plaything of the forces acting upon him.

Understanding of self comes via self-observation - a process of analysis, followed by recording in one’s mind what has been observed, and determining to which center (sensory, intellectual, emotional, instinctive, sexual) the observed phenomenon belongs. This type of self-study is prerequisite to informed change or willed effectiveness and can point to such problems as one's inappropriate center handling matters (emotional center acting in lieu of intellectual center; mechanical reading where the moving center “reads” without the intellectual center being engaged - hence no memory of the material; relying on a “gut” feeling in decision making, vrs informed, critical analysis). One's own habits and operational modes have to be recognized and analyzed, to determine control points ..[am I in control of my habit, or does my habit control me? Am I in control of my emotions and memories or do they control me? Am I apathetic as to outcomes or too lazy to inform myself?]

                                                (P.D. Ouspensky on Gurdjieff)

Prayer is when I talk to God; meditation is when God talks to me.                                     *

 

I abstain from the people who consider insolence - bravery; and tenderness - cowardice. And I abstain from those who consider chatter - wisdom; and silence – ignorance.                                       (Gibran)

 

O nobly born, the time has now come for thee to seek the Path – Thy breathing is about to cease. In the past thy teacher hath set thee face to face with the Clear Light; and now thou are about to experience it in its Reality in the BARDO state. In this bardo state all things are like the cloudless sky, and the naked, immaculate Intellect is like unto a translucent void without circumference or center. At this moment know thyself and abide in that state. I too, at this time, am setting thee face to face.

(First discourse – “Tibetan Book of The Dead” – Translated by T.W. Evans-Woods)

 

At every moment something within us dies and something is reborn. The different bardos, therefore, represent different states of consciousness of our life:

- the state of waking consciousness (the normal consciousness of a being born into our human world);

- the state of dream-consciousness;

- the state of experiencing death;

- the state of experiencing Reality;

- the state of rebirth consciousness.                 (Introductory explanation - ibid)

 

The courage to be is a function of vitality. Diminishing vitality consequently entails diminishing courage. Neurotic individuals and neurotic periods are lacking in vitality. Their biological substance has disintegrated. The periods of a diminished courage-to-be are periods of biological weakness in the individual and in history. - - - The fact that life tries to transform anxiety into specified fears that can be faced, analyzed, attacked, endured and overcome shows that anxiety is biologically useless and cannot be explained in terms of life protection.                (Paul Tillich)

 

The Stoic attitude, even if appearing in a collectivist form, is the only serious alternative to Christianity.  (ibid)

 

If one says that vitality resists despair, one must add that vitality in man is proportional to intentionality. (ibid)

 

In human love there is never such a thing as victory; only a few minor tactical successes before the final defeat of death or indifference.                                                                                                    (Albert Camus)

 

When one has the luck to live in the universe of the intelligence, what a folly to long for the terrible world of violence and passion.                                                                                                                          (ibid)

 

Without work all life goes rotten. But when work is soulless, the life stifles and dies.          (ibid)

 

Can we really learn from other people’s experience? It’s doubtful. Everybody has to find everything out for himself; and in the end, not the beginning, he or she does. But it’s the end, not the beginning; and there’s little to be done with the knowledge thus obtained; as Santayana said, we become wise too late and to no purpose.

        (Richard Needham)

 

At one time no one even considered penetrating to the ‘inside’ of the atom. But then it was tried and people found enormous spaces and energies there. Similarly, we can discover a kind of space in some intimate connection with each thought, sensation and conceptual category constituting our lived world. The availability of such psychological ‘space’ discoveries is entirely a matter of the particular ‘focal settings’ or perspectives we use. If we employ new ‘focal settings’ and see the way they work, we can come to an overall understanding – a ‘spatial’ knowledge.

                                        (Tarthang Tulka)

 

Mind, like space, has no foundation. It is not a palpable or solid thing, and it does not do anything. Rather, the mind is a sign of a specific focal setting being taken on the All. The capacity of the All is never exhausted or compromised by a commitment to one particular focal setting. It lets anything appear and supports infinitely many choices of perspective.                                                                                                        (ibid)

 

Along with this understanding of ‘space’, ‘time’ is the other inseparable partner of the primordial marriage and love affair. Any ‘time’ is essentially non-oppressive but rather is actually enabling, not restraining, if appreciated and used with the right perspective (knowledge). Time lifts knowing into a totally new type of ‘space’ experience and thru its alchemy transforms us and others, mind and body, world and worlds. By opening ourselves up to ‘time’, it can act and speak more freely through us. Our speech and gestures become totally irrepressible and spontaneous, welling up from time, the dynamic centre of our being.                                                                     (ibid )

 

No tragedy can compare with the situation of having our human intelligence – our discerning capacity – channelled, locked away, shut down. This capacity is our greatest treasure, and our one chance for fulfilment. - - - Although there may be nothing wrong with beliefs and concepts in themselves, if they constitute the only way we know of being, they become a trap. They proliferate and interlock until no alternative to them is even visible. They amount to massive solicitations of our attention, keeping our ‘focal settings’ tuned in very constrictively. The hypnotic demands made on our attention by ordinary social customs, entertainments, and other well-intended, harmless enjoyments keep us ‘tuned-in’ in a constant and limiting way, and are actually both physically and psychically destructive in a very pervasive sense.

 Our space, however can become more or less open, with each single thought. Notice how some thoughts, books and images make you feel refreshed and light, whereas others drain you. With more ‘knowingness’ we can make these subtle judgements, heal and nurture ourselves. Mindfulness must be maintained, as a sustained lapse of attentiveness results in disharmony and progressive collapse.

Through such ‘knowingness’ which is in all psychological energies, we can perform a kind of natural alchemy and transform emotions and trends which are ordinarily troublesome. Such a ‘transformation’ need effect no changes, but is simply a matter of being ‘in’ the energies we ‘are’.                                                        (ibid)

 

The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. What is called resignation is confirmed desperation.

                                                                   (Henry David Thoreau)

 

When we strengthen our egocentricity thru spiritual techniques, it is spiritual materialism.

                                                                             (Chogyam Trungpa)

                                                                  

Ego functions thru the Three Lords of Materialism:

Lord of Form      - the neurotic pursuit of comfort, security and pleasure.

Lord of Speech  - use of intellect (ideologies, systems) to relate to our world.

Lord of Mind       - use of spiritual and psychological disciplines as a means of maintaining our self-

consciousness/sense of self.                                              (ibid)

 

It is essential to relate spiritual impulses to your own self – your own experience. Let the first impulses dampen down, else the spiritual path becomes dangerous, becomes purely external entertainment, rather than an organic personal experience.                                                                                                (ibid)

 

One must transmute the watcher, or ego, into discriminating knowledge, which itself is another energy, that of precision, clarity, seeing through situations. [The birth of an intuitive insight which sees things as they really are.]                                                                                                                                              (ibid)

 

True compassion is ruthless, from ego’s point of view, because it does not consider ego’s drive to maintain itself. It is ‘crazy wisdom’, in that it does not relate to ego’s literal and simpleminded attempts to secure its own comfort. The fundamental characteristic of true compassion is pure and fearless openness without territorial limitations. There is no need to be loving and kind to one’s neighbours, no need to speak pleasantly to people or put on a pretty smile.                                                                                                                (ibid)

 

Emotional transmutation does not mean that the energy quality of the emotions is eliminated; in fact, it is transformed into wisdom.                                                                                                 (ibid)

 

Trust and compassion for oneself bring inspiration to dance with life and communicate with the energies of the world. Self-contained meditation and self-enlightenment is a form of aggression if we continually check the change of our mystical state – checking and indulging in our achievement – rather than opening compassion outwards.                                                                                                                                      (ibid)

Thou art speaking to me directly; my heart is filled with Thee, all at once, entirely and without effort! I feel Thee in me; Thou are speaking to me: “Courage my son, courage, for I love thee and I want thee; fear no more, hesitate no longer, cast off the last hawsers, launch forth into the sea, and turn not back even for a glance.”

(Unknown Italian officer, World War 1, killed in battle: discovered in his pocket)

 

The disruption which people feel at the entrance of a child into their lives is that they’re feeling the pull and influence of its own momentum, its own destiny, which may in the long run have very little to do with theirs. The fantasy of a child’s blank slate, of innocence, is an attempt to ignore, minimise and/or control that momentum.                                                                                                                   (Michael Ventura)

Every man is the builder of a temple, called his body, to the god he worships, after a style purely his own - - - we are all sculptors and painters, and our material is our own flesh and blood and bones. Any nobleness begins at once to refine a man’s features, any meanness or sensuality to imbrute them.               (Henry David Thoreau)

I left the woods [Walden] for as good a reason as I went there. Perhaps it seemed to me that I had several more lives to live, and could not spend any more time on this one.                                  (ibid)

Religion is what a man does with solitariness.                                    (Alfred North Whitehead)

It is the business of the future to be dangerous…The major advances in civilization are processes that all but wreck the societies within which they occur.                                         (ibid)

 

And whether I come to my own today or in ten thousand or in ten million years,

I can cheerfully take it now, or with equal cheerfulness I can wait…

And, as for you – Life – I reckon you are the leavings of many deaths,

No doubt I have died myself ten thousand times before.                           (Walt Whitman)

 

There is, in sanest hours, a consciousness, a thought that arises, independent, lifted out from all else, calm, like the stars, shining eternal. This is the thought of identity – yours for you, whoever you are, as mine for me…creeds and conventions fall away and become of no account before this simple idea.                    (ibid)

 

I should say, indeed, that only in the perfect uncontamination and solitariness of individuality may the spirituality of religion positively come forth at all. Only here and on such terms, the meditation, the devout ecstasy, the soaring flight. Only here communion with the mysteries, the eternal problems, WHENCE, WHITHER? Alone ask identity, and the mood – and the soul – emerges, and all statements, churches and sermons melt away like vapours. Alone, and silent thought, and awe, and aspiration – and then the interior consciousness, like a hitherto unseen inscription, in magic ink, beams out its wondrous lines to the sense. Bibles may convey and priests expound, but it is exclusively for the noiseless operation of one's isolated SELF to enter the pure ether of veneration, reach the divine levels, and commune with the unutterable.                                                                            (ibid)

 

If all men react on “an eye for an eye” basis, eventually all mankind will be blind.          (Gandhi)

 

What I am concerned with is my readiness to obey the call of Truth, my God, from moment to moment, no matter how inconsistent it may appear. My commitment is to the Truth, not to consistency.      (ibid)

 

Strength of numbers is the delight of the timid. The Valiant in spirit glory in fighting alone.        (ibid)

 

The gifts which derive from justice are greater than those that spring from charity.              (Gibran)

 

The process by which we living beings resist the general stream of corruption and decay (entropy) – both physically and psychologically – is known as homeostasis. It is the pattern maintained by this homeostasis which is the touchstone of our personal identity. Our tissues change as we live: the food we eat and the air we breathe become flesh of our flesh and bone of our bone, and the momentary elements of our flesh and bone pass out of our body every day with our excreta. We are but whirlpools in a river of ever-flowing water. We are not stuff that abides, but patterns that perpetuate themselves.                                    (Norbert Wiener)

 

The simple co-existence of two items of information is of relatively small value, unless these two items can be combined effectively in some mind or organ which is able to fertilize one by means of the other.     (ibid)

The Atman Project – According to the Perennial Philosophy, one’s real self or Buddha nature (Atman) is NOT everlasting and death–defying; rather it is TIMELESS and transcendent. (Liberation means a direct apprehension of the spaceless and timeless Ground of Being.) The rediscovery of this infinite and eternal Wholeness is man’s single greatest need and want. Not only is Atman the basic nature of all souls, each person knows or intuits that this is so. For every individual constantly intuits that his prior Nature is infinite and eternal, All and Whole – he is possessed, that is, with a true Atman intuition. But, at the same time, he is terrified of real transcendence, because transcendence entails the “death” of his isolated and separate-self sense; grasping only his ego, he denies the rest of the All, his Atman. Man then attempts to regain Atman consciousness in ways that prevent it, via substitute symbols (sex, food, power, fame, knowledge, money) – his personal “Atman Project”. The “project” is both a substitute (compensation) for Atman, and a drive to recapture it. Culture is a main human realm of objective compensatory activity                                                                                             (Ken Wilber)

Hermeneutics is the science of interpretation  (meaning )  of mental productions: a trans-emperical discipline. The legitimate way to GROUND mental truths is via the ‘community of like-minded interpreters’.  (ibid)

Hermeneutics is the art and science of interpretation of context-bound data                        (ibid)

In wise love, each divines the high secret self of the other, and, refusing to believe in the mere daily self, creates a mirror where the lover or the beloved sees an image to copy in daily life.          (William Butler Yeats)

 

The divine purpose of creation, so far as man’s reason can grasp it, is expounded in the Vedas. The RISHIS taught that each human being has been created by God as a soul that will uniquely manifest some special attribute of the Infinite before resuming its Absolute Identity. All men, endowed thus with a facet of Divine Individuality, are equally dear to God.                                                                          (Paramahansa Yogananda)

 

And you shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.             (John 8:32)

 

In the world to come, each of us will be called to account for all the good things God put on earth which we refused to enjoy.                                                                                            (Talmud)

 

Who is wealthy? He who is content with what he has.                               (ibid)

 

Had we not loved ourselves at all, we could never have been obliged to love anything. So that self-love is the basis of all love.                                                                                             (Thomas Traherne)

 

You never enjoy the world aright, till the sea itself flows in your veins, till you are clothed with the heavens and crowned with the stars.                                                                         (ibid)

 

All happy families resemble one another; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.

                                                                                                                                      (Count Leo Tolstoy)

To do anything in married life, husband and wife must either be in complete agreement or at loggerheads with one another. But when the relations between husband and wife are uncertain, neither one thing nor the other, nothing can be undertaken.                                                                                              (ibid)

Many families continue for years in their old rut, detested both by husband and wife, simply because there is neither complete dissension nor agreement.                                                               (ibid)

…now our whole life, from birth unto death, with all its dreams, is it not in its turn also a dream, which we take as the real life, the reality of which we do not doubt only because we do not know of the other, more real life? Our life is but one of the dreams of that more real life, and so it is endlessly, until the very last one, the very real life – the life of God.                                                                                                               (ibid)

In proportion as our inward life fails, we go more constantly and desperately to the post office.

                                                                                (Henry David Thoreau)

 

As a snowdrift is formed where there is a lull in the wind, so where there is a lull of truth, an institution springs up. But the truth blows right on over it, nevertheless, and at length blows it down.            (ibid)

 

It is the living spirit of the pine tree, not its spirit of turpentine, with which I sympathize, and which heals my cuts. It is as immortal as I am, and perchance will go to as high a heaven, there to tower above me still.           (ibid)

 

My new acquaintance closely resembled Thomas Hobbes’ description of human existence in a state of nature – solitary, nasty, brutish, and short. He conveyed the impression at first of being cynical and cold-blooded, but when you really got to know him, you find that he is cynical and cold-blooded.  (Richard Needham)

 

I did not know whether I was Chuang Tzu dreaming I was a butterfly; or a butterfly dreaming I was Chuang Tzu.

                                                        (Chuang Tzu)

 

Some day comes the Great Awakening - when we realize that life is no more than a dream. Yet the foolish go on thinking they are awake: Surveying the panorama of life with such clarity, they call this one a prince and that one a peasant – What delusion! The great Confucius and you are both a dream. And I, who say all this is a dream, I, too, am a dream.                                                                                            (ibid)

 

He who wants to have right without wrong, order without disorder, does not understand the principles of heaven and earth. He does not know how things hang together.                                         (ibid)

 

(When his wife died) – If someone is tired, we do not pursue him with shouting and bawling. She whom I have lost has laid down to sleep for a while. To break upon her rest with the noise of lamentation would but show that I know nothing of nature’s sovereign law.                                                                  (ibid)

 

It is not enough to be busy; so are the ants. The question is: What are we busy about?

                                                                                                                             (Henry David Thoreau)

One can learn more about oneself in a sleepless night, than by a trip to Europe.          (ibid)

It has been written that we are no greater than our dreams. Dreams are the touchstones of our characters.

                                                                                                                                                (ibid)

 

We already know how to enjoy ourselves. When we are enjoying ourselves, we are productive and creative. It is just a matter of bringing that enjoyment into everything we do.                            (Tarthang Tulka)

 

There are four kinds of people in the world – those in love, those who are trying to get ahead, those who look on and watch the others, and those who are merely stupid. The last-named ones are the happiest.

                                      (Richard Needham)

 

What if you slept?  

And what if in your sleep you dreamed?

And what if in your dream you went to heaven

and there plucked a strange and  beautiful  Flower?  

And what if, when you woke,

you had the flower in your hand?

Ah !!  What then?                                                                  (Samuel Taylor Coleridge)

 

Our direct awareness is the product of electrochemical impulses in the brain, thus what we see is not outside reality but constructions/simulations of our brain. We don’t recognize this because the process becomes automated and we don’t sense the effort. In experiments, subjects wear goggles with prisms so that they see inverted fields – the ceiling is now the floor and what was on the left is now on the right and vice versa. Confusion is the result because a lifetime of visual and motor simulations of the world and their relation to it are now wrong in major ways. These goggles are worn for several days and initially the subject must make perception and movement a conscious act instead of letting them run on automatic. After a few days, amazing things happen. Things no longer look upside down and the subject can reach directly for objects without consciously thinking where right and left are. An entirely new set of simulations have become automated. When the goggles come off, the world is again upside down and reversed and conscious compensations are again required, but because the old “regular” simulation is so well-learned, it takes much less time to adjust.                                                                                                                                  (Charles Tart)

 

From a culture’s point of view, it is far better if the habitual automatic way we think and feel is shaped to reflect the culture’s consensus beliefs and values. Then we will experience automatically the “right” perceptions and interpretations and so it will be “natural” to act in the culturally appropriate way, even when there are no agents of social coercion around. We are in a consensus trance. Everything not permitted is forbidden! Everything permitted is compulsory! Much of our energy is wasted in maintaining this consensus trance, suppressing our essence/spirit.                                                                            (ibid)

 

Sit down before fact: like a little child, be prepared to give up every preconceived notion. Follow humbly wherever and to whatever Nature leads, OR you shall learn nothing                      (Thomas Huxley)

 

Everyday experiences familiarize us with the facts that are grouped under the name of heredity. Every one of us bears upon him obvious marks of his parentage, perhaps of remoter relationships. More particularly, the sum of tendencies to act in a certain way, which we call ‘character’, is often to be traced through a long series of progenitors and collaterals. So we may justly say that this “character” – this moral and intellectual essence of a man – does veritably pass over from one fleshly tabernacle to another, and does really transmigrate from generation to generation.

 In the newborn infant, the character of the stock lies latent, and the Ego is little more than a bundle of potentialities. But, very early, these become actualities; from childhood to age they manifest themselves in dullness or brightness, - weakness or strength, viciousness or uprightness; and with each feature modified by confluence with another character – if by nothing else – the character passes on its incarnation in new bodies.

 The Indian philosophers called character as thus defined “KARMA” - - - In the theory of evolution, the tendency of a germ to develop according to a certain specific type, is its Karma. It is the ‘last inheritor and the last result’ of all the conditions which have effected a line of ancestry which goes back for millions of years, to the time when life first appeared on earth.                                                                               (ibid)

 

Whoever would be a teacher of men let him begin by teaching himself before teaching others; and let him teach by example before teaching by word. For he who teaches himself and rectifies his own ways is more deserving of respect and reverence than he who would teach others and rectify their ways.                  (Gibran)

 

If there is a soul, it is a mistake to believe that it is given to us fully created. It is created here, throughout a whole life. And living is nothing else but that long and painful bringing-forth. When the soul is ready, created by us and suffering, death comes along.                                                               (Albert Camus)

 

Maitri (friendliness or loving kindness) can be positively and actively cultivated by generally taking the attitude of exchanging oneself for others, and specifically by the practice known as ‘sending and taking’. This practice consists, basically, in the visualization of taking into oneself the anxiety and suffering of others and radiating out to others a feeling of warmth and friendship. When this is practised regularly in combination with the practice of mindfulness and awareness meditation, it does actually begin to soften the hard shell of the tendency to closure and to bring about an expansiveness and warmth toward the world. In this way a perception of oneself as fundamentally closed and separate, and of the world as harsh, hostile and limiting, can be gradually transformed.                                                              (Kalu Rinpoche “The Dharma”)

 

“You have only three things to do in this lifetime. Honour your guru. Deepen your emptiness. Deepen your compassion.”                                       (Kalu Rinpoche in private conversation with Ram Dass)

 

FOUR GREAT THOUGHTS   Kalu Rinpoche – Meditation regime:

 

1.    Precious human birth

2.    Impermanence

3.    Karma (the effect of ‘cause’ in the relativity plane: Not applicable in Eternal plane)

4.    Suffering

 

Ultimately speaking, the causes of samsara are produced by the mind, and mind is what experiences the consequences. Nothing other than mind makes the universe, and nothing other than mind experiences it. Yet, still ultimately speaking, mind is fundamentally empty, no 'thing' in and of itself. To understand that the mind pro­ducing and experiencing samsara is nothing real in itself can actually be a source of great relief. If the mind is not fundamentally real, neither are the situations it experiences. By finding the empty nature of mind and letting it rest there, we can find much relief and relaxation amidst the turmoil, confusion, and suffering that constitute the world.                                                                     (Kalu Rinpoche-“The Dharma”)

 

Teachers such as Milarepa can demonstrate miracles and make things happen contrary to the normal laws that govern the universe. If the universe were something ultimately real in its own right, its laws would be inviolable, and miraculous events impossible. In fact, the laws governing conventional reality are flexible, and once we realize this we have at least some limited power to manipulate the phenomenal world.

If it is the case that all experience is only the projection of mind, what determines the way in which our perceptions take place? The force that influences the way in which mind experiences the world is karma: actions and their results.                                                                        (ibid)

 

As human beings we exist in a relatively superior state. This is a result of positive karmic tendencies reinforced by virtuous actions – mental, verbal and physical – in countless previous lifetimes. All human karma is similar enough for all of us to experience more or less the same world: we have engaged in actions that result in similar, if not identical, impressions of what the world is like.                    (ibid)

 

Understand first the subjective nature of experience – that everything we perceive of the outer world, the physical body and the inner workings of our mind, is a projection and expression of mind. Having understood that, we return to the mind to determine that it is indeed essentially empty of limiting characteristics. But simply to understand this is not enough. You have to experience it through meditation. Only then, when you have directly realized the emptiness of mind and all experience, might you perhaps say: "Now I am not subject to the karmic process, the causal relationship between action and experience." Until you have had the direct realization of Emptiness that cuts the karmic process, karma is still unfailing and inescapable. Positive deeds will continue to give rise to positive results, and negative deeds give rise to negative ones. This is not something you can change in any way. It is simply the way the karmic process unfolds as long as you have not had the Realization of the Emptiness of mind and all experience.                 (ibid)

 

 

 

 

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