Questing Beyond

 

Harry consists of a hundred or a thousand selves, not of two. His life oscillates, as everyone's does, not merely between two poles, such as the body and the spirit, the saint and the sinner, but between thousands and thousands. 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.                                                                                                                          - From Steppenwolf by Hermann Hesse

Just a few days ago a man came to see me and he said, "I am a humble man. I am just like the dust on your feet. I have been trying for almost twenty years to achieve higher consciousness, but I have been a failure. Why can't I attain?" And on and on he went. Every sentence started with I. If the grammar allowed, every sentence would have ended with I. And if everything was allowed, every sentence would have consisted only of I's. "I etcetera, I etcetera, I etcetera," it went on and on. You are filled too much. There is no room, no space for God to enter in you. You are too crowded. A thousand I's milling inside -- they don't leave any space for anything to enter in you.                                                                                                                                                               (OSHO)

The notion of multiple dimensions doesn't explain anything, but at least it makes sense, because this phenomenon cannot be explained from a purely four-dimensional, extraterrestrial universe; or the idea that we could argue that this isn't occurring because space vehicles would take X amount of multiple years to get here from some other place, and that's not possible, and so forth and so on -- that really is beside the point. I mean, if these are beings who have mastered technologies that are way beyond anything we can now know, it's very possible that they can go through wormholes that collapse time, or that they can come from some other dimension and enter into our universe, travel by thought processes. There are all kinds of possibilities that scientists have conceived of, but which our technology hasn't even begun to approach. So I think that rather than look upon this as extraterrestrial, I think it does make more sense to use Jacques Vallee's term a multiverse, a universe of multiple dimensions from which it is possible that these beings come.                                                             [Dr. John Mack (Prof Psychiatry, Harvard), in conversation with Jeffrey Mishlove, concerning human contact with aliens]

It may be that people when they're dreaming are tapping into some other reality that enters our world filled with meaning.                                                                                      (ibid)

What if the alien encounter phenomenon were subtle in the sense that it may manifest in the physical world but derives from a source which by its very nature could not provide the kind of hard evidence that would satisfy skeptics for whom reality is limited to the material? What if we were to acknowledge that the phenomenon is beyond our present framework of knowledge?
Might not such an attitude of humility become, paradoxically, a way to enlarge upon what could then be learned? Is it possible that adopting an open attitude toward the testimony of witnesses could enable us to learn of unseen realities now obscured by our too limited epistemology, allowing us to rediscover the sacred and the divinity in nature and in ourselves?
I think of these experiences as a crossing over between the material world and what in Eastern philosophy is called the subtle realm. Like a reified “mystic's journey,” experiencers describe being brought into another dimension of reality from which a new perspective on life on Earth is possible. Sensitivity to our dysfunctional ecological and social conditions emerges as many come to feel that every living system is connected to what many call “Source,” or “Home.” An awareness of this relationship must be regained, they say, if we are to create a sustainable, peaceful world.
Having listened to the similar testimony of more than 200 experiencers from the West and from indigenous cultures, I have come to feel that the phenomenon is of great importance to our evolution, regardless of its ontological status.                                                                                                                                                                                                                  (Dr. John Mack)

The alien encounter experience seems almost like an outreach program from the cosmos to the spiritually impaired.                                                   (Dr. John Mack)

 

A largely unexplored area having implications for our understanding of the interplay between psychopathology and bodily change has to do with the type of case where psi communications seem to take the form of transient somatic manifestations. Eisenbud (1970) describes several cases of what seemed to be psychosomatic symptoms initiated as psi-conditioned responses. Other observers, notably Schwarz (1967) and Stevenson (1970), suggest that the effect is more frequent than is generally suspected. Based on his studies of telepathic impressions, Stevenson feels it is reasonable to assume that somatic symptomatology ranging from obscure physical symptoms to identifiable psychosomatic syndromes may come about as physical analogies of a telepathic message. Schwarz coined the term telesomatic reactions for responses of this nature and reported on a number of illustrative cases drawn from his own practice as well as self-observation. He points out that, since reactions of this kind evolve unconsciously, they are apt to go unnoticed unless the telepathy hypothesis is kept in mind. He cites the work on the plethysmographic registration of ESP effects as suggestive of the possible mechanism responsible for physiological changes and somatic symptomatology.

 

Two types of reported experience are worth noting in their possible bearing on the problem of remotely induced bodily changes. One is a well-documented report of the extraordinary circumstances attending the unexpected simultaneous deaths of 32-year-old schizophrenic twins (Wilson and Reece, 1964) who were under observation at the time on different wards of a psychiatric hospital. They died at approximately the same time and for causes that could not be determined at autopsy. In the analysis of the various factors that might have accounted for the simultaneity of death the authors included a "psychic" determinant.

 

Another kind of remotely induced organismic change is reported by Paul (1966) in her description of how two of her patients reacted during a period of time when she was under the influence of an hallucinogenic mushroom taken for experimental purposes. In each instance the patient went through a period of upset and disturbance followed by an amnesia of several hours duration correlating with the time the therapist herself was experiencing an altered state of consciousness. Temporary psychotic-like symptoms appeared to have been remotely induced, followed by a near total memory loss. Here again the question arises: if incidents of this kind do occur, how often do they go, if not unnoticed, then unrecognized as telepathically induced?

                                                                                                                                                                                    (Montague Ullman – Psychopathology and Psi Phenomena)

 

If astrology is right, the ego is wrong. Let us understand it this way: if astrology is wrong, then nothing remains to be right but the ego. If astrology is right then the world is right, and only I as an island am wrong. I am only an infinitesimal and trifling part of the world - I am so minute that I cannot even be included in the count. If astrology is right, then I am not there. There is a huge flow of forces in which I am only a small ripple.
Sometimes as we ride a big wave, we are under the illusion that we too are something special, and we forget about the big wave. This big wave is also riding upon the ocean of which we are completely unaware. If the ocean disappears below it, the wave will disappear and we will also disappear. Without any reason we become unhappy about the possibility of our disappearance, only because we have contrived to be happy through our belief in our own separate existence. If we had realized that there is only a big wave and the vast ocean, and that we are not - that it is the wish of the ocean that we arise on it, that it is the wish of the ocean that we die...            (Osho - Hidden Mysteries)

 

The best way to bring a malfunction to an end on either the physical or psychological plane is to totally accept the perception we have of it. This does not mean accepting it morally, but actively. Acceptance is lucid, watchful awareness. It is this acceptance that brings about the cure. Seen from an "accepting" point of view; illness no longer has any substance, and the patient then has the greatest possible chance of getting better. …"Acceptance” means objectifying the sensation, not trying to escape it, dominate it or suppress it. In this total acceptance the body regains its health for it already knows health…. To accept, to take note, this is awareness. There is no other way of expressing it than this, for memory does not intervene. Sometimes we come very near to this state when meditating, there are moments when we are silent awareness.                                                                                                                     (Jean Klein “Neither This nor That I Am”)

Do not nourish the ideas you have built around yourself nor the image people have of you. Be neither someone nor something, just don't play the game. This will bring about being, constant awareness.                                                                                                                                                                                          (ibid)

Observe the way your mind moves, works, without having any preconceived ideas about it. A moment will come when you discover yourself to be the witness. Subsequently, when all striving has left you, you will realize that you are the light shining beyond the observer. Reality is neither a product of the mind nor the result of a whole train of thoughts, it just is. The only method we can suggest is to observe impartially the way in which your mind reacts in the different circumstances of everyday life.                                                                   (ibid)
 

Deeply buried within you is the conviction that all objects and your surroundings are separate from you, outside you. In the same way, feelings and your body are just objects amongst others which can also be considered separate from you. If we adopt this point of view, the ego loses its substance. You will come to see that your thoughts, your I-thought, emotions, likes and dislikes are equally only perceived objects. This standpoint will lead you to realize spontaneously that you are the ultimate knower, and your notion of being a personal entity will thus lose all meaning.                  (ibid)

When you listen without being aggressive or resisting, your whole body becomes this listening. Everything surrounding you is included in this listening, and ultimately there is total listening. There is no longer a listener and something listened to. You are then on the threshold of non-duality. You have left conceptual patterns behind. You must live this experience for yourself. "I am" points towards ultimate reality.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                   (ibid)

We exchange ideas so as to know their worth, so as to find a just way of seeing things, but under no circumstances do we try to situate ourselves in relation to a thought or a projection. Basically it is a form of reasoning which is meant to being about its own elimination, so that sooner or later you will find there is no room for personal identity.                                                                    (ibid)   

 

Reality is not limited to the body and mind. We can consider the latter to be instruments, our property to be put to use. The changes that the body and mind go through during the different ages; childhood, adolescence, adulthood and old age are seen by a knower. This knower who observes these changes could not do so if he were not himself unchanging.                         (ibid)

We free ourselves by awareness, free from all reference to the past, free from bodily or psychological habits, free from choice and repetition. It is a door open to spontaneous understanding and having nothing to do with mental activity. Instantaneous total vision consumes error. The energy which previously constituted the error shifts away from it and integrates with truth that is being. The ego striving to survive either clings on to its accumulated memories, or projects desires into the future, thus using up a considerable amount of energy.                                                                (ibid)

Know that awareness without tension, where you are uninvolved and do not seek a conclusion, is total awareness.                                                                                             (ibid)

 

In the evening when you go to bed prepare yourself, so as to avoid taking your daily worries with you. Observe whatever should present itself objectively; if you feel tired, feel it deep within yourself, look at it closely, thus you will spontaneously find yourself exterior to it. Sooner or later a moment will arrive where it is no longer the focal point of your attention and it will disappear, will be burnt up by this awareness. The same thing will happen to all worries that preoccupy you. You will thus experience a feeling of harmony. Finally let your body sink into deep sleep.             (ibid)
 
When you wake up in the morning, don't do so in relation to objects, let it be in the Self, your true being. First of all be deeply aware, later the ego and the world will come to life.        (ibid)

Perception is entirely independent of the perceiver and of the perceived object, which are but concepts. Perception is living, the only reality, now, however gross or subtle it may be. Each perception is a non-dual experiencing of pure awareness. Subsequently we may say: "I thought this or that, or I heard a chord in C major" ….. at the actual time, there was no thought, no sensation, only "I am". With deep conviction, this fact will take root within us and we will no longer need to make an effort to remember it. It is this true understanding that turns the "I am" into a reality.                    (ibid)
 
In reality there is only the Self, the non-dual Self which is. Awareness is reflected in the mind's mirror, and this gives birth to the ego. Seeing this dependent and separate, we mistakenly take ourselves to be this or that, but in reality there is only the true "I am" beyond time and space.                                                                                                                                                       (ibid)
 
When one is struck by wonder or astonishment there is perfect non-duality between the knower and the thing known. It is a living reality. Let yourself be totally absorbed by it, then thought and action will derive directly from this background which is wonderment.                                                                                                                                                                                        (ibid)

A handshake, hug, or gesture of touch is a universal way of communicating. It might surprise you to know what this simple act of touch is really doing! The electromagnetic field generated by the heart not only radiates outward from the body, but also appears to carry information about our feelings, in a manner similar to how information is carried by radio waves. The HeartMath Research team wanted to know if they could demonstrate scientifically a transfer of information between people when they touch or are close to each other. This research has indicated bioelectromagnetic communication between people is indeed possible.

The research team set out to determine if the electromagnetic field produced by the heartbeat (ECG) of one person could be detected in another individual's brain activity (EEG) during physical contact. At first they seated pairs of subjects four feet apart while monitoring them during an initial baseline (no physical contact). This was followed by a period where participants reached out and held the hand of the other person (like shaking hands). Prior to holding hands, there was no indication that one subject's heartbeat signals could be detected in the other subject's brainwaves. However, upon holding hands, the heartbeat signal of one subject could be clearly detected in the other subject's brainwaves. (See graph) In some cases, the signal exchange could be detected in both directions, but only in about 30% of the pairs of participants, However it could almost always be detected in one of the participants! This was a bit of a mystery, as neither gender nor the strength of the heartbeat (ECG amplitude) explained in which participant the signal could be detected.

In later research, the answer to this puzzling finding seems to have been found. It appears that the important factor in the transmission and reception of these signals is the degree of physiological coherence that participants are in during the experiment. Do the results of these experiments mean that during a handshake or hug, another person is unconsciously detecting how we're are feeling? It appears that the electromagnetic energy generated by the heart could be an important source of non-verbal communication that occurs between people. This possibility needs further exploration, and more research is planned in this area.

(HeartMath Research)

 

There was this man who attended one of our European conferences. He had been working with a spiritual teacher for many years but he was feeling a good deal of discontent because his own male power/instinctual energy was emerging and creating conflict in the spiritual community of which he as a part. He had the following dream about his teacher: “I’m exploring the compound of my teacher. I see that in this compound children are being trained to kill animals.”

This was a remarkable dream to us, to the group and especially to the dreamer. It does not say that his training was bad. What it points out so clearly is that in this training, his feelings (children) are being trained to kill the animals, his instinctual nature. The dream had a very strong impact on the dreamer and he discontinued his studies with the teacher within a very short period of time.

We personally do not appreciate the emphasis on spiritual training that governs so much of the consciousness community. We prefer to speak about psycho-spiritual development. The name itself makes clear that transformational work requires that we move on the path of the snake, a path that is forever interweaving between psychological, emotional and physical reality on the one side and our spiritual nature on the other. From our study of the dream process it is clear that the higher mind that directs this process wants us to be in balance and requires that we embrace all of our selves.                                                                                                                                                                   (Hal and Sidra Stone)

 

To live between opposites is to learn to live with the ambiguities of life. It is the ability to hold the tension of opposites until the Aware Ego process becomes sufficiently strong that a decision occurs organically and in a way that is so natural that it hardly feels like a decision. This is one of the deeper goals of Voice Dialogue and dream work.
Always keep in mind that knowledge is the province of the primary self system. Wisdom however belongs to the province of the Aware Ego, to the ability to “not know”, to the willingness to feel as well as understand both sides of the decision making process.                                                                                                                       (ibid)

 

 

(OSHO - quoting Yakusan: Straight to the Point of Enlightenment Discourse of 18-01-89. Osho relates Zen Master Yakusan's thinking shortly before he himself withdraws from all public speaking.)

The great enemy of the truth is very often not the lie: deliberate, continued, and dishonest; but the myth: persistent, persuasive, and unrealistic.

(John F. Kennedy)

 

Pythagoras’ biographer Porphyry tells us that Pythagoras also “soothed the passions of the soul and body by rhythms, songs and incantations,” for Pythagoras considered himself above all a healer, and used music as a remedy for every manner of illness. The Pythagoreans distinguished between three kinds of music in their philosophy: these were, to use the nomenclature of a later era, musica instrumentalis, the ordinary music made by plucking the lyre, blowing the pipe, with the singing voice, etc.; musica humana, the continuous but unheard music made by each human organism, especially the harmonious (or inharmonious) resonance between the soul and the body; and musica mundana, the music made by the cosmos itself, which would come to be known as the “Music of the Spheres.”  *

Never ask for advice, because everybody is so unique and so different that there has never been any person like you before, nor is there going to be another person like you again. So really, no guidelines for you exist. But existence is greatly compassionate. It has given you the whole program of your life in a seed form. If you don't ask anybody, and just silently listen to your own heart and go on following it, you will reach the space where you can feel at home; where suddenly you realize who you are, where suddenly you feel a synchronicity with the whole existence.            (OSHO)

 

All that is natural, the trees, the clouds, the mountains, the oceans, with all of them you will find a certain harmony. You will not find harmony with machines, big and great computers, factories, automobiles, railway trains. You may not find any harmony... there is no question, because these are heartless, lifeless things. They don't know how to sing; they don't know how to dance. Have you seen any computer dancing? Have you heard of any computer falling in love with a woman computer? Only machines will be left out.                                                                               (OSHO)

 

With all that is natural and all that grows, all that blossoms, all that moves and breathes, all that has a heartbeat, you will find a tremendous harmony. Your heartbeat will be merging and melting into the universal heartbeat ― no personal counseling.                                                                                                                                                                          (OSHO)

 

If man were immortal, love would be impossi­ble. Think. If man were immortal, I say love would be impossible. It would be difficult to love anybody if you were immortals. It would be so dangerous to fall in love. Death is there and life is just like a dewdrop on a trem­bling leaf. Any moment the breeze comes and the dewdrop will fall and disappear. Life is just a wavering….because of that wavering, because of that movement – and death is always there. It gives intensity to love. Love is possible only because there is death. Love becomes intense because there is death. Think! If you know that your be­loved is going to die the next moment, all meanness will go, all conflict will go. And this one moment will become eternity. And you will be so much love that your whole being will be poured into it. But you know the beloved is going to live, there is no hurry. You can fight and you can postpone loving for later on. If life is eternal, if you are immortal in the body, you cannot love.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                        (OSHO)

 

In deep love it happens that the two persons are not two. Something between the two has come into being and they have become two poles. Something is flowing between the two. When this flow is there you will feel blissful. If love gives bliss, it gives bliss only because of this: that two persons – just for a single moment – lose their egos; their “otherness” is lost and oneness comes into being. Even for a single moment if it happens, it is ecstatic, it is blissful, you have entered paradise – even for a single moment. And this moment can be transforming                                  (OSHO)

 

Once you get in tune with your imagination, the body starts functioning. And many things you are already doing without knowing how your imagination goes on working. Many times you create many illnesses just through imagination, because you imagine that now this disease is there, infectious, it is all over the place – you have become receptive; now there is every possibility that you will fall ill. And that illness is real. But the illness has been created through imagination. Imagination is a force, is an energy, and the mind moves through it. And when the mind moves through it, the body follows.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                    (OSHO)

 

Imagine energy, not substance, nothing static, but process, movement, rhythm, dance. And go on imagining until the entire universe spiritualizes. If you persist, within three months you can move to this feeling – just working one hour every day, but intensively. Within three months you can have a different feeling of the whole existence around you. Matter is no longer there – immaterial, oceanic existence; just waves, vibrations. And when this happens then you know what God is. That ocean of energy is God. God is not a person. God is not somewhere sitting on a throne in heaven. There is no one. God is the totality of what is. This whole creative energy of existence is God. But we have a pattern of thinking. We say God is the creator. Rather, God is the creative force, the very creation itself.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                    (OSHO)

 

Do not believe in anything simply because you have heard it.
Do not believe in traditions because they have been handed down for many generations.
Do not believe in anything because it is spoken and rumored by many.
Do not believe in anything simply because it is found written in your religious books.
Do not believe in anything merely on the authority of your teachers and elders.
But after observation and analysis, when you find that anything agrees with reason,

                           and is conducive to the good and benefit of one and all, then accept it and live up to it.

                                                (The Buddha - discourse to the Kalamas)

 

Non-attachment is the systematic practice of not automatically giving psychological energy to whatever thoughts, feelings and perceptions come along but rather having a commitment to more realistic perception, thinking and feeling, and so using various psychological and meditative techniques to reduce these automatized attachments. As a person becomes less the victim of these automatized attachments, psychological energy is freed up that can be used for more accurate insights into the nature of self and world.

A common Western error about the Buddhist concept of non-attachment is to see it as a state of having no desires, a kind of zombie like blankness where a person is at "peace" because the person doesn't give a damn about anything. Like being zonked out on some narcotic. Not so. A person who is skilled at non-attachment still has hopes, fear, desires and aversions, but they aren't attached to them, they don't hold on to them. If I see something delicious to eat, e.g., I want it - my body is designed to produce that feeling. Suppose I don't get it. If I'm attached, I get angry or sad about not getting it, I bring up memories (or more accurately, memories come up via automated processes, it's not very voluntary) of other times I've been deprived, and I generally stay worked up about it and suffer for minutes, hours, possibly days, possibly a lifetime (sadly, we all know some people who are still holding on to some slight from years ago). If I am relatively non-attached, I think (although non-attachment is not just an intellectual process) something like "Ah, what a delicious anticipation! Too bad I didn't get it, but that's past, now back to the present moment," and I forget about it.

Thus the degree to which attachment or non-attachment operates in a person's life is a major determinant of how they live their life, how much (useless) suffering they experience, and how much psychological attention they have left over after attachments to inquire into the nature of mind and life.                                                                                                    (Charles Tart)

 

In The Interior Castle, Saint Teresa of Avila describes the seventh and final stage of her journey to God:

"The self-forgetting is so great that it seems as though the soul does not even exist."

 

In his famous treatise on Soto Zen, The Shobogenzo, Dogen speaks thus:

"To study the Way is to study oneself; to study oneself is to forget oneself; to forget oneself is to be enlightened by all things."

(Shnizen Young)

 

In classical physics, the mass of an object has always been associated with an indestructible material substance, with some 'stuff' of which all things were thought to be made. Relativity theory showed that mass has nothing to do with any stuff, but is a form of energy. Energy, however, is a dynamic quantity associated with activity, or with processes. The fact that the mass of a particle is equivalent to a certain amount of energy means that the particle can no longer be seen as a static object, but has to be conceived as a dynamic pattern, a process involving the energy which manifests itself as the particle's mass... In modern physics, the universe is thus experienced as a dynamic, inseparable whole which always includes the observer in an essential way.               (Fritjof Capra “The Tao of Physics”)

 

 

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

 

[Aldous Huxley in “The Doors of Perception” notes that our conscious brain 'filters' the input from the world around us, quoting Bagson's theory that the function of the brain, nervous system and sense organs is in the main eliminative and not productive. Bagson apparently claimed that each individual is capable of remembering all that has ever happened to him and of perceiving everything that is happening everywhere in the universe. The brain's job is to protect us from being overwhelmed by this mass of knowledge, leaving only that tiny selection which is practically useful in so far that, as animals, our business is at all costs to survive. Huxley points out that, according to such a theory, each one of us is potentially Mind at Large, but to make biological survival possible, Mind at Large has to be filtered or, as he puts it, funneled through the reducing valve of the brain and the nervous system. What comes out the other end, he says, is a measly trickle of the kind of consciousness which will help us to stay alive on the surface of this particular planet.

As Huxley also points out, the filter or reducing valve is reinforced by our gift (or is it a curse?) of speech. To formulate and express the contents of this 'measly trickle' of consciousness, man has invented and endlessly elaborated those symbol-systems and implicit philosophies which we call languages. Every individual is at once the beneficiary and the victim of the linguistic tradition into which he or she has been born – the beneficiary in as much as language gives access to the accumulated records of other people's experience, the victim in so far as it confirms him in the belief that reduced awareness is the only awareness and as it bedevils his sense of reality, so that he is only too apt to take his concepts for data, his words for actual things... Most people most of the time know only what comes through the reducing valve and is consecrated as genuinely real by the local language. ]

 

Without beauty the truth becomes solemn, ponderous, dreary; and goodness becomes joyless and over-earnest. Lightness of touch, spontaneity, gaiety, even abandon, are needed if the saint and the sage are to avoid taking on an ugly appearance, not to say an evil one. And indeed the universe does not look like the product of a logician, or a works-manager, and still less like the work of a priest; but much more like that of an artist who is well aware of the value of nonsense, of play, and of the superbly bountiful imagination. In Hell we are all admirably practical and down-to-earth; we do not find life fun, but take it and ourselves very seriously. But I suspect that all Heaven is light-hearted and merry, and that the skies are one broad smile, and that the blessed galaxies are even now shaking their fiery manes with laughter, while Satan is profoundly shocked at their lack of gravity and earnest common sense.                                                                                           (Douglas Harding)

 

There are moments when you become aware not only of what you are doing but also of yourself doing it. You see both 'I' and the 'here' of 'I am here'—both the anger and the 'I' that is angry. Call this self-remembering if you like.                                                                                                                 (Gurdjieff - Views From the Real World)

Esoteric knowledge cannot belong to all, cannot even belong to many. Such is the law. [The reason is that the order of the universe, the ray of creation, would be destabilized, and the result would be chaos.]                                                                                                                                                           (Gurdjieff - In Search of the Miraculous)

 

Those dealing in the actual manufacture of mind are dealing in a very explosive material. The material is not merely the clay of which man is master, but the truths of semblances of truth which have a certain mastery over man. The material is explosive because it must be taken seriously. The men writing books really are throwing bombs.                (G. K. Chesterton)

 

What is education? Properly speaking, there is no such thing as education. Education is simply the soul of a society as it passes from one generation to another. Whatever the soul is like, it will have to be passed on somehow, consciously or unconsciously, and that transition may be called education. ... What we need is to have a culture before we hand it down. In other words, it is a truth, however sad and strange, that we cannot give what we have not got, and cannot teach to other people what we do not know ourselves.                                                (G. K. Chesterton)

 

It was the mystical dogma of Bentham and Adam Smith and the rest, that some of the worst of human passions would turn out to be all for the best. It was the mysterious doctrine that selfishness would do the work of unselfishness.                                                                                                                                                                                (G. K. Chesterton)

 

When men have come to the edge of a precipice, it is the lover of life who has the spirit to leap backwards, and only the pessimist who continues to believe in progress.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                          (G. K. Chesterton)

 

We all have a little weakness, which is very natural but rather misleading, for supposing that this epoch must be the end of the world because it will be the end of us. How future generations will get on without us is indeed, when we come to think of it, quite a puzzle. But I suppose they will get on somehow, and may possibly venture to revise our judgments as we have revised earlier judgments.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                              (G. K. Chesterton)

 

To real Being we go back, all that we have and are. To This we return as from This we came. When we look outside of This on which we depend, we ignore our unity. Looking outward we see many faces, look inward and all is the One Head. If a man could but be turned about - by his own motion or by the happy pull of Athene - he would at once see God, and himself, and the All.                                                                                                                                                                                                   (Plotinus, 3rd-century neo-platonist philosopher)

 

Suddenly, while at the very depths, it struck me like a thunderbolt that I had never been born, and that my birthlessness could settle any and every matter. This seemed to be my satori.... the birthless Buddha-mind can cut any and every knot.... to live in a state of non-birth is to attain Buddhahood.... from the moment you have begun to realise this fact, you are a living Buddha.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                   (Bankei Zenji (1622-1693) Japanese Zen teacher)

 

The awakened person is called enlightened because the small flame of awareness continues to burn twenty-four hours a day, whether he is awake, whether he is asleep, whether he is doing something or not doing anything. Nothing matters; everything remains on the circumference. At the centre there is only the flame of awareness, and this flame of awareness is experienced as silence, bliss….All desires are in the mind, even the desire for God, the desire for enlightenment, the desire for truth, for freedom - all desires. Desire as such is part of the mind. And mind is the barrier, not the bridge. The last desire to leave is the desire for enlightenment. It is the thickest and strongest chain that keeps you imprisoned……In fact you start seeking God only when God has already started seeking you. You move towards God only when God has stirred in the deepest core of your being. We are so unaware; that's why we think that it is our desire to seek the truth, to know the truth. We are so small that we can't have that great a desire. We are small, our desires are bound to be small. Our egos are tiny and their desires are trivia…. The energy called desire has been condemned for centuries. Almost all the so-called saints have been against it because desire is life and they were all life-negative. Desire is the very source of all that you see, and they were against all that which is visible. They wanted to sacrifice the visible at the feet of the invisible; they wanted to cut the roots of desire so there would no longer be any possibility of life… I have a totally different concept of desire. First: desire itself is God. Desire without any object, desire without being goal-oriented, unmotivated desire, pure desire, is God. The energy called desire is the same energy as God. Desire has not to be destroyed, it has to be purified. Desire has not to be dropped, it has to be transformed. Your very being is desire; to be against it is to be against yourself and against all. To be against it is to be against the flowers and the birds and the sun and the moon… Your desire is as big as the sky - even the sky is not the limit to it… The intelligent person stops desiring objects… he starts living his desire in its purity, moment to moment. He is full of desire, full of overflowing energy. His ordinary life becomes so intense, so passionate, that whatsoever he touches will be transformed.             (OSHO)

 

[Maurice Bucke, M.D. a 19th century physician describing a full blown mystical experience in the third person]:

It was in the early spring at the beginning of his thirty-sixth year. He and two friends had spent the evening reading Wordsworth, Shelley, Keats, Browning, and especially Whitman. They parted at midnight, and he had a long drive in a hansom (it was in an English city). His mind deeply under the influences of the ideas, images and emotions called up by the reading and talk of the evening, was calm and peaceful. He was in a state of quiet, almost passive enjoyment. All at once, without warning of any kind, he found himself wrapped around as it were by a flame colored cloud. For an instant he thought of fire, some sudden conflagration in the great city, the next he knew that the light was within himself. Directly afterwards there came upon him a sense of exultation, of immense joyousness, accompanied or immediately followed by an intellectual illumination quite impossible to describe. Into his brain streamed one momentary lightning-flash of the Brahmic Splendor which has ever since lightened his life; upon his heart fell one drop of Brahmic Bliss, leaving thenceforward for always an after taste of heaven. Among other things...he saw and knew that the Cosmos is not dead matter but a living Presence, that the soul of man is immortal, that the universe is so built and ordered that without any peradventure all things work together for the good of each and all, that the foundation principle of the world is what we call love and that the happiness of every one is in the long run absolutely certain. He claims that he learned more within the few seconds during which the illumination lasted that in previous months or even years of study, and that he learned much that no study could ever have taught.

The illumination itself continued not more than a few moments, but its effects proved ineffaceable; it was impossible for him ever to forget what he at that time saw and knew, neither did he, or could he, ever doubt the truth of what was then presented to his mind....

 

Simply because religious experience is apprehended in an 'interior' fashion does not mean it is merely private knowledge, any more than the fact that mathematics and logic are seen inwardly, by the mind's eye, makes them merely private fantasies without public import. Mathematical knowledge is public knowledge to all equally trained mathematicians; just so, contemplative knowledge is public knowledge to all equally trained contemplatives.                                                          (Ken Wilber)

 

Whom the gods would destroy they first make mad.                                                                                                                  (Euripides)

 

It is always better to say right out what you think without trying to prove anything much: for all our proofs are only variations of our opinions, and the contrary-minded listen neither to one nor the other.                                                                                                                                                                             (Johann Wolfgang von Goethe)

 

[In pointing out the necessity for beleaguered people to hold close to one another]... “Above all, we must not split up, if we do we’re as good as dead.” Another pleads “If we stay together we might manage to survive”…The doctor’s wife [the only one in the group who is not blind] says “The only miracle we can perform is to go on living… to preserve the fragility of life from day to day, as if it were blind and did not know where to go, and perhaps it is like that, perhaps it really does not know, it placed itself in our hands, after giving us intelligence, and this is what we have made of it.”

(Jose Saramago- “Blindness”)

 

Evil when we are in its power is not felt as evil but as a necessity, or even as a duty.                                                      (Simone Weil)

 

To illustrate the effects of scientism in Western life, some years ago I devised an experiential exercise to use in workshops, a "belief experiment" I called the Western Creed. It's purpose was to make people aware of the implicit and hidden assumptions that Western civilization and scientism have instilled to varying degrees in all of us, even people who think they have a spiritual orientation to life. The Western Creed takes the same external form as the Nicene Creed in Christianity, but its content is based on currently popular scientistic beliefs, put in a form to make their emotional connotations clearer. Incidentally, I want to assure you that this is not an attack on Christianity, only an educational exercise.

 

The Western Creed:

Here is the creed participants can read aloud together:

I BELIEVE - in the material universe - as the only and ultimate reality - a universe controlled by fixed physical laws - and blind chance.

I AFFIRM - that the universe has no creator - no objective purpose - and no objective meaning or destiny.

I MAINTAIN - that all ideas about God or gods - enlightened beings - prophets and saviors - or other non-physical beings or forces - are superstitions and delusions. - Life and consciousness are totally identical to physical processes - and arose from chance interactions of blind physical forces. - Like the rest of life - my life - and my consciousness - have no objective purpose - meaning - or destiny.

I BELIEVE - that all judgments, values, and moralities - whether my own or others - are subjective - arising solely from biological determinants - personal history - and chance. - Free will is an illusion. - Therefore the most rational values I can personally live by must be based on the knowledge that for me - what pleases me is Good - what pains me is Bad. - Those who please me or help me avoid pain are my friends - those who pain me or keep me from my pleasure are my enemies. - Rationality requires that friends and enemies be used in ways that maximize my pleasure - and minimize my pain.

I AFFIRM - that churches have no real use other than social support - that there are no objective sins to commit or be forgiven for - that there is no divine or supernatural retribution for sin or reward for virtue - although there may be social consequences of actions. - Virtue for me is getting what I want - without being caught and punished by others.

I MAINTAIN - that the death of the body - is the death of the mind. - There is no afterlife - and all hope of such is nonsense.

 

I suspect that some of you, from just identifying with the description, are feeling depression, nihilism and negativity.                                             (Charles Tart)

 

Sometimes I think that the greatest achievement of modern culture is its brilliant selling of samsara [living in a state of illusion] and its barren distractions. Modern society seems to me a celebration of all the things that lead away from the truth, make truth hard to live for, and discourage people from even believing that it exists. And to think that all this springs from a civilization that claims to adore life, but actually starves it of any real meaning; that endlessly speaks of making people "happy," but in fact blocks their way to the source of real joy.                (Sogyal Rinpoche)

 

Despite this massive and nearly all-pervasive denial of their existence, we still sometimes have fleeting glimpses of the nature of mind....I think we do, sometimes, half understand these glimpses, but modern culture gives us no context or framework in which to comprehend them. Worse still, rather than encouraging us to explore these glimpses more deeply and discover where they spring from, we are told in both obvious and subtle ways to shut them out. We know that no one will take us seriously if we try to share them. We can be frightened by them, or even think we are going mad. So we ignore what could really be the most revealing experiences of our lives, if only we understood them. This is perhaps the darkest and most disturbing aspect of modern civilization its ignorance and repression of who we really are.                                                                                                                                                                                                                       (Sogyal Rinpoche)

 

I am reminded of what one Tibetan master says: "People often make the mistake of being frivolous about death, and think, 'Oh well, death happens to everybody. It's not a big deal, it's natural. I'll be fine.' That's a nice theory until one is dying.                                                                                                                                                               (Sogyal Rinpoche)

 

So what is an OBE? Does the mind or soul really leave the body and go somewhere else, “out,” or is the OBE just a special ASC that is basically hallucinatory in nature, i.e. that the feeling and conviction that you are elsewhere than your physical body’s location is an illusion?

After decades of reflection on the results of my own and others’ research particularly in the light of my studies on the nature of consciousness and ASCs, I have a more complex view of OBEs that includes both of these possibilities at different times and more. I believe that in some OBEs, the mind may, at least partially, really be located elsewhere than the physical body….. At the opposite extreme, as with my virtuoso hypnotic subjects whose experience was vivid and perfectly real to them but whose perception of the target room was only illusory, I believe an OBE can be a simulation of being out of the body, and mind is as much “in” the physical body as it ever is. In between these two extremes, I believe we can have OBEs which are basically a simulation of being out, but which are informed by information gathered by ESP such that the simulation of the OBE location is accurate and veridical.

This is a messy situation in some ways, especially because all three of these types of OBEs may seem experientially identical to the person having them, at least at rough levels of description. While I would prefer reality to fall into simple, clear cut categories, I’ve learned in life that reality doesn’t care about our wishes for simplicity, though, and things are often complex.                                                                                                                                                                                                    (Charles Tart)

 

My aim is not to be consistent with my previous statements on a given question, but to be consistent with truth as it may present itself to me at a given moment.               (Gandhi)

 

A crazy person is a person who has lost everything, except their reason.                                                                                                 (G. K. Chesterton)

 

Those who manipulate the unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country. We are governed, our minds molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested largely by men we have never heard of. This is a logical result of the way in which our democratic society is organized. Vast numbers of human beings must cooperate in this manner if they are to live together as a smoothly functioning society. In almost every act of our lives whether in the sphere of politics or business in our social conduct or our ethical thinking, we are dominated by the relatively small number of persons who understand the mental processes and social patterns of the masses. It is they who pull the wires that control the public mind.             (Edward Bernays)

 

Only two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity. And I'm not sure about the universe.                                                                                        (Albert Einstein)

 

WHAT ARE WE??

 

Figure 1.Being a product of my culture, at the top of the figure I’ve put the transpersonal or spiritual realm, and I’ve shown it as unbounded in extent. Those of you who’ve had OBEs, NDEs or other transpersonal experiences know of what realm of experience I speak here, even if ordinary words can’t grasp it too well. A part of that transpersonal realm, designated as mind in Figure 1, is in intimate relation with our particular body, brain and nervous system. As I mentioned briefly above, although this mind is of a different nature from ordinary matter, psi phenomena like clairvoyance and PK are the means which link the transpersonal and the physical, i.e., our mind has an intimate and ongoing relationship with our body, brain and nervous system through what I’ve termed autoclairvoyance, where mind reads the physical state of the brain, and autoPK, where mind uses psychokinesis to affect the operation of the physical brain.

 

The result of this interaction is the creation of a biophysical virtual reality (BPVR), what I’ve labeled ME! in the figure, to stand for Mind Embodied, with the boldness of the type and the exclamation point added to remind us that our identification with and attachment to ME! is intense! This ME! is a simulation of our ultimate, transpersonal nature, our physical nature, and the external physical world around us. We ordinarily live inside this simulation and take it for the direct perception of reality and our selves, but those of you who’ve been “out” know, as we’ve discussed above, that our ordinary self is indeed just a limited point of view, not the whole of reality.                                                                    (Charles Tart)

 


Transpersonal psychology is ............ based on people's experiences of temporarily transcending our usual identification with our limited biological, historical, cultural and personal self and, at the deepest and most profound levels of experience possible, recognizing/being "something" of vast intelligence and compassion

that encompasses/is the entire universe. From this perspective our ordinary, "normal" biological, historical, cultural and personal self is seen as an important, but quite partial (and often pathologically distorted) manifestation or expression of this much greater "something" that is our deeper origin and destination.                                                                                                                                                         (Charles Tart)

 

Note there are practical moral relationship implications of psi data. If we are indeed united, one, then if I am hurting you, there is some profound sense of which I am hurting myself - which is a stupid thing to do. Instead of morality toward one another merely being a matter of shoulds, it becomes a matter of intelligence self-interest. Your pain, your suffering, is no longer merely a isolated neurochemical reaction taking place in another brain and body that isn't me, it's my pain, my suffering, something of fundamental concern to me!

And perhaps our resistance to dealing with this level of relationship is one of the fundamental reasons that psi appears rarely in ordinary life? 

I've also been impressed by William Braud's analysis that three general factors that facilitate psi performance are faith, hope, and love: factors which are central virtues in all religions.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                (Charles Tart)

 

As fascinating as the new computer developments in creating virtual reality are, the truth is that we already live in a variety of internally generated virtual realities, whether we label ourselves "clients," "therapists," or whatever. It is happening right this moment. We each live "inside" a world simulation machine. We almost always forget that our "perception" is a simulation, not reality itself, and we almost always forget that we have anything to do with the particulars of how the simulation works.                                                                                                               (Charles Tart)

 

There is a great freedom available, a kind of enlightenment, when you realize that the world and self you take for granted because they are an immediate perception are actually, in vitally important ways, an interpretation, a simulation, not final reality. Then you can take a simulation as largely a working hypothesis and, when it does not work well, try dropping it and either learn to perceive more accurately, with less distorted simulation and/or create more useful simulations.                                                                                                                                                                   (Charles Tart)

 

[The scientistic/materialistic view expressed by Bertrand Russell – A Free Man’s Worship]

That man is the product of causes which had no prevision of the end they were achieving; that his origin, his growth, his hopes and fears, his loves and his beliefs, are but the outcome of accidental collocations of atoms; that no fire, no heroism, no intensity of thought or feeling, can preserve an individual life beyond the grave; that all the labours of the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness of human genius, are destined to extinction in the vast death of the solar system; and the whole temple of Man’s achievement must inevitably be buried beneath the debris of a universe in ruins—all these things, if not quite beyond dispute, are yet so nearly certain, that no philosophy that rejects them can hope to stand. Only within the scaffolding of these truths, only on the firm foundation of unyielding despair, can the soul’s habitation henceforth be safely built.

 

An unexamined life is not worth living.                                                                                                                                 (Socrates – at his trial)

 

Perception is built to detect what is right here, right now - what is available, for example, for eating or being eaten by. If this is indeed its teleology, then it is understandable that perception should be performed by fast, mandatory, encapsulated ... systems that ... are prepared to trade false positives for high gain. It is, no doubt, important to attend to the eternally beautiful and to believe the eternally true. But it is more important not to be eaten.                                                                                                                                                (J. Fodor)

 

My notion of what I am, like your notion of what you are, reflects a cognitive model embedded in a theoretical network. It too is based primarily on what I have been told, not only in the form of general cultural assumptions but also of communications addressed to me in particular. Like other concepts it tends to govern what I notice; in this case, what I notice about myself. Like other theories, it is not necessarily correct; all of us know people whose self-theories seem off the mark in certain respects. Nevertheless most self-theories do work fairly well, at least in areas where they make predictions about real experience. (Where this is not the case -- e.g. in paranoia -- we tend to classify them as pathological.)                                                (U. Neisser)

 

The universe computes itself. The universe computes its own behavior. As soon as the universe began, it began computing. At first the patterns were simple, comprising elementary particles and establishing the fundamental laws of physics. In time, as it processed more and more information, the universe spun out ever more intricate and complex patterns, including galaxies, stars and planets. Life, language, human beings, society, culture -- all owe their existence to the intrinsic ability of matter and energy to process information.                                                                                                                                                                                                             (MIT computer scientist Seth Lloyd)

 

Do not go where the path may lead, go instead where there is no path and leave a trail.                                                  (Ralph Waldo Emerson)

 

In 1900, Mark Twain wrote a warning about phony humanitarianism that rings true today. "I said to myself," wrote Twain, about the American intervention in the Philippines a century ago, "here are a people who have suffered for three centuries. We can make them as free as ourselves, give them a government and country of their own, put a miniature of the American constitution afloat in the Pacific, start a brand new republic to take its place among the free nations of the world. It seemed to me a great task to which we had addressed ourselves."

"But I have thought some more since then, and I have seen that we do not intend to free, but to subjugate the people of the Philippines. We have gone there to conquer, not to redeem.

"And so I am an anti-imperialist. I am opposed to having the eagle put its talons on any other land."

 

We can neither put back the clock nor slow down our forward speed, and as we are already flying pilotless, on instrument controls, it is even too late to ask where we are going.                                                                                                                                                                                                                           (Igor Stravinsky)

 

A little learning is a dangerous thing; Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian Spring. There shallow draughts intoxicate the brain, and drinking largely sobers us again.                                                                                                                                                                                                             (Alexander Pope)

 

The education of a man is never completed until he dies.                                                                                                (Robert E. Lee)

 

The human mind, once expanded to take in a new idea never goes back to its original size.                               (Oliver Wendell Holmes)

 

 

I met a traveler from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert …
And on the pedestal these words appear:
“My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings:
Look upon my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”

 

Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

(Percy Bysshe Shelley)

 

 

I think that gaining a mythic perspective is important because we are mythic beings. We contain these great stories of death and resurrection and rites of passage--it's the totemic structure of history. Suppose that all of the meanderings and wanderings of your life were not due necessarily to cause and effect--what your mother did to you, what your father didn't do--but suppose it was a tale told by a master to orchestrate a larger life, unfolding from the mind of the maker, the daimon?

Look at Winston Churchill, dyslexic and stuttering until he was fourteen or fifteen years old, and then writing those great, luminous books of history and speaking the words that charged a nation. Was that compensation? Maybe not. Maybe the daimon knew he was going to be Winston Churchill and was shoring up his tongue.

What about Manolete? The greatest bullfighter that ever lived, who was scared to death of everything and hid behind his mother's skirts until he was fourteen years old. Compensation? Maybe not. Maybe the daimon was shoring up his courage.

Instead of looking at developmental psychology, which says you're born, you have these problems, you get all kinds of wounds, you make some kind of adjustment, and then you die--it's very melancholy isn't it?--maybe there are these great passions and purposes that are encoded in us, and then unfold in and through time.

A myth is something that never was but that is always happening. It is the DNA code of the human psyche. It is available for one generation, and again, in a different twist, for another. It has multiple, myriad facets. It drops into a culture like a crystal seed in a supersaturated solution, and then it blooms and blossoms. Einstein said, "If you want to make your children brilliant, tell them fairy tales. If you want to make them more brilliant, tell them more fairy tales."                                                                                                                           (Jean Houston)

 

Everything that exists comes through the imagination, is directed by the will, and expressed through the physical body.                           (David Jay Brown)

 

Concerning the imagination-will-body triangle, consider the placebo effect. Years ago, if a patient's symptoms could not be given a diagnostic label, the doctor would say, "It's just your imagination." As you know a certain percentage of the population is cured by taking a medicine that has no curative property; it is just a pill with nothing in it. How do these people get well? It seems to me that their will to get well directs their imagination which on its own, in turn, influences body chemistry. I suppose that those people who are healed by a placebo have a closer connection, maybe a direct line from the will to the imagination and body.

Which brings up the point that in identical situations, one person may die and another not die. Now I think that maybe in one the connection of will (in this case the will to die) to imagination and body was stronger than in the other.                                                                                                                                                                        (Laura Huxley)

 

It is increasingly clear that the way we treat our body-mind is the way our body-mind will treat us. The Golden Rule applies here too. It is amazing to me that the two main branches of therapies, psychotherapy and somatic therapy, are kept separate, when in fact, every state of being is either psychosomatic or somato-psychic. What else is there? I see the human being as a circle and all the points on the circle must be considered important. If you take away even the smallest point out of the circle, the circle is no more a circle. The optimum is, in my view, that kind of education or therapy that contacts as many points of the circle of the human being as possible. To contact only the intellectual, emotional, or social points of the human being without involving the body through which the intellect and emotion are expressed is inadequate and the outcome is slower and not on the high level of excellence it might be…. What I mean is synchronizing the psyche and somatic therapy. One must be aware of how the emotions play on the body and how one can use the body to transform emotion. It is exorcism through exercise.                                   (ibid)

 

Prayer of the Unconceived

 

Men and women who are on Earth

You are our creators.

We, the unconceived, beseech you:

Let us have living bread.

The builder of our new body

Let us have pure water

The vitalizer of our blood.

Let us have clean air

So that every breath is a caress

Let us feel the petals of jasmine and roses

Which are as tender as our skin.

 

Men and women who are the Earth

You are our creators.

We, the unconceived, beseech you:

Do not give us a world of rage and fear

For our minds will be rage and fear.

Do not give us violence and pollution

For our bodies will be disease and abomination.

Let us be wherever we are

Rather than bringing us

Into a tormented self-destroying humanity.

 

Men and women who are the Earth

You are our creators.

We, the unconceived, beseech you:

If you are ready to love and be loved,

Invite us to this Earth

Of the Thousand Wonders

And we will be born

To love and be loved.

(Laura Huxley)

 

 

Every parting gives a foretaste of death, every reunion a hint of resurrection.                                                                            (Arthur Schopenhauer)

 

In the ‘free’ market, free speech has become a commodity like everything else—justice, human rights, drinking water, clean air. It’s available only to those who can afford it. And naturally, those who can afford it use free speech to manufacture the kind of product, confect the kind of public opinion, that best suits their purpose.             (Arundhati Roy)

 

Nobody can give you freedom. Nobody can give you equality or justice or anything. If you're a man, you take it.                        (Malcolm X)

 

It was William Wallace, as played by Mel Gibson in the movie Braveheart, who exhorted his ragtag Scottish army to rally and defeat numerically-superior British forces with the following:  “Aye. Fight and you may die.  Run and you will live - at least, a while.  And, dying in your beds, many years from now, would you be willing to trade all the days, from this day to that, for one chance - just one chance – to come back here and tell our enemies that they may take our lives, but they will never take our freedom?"                                           (Edgar J. Steele)

 

A tyrant must put on the appearance of uncommon devotion to religion. Subjects are less apprehensive of illegal treatment from a ruler whom they consider to be God-fearing and pious.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                 (Aristotle, 343 B.C).

 

We must labor to keep alive in our hearts that celestial fire called conscience.                                                                                         (George Washington)

 

Moving farther beyond the confines of the human experience and conventional theories of militarism and empire, an explanation may lie - and indeed be observed in the microcosm of human behavior - in what physicists call the “string” theory.  This theory that apparently unites general relativity with quantum mechanics suggests that everything in the universe, including space that appears to be dark to the human (and the telescopic and scientifically measurable) eye, is composed of a fabric of vibrating strings too small to be measured in any known way, but that are logically independent (individuals, if you will) parts of the whole, operating on a dazzling array of frequencies. That there are humans who, consciously or not, operate as over-the-top aggressive sharks in moderating the entire chain of life on Earth - and that there are humans of other inclinations of thought - could be a product of this theory as well.  Most significantly, and offering a thrillingly hopeful possibility, the theory also suggests that the cosmos is progressing toward a kind of intelligent balance of positive-activist unity, and that everything in the cosmos is part of that progression. 

In fact, personally, this explains the lifelong driving force that continues to sustain my positive activism.  Long before I heard of string theory, my motivation was that we are challenged by a worthy opportunity in the harshest of circumstances and the most dangerous of times surrounding human activity (that we know of), and that perhaps this was a choice made by or for us because it generates a brilliance of positive energy, or ultimately has the potential to do so.  In this respect, we are part of a symphony, seeking to play in tune with an orchestra that we can neither see nor yet imagine.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                           (Brian Bogart)

 

Do you know Candice Pert's work? Well, she's found fifty-two peptides in the brain that control mood. As Pert said, "Once we understand the chemistry of the brain there will be no use for psychoanalysis." She said that the brain is a huge, diverse chemical factory. We cannot make generalizations about any one of these yet but, for instance, if you give an overdose of this one people get depressed, if you give an overdose of that one they get euphoria, and so on. If you OD on cocaine your brain changes its operation, but if you're aware of this - and you pay attention you realize that yes, it modifies some things, but it doesn't always do it in the same way. So there's this continuous modulation of life versus brain chemistry. So I gave up long ago trying to figure out how the brain works because it's so immense and so complex. We don't yet know how thought is connected to operations in the brain!                                                                          (John Lily)

 

There's no way to tell what the hell language the brain uses. Sure, you can show digital operations of the brain, you can analyze neural impulses traveling down your axons, but what are those? Well, as far as I can see they are just a recovery from a system that's in the middle of the axon, and that's operating at the speed of light. Neuronal impulses going down the axons are just clearing up the laser points so that it's ready for the next one, continuously. It's like sleep. Sleep is a state in which the human bio-computer integrates and analyzes what went on the previous time it was outside, throws out all the memories that aren't going to be useful tomorrow and stores only those memories which will be useful. So it's a process like a big computer in which you have to empty memory and start over. We do this all the time.

This process comprises no particular interest in our survival, since we're just a minute part of what's going on. I call this “process” ECCO (The Earth Coincidence Control Office) and it's totally impersonal. It's way beyond what people can understand except in a ketamine or LSD state. Then ECCO tells you, well we're at a low level, there are influences above us. It would be nice to meet these entities that experience these various states. They won't take human form, though; it's a waste of their time. And once I joined ECCO and realized that that's where I came from and that I had gotten bored and become human in order to have some different experiences with a smaller intelligence. It's like becoming a cat or something, to find out what's going on with the cat.             (John Lily)

 

[at the end of her book] …Our document, though in its own way eloquent, is on many subjects mute. We may call Eurydice forth from the world of the dead, but we cannot make her answer; and when we turn to look at her we glimpse her only for a moment, before she slips from our grasp and flees. As all historians know, the past is a great darkness, and filled with echoes. Voices may reach us from it; but what they say to us is imbued with the obscurity of the matrix out of which they come; and, try as we may, we cannot always decipher them precisely in the clearer light of our own day.                                                                                                                                            (Margaret Atwood - “The Handmaid’s Tale”)

 

Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired, signifies in the final sense a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.                                                                                                                                                                                              (Dwight D. Eisenhower)

Contemporary psychological research has revealed Leonardo da Vinci-like info about the extent of our potential. Our brains are much better than we think. They are more flexible and multi-dimensional than any computer. They can learn seven facts per second, every second, for the rest of our lives--and there's still plenty of RAM to go. If used properly, our brains improve with age. And this is not just in our heads--it's in every cell of our bodies. Mona Lisa is winking at us. How totally Renaissance!                   (Robert Genn)

If the only prayer you ever say in your life is “thank you”, that would suffice.                                                                                                       (Meister Eckhart)

 

What happens to another, whether it be a joy or a sorrow, happens to me.                                                                                                        (ibid)

 

When I return to the source, the core, the fountain of the Godhead, no one will ask what I've been doing. No one will have missed me.                   (ibid)

[What he's really saying is that there's no judgment.]

 

Revelation comes in two volumes; the Bible and Nature.                                                                                                                           (Thomas Aquinas)

 

It seems to me the universe is like a self-awareness machine. I think the world was created for each individual to manifest the boundless experiences of identity with the entire universe, and with the pregnant void that gives birth to the phenomenal universe. That's the Logos. That's the point of a universe, to increase complexity and self-awareness. The evolution of consciousness is the counter-force to the entropic laws of thermodynamics that end in stasis, heat death, and the loss of order. The evolution of consciousness appears to gain complexity, mastery, and wisdom.

Lessons are learned over a lifetime-- maybe many lifetimes. And the soul grows and hopefully attains a state of spiritual awakenedness. Buddha was the "Awakened One". To be able to access all the simultaneous parallel dimensions, and come from a ground of love and infinite compassion like the awakenedness of the Buddha, is a good goal for the evolution of consciousness. The spiritual "fruit" in many spiritual paths is compassion and wisdom.                                                                                                                                                     (Alex Grey – visionary artist)

 

Metaphorically, the path of the wounded healer, or the journey of the shaman has very important implications for the future of spirituality. No other metaphor sufficiently deals with the journey of humanity. We are wounded, and whether we're going to be the wounded victim - or the wounded healer - is our choice. We have wounded the planet. We have wounded our genes. We've wounded the coming generations. Whether we make some remediation to the environment, and to our psyches, is something that only time will tell.                                                                   (ibid)

 

As to what happens to human consciousness after biological death - I accept the near-death research and Tibetan bardo explanations. Soon after physical death, when the senses shut down, you enter into the realms of light and archetypal beings. You have the potential to realize the clear light, our deepest and truest identity, if you recognize it as the true nature of your mind and are not freaked out. If you don't, you may contact other less appealing dimensions. No one can know, of course until they get there. Some people have had experiences which give them certainty, but consciousness is the ultimate mystery. I'd like to surrender to the process on it's deepest level when death occurs, but I will probably fail, and be back to interview you in the next lifetime.                                      (ibid)

 

As to the concept of God - even though Buddhists would not use the word God, the non-dual nature of mind, voidness, clarity, and infinite compassion, as described in the Buddhist teachings, is not different than the experience that I call God. Ken Wilber uses the ladder metaphor. There are different rungs, the material realm, the emotional, the mental, then the psychical, and progressively more spiritual hierarchies of states of consciousness and awareness. The highest rungs of the ladder give one the highest context, wherein the entire ladder is seen. The experience of God is the highest rung, and also the entire ladder. That's the transcendent and the immanent aspects of God. God is the beyond and also the manifest world - "the entire field of events and meanings" as Manjushrimitra puts it. One without the other is not the full picture.                                                                                                                                                                                                                (ibid)

 

As to an intelligent design in the universe -  Absolutely. Wilber says that the materialists can't offer more than a "whoops!" theory for the universe manifesting. Whoops, it occurred by some chance. That's an infantile orientation to the complexity and beauty of the evolutionary design of the earth and cosmos. I think we can come up with something deeper. Spirit, God, Primordial Nature of the Mind, whatever you call it, is the source and goal of it all.                                                                                                                                                                                                         (ibid)

 

Since I want to make art that deals with the nature of consciousness and spirit, I have to experience higher dimensions of consciousness. For instance, during a psychedelic trip I will have visions that are crystallizations of my life experience, or something completely surprising. You may enter a dimension that you've never known before, and it seems very real, more real than this phenomenal world. That "other" reality seems to be tinkering with this one, or acting like a puppet-master to this one. I want to reveal the inter-relationships between the different dimensions in my work - to act as a bridge between dimensions.

Consciousness is that bridge. Making inter-dimensionality visible validates it for people who have had that experience. They can see a picture outside of their own heads, and say, "It was something like this. I'm not crazy." There's plenty of people who've had those experiences. Perhaps the work can be useful in that way. I've talked to people who use my paintings as a tool to access the dimensions that are represented. Some people trip and look at the book, or look at the art, and key into the states that are symbolized there. That is a psychedelic or entheogenic full circle. I glimpsed the visions while tripping, come back and made the work. Then people trip and access the higher state that produced the vision. The painting acts a portal to the mystical dimension – to act as something like an access code, or a doorway to a particular dimension, reality, or vibration. That is the real usefulness of the work, and it is the great thing about any sacred art.                                        (ibid)

 

I am hopeful about the future evolution of the human species. I am hopeful because I have the impression that more and more human individuals are becoming conscious, and that the creative spirit, which we call “God,” speaks to us through his creation--through the endlessness of the starry sky, through the beauty and wonder of the living individuals of the plant, the animal, and the human kingdoms.
We human beings are able to understand this message because we possess the divine gift of consciousness. This connects us to the universal mind and gives us divine creativity. Any means that helps to expand our individual consciousness--by opening up and sharpening our inner and outer eyes, in order to understand the divine universal message--will help humanity to survive. An understanding of the divine message--in its universal language--would bring an end to the war between the religions of the world.                                                                ( Albert Hofmann – discoverer of LSD)

 

 

Q: What do you think happens after biological death and has your experience with lucid dreaming influenced your thoughts in this area and about the nature of God?

A: Let’s suppose I’m having a lucid dream. The first thing I think is, "Oh this is a dream, here I am." Now the "I" here is who I think Stephen is. Now what’s happening in fact is that Stephen is asleep in bed somewhere, not in this world at all, and he’s having a dream that he’s in this room talking to you. With a little bit of lucidity I’d say, "this is a dream, and you’re all in my dream." A little more lucidity and I’d know you’re a dream figure and this is a dream-table, and this must be a dream-shirt and a dream-watch and what’s this? It’s got to be a dream-hand and well, so what’s this? It’s a dream-Stephen! So a moment ago I thought this is who I am and now I know that it’s just a mental model of who I am. So reasoning along those lines, I thought, I’d like to have a sense of what my deepest identity is, what’s my highest potential, which level is the realest in a sense? With that in mind at the beginning of a lucid dream, I was driving in my sports car down through the green, Spring countryside. I see an attractive hitchhiker at the side of the road, thought of picking her up but said, "No, I’ve already had that dream, I want this to be a representation of my highest potential. So the moment I had that thought and decided to forgo the immediate pleasure, the car started to fly into the air and the car disappeared and my body, also. There were symbols of traditional religions in the clouds, the Star of David and the cross and the steeple and near-eastern symbols. As I passed through that realm, higher beyond the clouds, I entered into a vast emptiness of space that was infinite and it was filled with potential and love. And the feeling I had was-- this is home! This is where I’m from and I’d forgotten that it was here. I was overwhelmed with joy about the fact that this source of being was immediately present, that it was always here, and I had not been seeing it because of what was in my way. So I started singing for joy with a voice that spanned three or four octaves and resonated with the cosmos with words like, "I Praise Thee, O Lord!" There wasn’t any I, there was no thee, no Lord, no duality somehow but sort of, ‘Praise Be’ was the feeling of it. My belief is that the experience I had of this void, that’s what you get if you take away the brain. When I thought about the meaning of that, I recognized that the deepest identity I had there was the source of being, the all and nothing that was here right now, that was what I was too, in addition to being Stephen. So the analogy that I use for understanding this is that we have these separate snowflake identities. Every snowflake is different in the same sense that each one of us is, in fact, distinct. So here is death, and here’s the snowflake and we’re falling into the infinite ocean. So what do we fear? We fear that we’re going to lose our identity, we’ll be melted, dissolved in that ocean and we’ll be gone; but what may happen is that the snowflake hits the ocean and feels an infinite expansion of identity and realizes, what I was in essence, was water! So we’re each one of these little frozen droplets and we feel only our individuality, but not our substance, but our essential substance is common to everything in that sense, so now God is the ocean. So we’re each a little droplet of that ocean, identifying only with the form of the droplet and not with the majesty and the unity.                                                                                                                                  (Stephen La Berge)

 

Q: Do you believe that the soul then reincarnates into another form?

A: There may be intermediate states where "to press the metaphor" the seed crystal is recycled and makes another snowflake in a similar form or something like that, but that’s not my concern. My concern is with the ocean, that’s what I care about. So whether or not Stephen, or some deeper identity of Stephen survives, well that’d be nice if that were so, but how can one not be satisfied with being the ocean?                                                                                                                                                                                                                    (Stephen La Berge)

 

It is no measure of health to be sane in an insane society.                                                                                                                         (Krishnamurti)

 

The fact that two people can communicate is a fundamentally mysterious thing, it's not understood. You can go out and buy books that try and explain how two people communicate and you will see very clearly that the authors do not know. It's philosophically mysterious, it's scientifically mysterious, it's an area of totally wild unknown. There's not even a beginning of a possible explanation for it.

I think one of the greatest intellectual sins that we've committed is that we've somehow created this world view that we don't live surrounded by mystery. This is something which is abhorrent to a real scientist and to a real artist. Science is based on mystery and on not really trusting your theories thus far, but having them always subject to change.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                         (Jaron Lanier - Inventor of Virtual Reality)

 

Evolution only proceeds when people die before they reproduce, or when they just fail to reproduce as a result of their adaptation to their environment. Without death you don't have evolution. The way you are now, almost everything about you, the way your fingers work, the way your nostrils point down, the way you think, to a large degree; all this is the result of countless millions of deaths of incredible suffering. It's an extraordinary thing.   …....  To address the cosmic long-term, I have this ultimate creation myth I made up as a way to think about people and technology:

Once a long, long time ago, our ancestors were very highly technological people. They even built time-machines that worked and transporter booths like they use in Star Trek. So, what happened is, this certain point came where they had all this great technology, and they suddenly stopped experiencing anything. They already had the future at hand, because of their time machines, so there were no surprises, and everything just kind of stopped. So they had a meeting, as they knew they were about to, (laughter) in which they said, "Well, this sucks! Let's create a situation in which we drop all this technology, forget all of it and we'll become cave men and women and fight saber-toothed tigers and then we'll just gradually build it up again. They knew that they and their descendants would go through tremendous pain, but it sort of didn't matter to them because they could see the whole future and see that they would just come back to the same place eventually. And we descended from them.                                                                                                                                                                                          (ibid)

 

As to what happens when we die, I think the only thing it's possible to talk about is how our idea and perception of our own death effects our life now. I mean, it's just out of the bounds of the possible for discussion and thought.

There are the two big limitations you have to live with. By a certain age, you've dealt with the lack of total godlike power over the universe and the limitations of the body, but your own mortality usually takes longer to come to grips with.

One way to explain mortality is to imagine a universe where we were unlimited and to see that that wouldn't lead to any experience at all, like in the above techno-creation myth. A person with a time-machine is essentially immortal. The people in my story overcame the two basic human limitations and the penalty they paid was to cease to have experience.

Now let's suppose my creation myth is true. It's just a techno version of the old "perennial philosophy", so who knows? Then the ultimate truth of our situation would be found in the eternal cyclical story of our ancestor/descendants having their meeting without any sense of surprise or experience, which results in a perpetual grand cycle of induced amnesia which allows our lives to happen. Some sort of stillness which has to forget itself in order to give birth to experience seems like a reasonable metaphysics. What else could be going on?

Now, if this is right, we don't know how many worlds there might be between us and that ultimate reality in which there is no experience. So, maybe there is some kind of afterlife or heaven that's between us and that ultimate thing, but that ultimate thing must be there - however many layers there might be between us and it.

And in that ultimate place there is no experience. Experience only happens within the context of ignorance of the next moment and ignorance in general. So our deaths allow us to experience.

Having said that, it would be nice if life were longer, but that's another problem. So, death represents a necessary ignorance without which you couldn't have experience. It's an inevitable thing, and I think that all beings and all realities in all possible planes of existence have something analogous to it.                                                                    (ibid)

 

In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of misplaced power, whether sought or unsought by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist. We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties and democratic processes.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                            (Dwight D. Eisenhower - 17-01-1961)

 

I certainly believe in God, in a divine force. One of the things about being both Buddhist and Christian is I often wonder what kind of prayer I'll do on my death bed, and into whose arms I will shoot my consciousness-- whether into the lap of the Buddha or Jesus. This is quite a conundrum really. One of the things I find is that Buddhism is so much more sophisticated philosophically than Christianity. I also believe that my philosophy effects what happens after I die.

The Tibetans think that everything we do effects what happens after we die. I think a lot of our lives are about how we die. How we die is very important. A lot of spiritual practice is preparation for death. To die gracefully is one of the most important things there is.                                                                                                            (Jill Purce)

 

Our whole body is based on resonance, on the regularities and the periodices of movements-- as are all physicalities. If you ever see a film of human fertilization, the first thing that happens is that the zygote-- the fertilized egg-- starts to blip. It starts to beat. The whole egg pulsates in a regular manner, and that's what becomes the heart. The beat becomes the heart. That beat never stops until we die.

The rhythm starts, and everything about life is rhythmic. Every organ has its own rhythm. Even our walking is rhythmic, it's the oscillation of our limbs in a spiral manner. Everything we do is rhythmic -- our breathing, our heartbeat, our brain rhythms, our proteins, all the organs have their own rhythm.

Everything is sound and resonance. And if you don't make sound then you get out of tune. The only way we can actually put sound back inside us is by making it ourselves, playing our own instrument. We have this extraordinary ability to make sound, but if we don't do it, we become unsound, out of tune, highly strung. To be sound in mind and body means to be healthy and true.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                   (Jill Purce)

 

If there is no struggle there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom and yet depreciate agitation...want crops without plowing up the ground, they want rain without thunder and lightening. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters.... Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                         (Frederick Douglass)

 

What happens to consciousness after the physical death of the body?? I expect that what we think of as ourselves-- which is primarily personality, personal history, personality traits, and that sort of thing-- all goes away, because it's probably captured in some way in the body itself. But as to some kind of a primal awareness, I think it probably continues, because it's not clear to me that that's captured by the body. I think it's actually captured by everything. So you have a funny thing. If you go into a deep meditation, and you lose your sense of personality, that's probably similar to what it might like to be dead.

On the other hand, if you're not practiced at being in that deep state, or are not actually paying attention, it's not clear that your consciousness would stay around very long. In other words, you might have a momentary time when you have this sense of awareness, and then it just dissolves. It goes back and becomes part of the rest of everything. So it's like a drop that settles into the ocean and disappears into it. Whereas some people, who either spend a life-time preparing in meditation, or who are naturally adept, may be able to become a drop. They may be able to settle into the ocean, and still have a sense of their "dropness", even though they're kind of mushed out.

Then maybe one's sense of awareness would increase dramatically, and yet still have a sense of holding it together. Of course, all this probably occurs beyond time. The state is probably not locked into space and time as we normally think of it. So, presumably, you would have access to everything, everywhere. I imagine that something like that is the reason why ideas of reincarnation have come about, because people remember something about it. They may even remember something about the process of coming out of this ocean into a drop, into a particular incarnation, because the drop becomes embodied in a sense. And maybe that's out of choice.                                                                                                              (Dean Radin)

 

What do I think happens to consciousness after death??   I think it continues, but in some unknown form. I think a lot depends upon the nature of our consciousness during our lives--how attached to various levels of consensus reality it is. My late/former Zen teacher used to use the analogy of a light bulb, with electric current passing through it. The light bulb goes out, but the current continues, "changed" in a way, for its experience in the bulb. He also referred to "like gravitating toward like" in terms of the idea of the need for certain aspects of consciousness to develop further, before it can return to its source. That is, dog-like aspects of our consciousness end up in a dog, human-like aspects get worked through in another human, plant-like aspects into plants, and so on.
As to my perspective on the concept of God?  I'm working on it. Put simply, I think God is the creator and sustainer of this whole scene. And, the creator and sustainer of cause-and-effect, which for many Buddhists, is equivalent to God, but by not “believing” in God, they get to sidestep the whole issue of a beginning or an end—which I believe, is extraordinarily important.                                                                                                                                                                                               (Dr. Rick Strassman)

 

I believe that what happens to consciousness after the death of the body is a function of the level of evolution of the individual psychic DNA code, or whatever. I think that if you have finished your work and you're just awareness that happens to be in a body, when the body ends it's like selling your Ford - it's no big deal.

Then the question is, what of you is left after that? If you're fully enlightened, nothing of you is left because nothing was there before. If there's something before, there will probably be something after, and it will project onward. I can imagine beings that are so dense and caught in life that when they die, there is no place in awareness that they can conceive of the fact that they're dead. The word conceive in this context is strange because they have no brain, so it really raises questions about who is thinking this. But I think that identifying the brain with thought is a mistake, I think that the brain is a way of manifesting the thought but I don't think that it is actually an isomorphic thing.

So, I suspect that some beings go unconscious, they go into what Christians call purgatory. They go to sleep during that process before they project into the next form. Others I think go through and are aware they are going through it, but are still caught. All the bardos in the Tibetan Book of the Dead are about how to avoid getting caught.

Those beings are awake enough for them to be collaborators in the appreciation of the gestalt in which their incarnations are flowing. They sort of see where they're coming from and where they're going. They are all part of the design of things. So, when you say, did you choose to incarnate? At the level at which you are free, you did choose. At the level at which you are not - you didn't.

And then there are beings who are so free that when they go through they may still have separateness. They may have taken the Bodhisatva vow which says, `I agree to not give up separateness until everybody is free,' and they're left with that thought. They don't have anything else. Then the next incarnation will be out of the intention to save all beings and not out of personal karma. That one bit of personal karma is what keeps it moving.

To me, since nothing happened anyway, it's all an illusion - reincarnation and everything - but within the relative reality in which that's real, I think it's quite real.

                                                                                                                                                                                                (Baba Ram Dass)

 

[Later, after a major stroke which crippled his body and powers of speech]       After the death of the body I think ones consciousness jumps into a body of some kind, on some plane of existence, and it goes on doing that until – in a Buddhist sense – it jumps into form until it merges into formlessness. From a Hindu point of view, consciousness keeps going through reincarnations, which are learning experiences for the soul.                                                                                                                                                         (Baba Ram Dass)

A man found an eagle's egg and put it in a nest of a barnyard hen. The eaglet hatched with the brood of chicks and grew up with them. All his life the eagle did what the barnyard chicks did, thinking he was a barnyard chicken. He scratched the earth for worms and insects. He clucked and cackled. And he would thrash his wings and fly a few feet into the air. Years passed and the eagle grew very old. One day he saw a magnificent bird above him in the cloudless sky. It glided in graceful majesty among the powerful wind currents, with scarcely a beat of its strong golden wings. The old eagle looked up in awe. "Who's that?" he asked. "That's the eagle, the king of the birds," said his neighbor. "He belongs to the sky. We belong to the earth--we're chickens." So the eagle lived and died a chicken, for that's what he thought he was.                                                 (Anthony deMello – Awareness)

There are several psychic, or personal, or spiritual kinds of destinies:

The thing is that most of us aren't at all original. We mostly take on opinions from the available variety on the market, and when you come to the question of individual destiny, you know, there's several traditional theories. One is that when we die, that's it, everything just goes blank, and so the only purpose of life is to enjoy it while it's happening. There's nothing beyond. This is the classic materialist or Epicurean view of life.

Then there are those who think that after death we go into a kind of underworld, and our destiny is to join the ancestors, and that basically we're just cycled back into a kind of eternally cycling pool of life. This is found in traditional societies where it's not believed that things change much over time, so the ancestors are constantly being recycled among the living, and they're a living force. But people don't have any individual destiny other than becoming merged with the ancestors. So that would be another option.

Then there are the reincarnational theories, that you're reincarnated, and that the ultimate destiny is liberation from the wheels of reincarnation. The boddhisatva ideal in Buddhism is to become liberated and then help others to become liberated. But if you don't aspire towards that end, which is the ultimate human end, namely liberation, then through karmic activities and involvement with this life you'll simply be reborn and keep being reborn until you move towards this end or goal which may take many lifetimes to achieve.

Then there's the view you find among Christians and Moslems, which is that there's another realm after this life in which you can undergo continued development or some further destiny, different destinies, depending on how you behave and what you want in this life. So, I mean there are many choices, and that's one of the areas in which choice or freedom comes in. We choose which of these kinds of destiny we want to align ourselves with. Or if we don't think about it or don't choose, then we just fall to the lowest common denominator.             (Rupert Sheldrake)

Travel in all the four quarters of the earth, yet you will find nothing anywhere. Whatever there is, is only here.                                    (Ramakrishna)

Nothing is more apt to deceive us than our own judgment of our work. We derive more benefit from having our faults pointed out by our enemies than from hearing the opinions of friends.

                                                                                                                                                                                                                        (Leonardo da Vinci 1452-1519)

Nothing at last is sacred but the integrity of your mind.                                                                                                                  (Ralph Waldo Emerson - Self-Reliance)

The cosmic food-chain is an energy symbiosis, from the plants that feed off the sun to the devas and asuras that fed off the astral emanations of collective human thought. Just as we corral beasts to keep them in their place for our use, and as we sit on the fence and watch them ruminate all day long, we wonder how they can stand to eat all the time; so do the gods and demons corral us in history, and as they sit on the edge, they wonder how we can stand to think all day long. Within our corrals of history they come to stir up our wars and passions, so that we can be fat with the astral emanations that sustain them. Knowing that we are afraid of death, they catch us with its linked opposite, sexuality. Eros is thus the attractive jailkeeper in the prison of Thanatos. 

(William Irwin Thompson, Passages About Earth)

 

We are experiencing the initiation of the human race into a new level of consciousness, and that is a very terrifying experience. It does no good to turn and run from the terror of our darkness into light; we must sit it out: zazen. We must take our counsel from The Tibetan Book of the Dead and realize that these frightening projections of famines, economic disasters, ecological catastrophes, floods, earthquakes, and wars are all only the malevolent aspects of beneficent deities. If we sit and observe them, do not identify with them, but remember our Buddha-nature, we will not be dragged down by them into an incarnation of the hell they prefigure. If we run from them, we validate them; we give the projections the very psychic energy they need to overtake us. Then, as Jung has pointed out, the situation will happen outside as fate.                                                                                                                                                                                               (William Irwin Thompson, Evil and World Order)

 

 

Q: The cultural link between sex and death was foreshadowed by their simultaneous biological arrival, but I'm wondering if you on some level see an even deeper link between sex and death; something in the universe's history prior to that which connects them.

A: Sex and death is basic to the structure of myth, long before Freud. Death is really a definition of individuation. If you don't have a discrete cell with a nucleus that dies, if you just repeat cell division ad infinitum, then the process is plasmic and universal and extended, but like bacteria that don't have a nucleus it's not highly individuated. It's so collective that it's not a discretely located genetically-defined individual.

One of the things that I'm fascinated with in myth is how every structural transition within cultural transformation is characterized by loss and a dark age. Then after that there is an opening to the unimaginable. Something else happens like Cretaceous extinction and the occurrence of mammals after the dinosaurs. This is one reason why I don't buy into cryogenics and the ego's cry of “I don't want to die!” Death is part of what enables individuation to be possible.

In a Greek tragedy it gives it poignancy. What is opera about? The guy is about to die and the woman sings an aria, "Addio vita!" Goodbye life! So the whole nature of romantic art, poetry, opera, Greek tragedy, is all about the intensity of death and its linked opposite of sex and orgasmic ecstasy.

I think that on some level this is an evolutionary commitment to energizing the universal by energizing the unique. It's a kind of Mobius strip where the unique and the universal cross in more interesting ways than with bacteria where it's the unit and the uniform. So fascist states that try to compress with a single center like the old Soviet Union, tend not to carry much evolutionary energy.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                          (William Irwin Thompson)


What do I think happens to human consciousness after death??  I think that when you're alive, you weave a subtle body and that it's composed out of all of your thoughts - the collective ecology of your consciousness. When you die, you've actually woven your next form of incarnation, and you move into that subtle body which you've constructed throughout your life.

It isn't punishment, like going to hell, but it is remorseless. When you live in your subtle body in the bardo realm, you begin to meditate on weaving the flesh that will be the carnal form for your next incarnation. You're not alone because you're actually inside (this may seem flaky, but indulge me) an angelic body that is a collective neighborhood interacting with you.

I talked to Nechung Rinpoche who was the abbot of the largest monastery in Tibet before the communist invasion. He said that when people come together in practice they actually constellate a form of consciousness that is larger than them. The bodhisatva sends a beneficent being that takes an energy from a higher dimension, steps it down and makes it available to the people in the meditation practice. It's like when you go to a great concert and you suddenly feel that something has happened, that everybody has suddenly thrown a switch and turned on another reality.

So, our subtle bodies are woven into this larger angelic formation. I'm happy with the concept of angel but there are different words for this in different traditions; it's a transcultural phenomenon. These angelic bodies are like midwives to your own rebirth, and so when you interact with them when you die you actually go into that bardo. The paranoid way of thinking of this is abduction and flying saucers, that you're taken up into a tin can which is going to carry you to the stars. Well, all of that is misplaced concreteness for what is really angelic multi-dimensionality.

What happens at the moment of death? Well - It all depends on what you've been doing in your meditation practice. If you're a yogi, you die consciously every night - you can stop your heart and go into bardo at any time during meditation. At the moment of death, if you're really advanced, you could just stop your heart and go out through the top of your head and not have the process just inflicted upon you. And when I say "go out," I mean going out in the vehicle of thought that one weaves together throughout ones entire lifetime. And one is not alone at that time - in the subtle dimension you have your colleagues as in ‘life’. Plato discusses this in the myth of Er at the end of the Republic which is one of the first descriptions of the death experience. If you examine your dreams at night, you'll often find yourself at airports or at college campuses or at places with a lot of other people and if you start doing dream practice you notice that this stuff is already coming up.

                                                                                                                                                                                                            (William Irwin Thompson)

 

Everything that happens to us happens in our consciousness. As you read these words, they will become part of you – part of what you are aware of. They will influence you, whether you choose to discard them or accept them, depending on the degree of emotional connection you have with them.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                         (William Isaacs “Dialogue and the Art of Thinking Together”)

 

There is only one thing in your life YOU can be sure of. That one thing is this moment, now. The last moment has gone forever The next moment has not come. YOU can become fully conscious only when you are living in the moment. To begin to live in the moment you have to know it exists and understand it. To understand it you have to observe it in relation to yourself and in relation to life. When you under-stand it, when you become conscious, you will see it is all that exists. To see this is to glimpse reality.                                                             (Barry Long)

 

Nothing is ever concluded here in existence. Although everything happens here, the value of it - the essential meaning and worth - is registered in another place within…. Two laws only are behind the apparent complexity of existence. One is force, the other divine power. Force is the sexual/power drive into existence which organizes the innumerable human pairings, groupings and associations. Divine power is the irresistible pull of everything back out of existence into nothing, God or Source - hence every body dies and everything extant gradually disappears into nothing…..There is a notion that existence is an illusion. Existence is not an illusion. Existence is a projection from the inner through the brain producing the outer sensory world of what is - an amazing complete mystery. An illusion is a misinterpretation of what is. Any illusion is in the mind of the interpreter.                                                                                                        {ibid)

 

At night the smudge pots illuminate the winding hillside path up to Gloria's and lights from the beach restaurants are so subdued as to not occlude our view of the constellations above. In the pastel pre-dawns, the new moon arcs above, and the high January tides of the night have firmed the beach for long walks and Tai Chi. Huge waves curl in from across the Pacific and the odd surfer exercises his board. Schools of fish can be seen swimming the curls parallel to the beach, and flocks of pelicans glide the crests, rise, aim and plummet into the schools. The breezes are light and warm, with occasional salty mists borne on the sea breeze. Beach dogs cavort out front, and a thrush calls from the roof of our open palapa to his neighbour in a coco palm.

Another day gears in, another experience on the Wheel.                                                                                             (from “The Mexlogues”, in Remedy’s Our Stories’)

 

O Nature, and O soul of man!

How far beyond all utterance are your linked analogies!

Not the smallest atom stirs or lives in matter,

But has its cunning duplicate in mind.                                                                 (Herman Melville “Moby Dick”)

 

Defeat I shall not know. It shall not touch me. I will meet it with true thinking. Resisting it will be my strengthening. But if, perchance, the day will give me the bitter cup, it will sweeten in the drinking.                                                                                                                                                                                                      (Walter Russell)

 

“Dialogue is group magic  - the experiences that inform. They are extraordinary but they are also ordinary because they happen every day in all kinds of contexts to ordinary people. They are difficult to describe, but we know when they have occurred. It is in the space between us, beyond the level of intellectual exchange, and felt in a different way than as a meeting of the minds. It is a meeting, but one of a different sort: it is a meeting of hearts, of souls, of energies, and memories, and although it exists in the realm of physical space and time, it may reflect a dimension beyond the immediate interaction.

This collective resonance is, by my definition, a felt sense of energy, rhythm, or intuitive knowing that occurs in a group of human beings and positively affects the way they interact toward a common purpose. … It is a level that operates constantly when human beings interact in the same space, whether or not they are communicating verbally. It is based on the laws of physics, that vibrating bodies in this case, human beings transmit and receive sound waves that impact one another. When waves of similar enough frequency interact, they can entrain or become one wave with greater amplitude”.

(Renee Levi – from a phenomenological study completed as part of her doctoral work in organizational systems)

 

“Beyond the individual physical and psychological health benefits available through learning to listen to heart messages, hearts may be able to communicate with other hearts directly, exchanging messages of empathy, connection, and love that, if noticed and valued, could provide direction for future action toward a different way of living together in the world.”                    (Renee Levi)

 

When men go to war, what they want is to impose on their enemies the victor's will and call it peace.                                                                                                      (St. Augustine)

 

Each and every master, regardless of the era or place, heard the call and attained harmony with heaven and earth. There are many paths leading to the top of Mount Fuji, but there is only one summit—love.                                                                                                                                           (Morihei Ueshiba, the originator-master of Aikido)

 

For happiness, how little suffices for happiness! ….. the least thing precisely, the gen­tlest thing, the lightest thing, a lizard's rustling, a breath, a wisk, an eye glance - little maketh up the best happiness. Be still.                                                                                                                                                                (Nietzsche – “Thus Spake Zarathustra”)

 

To be a philosopher is not merely to have subtle thoughts, nor even to found a school. . . . It is to solve some of the problems of life, not theoretically, but practically.                                                                                                                                                                                                         (Henry David Thoreau)

 

What cannot be seen with the eye, but that whereby the eye can see: know that alone to be Brahman the Spirit and not what people here adore. What cannot be heard with the ear but that whereby the ear can hear: know that alone to be Brahman the Spirit and not what people here adore... . What cannot be thought with the mind, but that whereby the mind can think: know that alone to be Brahman the Spirit and not what people here adore.                                                                                                                    (Kena Upanishad)

[God, the scripture is saying, is formless consciousness and the essence of who you are. Everything else is form, is “what people here adore”]

                                               

There have always been tyrants and murderers, and for a time they can seem invincible, but in the end they always fall. Think of it....always.       (Ghandi)

 

Only a few achieve the colossal task of holding together, without being split asunder, the clarity of their vision alongside an ability to take their place in a materialistic world.  They are the modern heroes. . . . Artists at least have a form within which they can hold their own conflicting opposites together.  But there are some who have no recognized artistic form to serve this purpose, they are artists of the living.  To my mind these last are the supreme heroes in our soulless society.                                                                    (Irene Claremont de Castillejo)

 

ECKHART TOLLE TIPS

Stay fully present in the now—your whole life unfolds here. In the now there is joy of Being and deep peace. 

Be present as the watcher of the mind. 

Just observe and feel—do not judge anything. 

Do not wish the present moment to be different from what it is. 

Make it a habit to feel your body from inside as often as possible. The body is always in the present. Only thinking moves to the future or past.

An enlightened person has the main focus of his attention always in the present moment. He is only peripherally aware of past and future-only in as much as it is necessary to function in daily life. Allow the present moment to be and do not wish it to be different.

 

Ripples on the Surface of Being

Q (Andrew Cohen) Often the word enlightenment is interpreted to mean the end of division within the self and the simultaneous discovery of a perspective or way of seeing that is whole, complete, or free from duality. Some who have experienced this perspective claim that the ultimate realization is that there is no difference between the world and God or the Absolute, between samsara and nirvana, between the manifest and the unmanifest. But there are others who claim that, in fact, the ultimate realization is that the world doesn’t actually exist at all—that the world is only an illusion, completely empty of meaning, significance, or reality. So in your own experience, is the world real? Is the world unreal? Both?

 

A (Eckhart Tolle) Even when I’m interacting with people or walking in a city, doing ordinary things, the way I perceive the world is like ripples on the surface of being. Underneath the world of sense perceptions and the world of mind activity, there is the vastness of being. There’s a vast spaciousness. There’s a vast stillness and there’s a little ripple activity on the surface, which isn’t separate, just like the ripples are not separate from the ocean.

So there is no separation in the way I perceive it. There is no separation between being and the manifested world, between the manifested and the unmanifested. But the unmanifested is so much vaster, deeper, and greater than what happens in the manifested. Every phenomenon in the manifested is so short-lived and so fleeting that, yes, one could almost say that from the perspective of the unmanifested, which is the timeless beingness or presence, all that happens in the manifested realm really seems like a play of shadows. It seems like vapor or mist with continuously new forms arising and disappearing, arising and disappearing. So to the one who is deeply rooted in the unmanifested, the manifested could very easily be called unreal. I don’t call it unreal because I see it as not separate from anything.

…within every form that is subject to birth and death, there is the deathless. The essence of every form is the deathless. Even the essence of a blade of grass is the deathless. And that’s why the world of form is sacred. It’s not that the realm of the sacred is exclusively being or the unmanifested. Even the world of form I see as sacred.

 

There is something mysterious and whole, which existed before heaven and earth. Silent, formless, complete, and never changing. Living eternally everywhere in perfection, it is the mother of all things. I do not know its name; I call it the Way.                                                                                               ( Lao Tzu)

 

The more I work,

the more I see things differently.

 

That is, everything gains in grandeur every day-

becomes more and more unknown,

more and more beautiful.

 

The closer I come, the grander it is,

the more remote it is.

(Alberto Giacometti)

 

This body of ours is something like an electric battery in which a mysterious power latently lies. When this power is not properly brought into operation, it either grows mouldy and withers away or is warped and expresses itself abnormally. It is the object of Zen, therefore, to save us from going crazy or being crippled.                                (D.T. Suzuki Essays in Zen Buddhism)

 

Authenticity is fundamental, more fundamental than spiritual enlightenment. Without authenticity, no genuine spiritual enlightenment is possible. Authenticity is the state of being committed to truth. ...Truth is simple, utterly so.... And no matter how simply a truth is stated, only those who have walked the path of understanding and evolution on their own can know and understand it authentically. The path of truth is the path least traveled.... Authenticity is the clarity of being in which there is no self-deceit.                                                                                                                                                                       

Why is authenticity so fundamental, and why is it more important than even spiritual enlightenment? Well - you see, our mind is extremely clever, and it has a tremendous capacity for delusion and self-deception. Authenticity is a counteraction for that self-deceit and tendency to delude oneself.

I often quote P.D. Ouspensky's simple statement that the most difficult thing in life is to know what one knows and to know what one doesn't know and to know the difference between the two. It requires a kind of honesty and authenticity to be aware of this difference and to really examine one's body of knowledge. What is it that one really knows and that one doesn't know? This is the kind of discipline that one needs to exert in one's own life. It is essential for taking advantage of the spiritual experience that one has. Otherwise, it can turn into another form of self-delusion utilized by the ego. So a person needs to have humility and authenticity with regard to the truth of the experience that they do have. And this authenticity leads one to higher and higher levels or into a more whole knowledge and understanding of the truth that is revealed to one.
When one is true to oneself, when one is authentic, one becomes true to the evolutionary thrust for self-optimization that exists within oneself and within the universe. And that evolutionary thrust is a continuous unfolding process.                                                                                                                                                         (Yasuhiko Genku Kimura)

 

You are the world. As you are woven into the fabric of the world, so is the world woven into the fabric of your being—as if holographically. You are humanity. As you are a part of humanity, humanity is a part of you. To know that you are the world, that you are humanity, is to have true compassion, and to act from this knowledge is to be moral in the deepest sense of the word. To be moral in this sense is to think freely for yourself, and to act spontaneously with others—inside the profound certainty of the universal oneness of all humanity in the world, and all existence in the universe.                                                                                                                                                                                                                            (Yasuhiko Genku Kimura)

 

That which drives your character development is your desire and intent for the self-unfoldment of the OverSoul, whereas that which drives your personality development is your desire for self-preservation through social adaptation.  You develop your character not in order to fit better in the social environment but in order to respond to the call of the OverSoul for greater self-unfoldment and higher self-evolution.                                                                                                                                                                                   (Yasuhiko Genku Kimura)

 

The human being has two wings–the wing of universality and the wing of individuality–with which to fly above the earth and to soar into the heavens. The wing of universality grows in the awareness of selflessness, while the wing of individuality grows through the creation of selfhood. In this seeming paradox lies the secret of human evolution–and of human happiness. To be universal is to be inseparably one, in the oneness of which there is no separate self. To be an individual is to be indivisibly one, in the oneness of which there is an indivisible whole self. In being universal, you come to know what Emerson calls the Over-Soul, and in being indivisibly whole, you come to realize your singular individual soul. With both wings spread freely, to soar into the whole sphere of the Universe and to fly in the entire realm of Reality is to live a Life Immortal. And that is the ecstasy of Enlightened Selfishness.                                             (Yasuhiko Genku Kimura)

 

There is a force which operates in us that I call "dynamic equilibrium." Is any effort at personal change—our own or that of others we may seek to lead—likely to be powerful without better understanding of this force in nature, our own immunity to change? Specifically, is change likely without grasping how this force expresses itself in the unique particulars of our own lives? And yet, one of the things that makes gaining this understanding so difficult is that we tend to be held captive by our own immune systems. We live inside them. We do not "have them"; they "have us." We cannot see them because we are too caught up in them.... How can we secure for ourselves the supports most likely to foster real change, change that actually escapes the immunizing gravity of our own dynamic equilibria and leads to new concentrations of energy, enhanced capacity, greater complexity? "Dynamic equilibrium."  is similar to what is called ego, or homeostasis, where people get to a certain point and they just want to stay there.                                                                                                                                                                                        (developmental psychologist Robert Kegan)

 

Whether humanity is to continue and comprehensively prosper on spaceship earth depends entirely on the integrity of the human individuals and not on the political and economic systems.                                                                                                                                                                                               (Buckminster Fuller)

 

There is nothing in all the universe so much like God as silence.                                                                                       (Meister Eckhart)

 

All that is proper to the divine nature is also proper to the just and godly man; therefore such a man performs everything that God performs, and together with God he has created heaven and earth, and he is the begetter of the eternal Word, and without such a man God could do nothing.                          (Meister Eckhart)

 

It's difficult not to feel sorry for people who see, feel, taste zero of the miraculous in the mundane plastic/electronic/metal gizmongery surrounding them; those who refuse to recognize that everything, from rock to spoon to wristwatch, contains vibration and movement and subatomic shimmy, and that we need not, therefore, be so brutally separate and distant from our things as the culture -- and even most modern religious dogma -- would have you believe.                                                                                                                            (Mark Morford)

 

Under democracy, one party always devotes its chief energies to trying to prove that the other party is unfit to rule--and both commonly succeed, and are right.

(H. L. Mencken)

 

A powerful triangle: the imagination, the will, and the body. I mean the will is ultimately what is us. We are not speaking about that stiff will that betrays the body and does not accept the imagination, but the will that is attentive to the urging of imagination, and the needs of the body. That is a triangle that responds in all ways--because the body responds to the imagination. If you would just imagine that there is a big tiger that is going to come right out and chew you, the body responds immediately. Because the imagination and the body are so close, the will has to take an overview and direct it. I have exercises for this triangle in my book Between Heaven and Earth. The will is basic, as are the two cooperators of the will--imagination and body. The will is the conductor of the rich vast orchestra of imagination and body.                                                        (Laura Huxley - Widow of Aldous Huxley)

 

The world promises fulfillment somewhere in time, and there is a continuous striving toward that fulfillment in time. Many times people feel, “Yes, now I have arrived,” and then they realize that, no, they haven’t arrived, and then the striving continues. It is expressed beautifully in A Course in Miracles, where it says that the dictum of the ego is “seek but do not find.” People look to the future for salvation, but the future never arrives.

So ultimately, suffering arises through not finding. And that is the beginning of an awakening—when the realization dawns that “perhaps this is not the way. Perhaps I will never get to where I am striving to reach; perhaps it’s not in the future at all.” After having been lost in the world, suddenly, through the pressure of suffering, the realization comes that the answers may not be found out there in worldly attainment and in the future.

How have individuals been af­fected by the technological advances of recent years?

Here is the an­swer to this question given by a philosopher-psychiatrist, Dr. Erich Fromm:

Our contemporary Western society in spite of its material, intellectual and political progress, is increasingly less con­ducive to mental health, and tends to undermine the inner security happiness, reason and the capacity for love in the individual; it tends to turn him into an automaton who pays for his human failure with increasing mental sickness, and with despair hidden under a frantic drive for work and so-called pleasure.

Our "increasing mental sickness" may find expression in neu­rotic symptoms. These symptoms are conspicuous and extremely distressing. But "let us beware," says Dr. Fromm, "of defining men­tal hygiene as the prevention of symptoms. Symptoms as such are not our enemy but our friend; where there are symptoms there is conflict, and conflict always indicates that the forces of life which strive for integration and happiness are still fighting." The really hopeless victims of mental illness are to be found among those who appear to be most normal. "Many of them are normal because they are so well adjusted to our mode of existence, because their human voice has been silenced so early in their lives, that they do not even struggle or suffer or develop symptoms as the neurotic does." They are normal not in what may be called the absolute sense of the word; they are normal only in relation to a profoundly abnormal society Their perfect adjustment to that abnormal society is a measure of their mental sickness. These millions of abnormally normal people, living without fuss in a society to which, if they were fully human beings, they ought not to be adjusted, still cherish "the illusion of individuality" but in fact they have been to a great extent deindivid­ualized. Their conformity is developing into something like unifor­mity. But "uniformity and freedom are incompatible. Uniformity and mental health are incompatible too.... Man is not made to be an automaton, and if he becomes one, the basis for mental health is destroyed. "                                                               (Aldous Huxley – Brave New World Revisited)

 

It's only when we truly know and understand that we have a limited time on earth - and that we have no way of knowing when our time is up, we will then begin to live each day to the fullest, as if it was the only one we had.                                                                                                                                                     (Dr Elisabeth Kubler Ross)

 

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

(William Butler Yeats: “The Second Coming”)

 

 

Even some philosophers have praised war as an ennoblement of humanity, forgetting the pronouncement of the Greek who said, “War is an evil inasmuch as it produces more wicked men than it takes away.”                                                                                                                                                                               (Immanuel Kant Perpetual Peace)

 

If you can accept a God who coexists with death camps, schizophrenia, and AIDS, yet remains all-powerful and somehow benign, then you have faith, and you have accepted the covenant with Yahweh.... If you know yourself as having an affinity with the alien or stranger God, cut off from this world, then you are a Gnostic, and perhaps the best and strongest moments still come to what is best and oldest in you, to a breath or spark that long precedes this Creation.                                                                                                           (Harold Bloom)

 

Between the idea and the reality,

Between the motion and the act,

Falls the Shadow.                   T. S. ELIOT (1888-1965), The Hollow Men, 1925.

 

The first grand discovery was time, the landscape of experience. Only by marking off months, weeks, and years, days and hours, minutes and seconds, would mankind be liberated from the cyclical monotony of nature. The flow of shadows, sand, and water, and time itself, translated into the clock’s staccato, became a useful measure of man’s movements across the planet … Communities of time would bring the first communities of knowledge, ways to share discovery, a common frontier of the unknown.

(DANIEL BOORSTIN (1914-2004) The Discoverers)

 

“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said in a rather scornful tone, “it means just what I chose it to mean -- neither more nor less.” “The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.” “The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master -- that’s all.”

(LEWIS CARROLL (1832-1898) Through the Looking Glass)

 

Faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.                      BIBLE, Hebrews 11:1.

 

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times; it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness; it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity; it was the season of light, it was the season of darkness; it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair; we had everything

before us, we had nothing before us; we were all going directly to Heaven, we were all going the other way.

(CHARLES DICKENS (1812-1870) A Tale of Two Cities)

 

It is scientific thinking, not religion, which is profoundly unnatural for us; no matter how science progresses, most of us will be most comfortable explaining the world through the actions of personal agents. ... For most people, learning to go without a God is a costly undertaking for no clear benefit.                                                                         (physicist Taner Edis)

 

Every one admits how praiseworthy it is in a prince to keep faith, and to live with integrity and not with craft. Nevertheless our experience has been that those princes who have done great things have held good faith of little account, and have known how to circumvent the intellect of men by craft, and in the end have overcome those who have relied on their word.                       (Niccolo Machiavelli)

 

A ruler must govern via his moral authority. The moral character of the ruler is the wind, the moral character of those beneath him is the grass. When the wind blows, the grass bends.            (Confucius)                  

 

Was some pow’re the giftie gie us

To see ourselves as others see us!

It would frae many a blunder frae us,

And foolish notion.                                                                 ROBERT BURNES (1756-1796)

 

Joseph Campbell in conversation with Bill Moyers:

Campbell – A marriage is a relationship. When you make a sacrifice in marriage, you’re not sacrificing to the other; you’re sacrificing to the relationship. This is symbolized by the Chinese image of the Tai Chi; the dark and the light interacting is the relationship of yin and yang, male and female which is what a marriage is. And this is what you are. You’re no longer separate, you’re the relationship. And so marriage is not a love affair, but is an ordeal and the ordeal is sacrifice of ego to the relationship of a twoness which now becomes the one.

Moyers – One not only biological but spiritual.

Campbell – Primarily spiritual

Moyers – But the necessary function of marriage in order to create our own images and perpetuate ourselves in children is not the primary one.

Campbell- No, it’s just the elementary aspect of marriage. There are two completely different stages of marriage. First there’s the youthful stage following the wonderful impulse you know that nature has given us in the interplay of the sexes biologically and then the production of children. But there comes a time when the child graduates from the family but the family is left. I’ve been amazed at the number of my friends who are in their 40s or 50s that go apart; who’ve had a perfectly decent life together with the child but they interpreted their union in terms of relationship through the child. They did not interpret it through their own personal relationship to each other.

 

Our beliefs are not just passive schemata or ideas, but correspond to tensions and emotional climates that, taking shape in images, become forces that orient and direct action, both individual and collective. Independent of the ethical or exemplary character they sometimes have, certain beliefs by their very nature possess great referential force. We are aware that beliefs regarding the gods are quite different from strong beliefs of a secular nature; however, even taking those differences into account, we note structures that are common to both.                            (Mario Rodrigues Cobos aka “SILO”)

The following six ideas form the foundation of the stories in my book “Guided Experiences”:

  1. Just as in dreams there appear images that are the allegorized expression of deep tensions, in daily life there occur similar phenomena, though we do not pay them much attention—these are the daydreams and mental meanderings that, converted into images, carry psychic charges that perform very important functions in our lives.
  2. Images are what allow one to move one’s body in one direction or another. But images are not only visual—there are images that correspond to each external sense, and they are what allow the consciousness to open outward into the world, mobilizing the body. Of course, since we also have internal senses, there are, correspondingly, images whose energy discharges toward the interior, and that in so doing decrease or increase tensions in the intrabody.
  3. One’s entire biography—that is, one’s memory—also acts through images that are associated with the various tensions and affective climates with which they were “recorded.”
  4. That biography is constantly acting in every one of us, and therefore we do not passively capture the world that is presented to us in each new perception, but rather our biographical images act as a previously constituted “landscape” for that perception. So it is that every day we carry out various activities during which we “cover” the world with our daydreams, compulsions, and deepest aspirations.
  5. One’s action or inhibition vis-à-vis the world is closely tied to the theme of the image, so that transformations of the image are also important keys to behavioral variation; since it is clearly possible to transform images and transfer their charges, one must therefore infer that changes in behavior do occur in these cases.
  6. In dreams and daydreams, in artistic production, and in myths, images appear that correspond to vital tensions and to those “biographies,” whether of the individual or of whole peoples; such images orient behavior (likewise individual or collective, as the case may be).

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                    (Mario Rodrigues Cobos aka “SILO”)

 

The world will always be here, and it will always be different, more varied, more interesting, more alive, but still always the world in all its complexity and incompleteness. There is nothing behind it, no absolute or platonic world to transcend to. All there is of Nature is what is around us. All there is of Being is relations among real, sensible things. All we have of natural law is a world that has made itself. All we may expect of human law is what we can negotiate among ourselves, and what we take as our responsibility. All we may gain of knowledge must be drawn from what we can see with our own eyes and what others tell us they have seen with their eyes. All we may expect of justice is compassion. All we may look up to as judges are each other. All that is possible of utopia is what we can make with our own hands. Pray let it be enough.                                                                                                                                                                                                (physicist Lee Smolin)

 

Humanism teaches us that it is immoral to wait for God to act for us. We must act to stop the wars and the crimes and the brutality of this and future ages. We have powers of a remarkable kind. We have a high degree of freedom in choosing what we will do. Humanism tells us that whatever our philosophy of the universe may be, ultimately the responsibility for the kind of world in which we live rests with us.                                                                                                              (UnitarianUniversalist Minister Kenneth Phifer)

 

Many men have got a great name from the false opinions of the crowd. And what could be baser than such a thing? For those who are falsely praised, must blush to hear their praises. And if they are justly won by merits, what can they add to the pleasure of a wise man’s conscience? For he measures his happiness not by popular talk, but by the truth of his conscience.                                                                                                                                                                                                        BOETHIUS (480-525 AD

 

The world is a dangerous place, not because of those who do evil, but because of those who look on and do nothing.                                        (Albert Einstein)

 

What is faith? Is it to believe that which is evident? No. It is perfectly evident to my mind that there exists a necessary, eternal, supreme, and intelligent being. This is no matter of faith, but of reason.                                                                                                                                                                                                      (Voltaire)

An aspect of the Secular Humanist tradition is skepticism. Skepticism's historical exemplar is Socrates. Why Socrates? Because, after all this time, he still stands out alone among all the famous saints and sages from antiquity to the present. Every religion has its sage. Judaism has Moses, Zoroastrianism has Zarathustra, Buddhism has the Buddha, Christianity has Jesus, Islam has Mohammad, Mormonism has Joseph Smith, and Bahai has Baha-u-lah. Every one of these individuals claimed to know the absolute truth. It is Socrates, alone among famous sages, who claimed to know NOTHING. Each devised a set of rules or laws, save Socrates. Instead, Socrates gave us a method --a method of questioning the rules of others, of cross- examination. And Socrates didn't die for truth, he died for rights and the rule of law. For these reasons, Socrates is the quintessential skeptical Humanist. He stands as a symbol, both of Greek rationalism and the Humanist tradition that grew out of it. And no equally recognized saint or sage has joined his company since his death.

Humanism is one of those philosophies for people who think for themselves. There is no area of thought that a Humanist is afraid to challenge and explore.

Humanism is a philosophy focused upon human means for comprehending reality. Humanists make no claims to possess or have access to supposed transcendent knowledge.

Humanism is a philosophy of reason and science in the pursuit of knowledge. Therefore, when it comes to the question of the most valid means for acquiring knowledge of the world, Humanists reject arbitrary faith, authority, revelation, and altered states of consciousness.

Humanism is a philosophy of imagination. Humanists recognize that intuitive feelings, hunches, speculation, flashes of inspiration, emotion, altered states of consciousness, and even religious experience, while not valid means to acquire knowledge, remain useful sources of ideas that can lead us to new ways of looking at the world. These ideas, after they have been assessed rationally for their usefulness, can then be put to work, often as alternate approaches for solving problems.

Humanism is a philosophy for the here and now. Humanists regard human values as making sense only in the context of human life rather than in the promise of a supposed life after death.

Humanism is a philosophy of compassion. Humanist ethics is solely concerned with meeting human needs and answering human problems--for both the individual and society--and devotes no attention to the satisfaction of the desires of supposed theological entities.

Humanism is a realistic philosophy. Humanists recognize the existence of moral dilemmas and the need for careful consideration of immediate and future consequences in moral decision making.

Humanism is in tune with the science of today. Humanists therefore recognize that we live in a natural universe of great size and age, that we evolved on this planet over a long period of time, that there is no compelling evidence for a separable "soul," and that human beings have certain built-in needs that effectively form the basis for any human-oriented value system.

Humanism is in tune with today's enlightened social thought. Humanists are committed to civil liberties, human rights, church-state separation, the extension of participatory democracy not only in government but in the workplace and education, an expansion of global consciousness and exchange of products and ideas internationally, and an open-ended approach to solving social problems, an approach that allows for the testing of new alternatives.

Humanism is in tune with new technological developments. Humanists are willing to take part in emerging scientific and technological discoveries in order to exercise their moral influence on these revolutions as they come about, especially in the interest of protecting the environment.

Humanism is, in sum, a philosophy for those in love with life. Humanists take responsibility for their own lives and relish the adventure of being part of new discoveries, seeking new knowledge, exploring new options. Instead of finding solace in prefabricated answers to the great questions of life, Humanists enjoy the open-endedness of a quest and the freedom of discovery that this entails.

                                                                                                                                                                                                                        (Frederick Edwords)

 

When I became convinced that the universe is natural, that all the ghosts and gods are myths, there entered into my brain, into my soul, into every drop of my blood the sense, the feeling, the joy of freedom. The walls of my prison crumbled and fell. The dungeon was flooded with light and all the bolts and bars and manacles became dust. I was no longer a servant, a serf, or a slave. There was for me no master in all the wide world, not even in infinite space. I was free--free to think, to express my thoughts--free to live my own ideal, free to live for myself and those I loved, free to use all my faculties, all my senses, free to spread imagination's wings, free to investigate, to guess and dream and hope, free to judge and determine for myself . . . I was free! I stood erect and fearlessly, joyously faced all worlds.                                                                                                                                                                                                                              (Robert G. Ingersoll)

 

All human beings have an innate need to hear and tell stories and to have a story to live by. … Religion, whatever else it has done, had provided one of the main ways of meeting this abiding need.                                                                                                                                                                                                      (HARVEY COX)

 

Leap over your suffering, and it will not be the abyss but life that grows within you. There is no passion, idea, or human deed that is not linked to the abyss. Therefore, let us turn to the only thing that deserves our attention: the abyss and that which overcomes it.                                                                                                                            (Mario Rodrigues Cobos aka “SILO”)

 

Namer of a thousand names, maker of meanings, transformer of the world, your parents and the parents of your parents continue in you. You are not a fallen star but a brilliant arrow flying toward the heavens. You are the meaning of the world, and when you clarify your meaning you illuminate the earth. When you lose your meaning, the earth becomes darkened and the abyss opens…..I will tell you the meaning of your life here: It is to humanize the earth. And what does it mean to humanize the earth? It is to surpass pain and suffering; it is to learn without limits; it is to love the reality you build.… You will not fulfill your mission if you do not apply your energies to vanquishing pain and suffering in those around you. And if through your action they in turn take up the task of humanizing the world, you will have opened their destiny toward a new life.                                                                                                                                                    (Mario Rodrigues Cobos aka “SILO”)

 

[An Allegory concerning Time - wherein past, present, and future are not successions of instants, but structural determinants of situation. In “The Internal Landscape” by

Mario Rodrigues Cobos aka “SILO” we read the following, in which the rider speaks]:

“Strange encounters these, where the old man suffers for his short future, seeking refuge in his long past; the middle-aged man suffers for his present situation, seeking refuge in what has happened or what will happen, depending on whether he grasps before or behind him; and the youth suffers because his short past nips at his heels, spurring on his flight toward a long future.

“And yet I recognize my own face in the faces of all three, and it seems to me that all human beings, whatever their age, can move through these times and see in them phantoms that do not exist. Or does that offense of my youth still exist today? Does my coming old age exist today? Does my death already dwell here today in this darkness?

“All suffering steals in through memory, imagination, or perception. But it is thanks to these same three pathways that thoughts, affections, and human deeds exist. So it is that even while these pathways are necessary for life, if suffering contaminates them they also become channels of destruction.”

External landscape is what we perceive of things, while internal landscape is what we sift from them through the sieve of our internal world. These landscapes are one and constitute our indissoluble vision of reality.                                                           

 

We are lucky to be alive and therefore we should value life. Life is precious. We're never going to get another one. This is it. Don't waste it. Open your eyes. Open your ears. Treasure the experiences that you have and don't waste your time fussing about a non-existent future life after you're dead. Try to do as much good as you can now to others. Try to live life as richly as possible during the time that you have left available to you.                                                                                                                                                                 (Richard Dawkins)

 

The “Statement of the Humanist Movement,” the foundational document of the Humanist Movement, declares that we will pass from prehistory to the true history of the human being when the violent, animal appropriation of some human beings by others is no more. In the meantime, we cannot start from any central value other than that of the human being, fully realized and fully free. The affirmation “nothing above the human being and no human being below any other” is a synthetic way of expressing this core idea. If one places as the central value God, the State, Money, or any other entity, one necessarily subordinates the human being, and thus creates conditions for the subsequent control or sacrifice of human beings. Humanists are very clear on this point, and while Humanists include both atheists and believers, we do not start from atheism or from religion as the basis for our vision of the world and our action—we begin from the human being and from the immediate needs of the human being.                                                                                                                                                                                 (Mario Rodrigues Cobos aka “SILO” - “The Human Landscape”)

 

I've set aside the following passage from my book “Unweaving the Rainbow” and asked that it be read at my funeral.

“We are going to die and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die because they're never going to be born. The potential people who could have been here in my place, but who will, in fact, never see the light of day, outnumber the sand grains of Sahara. ...In the face of these stupefying odds, it is you and I, in our ordinariness, that are here. Here's another respect in which we are lucky. The universe is older than a hundred million centuries. Within a comparable time, the sun will swell to a red giant and engulf the earth. Every century of hundreds of millions has been in its time, or will be when its time comes, the present century. The present moves from the past to the future like a tiny spotlight inching its way along a gigantic ruler of time. Everything behind the spotlight is in darkness, the darkness of the dead past. Everything ahead of the spotlight is in the darkness of the unknown future. The odds of your century being the one in the spotlight are the same as the odds that a penny, tossed down at random, will land on a particular ant crawling somewhere on the road from New York to San Francisco. You are lucky to be alive and so am I.”                                                                                (Richard Dawkins)

                  

There is some evidence that the ubiquitous moral injunction to think positively may place an addi­tional burden on the already sick or otherwise aggrieved. Not only are you failing to get better but you're failing to feel good about not getting better. Similarly for the long-term unem­ployed, who, as I found while re­searching my book Bait and Switch, are informed by career coaches and self-help books that their principal battle is against their own negative, resent­ful, loser-like feelings. This is victim-blaming at its cruelest, and may help account for the passivity of Americans in the face of repeated economic insult.

But what is truly sinister about the positivity cult is that it seems to reduce our tolerance of other people's suffer­ing. Far from being a "culture of com­plaint" that upholds "victims," ours has become "less and less tolerant of people having a bad day or a bad year,” according to Barbara Held, professor of psychology at Bowdoin College and a leading critic of positive psychology. If no one will listen to my problems, I won't listen to theirs: "no whining," as the popular bumper stickers and wall plaques warn. Thus the cult ac­quires a viral-like reproductive ener­gy, creating an empathy deficit that pushes ever more people into a harsh insistence on positivity in others.                                                                                                       (Barbara Ehrenreich)

 

All human beings have this burden in life to constantly figure out what's true, what's authentic, what's meaningful, what's dross, what's a hallucination, what's a figment, what's madness. We all need to figure out what is valuable, constantly. As a writer, all I am doing is posing the question in a way that people can see very clearly.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                            (novelist Maxine Hong Kingston)

 

The world will be a better place if we all believe whatever we wish, but behave as if there is no deity to sort out humankind’s problems.

(Robert Buckman in “Can We Be Good Without God?”)

 

The different religions of the world do not show, as many insist, that all people worship the same god in different ways. Instead, humans worship different gods in the same ways. The world’s varied gods present us with very different ‘personalities’ and precepts, and each religion has its own unique and mutually exclusive creation myth, pantheon of supernatural entities, and vision of life after death. But the ways of worshiping are essentially the same: rituals, prayers, chants, acts of offering or self denial, special gestures before revered objects or images, all led by special people wearing special costumes or adornments, in special places and at special times.                                                                           (Michael Schulman, quoted by Robert Buckman in “Can We Be Good Without God?”)

 

Of two people given their choice of living again ten thousand years hence or ten thousand years ago: one reasoned that he knew enough already of the past and so would choose the future, the other that he knew just enough of the past to want to know more and so he would take the past. The one who chose ten thousand years ago was sacrificed on an altar almost the moment he was born. The one who chose ten thousand years hence found himself the last of the human race and soon perished miserably of having no­body to talk to (a mental case).                                                                                                                                                                                                                                     (Robert Frost)

 

An engineer said it was the easiest thing in the world for one of his profession to see the beau­ty of a mechanistic theory of the universe. He didn't need a God to explain things, yet when asked he couldn't remember having seen a ma­chine with no one's hand on the lever of it, foot on the pedal. Every metaphor breaks down.             (ibid)

 

More than any other time in history, mankind faces a crossroads. One path leads to despair and utter hopelessness, the other, to total extinction. Let us pray we have the wisdom to choose correctly.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                       (Woody Allen)

 

I think over again my small adventures, my fears, These small ones that seemed so big. For all the things I had to get and to reach. And yet there is only one great thing. The only thing. To live to see the great day that dawns. And the light that fills the world.                                                                                                       (Inuit song)

 

All mankind is of one author, and is one volume; when one man dies, one chapter is not torn out of the book, but translated into a better language; and every chapter must be so translated.              (John Donne)

 

Beliefs do not work because they are true, but are true because they work.                                                                                                        (William James)

 

Every human life – no matter how worthwhile, exalted, productive, creative, philanthropic or brilliant – ends in death. A medical ethicist put it well when he remarked that “despite all the miracles and breakthroughs of modern medicine, the death rate will always remain the same – precisely one death per person.                                 (Dr. Robert Buckman  Can We Be Good Without God?)

 

There is an important difference between, on the one hand, treating others as you would want to be treated yourself and, on the other, trying to be aware of the con­sequences of your actions on others. The difference is that under the Golden Rule you project your own expectations onto the other person. If, on the other hand, you are guided by the principle of consideration of consequences, then you will try to anticipate the resulting effect on the other person (ignoring, if need be, the way you would respond if it were you). That is a difference worth noting.

The flaw in the Golden Rule is that it can be used so easily as a justification for selfish instincts – it is just as likely to feed into our aggressive instincts as it is to promote more constructive behaviour. ("Of course it was reasonable for me to cut off that inattentive driver – I’d expect to be cut off if I was just bumbling along as he was.”)                                                       (ibid)                                       

 

(F. David Peat, on the thought of physicist David Bohm)

Bohm lived for the transcendental; his dreams were of the light that penetrates. . . . Yet his life was accompanied by great personal pain and periods of crippling depression. He never achieved wholeness in his own personal life and the fruits of that life, which are still with us, were gained only at great sacrifice.

 

He felt that the universe itself is in a sense a mirror of our basic structure as human beings and of our relationship to the transcendent. That was the key that was present in all his thinking. So that when he began to develop his theory of the implicate order, there was a sense that this wasn't just about the structure of matter but also about the structure of consciousness, because everything mirrors itself... …In his theory of hidden variables, he believed that the universe was an infinity of levels, that the universe could never be completely encompassed by human thought…This idea contained an alternative to reductionism because in reductionism you'd discover, say, molecules, and then you'd explain them in terms of atoms, and atoms in terms of elementary particles, and so on; you'd go into smaller and smaller bricks.

But for Bohm, the level above and the level below could mutually condition each other. So these were not really independent levels, much as you could say that the human body is made out of organs and cells, but that the cells in turn are determined by the whole order of the body. So the higher conditions the lower, and the lower the higher….

 

Then there was his theory of the implicate order. The world we seem to live in — the world of classical objects, the world of Newtonian physics — Dave referred to as the "explicate order." He felt that what we take for reality is only one particular level or perception of order. And underneath that is what he called the "implicate order," the enfolded order, in which things are folded together and deeply interconnected, and out of which the explicate order unfolds. The explicate is only, you could say, the froth on top of the milk and the implicate order is much deeper. It includes not only matter, but consciousness; it's only in the explicate order that we tend to break them apart, to see them as two separate things….He also felt there was a need to reintroduce time into physics. Of course time had always been there as a parameter, but not as an actual dynamic entity which makes things move around. That was the work he was doing up to the very end of his life.

 

And his other work of that period, with dialogue groups, was not separate from that because again, he felt that his theory had to include consciousness as well as matter, which led in this case to the idea that there could be a field of information. His ontological interpretation of the quantum theory gives the notion that matter is always responding to such a field. Up to that point we had two levels in nature — matter and energy. And now Bohm in his ontological interpretation introduced a third, which he called "active information" — information as an activity in nature. The electron moves and does these curious things because it is responding to a field of information, an active field. And the human body also responds to an active field — that's how the immune system works. So he introduced this notion of active information as something which is inherent in both matter and consciousness, a collective and non-local phenomenon to which the individual human consciousness, or brain, is capable of responding.

 

He believed it was possible to develop some sort of collectivity if people worked at it together over a period of time, so he developed his dialogue groups based on the idea that it might somehow be possible, through this active information, to produce a transformation in human consciousness. He may have believed that this is what had happened with Krishnamurti — that if you were with Krishnamurti, in the presence of Krishnamurti in a group of people, some change of consciousness took place. In physics you don't always need an enormous amount of energy to effect a large change—that maybe even a few of these small groups could affect human consciousness.                                                                  (F. David Peat on the thought of physicist David Bohm)

 

Bohm’s earliest work, on plasmas, came about not so much through thinking about atoms and electrons—which of course he did —but about the basic dilemma of the individual and the collective: Can an individual simultaneously have freedom in a society and contribute to that society? He saw that here too, the basic dilemmas of human beings with regard to free will and obligations to society are somehow mirrored in the very structure of the universe. In fact there was a vision he had, I think when he was living in Brazil, in which he saw the universe as a collection of silver balls, each ball reflecting every other ball, itself included — a sort of infinite reflectivity of the universe in which each part is contained in everything else.

                                                                                                                                                            (F. David Peat on the thought of physicist David Bohm)

 

"Body am I, and soul"--thus speaks the child. And why should one not speak like children? But the awakened and knowing say: body am I entirely, and nothing else; and soul is only a word for something about the body. The body is a great reason, a plurality with one sense, a war and a peace, a herd and a shepherd. An instrument of your body is also your little reason, my brother, which you call "spirit"--a little instrument and toy of your great reason. . . . Behind your thoughts and feelings, my brother, there stands a mighty ruler, an unknown sage--whose name is self. In your body he dwells; he is your body. There is more reason in your body than in your best wisdom.          

(Friedrich Nietzsche - Thus Spake Zarathustra)

 

At the start of therapy, I thought that enough disasters had hap­pened to me to justify the way I was, that there was some objective ledger in which my behaviour balance would be set out. In the left-hand column would be dermatomyositis and myelitis and divorce and big nose and so on. In the right-hand column would be impa­tience and toxic Type-A behaviour. Some psychological St. Peter would pronounce on the two columns: "Oh, yes – his present behaviour is amply justified by what he's been through." Such thought encourages the person to see himself as a bit of a hero. At work, the hero role sometimes has some social cachet. At home it's a pain in the ass, as is the person who plays it.

I don't want to make too big a deal of psychotherapy. There's nothing miraculous about it: it's not the Answer. But it does help you to identify the Questions that really matter to your life and to the way you relate to other people. It also helps you realize that one answer is that there are many answers, and that recognizing choice is often a good thing in itself. Particularly if you previously believed that there was only one way to do things - yours.                                                                                                           (Dr. Robert Buckman Not Dead Yet)

 

The images in the consciousness narrative flow like shadows along with the images of the object for which they are providing an unwitting, unsolicited comment. To come back to the metaphor of movie-in-the-brain, they are within the movie. There is no external spectator…..The story is not told by some clever homunculus. Nor is the story really told by you as a self because the core you is only born as the story is told, within the story itself. You exist as a mental being when primordial stories are being told, and only then; as long as primordial stories are being told, and only then. You are the music while the music lasts….. One’s "autobiographical self" is always under reconstruction. When we discover what we are made of and how we are put together, we discover a ceaseless process of building up and tearing down, and we realize that life is at the mercy of that never-ending process. Like the sand castles on the beaches of our childhood, it can be washed away. It is astonishing that we have a sense of self at all…, astonishing that we have the continuity of structure and function that constitutes identity and the stable traits of behavior we call a personality…. The drama of the human condition comes solely from consciousness. Of course, consciousness and its revelations allow us to create a better life… but the price we pay for that better life is high. It is not just the price of risk and danger and pain. It is the price of knowing risk, danger, and pain. Worse even: it is the price of knowing what pleasure is and knowing when it is missing or unattainable.  

(Antonio Damasio – The Feeling of What Happens)

 

Truth is like daylight shining behind a curtain. All the different branches of human enquiry are like pinholes in the curtain. How much you see does not depend on which hole you decide to look through – it depends on how close to the hole you place your eye.                                                                                    Anonymous

 

Because we are part of one existence, whomsoever you are hurting, you are hurting yourself in the long run. Today you may not realize it, but one day when you become more aware; then you will say, 'My God! This wound was inflicted by me -- upon myself.' You had hurt somebody else thinking that people are different. Nobody is different. This whole existence is one, cosmic unity. Out of this understanding comes non-violence.                                                                                                                                                                       (Osho)

 

And once upon a time, in a land called America, the people would come in from their mountain cabins, farms, and mill towns with their young ones to joy in the closeness of community on warm sultry summer nights. The American dream was never about grand mansions, designer wear, exotic vacations, health clubs, silicone implants, Viagra love affairs, fortress malls, boutiques, forever war, the prison industry, or slave labor junk stores. It was about a man being able to make a living for his family. It was about a simple life of small town living, where people congregated on Main Street for the Fourth of July parade. It was about swimming holes, country lanes, fields of corn, teachers who challenged the young to greater heights (not social engineering ), doctors (not technocrats), marshland songs, a whippoorwill, splashing streams, and woodlands with secret paths. It was about rain washed streets; where barefoot children splashed in puddles, blew magic bubbles, caught fireflies, and played hide-and-seek long into a muggy summer's night. It was about concerts in the park, the clink of milk bottles, and visits to Grandma's house; with her blue hair, flowered dress, and flour dusted apron. It was about the certainty of love with the slamming of a screen door, a child running in flowered meadows, and at day’s end, neighbors gathered on darkened porches, holding tight the wonderment of the day. It was about Hometown.                                (Judith Moriarty)

 

Darwin wrote: “In the agony of death, a dog has been known to caress his master, and every one has heard of the dog suffering under vivisection, who licked the hand of the operator; this man is close enough to hear the anguished cries of the animals. Was it right to send an animal to slaughter who so desperately wished to live? Do they feel the same way? If resistance is to be respected, does lack of resistance confer a right to kill? We do know what the cow wants: the cow wants to live. The cow does not wish to sacrifice itself for any reason. That a cow will willingly offer itself as food is a fable.”

 

The "kingdom of god" IS within us, because it is the life force within our DNA, which was given to us in the beginning by the "gods" who put it into us.

(Mary Sparrowdancer)

 

Who has made the decision that sets in motion these chains of poisonings, this ever-widening wave of death that spreads out, like ripples when a pebble is dropped into a still pond? . . . Who has decided ­ who has the right to decide ­ for the countless legions of people who were not consulted that the supreme value is a world without insects, even though it be also a sterile world ungraced by the curving wing of a bird in flight?                                                                          (Rachel Carson,  Silent Spring)

 

 

The dark ages still reign over all humanity, and the depth and persistence of this domination are only now becoming clear. This Dark Age’s prison has no steel bars, chains, or locks. Instead, it is locked by disorientation and built from misinformation. Caught up in a plethora of conditioned reflexes and driven by the human ego, both warden and prisoner attempt meagerly to compete with God. All are intractably skeptical of what they do not understand. We are powerfully imprisoned in these Dark Ages simply by the terms in which we have been conditioned to think.

(Buckminister Fuller, Cosmography)

 

So long as men worship the Caesars and Napoleons, Caesars and Napoleons will duly arise and make them miserable.                   (Aldous Huxley)

 

We are the primitives of a culture yet to be, the cave men of that which will replace us.                                                                                       (Northrop Frye)

 

He who refuses to rule is liable to be ruled by one worse than himself                                                                                                      (Plato, Republic)

 

If you pick up a starving dog and make him prosperous, he will not bite you; that is the principal difference between a dog and a man.                    (Mark Twain)

 

As for man, his days are like grass; As a flower of the field, so he flourishes.      Psalm 103:15

 

The darkest places in hell are reserved for those who maintain their neutrality in times of moral crisis.                                               (Dante)

 

They are not long
the days of wine and roses;
Out of a misty dream
our path emerges for a while
Then closes within a dream.                          (Ernest Dowson - Vitae Summa Brevis)

 

Assume our existence as broadly as we can, in any way we can. Everything, even the unheard of, must be possible in this life. The only courage demanded of us is courage for the most singular and the most inexplicable that we may encounter.                                                                                                                                                             (Rilke)

 

Always recognize that human individuals are ends, and do not use them as mere means.                                                                        (Kant)

 

You have to begin to lose your memory, if only in bits and pieces, to realize that memory is what makes our lives. Life without memory is no life at all, just as an intelligence without the possibility of expression is not really an intelligence. Our memory is our coherence, our reason, our feeling, even our action. Without it, we are nothing.    (legendary surrealist Spanish filmmaker Luis Buñuel)

 

As long as our brain is a mystery, the universe, the reflection of the structure of the brain, will also be a mystery.

[A quote by the Spanish neuroscientist Santiago Ramón y Cajal who won the Nobel prize for pioneering research into the fine structure of the nervous system, particularly the structure of the synapse.]

 

There are faint stars in the night sky that you can see but only if you look to the side of where they shine. They burn too weakly or are too far to be seen directly, even if you stare. But you can see them out of the corner of your eye because the cells on the periphery of your retina are more sensitive to light. Maybe truth is just like that. You can see it, but only out of the corner of your eye. (Janna Levin)

 

We are apt to shut our eyes against a painful truth…. Is this the part of wise men, engaged in a great and arduous struggle for liberty? Are we disposed to be of the number of those, who having eyes, see not, and having ears, hear not..? For my part, whatever anguish of spirit it might cost, I am willing to know the whole truth; to know.. it — now.

(Patrick Henry – 1775)

 

Faith is a myth and beliefs shift like mists on the shore; thoughts vanish; words, once pronounced, die; and the memory of yesterday is as shadowy as the hope of to-morrow....

In this world — as I have known it — we are made to suffer without the shadow of a reason, of a cause or of guilt....

There is no morality, no knowledge and no hope; there is only the consciousness of ourselves which drives us about a world that... is always but a vain and floating appearance....

A moment, a twinkling of an eye and nothing remains — but a clot of mud, of cold mud, of dead mud cast into black space, rolling around an extinguished sun. Nothing. Neither thought, nor sound, nor soul. Nothing.                                                                                                                                                                     (Joseph Conrad)

 

In Christian ethics.... animals are seen as mere things. They can therefore be used for vivisection, hunting, coarsing, bull-fights and horse-races and can be whipped to death as they struggle along with their heavy carts of stone. Shame on such a morality that fails to recognise the eternal essence that exists in every living thing and shines forth with inscrutable significance from all eyes that see the sun.

                                                                                                                                                                                                                        (Arthur Schopenhauer)

 

The less one, as a result of objective or subjective conditions, has to come into contact with people, the better off one is for it.                                             (ibid)

 

What makes people sociable is their incapacity to endure solitude and thus themselves.                                                                                                  (ibid)

 

We should be surprised that a matter that generally plays such an important part in the life of man [love] has hitherto been almost entirely disregarded by philosophers, and lies before us as raw and untreated material….The ultimate aim of all love affairs ... is more important than all other aims in man's life; and therefore it is quite worthy of the profound seriousness with which everyone pursues it. …What is decided by it is nothing less than the composition of the next generation.                                                                                                                (ibid)

 

Every time a man is begotten and born, the clock of human life is wound up anew to repeat once more its same old tune that has already been played unnumerable times, movement by movement and measure by measure, with insignificant variations.                                                                                                                                                            (ibid)

 

[Schopenhauer gave a name to a force within man which he felt had invariably precedence over reason: the Will to Live defined as an inherent drive within human beings, and indeed all creatures, to stay alive and to reproduce. This thought foreshadowed and laid the groundwork for Darwin’s Theory of Evolution and Freud's concepts of the libido and the unconscious mind.]

 

All philosophy is in some sense the endeavor to find a unifying principle, to discover the most general conception underlying the whole field of nature and of knowledge. By one of those bold generalizations which occasionally mark a real advance in Science, Schopenhauer conceived this unifying principle, this underlying unity, to consist in something analogous to that will which self-consciousness reveals to us. Will is, according to him, the fundamental reality of the world, the thing-in-itself; and its objectivation is what is presented in phenomena. The struggle of the will to realize itself evolves the organism, which in its turn evolves intelligence as the servant of the will. And in practical life the antagonism between the will and the intellect arises from the fact that the former is the metaphysical substance, the latter something accidental and secondary. And further, will is desire, that is to say, need of something; hence need and pain are what is positive in the world, and the only possible happiness is a negation, a renunciation of the will to live….The origin of all things comprises not intelligence, but rather will, or the force of nature, from which all phenomena have developed.

(Explanatory notes on the philosophy of Arthur Schopenhauer by the translator of his ‘Religion’]

 

Carl Roger’s ‘Client Centered Therapy’ theory is based on nineteen propositions:

 

Experience is, for me, the highest authority. The touchstone of validity is my own experience. No other person's ideas, and none of my own ideas, are as authoritative as my experience. It is to experience that I must return again and again, to discover a closer approximation to truth as it is in the process of becoming in me. Neither the Bible nor the prophets -- neither Freud nor research --neither the revelations of God nor man -- can take precedence over my own direct experience. My experience is not authoritative because it is infallible. It is the basis of authority because it can always be checked in new primary ways. In this way its frequent error or fallibility is always open to correction.

(Carl Rogers - On Becoming a Person)

 

But when the self speaks to the self, who is speaking? — the entombed soul, the spirit driven in, in, in to the central catacomb; the self that took the veil and left the world — a coward perhaps, yet somehow beautiful, as it flits with its lantern restlessly up and down the dark corridors.                                 (Virginia Woolf)

 

It is possible that the next Buddha will not take the form of an individual. The next Buddha may take the form of a community – a community practicing understanding and loving kindness, a community practicing mindful living. This may be the most important thing we can do for the survival of the earth.                                       (Thich Nhat Hanh - Buddhist teacher)

 

Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God! I know not what course others may take; but as for me, give me liberty or give me death!                                                                                                                                                                           (Patrick Henry)

 

The supreme importance of the monotheistic traditions is in creating the concept of the individual.  This individualism—the belief that we can exist as distinct beings from the tribe, or the crowd, and that we are called on as individuals to make moral decisions that at times defy the clamor of the tribe or the nation—is a gift of the Abrahamic faiths.  This sense of individual responsibility is coupled with the constant injunctions in Islam, Judaism and Christianity for a deep altruism.  And this laid the foundations for the open society.  This individualism is the central doctrine and most important contribution of monotheism.  We are enjoined, after all, to love our neighbor, not our tribe.  This empowerment of individual conscience is the starting point of the great ethical systems of our civilization.  The prophets—and here I would include Jesus—helped institutionalize dissent and criticism.  They initiated the separation of powers.  They reminded us that culture and society were not the sole prerogative of the powerful, that freedom and indeed the religious life required us to often oppose and defy those in authority.  This is a distinctly anti-tribal outlook.  Immanuel Kant built his ethics upon this radical individualism.  And Kant’s injunction to “always recognize that human individuals are ends, and do not use them as mere means” runs in a direct line from the Christian Gospels.  Karl Popper rightly pointed out in the first volume of “The Open Society and Its Enemies,” when he writes about this creation of the individual as set against the crowd, that “There is no other thought which has been so powerful in the moral development of man”.  These religions set free the critical powers of humankind.  They broke with the older Greek and Roman traditions that gods and destiny ruled human fate—a belief that when challenged by Socrates saw him condemned to death.  They offered up the possibility that human beings, although limited by circumstances and simple human weaknesses, could shape and give direction to society.  And most important, individuals could give direction to their own lives.                                                                                                              (Chris Hedges)

 

The problem is not religion but religious orthodoxy.  Most moral thinkers—from Socrates to Christ to Francis of Assisi—eschewed the written word because they knew, I suspect, that once things were written down they became, in the wrong hands, codified and used not to promote morality but conformity, subservience and repression.  Writing freezes speech.  George Steiner calls this “the decay into writing.” Language is turned from a living and fluid form of moral inquiry to a tool of bondage….Beckett, like the author of Ecclesiastes, was a realist.  He saw the pathetic, empty monuments we spend a lifetime building to ourselves.  He knew, as we read in Ecclesiastes, that nothing is certain or permanent, real or unreal, and that the secret of wisdom is detachment without withdrawal, that, since death awaits us all, all is vanity, that we must give up on the childish notion that one is rewarded for virtue or wisdom…..The danger is not Islam or Christianity or any other religion.  It is the human heart—the capacity we all have for evil.  All human institutions with a lust for power give their utopian visions divine sanction, whether this comes through the worship of God, destiny, historical inevitability, the master race, fraternite-liberte-egalite, a worker’s paradise or the second coming of Jesus Christ. Religion is often a convenient vehicle for this blood lust.

(Chris Hedges)

 

Nothing worth doing is completed in our lifetime,
Therefore, we are saved by hope.
Nothing true or beautiful or good makes complete sense in any immediate context of history;
Therefore, we are saved by faith.
Nothing we do, however virtuous, can be accomplished alone.
Therefore, we are saved by love.
No virtuous act is quite as virtuous from the standpoint of our friend or foe as from our own;
Therefore, we are saved by the final form of love which is forgiveness.

(Reinhold Niebuhr)                           

 

From the records of history it seems to be clear that the theologies and philosophies which take time too seriously are correlated with political theories that inculcate and justify the use of large-scale violence. . . . For those whose philosophy does not compel them to take time with an excessive seriousness, the ultimate goal is to be sought neither in the revolutionary’s progressive social apocalypse, nor in the reactionary’s revived and perpetuated past, but in an eternal divine Now, which those who sufficiently desire this good can realize as a fact of immediate experience. The mere act of dying is not in itself a passport to eternity; nor can wholesale killing do anything to bring deliverance either to the slayers, or the slain, or their posterity. The peace that passes all understanding is the fruit of the liberation into eternity.                                                                                                                       (Aldous Huxley, Eternity and Time Summer 1945)


Freethinkers are those who are willing to use their minds without prejudice and without fearing to understand things that clash with their customs, privileges, or beliefs. This state of mind is not common, but it is essential for right thinking; where it is absent, discussion is apt to become worse than useless.                      (Leo Nikolaevich Tolstoi - (1828-1910) On Life and Essays on Religion)

 

My sense of the holy, insofar as I have one, is bound up with the hope that someday, any millennium now, my remote descendants will live in a global civilization in which love is pretty much the only law. In such a society, communication would be domination-free, class and caste would be unknown, hierarchy would be a matter of temporary pragmatic convenience, and power would be entirely at the disposal of the free agreement of a literate and well-educated electorate... I have no idea of how such a society could come about. It is, one might say, a mystery. This mystery, like that of the Incarnation, concerns the coming into existence of a love that is kind, patient, and endures all things.

                                                                                                                                    (Richard Rorty in an exchange with philosopher Gianni Vattimo)

 

Many people would sooner die than think. In fact they do.                                             (Bertrand Russell)        

 

An agnostic thinks it impossible to know the truth in matters such as God and the future life with which Christianity and other religions are concerned. Or, if not impossible, at least impossible at the present time…. Of the great religions of history, I prefer Buddhism, especially in its earliest forms, because it has had the smallest element of persecution….. As to the question “Do agnostics think that science and religion are impossible to reconcile?” the answer turns upon what is meant by `religion'. If it means merely a system of ethics, it can be reconciled with science. If it means a system of dogma, regarded as unquestionably true, it is incompatible with the scientific spirit, which refuses to accept matters of fact without evidence, and also holds that complete certainty is hardly ever impossible.

(Bertrand Russell)

 

I think the subject which will be of most importance politically is mass psychology.... Its importance has been enormously increased by the growth of modern methods of propaganda. Of these the most influential is what is called 'education.' Religion plays a part, though a diminishing one; the press, the cinema, and the radio play an increasing part.... It may be hoped that in time anybody will be able to persuade anybody of anything if he can catch the patient young and is provided by the State with money and equipment…. Although this science will be diligently studied, it will be rigidly confined to the governing class. The populace will not be allowed to know how its convictions were generated. When the technique has been perfected, every government that has been in charge of education for a generation will be able to control its subjects securely without the need of armies or policemen.

                                                                                                                                    (Bertrand Russell, The Impact of Science on Society)


Scientific societies are as yet in their infancy. . . . It is to be expected that advances in physiology and psychology will give governments much more control over individual mentality than they now have even in totalitarian countries. Fitche laid it down that education should aim at destroying free will, so that, after pupils have left school, they shall be incapable, throughout the rest of their lives, of thinking or acting otherwise than as their schoolmasters would have wished….Diet, injections, and injunctions will combine, from a very early age, to produce the sort of character and the sort of beliefs that the authorities consider desirable, and any serious criticism of the powers that be will become psychologically impossible. ….Gradually, by selective breeding, the congenital differences between rulers and ruled will increase until they become almost different species. A revolt of the plebs would become as unthinkable as an organized insurrection of sheep against the practice of eating mutton.          (ibid)

In like manner, the scientific rulers will provide one kind of education for ordinary men and women, and another for those who are to become holders of scientific power. Ordinary men and women will be expected to be docile, industrious, punctual, thoughtless, and contented. Of these qualities, probably contentment will be considered the most important. In order to produce it, all the researches of psycho-analysis, behaviourism, and biochemistry will be brought into play.... All the boys and girls will learn from an early age to be what is called 'co-operative,' i.e., to do exactly what everybody is doing. Initiative will be discouraged in these children, and insubordination, without being punished, will be scientifically trained out of them…..Except for the one matter of loyalty to the World State and to their own order, members of the governing class will be encouraged to be adventurous and full of initiative..….On those rare occasions, when a boy or girl who has passed the age at which it is usual to determine social status, shows such marked ability as to seem the intellectual equal of the rulers, a difficult situation will arise, requiring serious consideration. If the youth is content to abandon his previous associates and to throw in his lot whole-heartedly with the rulers, he may, after suitable tests, be promoted, but if he shows any regrettable solidarity with his previous associates, the rulers will reluctantly conclude that there is nothing to be done with him except to send him to the lethal chamber before his ill-disciplined intelligence has had time to spread revolt. This will be a painful duty to the rulers, but I think they will not shrink from performing it.                                                                                                   (Bertrand Russell, The Scientific Outlook)

 

The success of the Third Reich was in dividing and subdividing responsibility for evil to such a degree that, while most adults in the country bore some responsibility, very few felt that anything much was their fault at the time. That sense of responsibility came to them afterwards, and usually in silence.                            (Günter Grass)

 

[A vision of the future of biology] Imagine a child playing in a woodland stream, poking a stick into an eddy in the flowing current, thereby disrupting it. But the eddy quickly reforms. The child disperses it again. Again it reforms, and the fascinating game goes on. There you have it! Organisms are resilient patterns in a turbulent flow—patterns in an energy flow.... It is becoming increasingly clear that to understand living systems in any deep sense, we must come to see them not materialistically, as machines, but as stable, complex, dynamic organization.                                                                                                                                                   (Carl Woese)

 

Adversity makes men, and prosperity makes monsters.                                                                                      (Victor Hugo)

 

Samurai Song

When I had no roof, I made audacity my roof.

When I had no supper, my eyes dined.

When I had no eyes I listened.
When I had no ears I thought.
When I had no thought I waited.

When I had no father I made Care my father.

When I had no mother I embraced order.

When I had no friend I made Quiet my friend.

When I had no enemy I opposed my body.

When I had no temple I made my voice my temple.

I have no priest, my tongue is my choir.

When I have no means, fortune is my means.

When I have nothing, death will be my fortune.

Need is my tactic, detachment is my strategy.

When I had no lover I courted my sleep.

                                                                        (Robert Pinsky)

 

I am convinced there is only one way to eliminate these grave evils, namely through the establishment of a socialist economy, accompanied by an educational system which would be oriented toward social goals. In such an economy, the means of production are owned by society itself and are utilized in a planned fashion. A planned economy, which adjusts production to the needs of the community, would distribute the work to be done among all those able to work and would guarantee a livelihood to every man, woman, and child. The education of the individual, in addition to promoting his own innate abilities, would attempt to develop in him a sense of responsibility for his fellow men in place of the glorification of power and success in our present society.   (Albert Einstein)

 

Transitions

 

So we'll go no more a-roving
So late into the night,
Though the heart still be as loving,
And the moon still be as bright.

 

For the sword outwears its sheath,
And the soul outwears the breast,
And the heart must pause to breathe,
And love itself have rest.

 

Though the night was made for loving,
And the day returns too soon,
Yet we'll go no more a-roving
By the light of the moon.                               (Byron)

 

 

Among the millions of nerve cells that clothe parts of the brain there runs a thread. It is the thread of time, the thread that has run through each succeeding wakeful hour of the individual.

(Wilder Penfield)

 

To know the brain...is equivalent to ascertaining the material course of thought and will, to discovering the intimate history of life in its perpetual duel with external forces.

                                                                                                            (pioneering Spanish neuroscientist and Nobel laureate (1906) - Santiago Ramon y Cajal (1852-1934)

 

Moral systems are interlocking sets of values, practices, institutions, and evolved psychological mechanisms that work together to suppress or regulate selfishness and make social life possible.

(Jonathan Haidt)

 

When the story of humankind and its intellect has gone to its end, nothing will have happened. For this intellect has no additional mission which would lead it beyond human life. Rather, it is human, and only its possessor and begetter takes it seriously–as though the world’s axis turned in its midst. But if we could communicate with the gnat, we would learn that he likewise flies through the air with the same solemnity, that he feels the flying center of the universe within himself. There is nothing so reprehensible and unimportant in nature that it would not immediately swell up like a balloon at the slightest puff of this power of knowing. And just as every porter wants to have an admirer, so even the proudest of men, the philosopher, supposes that he sees on all sides the eyes of the universe telescopically focused upon his action and thought.   (Friedrich Nietzsche)

 

We don't receive wisdom, we must discover it for ourselves after a journey that no one can take for us or spare us.                    (Marcel Proust (1871-1922)

 

We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny.                                                           (Martin Luther King, Jr.)

 

...Where you have a concentration of power in a few hands, all too frequently men with the mentality of gangsters get control. History has proven that. ... Power tends to corrupt; absolute power corrupts absolutely.                                                                                                                                                        (Lord Acton (1834-1902)

 

It is imperative that we give up the idea of ultimate sources of knowledge, and admit that all knowledge is human; that it is mixed with our errors, our prejudices, our dreams, and our hopes; that all we can do is to grope for truth even though it is beyond our reach. There is no authority beyond the reach of criticism.                            (Karl Popper)

 

How much music can I make with the time I have left?                                                                                                               (Itzhak Perlman)

 

For age is opportunity no less
Than youth itself, though in another dress,
And as the evening twilight fades away
The sky is filled with stars, invisible by day.      (Henry Wadsworth Longfellow)

 

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 am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous?’ Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small does not serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won't feel insecure around you. We are all meant to shine, as children do. We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It's not just in some of us; it's in everyone. And as we let our own 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.

(Marianne Williamson)

 

…….from the Book of Wisdom, Chapter II, verses 1-9:

For they have said, reasoning with themselves, but not right: The time of our life is short and tedious, and in the end of a man there is no remedy, and no man hath been known to have returned from hell:
For we are born of nothing, and after this we shall be as if we had not been: for the breath in our nostrils is smoke: and speech a spark to move our heart,
Which being put out, our body shall be ashes, and our spirit shall be poured abroad as soft air, and our life shall pass away as the trace of a cloud, and shall be dispersed as a mist, which is driven away by the beams of the sun, and overpowered with the heat thereof:
And our name in time shall be forgotten, and no man shall have any remembrance of our works.
For our time is as the passing of a shadow, and there is no going back of our end: for it is fast sealed, and no man returneth.
Come therefore, and let us enjoy the good things that are present, and let us speedily use the creatures as in youth.
Let us fill ourselves with costly wine, and ointments: and let not the flower of the time pass by us.
Let us crown ourselves with roses, before they be withered: let no meadow escape our riot.
Let none of us go without his part in luxury: let us everywhere leave tokens of joy: for this is our portion, and this our lot.

[Quote used by Luis Bruñuel in his movie Wuthering Heights]

           

We give dogs time we can spare, space we can spare and love we can spare. And in return, dogs give us their all. It's the best deal man has ever made.                      (M. Acklam)

 

 

Everything Americans think they know, they learned from a televised morality play. It’s all theater. You root for some good guy and boo some bad guy. You pick your own, but you dance to the tune of the men running the show. It’s mind control, pure and simple, and if there is an American immune to it, then he is probably living in a snow cave somewhere in Alaska.

                                                                                                                                    (Gypsy Joe Hess (1919-1988), prospector, self-educated philosopher and horse trader)

 

In the End, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.                     (Martin Luther King, Jr.)       

 

I long to accomplish a great and noble task, but it is my chief duty to accomplish humble tasks as though they were great and noble. The world is moved along, not only by the mighty shoves of its heroes, but also by the aggregate of the tiny pushes of each honest worker.                                                                 (Helen Keller)

 

Love is not mere kindness. "Kindness cares not whether its object becomes good or bad, provided only that it escapes suffering", while Love "would rather see [the loved ones] suffer much than be happy in contemptible and estranging modes".                                                                                                                           (C.S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain)

 

Don't walk in front of me,

I may not follow.

Don't walk behind me,

I may not lead.

Walk beside me and be my friend.    (Albert Camus)

 

All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident.                                                (Arthur Schopenhauer - 1788-1860)

 

The age of our parents, inferior to that of our grandparents, brought forth ourselves, who are more worthless and destined to have children more corrupt.                   (Horace 100 BC)

 

All active tyrants and oppressors holding the reins of administration feel their existence endangered if men develop their faculty of thinking. There is a possibility of revolution in all successful quests after Truth. The so-called organized societies, religions, and kingdoms have their edifices founded on untruths. Hence?? A collective effort is made the moment a baby is born to fetter him in bondage and make him dependent on beliefs. All types of educational systems so far have been doing only this. The avowed aim of education is to liberate man. But actually what is achieved is this. In the mind of the individual, restraints of subtle mental slavery are shrewdly infused. The system does not impart thinking but it inculcates beliefs. Since it does not encourage doubts and revolts, the products of such a system of education are usually incompetent to think independently.            (osho)

 

Life repeats itself mindlessly - unless you become mindful, it will go on repeating like a wheel. That’s why Buddhists call it the wheel of life and death, the wheel of time. It moves like a wheel: birth is followed by death, death is followed by birth; love is followed by hate, hate is followed by love; success is followed by failure, failure is followed by success. Just see! If you can watch just for a few days, you will see a pattern emerging, a wheel pattern. One day, a fine morning, you are feeling so good and so happy, and another day you are so dull, so dead that you start thinking of committing suicide. And just the other day you were so full of life, so blissful that you were feeling thankful to God, that you were in a mood of deep gratefulness, and today there is great complaint and you don't see the point why one should go on living.... And it goes on and on, but you don't see the pattern. Once you see the pattern, you can get out of it.                                                                                                                                                                                                                       (osho)

 

"I'm now a reverent agnostic," he asserts at last. "Which isn't an oxymoron, I swear. I now believe that whether or not there's a God, there is such a thing as sacredness. Life is sacred. ... There is something transcendent, beyond the everyday. It's possible that humans created this sacredness ourselves, but that doesn't take away from its power or importance."

(Agnostic A.J. Jacobs, journalist for Esquire, after spending a year trying to follow the 600+ laws he found proscribed in the Bible.)

 

The Parable of the Sheep

There was a magician who was also a shepherd. He had thousands of sheep to look after and he was a very miserly man, so he didn't want to pay anybody and he did not want his sheep to be lost or taken by the wolves. So he played a trick on the sheep. He hypnotized them and told every sheep, "You are not a sheep. Don't be afraid." To some he said, "You are a lion." To some he said, "You are tigers." To some he even said, "You are men. Nobody is going to kill you. Don't be afraid and don't try to escape from here."

The sheep started believing in his hypnosis. Every day he would butcher a few sheep but the others would think, "We are not sheep. He is butchering only sheep. We are lions, we are tigers, we are wolves, we are this and that...", even that they were men. And they believed it. It was always some sheep which was to be butchered. They remained aloof, distant. They were not worried. And by and by they were all slaughtered.

(George Gurdjieff)

 

When people stop believing in God, they don't believe in nothing - they believe in anything.                                                                     (G.K. Chesterton)

 

“Only when the last tree has died and
The last river has been poisoned and
The last fish has been caught,
Will we realise that
We cannot eat money”

19th Century Cree Indian

 

 

That gravitation extends throughout the whole world is a matter of faith; that laws which are traceable in our limited realm extend limitlessly in space and time is a matter of faith; that there are atoms and lightwaves is a matter of faith; the beginning and the goal of history are matters of faith; even in geometry there are things we take upon faith, such as the number of the dimensions of space and the definition of parallel lines. Indeed, strictly speaking everything is a matter of faith which is not directly experienced... Ultimately the best faith is that which is least contradictory in itself and to all knowledge and to our practical interest.                                                                                                                           (Gustav Fechner)

 

"We are visitors on this planet. We are here for ninety, a hundred
years at the very most. During that period we must try to do something good,
something useful with our lives. Try to be at peace with yourself and help others

share that peace. If you contribute to other people's happiness, you
will find the true goal, the true meaning of life."

(The Dalai Lama of Tibet)

 

The great poem and the deep theorem are new to every reader and yet are his own experience because he recreates them. They are the marks of unity in variety; and in the instant when the mind seizes this for itself in art or in science, the heart misses a beat.                                                                                        (Jacob Bronowski)

 

The more you go inward or upward, the more the view of things changes and the outer knowledge science organizes takes its real and very limited place. Science, like most mental and external knowledge, gives you only truth of process. I would add that it cannot give you even the whole truth of process; for you seize some of the ponderables, but miss the all-important imponderables; you get, hardly even the how, but the conditions under which things happen in Nature. After all the triumphs and marvels of Science, the explaining principle, the rationale, the significance of the whole is left as dark, as mysterious and even more mysterious than ever. The scheme it has built up of the evolution not only of this rich and vast variegated material world, but of life and consciousness and mind and their workings out of a brute mass of electrons, identical and varied only in arrangement and number is an irrational magic more baffling than any the most mystic imagination could conceive. Science in the end lands us in a paradox effectuated, an organized and rigidly determined accident, an impossibility that has somehow happened; it has shown us a new, a material Maya.... very clever at bringing about the impossible, a miracle that cannot logically be and yet somehow is there - actual, irresistibly organized, but still irrational and inexplicable. And this is evidently because science has missed something essential: it has seen and scrutinized what has happened and, in a way, how it has happened, but it has shut its eyes to something that made this impossible possible, something it is there to express. There is no fundamental significance in things if you miss the Divine Reality; for you remain embedded in a huge surface crust, of manageable and utilizable appearance. It is the magic of the Magician you are trying to analyze, but only when you enter into the consciousness of the Magician himself can you begin to experience the true origination, significance of the Lila (Divine Play). I say "begin" because, as you suggest, the Divine Reality is not so simple that at the first touch you can know all of it or put it into a single formula; it is Infinite and opens before you an infinite knowledge to which all science put together is a bagatelle. But still you do touch the essential, the eternal behind things and in the light of That, all begins to be profoundly luminous, intimately intelligible...                         (Sri Aurobindo on the limitations of the attitude of modern science)

 

 

Scientific technique increases the importance of organizations, and therefore the extent to which authority impinges upon the life of the individual. It follows that a scientific oligarchy has more power than any oligarchy could have in pre-scientific times. There is a tendency, which is inevitable unless consciously combated, for organizations to coalesce, and so to increase in size, until, ultimately, almost all become merged in the State. A scientific oligarchy, accordingly, is bound to become what is called 'totalitarian', that is to say, all important forms of power will become a monopoly of the State.                                                                                                                    (Bertrand Russell - The Impact of Science on Society)

 

Everyone sits in the prison of his own ideas. A human being is a part of the whole called by us "Universe," a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest - a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.            (Albert Einstein)

 

The nature of the universe is such that ends can never justify the means. On the contrary, the means always determine the end.                 (Aldous Huxley)

 

G. I. Gurdjieff put in very stark terms what the consequences would be if we didn't stop being machines:

‘People’ are machines. Machines have to be blind and unconscious, they cannot be otherwise, and all their actions have to correspond to their nature. Everything happens. No one does anything. 'Progress' and 'civilization,' in the real meaning of these words, can appear only as a result of conscious efforts. They cannot appear as a result of unconscious mechanical actions. And what conscious effort can there be in machines? And if one machine is unconscious, then a hundred machines are unconscious, and so are a thousand machines, or a hundred thousand, or a million. And the unconscious activity of a million machines must necessarily result in destruction and extermination. It is precisely in unconscious involuntary manifestations that all evil lies. You do not yet understand and cannot imagine all the results of this evil. But the time will come when you will understand."                                                                                          (from In Search of the Miraculous, by P.D. Ouspensky)

 

If we are to teach real peace in the world, we shall have to begin with children; and if they grow up in their natural innocence, we won’t have to pass fruitless resolutions, but we shall go from love to love for which consciously or unconsciously, the whole world is hungering.                                                                                                                                  (Gandhi)

 

The humble, meek, merciful, just, pious and devout souls, are everywhere of one religion; and when death has taken off the mask, they will know one another, though divers liveries they wear here, make them strangers.                                                                                                                                                            (William Penn)

 

The conviction that we know the truth and that those who do not share our beliefs are wrong has caused a lot of harm. When we believe something to be absolutely truth we have been caught in our own views. If we believe, for instance that Buddhism (or any other doctrine) is the only way to happiness, we may be practicing a kind of violence by discriminating against and excluding those who follow other spiritual paths. Being caught in our own views can be very dangerous and block the opportunity to gain greater wisdom.                                        (Thich Nhat Hanh)

 

I do not want my house to be walled in or my windows blocked. I want the cultures of all lands to be blown about the house as freely as possible. But I also refuse to be blown off my feet by any.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                        (Mahatma Gandhi)

 

The Golden Rule, at its universal root:

 

HINDUISM/ VEDANTA

All your duties are included in this:

Do nothing to others

that would pain you if it were done to you.         (Mahabharata)

 

BUDDHISM

Do not offend others

as you would not wish to be offended.               (Udanavarga)

 

CONFUCIANISM

Is there a maxim

that one ought to follow all one's life?

Surely the maxim of peaceful goodness:

what we don't want done to us

we should not do to others.                               (Analects)

 

TAOISM

Hold as your own

the gains of your neighbour

and - as yours - his losses.                                (Tai-Shang  Kan-Ying P’ien)

 

JUDAISM

What you don't wish for yourself

do not wish for your neighbour.

That is the Law, the rest is only commentary.     (Talmud Shabbat)

 

ISLAM

No one of you will he a true believer

who does not wish for his brother

the same that he wishes for himself.                   (Sunnah)

 

CIIIISTIANITY

Do unto others

all that you would have them do unto you

because that is the sum

of the Law and of the prophets.                         (Gospel according to Matthew)

 

 

"'Hope' is the thing with feathers
That perches in the soul
And sings the tune without the words
And never stops-at all."                                                 (Emily Dickinson)

 

I feel that art has something to do with the achievement of stillness in the midst of chaos. A stillness which characterizes prayer, too, and the eye of the storm. I think that art has something to do with an arrest of attention in the midst of distraction.                                                                                                                                                        (Pulitzer winner and Nobelist Saul Bellow)

 

Concerning the gods, I have no means of knowing whether they exist or not or of what sort they may be. Many things prevent knowledge, including the obscurity of the subject and the brevity of human life.                             (Protagoras - giving agnosticism - the suspension of belief in the existence of gods for lack of evidence - its founding statement)

 

There are no simple congruities in life or history. The cult of happiness erroneously assumes them. It is possible to soften the incongruities of life endlessly by the scientific conquest of nature's caprices, and the social and political triumph over historic injustice. But all such strategies cannot finally overcome the fragmentary character of human existence. The final wisdom of life requires, not the annulment of incongruity but the achievement of serenity within and above it...

Nothing that is worth doing can be achieved in our lifetime; there we must be saved by hope. Nothing which is true or beautiful or good makes complete sense in any immediate context of history; there we must be saved by faith. Nothing we do, however virtuous, can be accomplished alone; therefore we are saved by love. No virtuous act is quite as virtuous from the standpoint of our friend or foe as it is from our own standpoint. Therefore we must be saved by the final form of love which is forgiveness.       (Reinhold Niebuhr, Irony of American History)

 

One view of God is that God is our chosen name for the ceaseless creativity in the natural universe, biosphere, and human cultures. Because of this ceaseless creativity, we typically do not and cannot know what will happen. We live our lives forward, as Kierkegaard said. We live as if we knew, as Nietzsche said. We live our lives forward into mystery, and do so with faith and courage, for that is the mandate of life itself. But the fact that we must live our lives forward into a ceaseless creativity that we cannot fully understand means that reason alone is an insufficient guide to living our lives. Reason, the center of the Enlightenment, is but one of the evolved, fully human means we use to live our lives. Reason itself has finally led us to see the inadequacy of reason. We must therefore reunite our full humanity. We must see ourselves whole, living in a creative world we can never fully know.  (Stuart A. Kauffman,             renowned biologist and complexity theorist, in Reinventing the Sacred repeatedly speaks to the limitations of rationality in the face of an evolving, creative cosmos)

 

 

All social grouping is dependent upon love, and it no less true for the fascist or terrorist than it is for the cosmopolitan and multiculturalist, no less true for those who adored Hitler or Stalin as for members of the Baha'i faith, or Catholics and Shi'ite or Sunni Muslims. The great political monsters of totalitarianism were able to be so evil precisely because they generated so much love, love towards them and love, hope and faith in a future which they promised would be heavenly for people just like them. "I cannot distance myself from the love of my people," said Hitler to crowds of adorers ranging across both genders, all ages, and classes. Likewise, Stalin knew that the key to power lay in being both feared and loved.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                       (Professor Wayne Cristaudo of the University of Hong Kong, in Power, Love and Evil)

 

Man lives not once, but three times: the first stage of his life is continual sleep; the second, sleeping and waking by turns; the third, waking forever.

In the first stage man lives in the dark, alone; in the second, he lives associated with, yet separated from, his fellow-men, in a light reflected from the surface of things; in the third, his life, interwoven with... universal spirit...is a higher life.

In the first stage, his body develops itself from its germ, working out organs for the second; in the second stage his mind develops itself from its germ, working out organs for the third; in the third the divine germ develops itself, which lies hidden in every human mind.

The act of leaving the first stage for the second we call birth; that of leaving the second for the third, death. Our way from the second to the third is not darker than our way from the first to second; one way leads us forth to see the world outwardly; the other, to see it inwardly.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                           (Gustav Fechner “Life after Death” -1835)

 

 

People around the world have always been more impressed by the power of our example than by the example of our power.   (William Clinton)

 

If our view of memory is correct, in higher organisms every act of perception is, to some degree, an act of creation, and every act of memory is, to some degree, an act of imagination.                                                                                                                                                                                                               (Gerald Edelman & Giulio Tononi “A Universe of Consciousness”)

 

Read – so that when you see yourself in a book, you aren’t alone anymore.                                          (Mark Twain)

My current theory of psychosocial genomics in therapeutic hypnosis emphasizes the natural flow of information, communication and healing that takes place between the psychological levels of human experiencing and gene expression - the turning on and off of our genes in normal everyday life.  When genes are turned on (transcribed) they generate the formation of proteins (transcription) that are the molecular machines of life.  When we experience novel and enrichening activities, for example, a process called "activity dependent gene expression" takes place within neurons of the brain that can lead to neurogenesis - literally the growth of the brain. Notice that I do not separate mind and body - I emphasize their oneness by combining them into one word, "mind-body" just as Einstein emphasizes the connection of space-time in understanding modern physics.  Information in the form of words, ideas, emotions, images and meaning undergoes many transformations from the brain down to the molecular-genetic level within each of the six trillion cells of the human body. The organized structure of the molecules, tissues and organs of our body contain information just as our organized words and thoughts do - only the form is different. So consciousness as well as life itself can be best conceptualized as the circular flow of information between so-called "mind" and gene that I now call "psychosocial genomics" - the science of how our subjective experiences of mind can modulate gene expression and visa versa to facilitate neurogenesis and real physical healing of the body on the molecular level.  In my view therapeutic hypnosis is not an illusion - a so-called bending of sensation and perception so you think you feel good even when you are not.  The science and art of therapeutic suggestion that I call "psychosocial genomics" engages real healing on the molecular-genetic level.                                                                                                   (Ernest Lawrence Rossi)

 

As people mature, so do cultures. American culture is still in its infancy. It craves instant gratification. It has boundless energy and little sense of caution. It lives through sensation but has yet to master conceptualization.

The remedy of realism for what is seen as an excess of positivity is easy to advocate, but human beings — whether shaped by a culture in its infancy or one that has acquired maturity — are, as living entities, unrealistic. The will to live, is by its nature, death-denying. In perfect realism, we should be reconciled to our non-existence but the thrust of life pushes us elsewhere.

America is not so much burdened by its positivity than it is by the banality of its aspirations. It’s not that we want too much, but that what we want is so lacking in value. We don’t think too big; we don’t think big enough.                                                                                                                                           (Paul Woodward)

 

 

 

 

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