STILL QUESTING

Unless we are prepared to make demands on one another, we can enjoy only the most rudimentary kind of common life.

                                                                                                                        (Christopher Lasch)

 

A misplaced compassion degrades both the victims, who are reduced to objects of pity, and their would-be benefactors, who find it easier to pity their fellow citizens than to hold them up to impersonal standards, attainment of which would entitle them to respect.              (ibid)

 

FRIENDLESS - adj. Having no favors to bestow. Destitute of fortune. Addicted to utterance of truth and common sense.            [The Devil's Dictionary]

 

What kind of peace do I mean? What kind of peace do we seek? Not a Pax Americana enforced on the world by American weapons of war. Not the peace of the grave or the security of the slave. I am talking about genuine peace, the kind of peace that makes life on earth worth living, the kind that enables men and nations to grow and to hope and to build a better life for their children - not merely peace for Americans but peace for all men and women - not merely peace in our time but peace for all time.                       (President John F. Kennedy at American University 10 June 1963)

 

If something happens that is not consistent with our present knowledge, it is necessary for us to expand our awareness of the variable space of nature and provide a modeling concept that included both all that we know plus this new fact.  That is what we must start projecting to the people who say:  'Look, I don't understand it; therefore it doesn't happen.'  We have to get them to start thinking along the lines of, 'Nature is so much more than I thought, let's expand our thinking and include this.'  Then they can feel comfortable because they don't have to throw away what they already know, because what they already know isn't wrong.  It merely means that it's not complete.                                (Dr. William Tiller)

 

Once, not long ago, there was a great drought in a province of China. The situation was catastrophic. The Catholics made processions, the Protestants made prayers, and the Chinese burned joss-sticks and shot off guns to frighten away the demons of the drought; but to no avail. Finally the people said: "We will fetch the rain-maker." And from another province a dried up old man appeared. The only thing he asked for was a quiet little house somewhere, and there he locked himself in for three days. On the fourth day the clouds gathered and there was a great snow-storm at the time of year when no snow was expected - an unusual amount - and the town was filled with rumors about the wonderful rain-maker. Asked what he had been doing during the three days that had caused the snow to fall on the fourth he said: "I come from another country where things are in order. Here they are out of order; they are not as they should be by the ordinance of heaven. Therefore the whole country is not in Tao, and I also am not in the natural order of things because I am in a disordered country. So I had to wait three days until I was back in Tao and then naturally, the rain came.

The rain-maker did not do anything. He waited until he was in balance. Then, his quality of being rectified the state of imbalance that existed around him. Perhaps we need to become rain-makers...                                                                                                                          (Anne Baring)

For me it was the Christian story in which I sheltered, but later I had fallen out of it. I had fallen out of a world into a universe that seemed infinitely indifferent, even hostile, to my purposes and yearnings - out of a finite astrological cosmos into an infinite astronomical universe. This tipped me into an existential abyss, even if it was a 'disinheritance from delusion'. The mind and soul have unfathomable depths akin to the geological strata of the past, or, as Hopkins put it, 'mind has mountains, cliffs of fall frightful, sheer, no-man-fathomed ……..Eventually I may arrive home, only to find that I never really left! Meanwhile, to survive, certainly to flourish, I must breathe transcendentally, and that in a sense is what sacraments are, breathing-holes in which we can breathe in blessedness.                                                          (John Moriarty)

 

. . . Come my friends,
'tis not too late to seek a newer world.                                  
(Alfred Lord Tennyson)

 

What a piece of work is man, how noble in reason, how infinite in faculty . . . In action how like an angel! In apprehension how like a god.

                                                                                                                                                (Shakespeare)

 

As in a Dream
As in a dream, this simple magic
Of space and time, of here and there.

What is this here, what is this there,
What is this magic of location?

This ocean of presence, these waves of arising,
The wonder of anything happening at all?

Time to be open; Space open to be,
Living the dream; Dreaming our life.

                                                            Dr. Piet Hut

The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science... To know that what is impenetrable to us really exists, manifesting itself as the highest wisdom and the most radiant beauty which our dull faculties can comprehend only in their most primitive forms--this knowledge, this feeling, is at the center of true religiousness.               (Einstein)

I have learned through bitter experience the one supreme lesson to conserve my anger, and as heat conserved is transmitted into energy, even so our anger controlled can be transmitted into a power that can move the world.                                                        (Mahatma Gandhi)

[In the Buddhist view, all separateness is an illusion - individual selves are more or less arbitrary divisions across the continuum of life. The Buddhist self lives in a world without frontiers and must recognize a great range of others, human and otherwise, as literally continuous with itself.]

Sincere forgiveness isn't colored with expectations that the other person apologize or change. Don't worry whether or not they finally understand you. Love them and release them. Life feeds back truth to people in its own way and time -- just like it does for you and me.    (Sara Paddison, The Hidden Power of the Heart)

 

The values of a society have much to do with the functional significance of dreams. Awake and facing outward, we live in a society where a given set of values is already in place. Facing inward while dreaming we bring an evaluative process into play that reveals in a more consistently honest fashion the felt impact of the current realities impinging on us. The discrepancy between the waking view and the metaphorical portrayal of the situation in the dream creates the opportunity for emotional growth. Dreaming, however, is a nighttime activity. The remembered dream has to be "socialized" for its full informative potential to be realized. That means work has to be done …. Truth is healing, however we come by it.

…The two different forms of consciousness [dreaming and waking] reflect the unique and paradoxical predicament we are in. We are one with the material fabric of the world and at the same time capable of observing that world, reflecting on it and engaged in changing it. When awake we function in a world characterized by its discreteness and patterning. When asleep and dreaming we shift to a more diffuse imagistic portrayal of residual feeling tones. Awake, the feeling tones that later surface in dreaming consciousness are dimly felt in a manner akin to a Greek chorus registering the background dissonance between a particular conscious response to a given experience and the seeming unawareness of its actual felt impact. Asleep and dreaming there is a figure-ground reversal highlighting the feelings involved while the waking ego is assigned to a more reactive role. One can see the complementarities between waking and dreaming consciousness. To the extent that one prevails the other is lessened as if constrained by a kind of emotional uncertainty principle.       (Montague Ullman)

 

One of the main functions of mainstream religion is to protect people against direct experience of God.                                       (Carl Jung)

 

I taught psychology of religion for almost 25 years and then had a personal mystical experience, after which I suddenly understood what I had been teaching all those years. … Much of mainstream religion reminds me of vaccination: you go to church and get a little something that then protects you against the real thing. You think that you have already arrived because you go to church on Sunday. That belief then becomes a serious obstacle in any kind of spiritual quest that would have to involve some personal practice leading to direct experiences.

                                                                                                                                                            (Walter H. Clark, via Stanislav Grof)

 

It has been repeatedly observed that the consciousness of people in a state of clinical death can detach from the body and move to various close or remote locations while maintaining the capacity to perceive the environment. ... Ken Ring is now studying people who are congenitally blind because of organic reasons and who have never seen anything in their entire life. In near-death experiences when their consciousness leaves the body, they can see without the mediation of the optical system.                                                                                                                                     (Stanislav Grof)

 

If there appears to be a conflict between religion and science, it is very likely bogus religion and bogus science.            (Ken Wilber)

 

The work of the Danish mystic Martinus (1890-1981) substantiates what happens during an NDE. As human consciousness consists of electromagnetic rays (ray-formed, non-physical matter) and as this type of matter is indestructible, the human consciousness survives physical death. Ray-formed matter is measurable and contains not only consciousness, but also the life-force of the being (hence the flat line when the life force leaves the body). The ray-formed matter constitutes a field of energy and this field contains the self or "I". The physical body is only the instrument of the "I" and the brain is the plug through which the energy field electrifies the body. We are essentially the same whether we have a physical body or not, as the core of our being consists of another type of matter than physical matter. Death is an illusion.                                                                                                                                (Else Byskov)

 

From “Mental Prisons” - Martinus

It is absolutely useless to want to fulfill the morality of a higher step if we have not undergone precisely that evolution which is necessary to make us identical with the beings on that higher step. No being can by an effort of will suddenly, miraculously raise himself to a higher step in evolution. The lion, the tiger or, in other words, the animal does not become a human being simply by an act of will. This transformation or change is not an act of will but a question of evolution. And in the same way, the transition from one view of life or morality to another is not an act of will but a question of evolution. One thus understands that it would be foolish and glaringly against all justice to insist that one's fellow-beings absolutely must manifest the same morality or view of life as oneself. It is this foolishness which is the greatest undermining factor in the fate of the uninitiated terrestrial human being.

Since he is still, in principle, a plant among a profusion of plant-species in a meadow, he cannot possibly be happy as long as he lives in the illusion that all the other plants or fellow-beings should have exactly the same colour or mentality as himself. He will never be able to get this desire fulfilled. Disappointment, feelings of martyrdom and depression will fill his soul, since the flowers of the field do not change colour or allow themselves to be standardized because a single little flower in its foolishness wishes it. And this little flower, which is called "the terrestrial human being", must therefore as quickly as possible learn to understand that it is not a matter of getting all his fellow beings, the profusion of colours and beauty of the flower-meadow, standardized according to his foolishness, lack of wisdom or illusion, but that the absolutely only thing needful is, on the contrary, to eliminate as quickly as possible this illusion or foolishness by trying to come to an understanding of the fact that the profusion of colour-orgies of the flower-meadow, whether in the form of fellow-beings or in the form of plants, exists exclusively in order to be divine instructions to the individual and not in order that the individual through this should instruct the Godhead. As long as the individual hates and persecutes everything which does not appear in his own image or his own favour he is taking part in destroying and wiping out everything which creates "God's image" in life.

The only way out of the mental prisons of life: Since the highest or the most perfect form of happiness is to see in everything and everyone (which means everything which is accessible to sense perception) only "God's image", it is obvious that one is obliged to live unhappily when one, even if unconsciously, takes part in sabotaging this "image of God". When one is unhappy, one is shut out from the real life which is exclusively the very highest happiness; and where one is shut out from the real life or the true happiness one is mentally imprisoned. And as the confinement in this mental prison is maintained exclusively through one's desire to standardize the world and insist that everything and everyone should be otherwise than they are precisely at the moment, one cannot possibly be happy. In this insistence one is in total conflict with the Godhead. One wants the world in "one's own image". But the world can only be in "God's image".

Life and the world will therefore be a mental imprisonment and misfortune with the ensuing physical suffering or unhappy fate until one understands that it is not "God's image" which should be turned into one's image but, on the contrary, this image which should be transformed to being in "God's image". The key to coming out of the dark, mental imprisonment of superstition and illusion lies exclusively in coming to understand that "everything is very good" and that our fellow-beings cannot possibly manifest anything other than what is characteristic of their step in evolution, and that this manifestation consequently cannot possibly be a justifiable basis for intolerance, hatred or persecution of the being in question. And in the full understanding of this, one will, in harmony with the world-redeemer, "turn the right cheek when one is smitten on the left" and cry to heaven: "Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do".         (Martinus)

Homo sapiens, the first truly free species, is about to decommission natural selection, the force that made us.... Soon we must look deep within ourselves and decide what we wish to become.                                                                           (Edward O. Wilson “Consilience”)

 

Our mental and emotional diets determine our overall energy levels, health, and well-being to a far greater extent than most people realize. Every thought and feeling, no matter how big or small, impacts our inner energy reserves.                                                                        (HeartMath)

 

Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:

The Soul that rises with us, our life's Star,

Hath had elsewhere its setting,

And cometh from afar:

 

Not in entire forgetfulness,

And not in utter nakedness,

But trailing clouds of glory do we come

From God, who is our home;

 

Heaven lies about us in our infancy!

Shades of the prison-house begin to close

Upon the growing Boy,

But He beholds the light, and whence it flows,

He sees it in his joy;

 

The Youth, who daily farther from the east

Must travel, still is Nature's Priest,

And by the vision splendid

Is on his way attended;

 

At length the Man perceives it die away,

And fade into the light of common day.                    (William Wordsworth)

 

Although we have become accustomed to thinking of the universe as a huge empty space - a vacuum - in which planets, stars, and other sundry things move around, Ervin Laszlo reminded us in The Creative Cosmos that the universe is not a vacuum, but rather a plenum, in the sense that there is no such thing as empty space. Every cubic millimetre of what we think of as empty space is packed with a bewildering variety of fields, all interpenetrating each other. At any point in the universe, including any point on or in our own bodies, there are an incalculable number of gravitational and electromagnetic fields.                                                                                                                                   (Christopher Thomson)

SETH says:

·        Energy is the basis of the universe

·        Energy is consciousness: that is to say, mind is inherent in all matter from the elementary particle to the human.

·        The universe is constructed from mental activity and from all consciousness.

·        All conscious gestalts are constrained by their level of development but willingly cooperate to create a consensus reality. In the simplest terms, all is energy, energy is consciousness, and all cooperate for the development of all.

                                                                                                (Jane Roberts)

 

The Jews, I find, are very, very selfish. They care not how many Estonians, Latvians, Finns, Poles, Yugoslavs or Greeks get murdered or mistreated... as long as the Jews get special treatment. Yet, when they are in power ... neither Hitler nor Stalin has anything on them for cruelty or mistreatment to the underdog.

                                                (President Harry S. Truman)

 

We cannot teach people anything; we can only help them discover it within themselves.             (Galileo Galilei)

 

I often use the analogy of a chess game: one can learn all the rules of chess, but one doesn't know how to play well. The present situation in physics is as if we know chess, but we don't know one or two rules. But in this part of the board where things are in operation, those one or two rules are not operating much and we can get along pretty well without understanding those rules. That's the way it is, I would say, regarding the phenomena of life, consciousness and so forth..

                                                                                                                                                                        (Richard Feynman)

God was invented to explain mystery. God is always invented to explain those things that you do not understand. Now, when you finally discover how something works, you get some laws which you're taking away from God; you don't need him anymore. But you need him for the other mysteries. So therefore you leave him to create the universe because we haven't figured that out yet; you need him for understanding those things which you don't believe the laws will explain, such as consciousness, or why you only live to a certain length of time -- life and death -- stuff like that. God is always associated with those things that you do not understand. Therefore I don't think that the laws can be considered to be like God because they have been figured out.                    (ibid)

 

Consciousness converges with the self as a landing tern touches the outspread feet of its shadow on the sand; precisely, toe hits toe. The tern folds its wings to sit; its shadow dips and spreads over the sand to meet and cup its breast.                    (Anne Dillard ‘An American Childhood’)

 

The sense of direction

Homing pigeons can find their way back to their loft over hundreds of miles of unfamiliar terrain. Migrating European swallows travel thousands of miles to their feeding place, and have to cross unfamiliar terrain. Pigeons do not know their way home by remembering the twists and turns of the outward journey, because birds taken in closed vans by devious routes find their way home perfectly well, as do birds that have been anaesthetized on the outward journey, or transported in rotating drums. They do not navigate by the sun, because pigeons can home on cloudy days and can even be trained to navigate at night. However, they may use the sun as a simple compass to keep their bearings. Although they use landmarks in familiar terrain, they can home from unfamiliar places hundreds of kilometres from their home, where no familiar landmarks are visible. They cannot smell their home from hundreds of miles away, especially when it is downwind, although smell may play a part in their homing ability when they are close to familiar territory. Pigeons deprived of their sense of smell by researchers were still able to find their homes.

Some biologists hope that the homing of pigeons might turn out to be explicable in terms of a magnetic sense. But even if pigeons have a compass-sense (which is not proven), this could not explain their ability to navigate. If you were taken blindfold to an unknown destination and given a compass, you would know where north was, but not the direction of your home. The failure of conventional attempts to explain pigeon homing and many other kinds of animal navigation implies the existence of a sense of direction as yet unrecognized by institutional science. This could have major implications for the understanding of animal migrations, and would shed light on the human sense of direction, much better developed in traditional peoples, such as the bushmen of the Kalahari or Polynesian navigators, than in modern urban people.                                                 (Rupert Sheldrake)

Embryogenesis lies at the heart of our riddle. It is the unadulterated text of both creation and evolution. Every time a creature forms anew out of raw atoms it makes a replica of life itself. The way in which it organizes its body and complexifies is the way in which meaning was invented.      (Richard Grossinger)

In a sense our thoughts are the explicate forms thrown up by the underlying movements of the implicate orders of mind. Like the vortex of a river . . . thoughts have no absolute, independent existence of their own but are constantly being supported by the underlying processes of their ground. Ultimately this movement of mind merges into that of matter so that the two should not be considered as dual aspects of nature but as arising out of the same underlying ground. In a similar sense, individual minds could be said to arise out of the one ground. They represent relatively stable forms, identities, as it were, within the underlying background. In this way it appears that individual minds have a common or collective origin that has something in common with that of matter. In a sense, therefore, mind is able to act upon mind, and mind and matter exert an influence one on the other. But this should be thought of not as some form of causal interaction since individual minds, and mind and matter, are not fundamentally separate but are simply the explicate forms that emerge out of a common, generative order.       (David Peat – colleague of David Bohm)

Synchronicities are manifestations, in mind and matter, of the unknown ground that underlies them both .... The parallelism between the objective and the subjective aspects of the universe do not so much arise through causal connections, or linear patterns in time, but out of underlying dynamics that arc common to both.                                                                                                                                   (ibid)

I want to call attention to something we often pay lip service to but fail to appreciate fully; namely, that we are all much less separate than we think we are. The preoccupation with separateness has come about by the way our personal lives have been booby-trapped by the failures of history. We go about our daily tasks with a limited and often expedient view of our connection to all other members of the human species. Were we to allow a truer vision of this underlying state of interconnectedness we would be more inclined to remedy rather than increase the fragmentation and separateness among members of the human species that has been our heritage and that we so blindly perpetuate.                                                                               (Montague Ullman)

We avoid the things that we're afraid of because we think there will be dire consequences if we confront them. But the truly dire consequences in our lives come from avoiding things that we need to learn about or discover.                                                (Shakti Gawain)

 

Electromagnetic energy is used by the body to integrate, interrelate, harmonize, and execute diverse physiological processes. Such intrinsic energy is in fact created and transmitted in the body, and it controls specific biological functions.

Natural electromagnetic energy is an omnipresent factor in the environment of each organism on earth. From an evolutionary standpoint, nature would favor those organisms that developed a capacity to accept information about the earth, atmosphere, and the cosmos in the form of electromagnetic signals and to adjust their internal processes and behavior accordingly. Thus it follows that natural environmental electromagnetic energy could convey information to an organism about its surroundings, thereby facilitating behavioral changes. Studies of biological cycles and animal navigation support the thesis that environmental electromagnetic energy mediates the transfer of information from the environment to the organism.

If nature gave certain organisms the ability to receive information about the environment via unseen electromagnetic signals, then there must also have been the gift of an ability to discriminate between meaningful and meaningless signals. Signals having no information, or those outside certain physiological bandwidths or intensity ranges, would have to be recognized and responded to differently than informationally significant signals (which lead to behavioral changes that are ultimately geared to help the organism survive or compete). Based on these considerations, our original hypothesis led to the further conclusion that organisms would be particularly sensitive to artificial electromagnetic energy having electrical characteristics - frequency and intensity - similar to those of natural environmental electromagnetic fields. Signals outside this physiological range would elicit a nonspecific systemic reaction geared toward the re-establishment of homeostasis. Low-strength electromagnetic fields within the physiological frequency range can alter the electroencephalogram, the electrocardiogram, biological rhythms, calcium metabolism, and human and animal behavior. Electromagnetic energy at non-physiological frequencies and intensities induces adaptive homeostatic responses in animals and humans.                                                                      (Robert Becker and Andrew Marino)

 

A work of art - expressing its implicit interpretation by its technique - is a rotating, many-faceted gem against psychically darkened backgrounds; so too is a dream.                                                       (Daniel E. Schneider, M.D ‘The Psychoanalyst and the Artist’)

 

Analogously, our dreams “digest” residual feelings triggered by recent events and evaluate them in regard to their significance for our future. It does this by opening up our remote memory bank and exploring the degree to which a current concern links up with unresolved tensions in our past. Dreams arise spontaneously and involuntarily. No one can consciously decide to have a particular dream or consciously design the opening scene.                       (Montague Ullman)

Akin to an aesthetic experience, all of us have within us a musician endowed with perfect pitch who knows when we are singing off key and has no hesitation in calling it to our attention. He doesn’t persuade or preach. He simply presents. It’s up to us to act on it. That way lies emotional                       (ibid)

In some strange way we do not yet fully understand, unconscious domains resonate with each other more spontaneously and effectively than do our conscious domains. Put differently, it is as if, in our dreams, we are tapping into a single universal unconscious domain.                                         (ibid)

Metaphor is a frequent component of everyday discourse. As such, it renders speech more vivid and more expressive of the meaning to be conveyed. In the dream state the metaphor appears to function in a similar, but also somewhat different way. It is similar in regard to the concern with the qualities of dramatic presentation and vividness. It is different insofar as it is not concerned with the transfer of a meaningful statement from one person to another. In the dream state it is an integral part of a process of self-confrontation concerned not with the intelligibility and referential meaning of a given aspect of experience, but rather with the felt reactions associated with that experience. This technique does not solve the real problems at issue, but it does succeed in reducing an intangible and unknown set of operating causes to familiar and manipulable quantities, and in that way creates the possibility of resolving what, in the absence of more accurate knowledge, would be irreconcilable events. A personal myth is created which appears analogous to the mythopoetic process as it operates culturally.

The significant aspects of the mythopoetic process may be stated as follows:

We have the ongoing activities of a given society, including undesirable effects arising apart from the will and intent of the members of this society.  

There are the associated felt reactions of a distressing or disturbing nature.

There is the subjective explanation, which is objectively false but expressed in terms of referents external to the individual. The myth through the device of metaphor allows for illusory solutions in the absence of real mastery over some of the harsher realities of life.                                                   (ibid)

[Dreams appear to be both a projection of the personality and a reflection of the culture.]

 

Liberal democracy has never dared face the fact that industrial capitalism is an intensely coercive form of organization of society that cumulatively constrains men and all of their institutions to work the will of the minority who hold and wield the economic power; and that this relentless warping of men's lives and forms of association becomes less and less the result of voluntary decisions by 'bad' or 'good' men and more and more an impersonal web of coercions dictated by the need to 'keep the system running'.                          (sociologist Robert S. Lynd)

 

The world of dreams is our real world whilst we are sleeping, because our attention then lapses from the sensible world. Conversely when we wake, the attention usually lapses from the dream-world and that becomes unreal. But if a dream haunts us and compels our attention during the day, it is very apt to remain figuring in our consciousness as a sort of sub-universe alongside of the waking world. Most people have probably had dreams which it is hard to imagine not to have been glimpses into an actually existing region of being.                                                                                    (William James)

 

I've looked at life from both sides now,
From win and lose and still somehow
It's life's illusions I recall
I really don't know life at all.                       (Joni Mitchell)

As all newspaper writers are aware, truth can be an error of judgment.                                      (John Kenneth Galbraith)

In any great organization, it is far, far safer to be wrong with the majority than to be right alone.              (ibid)

Trickle-down theory – this is the less than elegant metaphor that, if one feeds the horse enough oats, some will pass through to the road for the sparrows.

                                                                                                                                                            (ibid)

There can be no knowledge without emotion. We may be aware of a truth, yet until we have felt its force, it is not ours. To the cognition of the brain must be added the experience of the soul.                                                                                          (Arnold Bennett -1867-1931)

It is quite beyond me how anyone can believe God speaks to us in books and stories. If the world does not directly reveal to us our relationship to it, if our hearts fail to tell us what we owe ourselves and others, we shall assuredly not learn it from books, which are at best designed but to give names to our errors.

                                                            (Goethe)

"The Artist"

Are you aware...
That within you dwells an Artist...
A Creator?

Your life is its handiwork...
A living canvas
Spread for all to see.

The Artist in you
Is destined to create a Masterpiece...
But, the Craftsman's work
Is not yet finished--
Nor shall it ever be.

In Truth...
The work has only just begun.
Glorious, wondrous, beautiful, exotic forms
Are being imaged now
In the artist's mind.
Mighty new brush strokes
Will soon bring new shape and color
To the canvas you know as your world.                    (Jack Boland)

The thousand mysteries around us would not trouble us but would rather interest us, if only we had cheerful, healthy hearts.

                                                                                                                                                            (Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche)

Let a man be true to his intentions and his efforts to fulfill them, and the point is gained, whether he succeed or not.            (Thomas Carlyle)

Like physical light (energy) and elementary particles (mass), consciousness (information) enjoys a wave/particle duality which allows it to circumvent and penetrate barriers, and to resonate with other consciousnesses and with appropriate aspects of its environment. Thereby it can both acquire and insert information, both objective and subjective, from and to its resonant partners.                                              (Jahn)

If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle.                              (Sun Tzu, The Art of War)

Truth is an illusion, and illusion is truth. Humanity has never lived except in error, and besides there is no truth, since the world is in perpetual change. If you succeed in building up a true image of the world, it will cease to be true to your grandchildren.                (Remy de Gourmont)

Once one knows what really matters, one ceases to be voluble. And what does really matter? That is easy: thinking and doing, doing and thinking---and these are the sum of all wisdom...Both must move ever onward in life, to and fro, like breathing in and breathing out. Whoever makes it a rule to test action by thought, thought by action, cannot falter, and if he does, will soon find his way back to the right road.                       (Goethe)

 

The first and last thing required of genius is the love of truth.                                                                    (ibid)

 

After fifteen minutes nobody looks at a rainbow.                                                                                     (ibid)

 

Everything is simpler than you think and at the same time more complex than you imagine.                        (ibid)

Syncretism is the acknowledgement that a single Tradition runs through and nurtures all religions, all learning, all philosophy. The wise man does not discriminate; he gathers together all the shreds of light, from wherever they come                   (Umberto Eco – ‘Foucault´s Pendulum’)

Of course, you attribute to others what you’re doing yourself, and since what you’re doing yourself is hateful, the others become hateful. But since the others, as a rule, would like to do the same hateful thing that you’re doing, they collaborate with you, hinting that – yes – what you attribute to them is actually what they have always desired. God blinds those He wishes to destroy; you just have to lend Him a helping hand.        (ibid)

Truth is within ourselves; it takes no rise from outward things, whatever you may believe. There is an inmost center in all of us where truth abides in fullness...To know consists in opening a way out whence the imprisoned splendor may escape, not in effecting entry for a light supposed to be without.       ( Buddha )

These are the years when more and more people around the world have became aware that the industrial society has become paradoxically unlivable, incalculably immoral, and ultimately deadly.                                   (Peter S. Beagle – intro to Tolkien’s ‘The Lord of The Rings’)

Many things I can command the Mirror [of Galadrial] to reveal – and to some I can show what they desire to see. But the Mirror will also show things unbidden, and those are often stranger and more profitable than things which we wish to behold. What you will see, if you leave the Mirror free to work, I cannot tell. For it shows things that were, and things that are, and things that yet may be. But which it is that he sees, even the wisest can not always tell. Do you wish to look?

                                                                                                                                                (J.R.R. Tolkien)

Time does not tarry ever, but change and growth is not in all things and places alike - - - - The passing seasons are but ripples ever repeated in the long long stream. Yet beneath the Sun all things must wear to an end at last.                                                                                     (ibid)

[Although you have wronged me, we are yet both fallible humans, so ---] “No, there is no need to grovel and rub the face in the dirt. Merely bow the head, as you enter, ever so slightly.”                                                                        (George R Stewart – ‘Earth Abides’)

“Young man,” the grandfather said, “are you happy?”

The young man looked startled at this question, and he glanced in both directions before answering, and then he spoke-“Yes, I am happy. Things are as they are, and I am part of them.”                                                                        (ibid)

 

He alone is great and happy who requires neither to command nor to obey in order to secure his being of some importance in the world.    (Goethe)

 

I can promise to be sincere, but not to be impartial.                                                                                                          (ibid)

 

The web of this world is woven of Necessity and Chance. Woe to him who has accustomed himself from his youth up to find something necessary in what is capricious, and who would ascribe something like reason to Chance and make a religion of surrendering to it.                   (ibid)

 

These are the five ways in which a human being reacts toward a source of danger, or on any given problem:       attack, flee, avoid, neglect or succumb.

If a child is punished and thereafter obeys, he can be considered to have succumbed. And the value of a child who will succumb to punishment is so slight that the Spartans would long since have drowned him, for it means he has sunk into an apathy unless it so happens that he himself has computed the idea, bypassing all reaction, that the thing for which he was punished was not bright (he can’t be assisted in this computation if punishment is entered into his reactive mind by the source trying to assist him). He can flee the punishment source, which at least is not apathy but cowardice by popular judgment. He can neglect the matter entirely and ignore the punishment source - and would have been called a Stoic by the ancients, but might be called merely dull witted by his friends. He can avoid the punishment source, which might give him the doubtful compliment of being sly or cunning or pandering. Or he can attack the punishment source either by direct action or by upsetting or fouling the person or the possessions of the source - in which instance he would be called, on direct action, a valiant fool, taking parental size into account, or in a less direct fashion he could be called “covertly hostile” or could be said to be “negating”; as long as a human being will attack as a response to a valid threat, he can be said to be in fair mental condition – “normal” – and a child is said to be acting “just like any normal child”.

                        (L. Ron Hubbard – ‘Dianetics’)

Ally Computation: A man is not victimized by his enemies so much as he is murdered by his friends.- - - For the ally computation – above all things – encysts the life force of the individual. Here is caught the free feeling, the very heartbeat of life itself. A pre-clear is only placed in apathy by ally computations. The body can be almost dead in the presence of antagonism and still rally and fight. But it cannot fight its friends.                                                              (ibid)

- - - Here, in the ally and the antagonist, we have the age-old tale of the hero and the villain, the heroine and the villainess, Mazda and Ahriman, the cowboy in the white hat and the cowboy in the black. The Hindu trinity is found, as source, in father, mother and unborn baby. But the war of “good and evil” is found as reactive data in the engram bank in the form of ally and antagonist.                                                                                                                    (ibid)

There is an accurate measuring stick for sanity. Sanity is the ability to tell differences. The better one can tell differences, no matter how minute, and know the width of these differences, the more rational he is. The less one can tell differences and the closer one comes to thinking in identities (A=A) the less sane he is. - - - The point here is that monotone importance in a class of facts leads to nothing but the most cluttered confusion. Here is evaluation: opinions are nothing, authority is useless, data is secondary: establishment of relative importance is the key. Given the world and the stars as a laboratory and a mind to compute the relative importance of what it perceives, no problems can remain unsolved. Given masses of data with monotone evaluation and one may have something which looks pretty but isn’t useful.                                                                                                                                                                                         (ibid)

A fool is he who soon forgets Depression’s lesson when ‘tis passed.                                 (Sri Ratnasekharasuri – a Jain master)

No mode of conscious life could have been devised which provided unalloyed happiness and unmixed goodness at the same time that it provided the varied experiences and diverse states necessary to develop the knowledge, intelligence, character and spiritually of the human being. Although some facets of this development could have been obtained by a one-sided monotonous experience, yielding only the pleasurable enjoyment of life, important parts of the psyche would then necessarily have been untouched by it. Only by providing a course of changing experiences which took a wider, more varied route and also included the opposites of suffering and evil, could the full complete evolution of man have been achieved.

The memory of the past darkness of ignorance heightens his appreciation of the present light of knowledge. The vivid contrast between the two conditions makes him much more conscious of the meaning and value of the higher one. Without the experiences of both to complement each other, he could not distinguish good from evil, bliss from misery, reality from appearance and truth from falsity. How, without conditions productive of sacrifice and self-denial, for instance, could the spiritual widening of his consciousness be obtained? Good becomes significant to him only as it stands in contrast to evil, which is indeed the Not-good. The consciousness of sound as sound always needs to be accompanied by the consciousness of its opposite and differentiating number, silence. There could be no manifestation of a universe without this play of opposites running completely through it. As soon as the One became Two, it began. Hence birth and death appear everywhere in the universe, pleasure and pain in man!                                                                (Dr. Paul Brunton – ‘The Spiritual Crisis of Man’)

The truthful work of a carpenter is judged by the senses whereas the truthful understanding of the human being is judged by the intelligence. And in the evolution of man, his senses have arrived at a more developed state than his intelligence. Hence, experience alone does not bring immediate wisdom as its fruit. Only after it is well and honestly thought over, well reasoned upon, or deeply intuited in an impersonal manner, does the fruit appear. This takes time, yet it both implies and elicits growth.                                                                                                                                                (ibid)

The world is not bereft, like a corpse, of life and sense. It has both. There is within and behind every bit of it, even when undiscerned by us, a directing Mind, a governing spiritual principle. This everywhere-present principle of life and the creative cosmic power are one and the same – God. In both stars and men we see the sign or evidence of its incomparable intelligence and unbelievable omnipotence.                                 (ibid)

There are followers of mysticism who use it as an escapism, who hope by some magical power to get a transformation of themselves and their lives without having to make any hard effort or to undergo any hard discipline. Three mystical doctrines particularly appeal to them and are constantly taken advantage of to avoid this effort and discipline, this necessary work on themselves. A fatalistic view of the law of recompense (karma) is taken to justify their stagnation or failure. An infantile view of the relationship with a master is taken to thrust on his shoulders the entire responsibility for their worldly life or problems, and spiritual progress. Third, a too personal view of the doctrine of grace is taken to seek God’s favoritism and to support the ego.                        (ibid)

Be reasonable in indulging in spiritual retreat from the uncertainties of worldly affairs. Make retreat occasional in frequency and limited in duration. - - - It is not necessary to flee to monasteries for this self-training; anyone can practice it in his own home. Sometimes he can even practice it better - for the opposition overcome, the difficulties mastered will give him a tested strength which no monastery can give. Lecturing to a multi-millionaire of his time who wished to renounce the world, the Buddha, arch-apostle of world renunciation though he was, said: “I say unto thee, remain in thy station in life and apply thyself with diligence to thy enterprise. It is not life, wealth and power that enslave men, but the cleaving to life, wealth and power.” When a man is concerned about lifelong retreat from the world, he may be obedient to a genuine inner need which at that time will make for his true progress. But he may also be obedient, not to genuine need, but to a timid fear of becoming entangled in the affairs of troubled mankind. In that case, he has merely transferred his selfishness from a positive to a negative state. His virtue, having no strain upon it, becomes a cloistered, enfeebled thing.                                                (ibid)

 

Nature! We are enveloped and embraced by her, incapable of emerging from her and incapable of entering her more deeply. Unbidden and unwarned, she receives us into the circuits of her dance, drifting onward with us herself, until we grow tired and drop from her arms.

                                                                                                                                                (Goethe)

From inaccessible mountain range, by way of desert untrod by human foot, to the ends of the unknown seas, the breath of the everlasting creative spirit is felt, rejoicing over every speck of dust that hearkens to it and lives.                         (ibid)

It is better to fail in originality than to succeed in imitation.                                               (Herman Melville)

It is one thing to show a man that he is in error, and another to put him in possession of truth.      (John Locke)

We see from recent experience that those princes have accomplished most who paid little to keeping their promises but who knew how to craftily manipulate the minds of men. A certain prince of our time who it's just as well not to name, preaches nothing but peace and mutual trust, yet he is the determined enemy of both.                                                                                                          (Machiavelli)

["You will remain in reverie as long as necessary to resolve the issue you have been dealing with in as satisfactory a manner as is possible at this time. Your subconscious (or 'inner mind') will then allow you to awaken entirely on your own, feeling refreshed and alert."]

                                    a remedy therapeutic prescription - naturalistic self-hypnosis

 

The human mind evolved to believe in gods... Acceptance of the supernatural conveyed a great advantage throughout prehistory, when the brain was evolving.  Thus it is in sharp contrast to science which was developed as a product of the modern age and is not underwritten by genetic algorithms.                                                                                                                                        (E.O. Wilson)

 

The brain is a filter of consciousness which transmits part of the Vaster Consciousness of Reality, like a partially opaque glass allowing through a few rays of a super-solar blaze. The “degree of opacity” or threshold of brain activity can vary so that under certain conditions “more light” or an awareness of a wider and more intense range of consciousness is possible. Thus the physical brain is necessary only as a means to transmit a part of this Larger Consciousness into the dimension of ordinary reality perceived by individual normal waking consciousness. If an individual brain is damaged, disintegrates, or dies, this Larger Consciousness does not cease.                                                                                                                                                (William James – Ingersoll Lectures)

Even basic Buddhist teachings such as refuge are now being taken theistically because of inadequate explanation. When we chant prayers like "I take refuge in the Buddha," we barely mention - and we therefore ignore - its essential meanings, such as knowing that one's ultimate nature is the Buddha.                                                                                                                                 (Dzongsar Khyentse Rinpoche)

A flourishing human life is not a life lived with an ageless body or an untroubled soul, but rather a life lived in rhythmed time, mindful of time’s limits, appreciative of each season and filled first of all with those intimate human relations that are ours only because we are born, age, replace ourselves, decline and die – and know it. It is a life of aspiration, made possible and born of experienced lack, of the disproportion between the transcendent longings of the soul and the limited capacities of our bodies and minds.                                             (The President’s Council on Bioethics - Beyond Therapy: Biotechnology and the Pursuit of Happiness)

Animal behavior can be deduced by careful observation and explained by evolution theory.  By carefully observing terriers, we can deduce that they were selected to creep into burrows.  By carefully observing people, we can deduce they were selected to believe in virtually anything:

"Precisely what we believe is immaterial; what matters is the kind of behavior it generates.  This is why humanity is characterized by such astonishing diversity in its belief systems.  As far as our genes are concerned, we can believe that the universe is driven by an overweight fairy on a green cheese bicycle provided that such belief effectively coerces us into adopting genetically advantageous behavior in all matters of evolutionary consequence, such as feeding, mating, nurturing, bonding, and protecting family, tribe, and territory."

(Reg Morrison, Lynn Margulis “ The Spirit  in The Gene: Humanity’s Proud Illusion and The Laws of Nature”)

 

A story from John O’Hara’s classic 1934 novel "Appointment in Samarra."

"There was a merchant in Bagdad who sent his servant to market to buy provisions and in a little while the servant came back, white and trembling, and said “Master, just now when I was in the marketplace I was jostled by a woman in the crowd and when I turned I saw it was Death that jostled me. She looked at me and made a threatening gesture; now, lend me your horse, and I will ride away from this city and avoid my fate. I will go to Samarra and there Death will not find me”. The merchant lent him his horse, and the servant mounted it, and he dug his spurs in its flanks and as fast as the horse could gallop he went. Then the merchant went down to the marketplace and he saw me standing in the crowd and he came to me and said “Why did you make a threatening gesture to my servant when you saw him this morning?” “That was not a threatening gesture”, I said, “it was only a start of surprise. I was astonished to see him in Bagdad, for I had an appointment with him tonight in Samarra."

Had Allah willed He could have made you all one community. But He made you as you are (diverse) as a test. So vie one with another in good works. Unto Allah you will all return, and He will then inform you of the meaning of differences within you.                       [Quran 5:48].

O humanity! We have indeed created you from one man and one woman, and have made you into various nations and tribes so that you may know one another.                                                                                                                                                                     [Quran 49:13].

And let there be amongst you a group of people who invite to goodness, encouraging that which is right and forbidding that which is wrong; it is they who are the successful.                                                                                                                                       [Quran 3:104].

Those who believe (in the Qur'an), and those who follow the Jewish (scriptures), and the Christians and the Sabians,- any who believe in God and the Last Day, and do good deeds, shall have their reward with their Lord; on them shall be no fear, nor shall they grieve.

                                                                                                                                                                                    (Quran 2:62 and 5:69). 

People who expect to be ignorant and free expect what never was and never will be.                                                     (Thomas Jefferson)

Wakefulness is nothing other than a dream-like state modulated by the constraints of sensory inputs.             (Rudolfo Llinas – neuroscientist)

In physics light is absolute, not in space and time. In the mind, the light of consciousness is absolute, the common ground of all experience. Both lights are intrinsically unknowable - they cannot be known in the way everything else is known. Both are universal. Every photon carries the same quantum of action. Similarly, the light of consciousness is the same in me as in you. These parallels suggest that the physical world and the world of mind share a common ground - one that we experience as light. Monotheistic religions call this common ground God. Many of their descriptions of God have the attributes and qualities of light. God is said to be absolute; so is light. God lies beyond the manifest world of matter, shape, and form; beyond space and time; so does light. God cannot be known directly; nor can light.                                                                                                                                                      (Peter Russell)

Nothing has to be achieved in order to be at peace. All we have to do is stop doing - stop wanting things to be different. Stop worrying, stop getting upset when things don’t go as we wish, or when people don’t behave as we think they should. When we stop doing all the things that obscure the peace that is there at the core, we find that what we have been seeking all along is there, waiting silently for us.                                          (ibid)

The Ultimate work of civilization is the unfolding of ever-deeper Spiritual Understanding.         (Arnold Toynbee)

Time and space are but the physiological colours the eye makes; the soul is light.                                    (Emerson)

What is this “I”? You will, on close introspection, find that what you really mean by “I” is the ground stuff upon which all experiences and memories are collected.                                                                                                                                     (Schroedinger – physicist)

Baba Ram Das (aka Professor Richard Alpert) tells about visiting his brother in a mental institution and his brother asked, "Why is it that you go about the world saying you are God, and people buy your books, and worship you, and I say "I am God", and they stick me in here?" And Ram Das said, “I say everyone else is God, and that's the difference”.

A Sleep of Prisoners

 So the human heart can go the length of God
Dark and cold we may be
But this is no winter now
The frozen misery of centuries
Clocks, breaks, begins to move
The thunder is the thunder of the flows,
The fill, the flat, the upstart spring.
Thank God our time is now
When one comes up to meet us everywhere
Never to leave us 'til we take the greatest stride
Of souls folk ever took
Affairs are now soul size
The enterprise is exploration into God
But where are you making for
It takes so many thousand years to wake
But will you wake, for pitys sake
     (
Christopher Fry)

 

Whether the universe is a concourse of atoms, or nature is a system, let this first be established, that I am part of the whole which is governed by nature; next, I am intimately related to the parts, which are of the same kind with myself.                (Marcus Aurelius)

To show how real astronomical wonder can be presented to children, I'll borrow from a book called Earthsearch by John Cassidy, which I brought back from America to show my daughter Juliet. Find a large open space and take a soccer ball to represent the sun. Put the ball down and walk ten paces in a straight line. Stick a pin in the ground. The head of the pin stands for the planet Mercury. Take another 9 paces beyond Mercury and put down a peppercorn to represent Venus. Seven paces on, drop another peppercorn for Earth. One inch away from earth, another pinhead represents the Moon, the furthest place, remember, that we've so far reached. 14 more paces to little Mars, then 95 paces to giant Jupiter, a ping-pong ball. 112 paces further, Saturn is a marble. No time to deal with the outer planets except to say that the distances are much larger. But, how far would you have to walk to reach the nearest star, Proxima Centauri? Pick up another soccer ball to represent it, and set off for a walk of 4200 miles. As for the nearest other galaxy, Andromeda, don't even think about it!

                                                                                                                                                                                    (Richard Dawkins)

You contain a trillion copies of a large, textual document written in a highly accurate, digital code, each copy as voluminous as a substantial book. I'm talking, of course, of the DNA in your cells. Textbooks describe DNA as a blueprint for a body. It's better seen as a recipe for making a body, because it is irreversible. But today I want to present it as something different again, and even more intriguing. The DNA in you is a coded description of ancient worlds in which your ancestors lived. DNA is the wisdom out of the old days, and I mean very old days indeed. …The messages that have come down to us are the ones that have survived millions, in some cases hundreds of millions, of generations. For every successful message that has reached the present, countless failures have fallen away like the chippings on a sculptor's floor. That's what Darwinian natural selection means. We are the descendants of a tiny élite of successful ancestors. Our DNA has proved itself successful, because it is here. Geological time has carved and sculpted our DNA to survive down to the present.                        (ibid)

The human body is the magazine of inventions, the patent-office, where are the models from which every hint was taken. All the tools and engines on earth are only extensions of its limbs and senses.                                                                                                     (R. W. Emerson)

As William Blum writes:

If I were the president, I could stop terrorist attacks against the United States in a few days. Permanently. I would first apologize -- very publicly and very sincerely -- to all the widows and orphans, the impoverished and the tortured, and all the many millions of other victims of American imperialism. Then I would announce that America's global military interventions have come to an end. I would then inform Israel that it is no longer the 51st state of the union but -– oddly enough -– a foreign country. Then I would reduce the military budget by at least 90% and use the savings to pay reparations to the victims and repair the damage from the many American bombings, invasions and sanctions. There would be enough money. One year of our military budget is equal to more than $20,000 per hour for every hour since Jesus Christ was born. That's one year.
   That's what I'd do on my first three days in the White House. On the fourth day, I'd be assassinated.

 

The only myth that's going to be worth thinking about in the immediate future is one talking about the planet -- not this city, not these people, but the planet and everybody on it.                                                                                                                                    (Joseph Campbell)

The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed, and thus clamorous to be led to safety, by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.                                                                                                                                             (H.L. Mencken)

Concrete meetings between persons are the most important thing in being human. Here is the infallible test: Imagine yourself in a situation where you are alone, wholly alone on earth, and you are offered one of the two, books or men. I often hear men prizing their solitude but that is only because there are still men somewhere on earth even though in the far distance.                                  (Martin Buber)

I knew nothing of books when I came forth from the womb of my mother, and I shall die without books, with another human hand in my own. I do, indeed, close my door at times and surrender myself to a book, but only because I can open the door again and see a human being looking at me.                                                                                                                                                                                    (ibid)

When I meet a man, I am not concerned about his opinions. I am concerned about the man. My inclination is to meet people. What is important is the manner in which I meet others; the quality of each relationship is vital.ber. I think no human being can give more than this. Making life possible for the other, if only for a moment.                                                                                                          (ibid)

As to my own books, I write them as a snake sheds its skins, because I must. But they are not the most important part of my life. The most important part is my relationship with others.                                                                                               (ibid)

It has been hypothesized that many forms of psychological and holistic healing utilizing hypnosis, the relaxation response, psychotherapy and meditation can facilitate stress reduction and healing right down to the molecular-genetic level by simply providing a therapeutic context for rest and recovery that can optimize ultradian rhythms.                                                                                                (Ernest Lawrence Rossi)

I teach entirely natural procedures whereby patients can learn to recognize the meaning of their own sensations, emotions, thoughts, creativity and developing points of view. I help patients discover the new frames of reference that their inner mind-body is creating spontaneously at many levels within themselves. Life is naturally creative - we are always in a state of creative flux to deal with an ever-changing world. I help patients to create or, better, to discover the naturally healing reframes that are taking place in themselves all the time. In one of my books I call this "The Symptom Path to Enlightenment." People learn how to listen to the message that their stress induced symptoms may be telling them. They learn how to convert their so-called "symptoms" into "signals" of how and when they need to do their own inner healing. By heeding the message of their symptoms they gradually acquire their own insights and "enlightenment" about how to better their lives and facilitate their own healing.

(ibid)

Life may not be the party we hoped for, but while we are here, we might as well dance!!!                                  *

Keep the country in fear if you want to remain in the leadership. Keep the country always afraid that the neighbour is going to attack, that there are countries who are designing an attack, that they are preparing to attack – go on creating rumors. Never leave people at ease, because when they are at ease they don’t bother about the politicians. When people are really at ease, politicians are meaningless. Keep people always afraid, then the politician is powerful.                                                                                                                                               (Osho)

Trust is personal, belief is social. Trust you have to grow in, belief you can remain in, whatsoever you are, and belief can be imposed on you. Drop beliefs.                                                                                                                                                 (Osho)

You've got to be taught
To hate and fear,
You've got to be taught
From year to year,
It's got to be drummed
In your dear little ear
You've got to be carefully taught.

You've got to be taught to be afraid
Of people whose eyes are oddly made,
And people whose skin is a diff'rent shade,
You've got to be carefully taught.

You've got to be taught before it's too late,
Before you are six or seven or eight,
To hate all the people your relatives hate,
You've got to be carefully taught!                      South Pacific

There are two parts to the human dilemma. One is the belief that the end justifies the means. That push-button philosophy, that deliberate deafness to suffering, has become the monster in the war machine. The other is the betrayal of the human spirit: the assertion of dogma that closes the mind, and turns a nation, a civilisation, into a regiment of ghosts - obedient ghosts, or tortured ghosts.        

It is said that science will dehumanize people and turn them into numbers. That is false, tragically false. Look for yourself. This is the concentration camp and crematorium at Auschwitz. This is where people were turned into numbers. Into this pond were flushed the ashes of some four million people. And that was not done by gas. It was done by arrogance. It was done by dogma. It was done by ignorance. When people believe that they have absolute knowledge, with no test in reality, this is how they behave. This is what men do when they aspire to the knowledge of gods.

                                                                                                            (Jacob Bronowski, while standing in the human ashes at Auschwitz)

We are nature’s unique experiment to make the rational intelligence prove itself sounder than the reflex.              (Jacob Bronowski)

America has little culture in the strict sense of the term. Culture - the transmittable experience of one's antecedents - is the stuff from which we weave the illusion of immortality. In the Old World one could not separate religion and culture. Myths of national origin, poetry and song, cuisine and geography fused into a shared experience of those who went before, with those who come after. Culture means existential continuity.

What America offers, by contrast, is redemption through a new beginning, as closely as anyone is likely to get to a realization of the original Christian project. That is the subject of the Western, which passes as an American original but in fact stems from the 16th century chivalresque novel. It finds its highest expression in John Ford's 1939 film Stagecoach, the greatest American work of narrative art (ignoring that insufferable allegory Moby Dick and that poor-man's picaresque novel Huckleberry Finn.).                           (Spengler)

 

Killing the Buddha” is a famous line from the Zen Buddhist tradition. A monk, after years of meditation, reached what he believed was a moment of supreme enlightenment. He described the experience to his master, who told the monk that his experience was nothing special, and might even interfere with his spiritual journey. The master told the now-dismayed monk that if he should meet the Buddha, he should kill him. Why? Because the Buddha you meet is not the true Buddha, but only an expression of your longing for what it is you seek. If you do not kill that Buddha, he will only stand in your way.

                                                                                                                                                            (William Rivers Pitt)

Truth does not change according to our ability to stomach it.                                                         (Flannery O'Conner)

There are veterans of all conflicts, who fall in love with the terrible sweet beauty of war. Men who polish their armor long after the parades have faded. Their glory is not in duty, honor, and country; but in the carnival mirrors of their own warped reflections. These are veterans who march with swagger and blaring brass, like small boys struggling to be seen and heard. There are veterans who have paid passage through the heart of darkness; who dedicate their lives to eliminating the horrors that hide behind their eyes at night, when they dream. These veterans testify to the unreal and repulsive acts of war that forever wound the soul. And there are veterans who let it go and never look back again. Not that they forget, they simply choose not to dwell in those memories. They seek peace of mind and hope.                                                                                                                                                       (John Cory, Vietnam veteran)

Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, and have not charity, I am become as sounding brass, or a tinkling cymbal. And though I have the gift of prophecy, and understand all mysteries, and all knowledge; and though I have all faith, so that I could remove mountains, and have not charity, I am nothing. And though I bestow all my goods to feed the poor . . . and have not charity, it profiteth me nothing. Charity suffereth long, and is kind; charity envieth not; charity vaunteth not itself, is not puffed up, doth not behave itself unseemly, seeketh not her own, is not easily provoked, thinketh no evil; rejoiceth not in iniquity, but rejoiceth in the truth; beareth all things, believeth all things, hopeth all things, endureth all things. Charity never faileth: but whether there be prophecies, they shall fail; whether there be tongues, they shall cease; whether there be knowledge, it shall vanish away. For we know in part, and prophesy in part. But when that which is perfect is come, then that which is in part shall be done away. When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things. For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face; now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known. And now abideth faith, hope, charity, these three; but the greatest of these is charity.                   (1 Cor. 13)

Be glad you have the opportunity to be alive at this time, and to be a part of that preparation for the coming influences of a spiritual nature that must rule the world. These are indicated, and these are part of thy experience. Be happy of it, and give thanks daily for it.                     (Edgar Cayce)

In "A Man for All Seasons," Sir Thomas More was confronted by a young lawyer, Will Roper, who sought his daughter's hand. Roper proclaimed that he would cut down every law in England to get after the devil.

More's response seems almost tailored for Ashcroft:

"And when the last law was down and the devil turned round on you, where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? ... This country's planted thick with laws from coast to coast ... and if you cut them down--and you are just the man to do it--do you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then?"

For there to be healing through interpersonal relations the respective individuals must obstinately attempt to recover the wholeness of being human through the relationship between them. Any technique concerned with the other without the self, with behavior to the exclusion of experience, with the relationship to the neglect of the persons in relation, with the individuals to the exclusion of their relationship, and most of all, with an object-to-be-changed rather than a person-to-be-accepted, simply perpetuates the disease it purports to cure.                                                                      (R.D. Laing)

[Beginning from the assumption that both parties are in the same existential fix, each alienated from his self, Laing concludes that]: “The therapeutic relationship is therefore a re-search. A search, constantly reasserted and reconstituted, for what we have all lost and whose loss some can perhaps endure a little more easily than others, as some people can stand lack of oxygen better than others, and this re-search is validated by the shared experience of experience regained in and through the therapeutic relationship in the here and now.”                                                              (R.D. Laing)

See the roles of power and perception. If those who are more powerful and in charge say that black is white, you're apt to say maybe black is white. Victims can come to embrace the way their persecutors see the world - "a paradigm utterly applicable to the development of madness."       (Loren Mosher)

Life's journey is not to arrive at the grave safely in a well preserved body, but rather to skid in sideways, totally worn out, shouting "...holy shit...what a ride !!  *

The point of public relations slogans like "Support our troops" is that they don't mean anything... That's the whole point of good propaganda. You want to create a slogan that nobody's going to be against, and everybody's going to be for. Nobody knows what it means, because it doesn't mean anything. Its crucial value is that it diverts your attention from a question that does mean something: Do you support our policy? That's the one you're not allowed to talk about.                                                                                                                                      (Noam Chomsky)

He thought that fear of death was perhaps the root of all art, perhaps also of all things of the mind. We fear death, we shudder at life's instability, we grieve to see the flowers wilt again and again, and the leaves fall, and in our hearts we know that we, too, are transitory and will soon disappear. When artists create pictures and thinkers search for laws and formulate thoughts, it is in order to salvage something from the great dance of death, to make something that lasts longer than we do.                                                                              (Herman Hesse)

This being human is a guest house.
Every morning a new arrival.
A joy, a depression, a meanness,
some momentary awareness comes as an unexpected visitor.
Welcome and entertain them all!
Even if they're a crowd of sorrows,
who violently sweep your house
empty of it's furniture,
still, treat each guest honorably.
He may be clearing you out
for some new delight.
The dark thought the shame, the malice
meet them at the door laughing,
and invite them in.
Be grateful for whoever comes,
because each has been sent as a guide from beyond.          
(The Essential Rumi, 109)

Where did I come from, and what am I supposed to be doing?" His answer: "I have no idea. My soul is from elsewhere, I'm sure of that, and I intend to end up there.                                                                                                               (Rumi)

In every action what is primarily intended by the doer, whether he acts from natural necessity or out of free will, is the disclosure of his own image. Hence it comes about that every doer, in so far as he does, takes delight in doing; since everything that is, desires its own being, and since in action the being of the doer is somehow intensified, delight necessarily follows. ... Thus, nothing acts unless by acting it makes patent its latent self.        (Dante)

“The use of the Bomb was implicit in its invention.” “We [the scientists] did the devil’s work.”

                                                                                                                        (two prescient observations by Robert Oppenheimer)

It is my thesis that schizophrenia is a possible outcome of a more than usual difficulty in being a whole person with the other, and with not sharing the common-sense (i.e. the community sense) way of experiencing oneself in the world. The world of the child, as of the adult, is 'a unity of the given and the constructed' (Hegel), a unity for the child of what is mediated to it by the parents, the mother in the first instance, and of what he makes of this. The mother and father greatly simplify the world for the young child, and as his capacity grows to make sense, to inform chaos with pattern, to grasp distinctions and connections of greater and greater complexity, so – as Buber puts it – he is led out into 'a feasible world'.                                                                  (R.D. Laing)

But what can happen if the mother's or the family's scheme of things does not match what the child can live and breathe in? The child then has to develop its own piercing vision and to be able to live by that - as William Blake succeeded in doing, as Rimbaud succeeded in stating, but not in living - or else become mad. It is out of the earliest loving bonds with the mother that the infant develops the beginnings of a being-for-itself. It is in and through these bonds that the mother 'mediates' the world to the infant in the first place. The world he is given may be one he can manage to be in; it is possible, on the contrary, that what he is given is just not feasible for him at the time. Yet, despite the im­portance of the first year of life, the nature of the milieu in which the child has to exist throughout its infancy, childhood, and adolescence may still have great effect one way or the other. It is at these subsequent stages that the father or other significant adults may play a decisive role in the child's life, either in direct relation with the child or, indirectly, through effects on the mother.                               (R.D. Laing)

These considerations suggest that one might do better to think of schizophrenogenic families, rather than too exclusively of schizophrenogenic mothers. At least, doing so might encourage more reports of the dynamics of the family constellation as a whole, instead of studies of mothers, or fathers, or siblings, without sufficient reference to the whole family dynamics.                                                                                                                  (R.D. Laing)

'Reality' moves from relative to absolute. The more the man we think is absolutely wrong thinks he is absolutely right and we are absolutely wrong, the sooner that man has to be destroyed before he destroys himself or us. We do not (of course) mean that we want to destroy him. We want to save him from his terrible delusion that we want to destroy him. Can't he see that all we want to do is to destroy his delusion? His delusion that we want to destroy him. His delusion is the belief that we are trying to stick pins in his eyes. Someone who thinks that people are sticking pins in his eyes may go along to a psychiatrist to have himself leucotomized by pins being stuck in his eyes, because he would rather even believe he was mad than that it might be real.                (R.D. Laing)

Most three-year-olds, helped on by their parents, helped on by authorities such as Anna Freud, are well on the way to successfully pretending to be just little boys and girls. Just about this time the child abdicates his ecstasy and forgets that he is pretending to be just a little boy. He becomes just a little boy. But he is no more simply himself, because he is now just a little boy, than the man is simply himself because he is a waiter in a cafe. 'Just a little boy' is just what many authorities on children think a three-year-old human being is.                                                                                      (R.D. Laing)

Sixty years later that man, having come to believe he was 'just a little boy' who had to learn all those things in order to become a 'big man', and having stuffed his mind with all the other things that big men tell little boys, having become a big man, begins to become an old man. But suddenly he begins to remember that it had all been a game. He had played at being a little boy, and at being a big man, and is now well into play­ing at being an ‘old man’. His wife and children begin to get very worried. A psychoanalyst friend of the family explains that a hypomanic denial of death (he had been influenced by existentialism), is not uncommon in certain particularly 'successful' people; it is a reversion to infantile omnipotence. Probably it can be 'contained' if he is socialized into a relig­ious group. It might be a good idea if the minister was asked round for dinner. We'd better watch out that the investments are quite safe, just in case

He tries to pretend that he is 'simply himself, just a little boy'. But he cannot quite do so. A three-year-old who tries and fails to pretend he is 'just a little boy' is in for trouble. He is likely to be sent for psychoanalysis if his parents can afford it. Woe betide the sixty-three-year-old man if he is unable to pretend that he is 'just an old man'.                                                                                                                                        (R.D. Laing)

The others tell one who one is. Later one endorses, or tries to discard, the ways the others have defined one. It is difficult not to accept their story. One may try not to be what one 'knows' one is, in one's heart of hearts. One may try to tear out from oneself this 'alien' identity one has been endowed with or condemned to, and create by one's own actions an identity for oneself, which one tries to force others to confirm. Whatever its particular subsequent vicissitudes, however, one's first social identity is conferred on one. We learn to be whom we are told we are.                                      (R.D. Laing)

Collusion is a ‘game’ played by two or more people whereby they deceive themselves in mutual self-deception. Each plays the other's game, though he may not necessarily be fully aware of doing so. An essential feature of this game is not admitting that it is a game. Two people in relation may confirm each other or genuinely complement each other. Still, to disclose oneself to the other is hard without confidence in oneself and trust in the other. Desire for confirmation from each is present in both, but each is caught between trust and mistrust, confidence and despair; and both settle for counterfeit acts of confirmation on the basis of pretence. To do so both must play the game of collu­sion.   

Collusion is always clinched when self finds in other that other who will confirm self in the false self that one is trying to make real, and vice versa. The ground is then set for prolonged mutual evasion of truth and true fulfillment. Each has found an other to endorse his own false notion of himself and to give this appearance a semblance of reality.

A third party is always a danger to a two-person collusion.                                                                    (R.D. Laing)

A large part of the art of therapy is in the tact and lucidity with which the analyst points out the ways in which collusion maintains illusions or disguises delusions. The dominant phantasy in a group may be that the therapist has 'the answer', and that if they had 'the answer' they would not suffer. The therapist's task is then like that of the Zen Master, to point out that suffering is not due to not getting 'the answer', but is the very state of desire that assumes the existence of that kind of ans­wer, and the frustration of never getting it. Therapy without collusion cannot help but frustrate desires generated by phantasy.             (R.D. Laing)

To be 'authentic' is to be true to oneself, to be what one is, to be 'genuine'. To be 'inauthentic' is to not be oneself, to be false to oneself: to be not as one appears to be, to be counter­feit…. We tend to link the categories of truth and reality by say­ing that a genuine act is real, but that a person who habitually uses action as a masquerade is not real.

The intensification of the being of the agent through self-disclosure, through making patent the latent self, is the mean­ing of Nietzsche's 'will to power'.        (ibid)

 

Truth is literally that which is without secrecy, what discloses itself without a veil. This concept has practical interpersonal implications in terms of telling the truth, lying, pretending, equivocating, by speech or deed: one constantly seeks to gauge the person's ‘position’ in relation to his own speech and deeds.

When one sees actions of the other in the light of this latter form of truth or falsehood, one says a man is truthful or 'true to himself' if one 'feels' he means what he says or says what he means. His words, or his other ways of expressing himself, are 'true' expressions of his 'real' experience or intentions. Between such 'truth' and a lie there is room for the most curious and subtle ambiguities and complexities in the per­son's disclosure or concealment of himself.             (ibid)

 

When a man's words, gestures, acts, disclose his real in­tentions, one says they are genuine and not counterfeit as coin is genuine and not counterfeit. His frown of disapproval, his word of encouragement, his smile of pleasure, are the true and genuine currency of himself.

Actions may be attributed, by self to self or self to other, as revealing or concealing, 'strong' or 'weak', 'fulfilling' or 'emptying'; making 'real' the being of the doer, making him more 'unreal', more creative, or more destructive.                                                                                          (R.D. Laing)

One can put oneself into a false position, ultimately into an untenable position. One can be put into a false position also, ultimately into an untenable position, by the actions of others….The amount of 'room' to move a person feels that he has is related both to the room that he gives himself and the room he is given by others.                                                                                                                                                                           (R.D. Laing)

Every human being, whether child or adult, seems to require significance, that is, place in another person’s world. Adults and children seek 'position' in the eyes of others, a position that offers room to move. It is difficult to imagine many who would choose unlimited freedom within a nexus of personal relations, if anything they did had no significance for anyone else.                                                                                                                        (R.D. Laing)

Therapy often entails coming to look at the as­sumptions made on the basis of shared phantasy systems. The disjunction must be seen. Once seen, and faced for the first time, confusion is converted to conflict. This involves emergence from a shared phantasy dread of separation. The act of leaving is felt as suicide or murder, or both. In dis­entangling the parent's phantasy from the patient's experience, the patient gets clear of this particular possibility of psychosis. True conflict is clarifying. False conflict is muddling. When the 'issue' is false and confused, the 'real' or 'true' conflict cannot come into focus, 'true' choices are not available, and the person is in danger of psychosis.                                                                                                                                                         (R.D. Laing)

Some people undoubtedly have a remarkable aptitude for keeping the other tied in knots. There are those who excel in tying knots and those who excel in being tied in knots. Tyer and tied are often both unconscious of how it is done, or even that it is being done at all. It is striking how difficult it is for the parties concerned to see what is happening. We must remember that part of the knot is not to see that it is a knot.                                          (R.D. Laing)

There must be something the matter with him

because he would not be acting as he does

unless there was

therefore he is acting as he is

because there is something the matter with him

 

He does not think there is anything the matter with him because

one of the things that is

the matter with him

is that he does not think that there is anything

the matter with him

therefore

we have to help him realize that,

the fact that he does not think there is anything

the matter with him

is one of the things that is

the matter with him                                                                (R.D. Laing)

 

a finger points to the moon

 

Put the expression

“a finger points to the moon”, in brackets

(a finger points to the moon)

The statement:

“A finger points to the moon is in brackets”

is an attempt to say that all that is in the bracket

(                                                           )

is, as to that which is not in the bracket,

what a finger is to the moon

 

Put all possible expressions in brackets

Put all possible forms in brackets

and put the brackets in brackets

 

Every expression, and every form,

is to what is expressionless and formless

what a finger is to the moon

all expressions and all forms

point to the expressionless and formless

 

the proposition

'All forms point to the formless'

is itself a formal proposition                                                              (R.D. Laing)

 

The main fact of life for me is love or its absence. This is a generalization for which I can think of no exception. Whether life is worth living depends for me on whether there is love in life. Without a sense of it, or even the memory of an hallucination of it, I think I would lose heart completely. If I study human biology, the science of human life, I don't suppose I will ever come across the term or the concept and very little evidence of it. Here is a contradiction.       (R.D. Laing)

 

What is one's original face before one is born? This face that we take to be our face is far from our original face, and if we identify ourselves with that face, then we're already in a sense deracinated, uprooted, and captured by this magic spell of reflected images reflect­ing each other, wherein we can become lost by identifying ourselves with any part of it. There's no way to describe one's original face. One can only allude. Some people go so far as to try to characterize their original face, but that is felt to be going too far by those who have gone further.                                              (R.D. Laing)

There's nothing that affects our chemistry more immediately than other people. When one walks into a room where one feels welcome and comfortable and so on, if one had a little trepidation before go­ing in, that settles down, one's heart is not in a flurry, one's breathing is calm, one's palms are not sweating, one's throat isn't dry, one doesn't have butterflies in one's stomach. All these experiential affairs are inextricably part of the same tapestry as that of our chemistry. There's nothing more intimately attuned to how we feel in other people’s company than our body chemistry. And I’m sure that just as there is a chemistry of acute fear, so there is a chemistry of chronic despair.                                                                                                          (R.D. Laing)

[Gregory Bateson originally defined the term double bind as] “communication in the context of an emotionally important relationship in which there is unacknowledged contradiction between messages of different logical levels.”          

Capital is our precious stock of stored flexibility for performing an orderly transition to adapt to new conditions, just as a chrysalis uses its stored energy to turn itself into a butterfly.                                                                                                                    (Gregory Bateson)

“It would appear that once precipitated into psychosis the patient has a course to run. He is, as it were, embarked upon a voyage of discovery which is only completed by his return to the normal world, to which he comes back with insights different from those of the inhabitants who never embarked on such a voyage. Once begun, a schizophrenic episode would appear to have as definite a course as an initiation ceremony – a death and rebirth – into which the novice may have been precipitated by his family life or by adventitious circumstances, but which in its course is largely steered by endogenous process.

In terms of this picture, spontaneous remission is no problem. This is only the final and natural outcome of the total process. What needs to be explained is the failure of many who embark on this voyage to return from it. Do these encounter circumstances either in family life or in institutional care so grossly maladaptive that even the richest and best organized hallucinatory experience cannot save them?”                  (ibid)

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

All outside knowledge whatsoever must derive in part from self-knowledge.                                         (ibid)

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

After death, the pattern and organization of the living creature are reduced to very simple forms and do not come together again.   (ibid)

If we had continual awareness of our image-making processes, our images would cease to be credible. It is indeed a merciful dispensation that we know not the processes of our own creativity – which sometimes are but the processes of self-deceit.                                    (ibid)

The mind-body problem cannot be resolved by denying the reality of the mind. Biological causation is not simply a materialistic impact of billiard balls. Nor is it good enough to assert that mind is a separate transcendent agent, a supernatural which can be divorced from body.                    (ibid)

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

When death is close and utterly sure – and not to be temporized with – then it becomes possible to see with a new clarity and the mind can soar. This liberation from appetitive drives is Buddhism’s “non attachment”.                                                                             (ibid)

Central to the net of metaphor through which we recognize and respond to the world is the experience of the self and the possibility of reference to it. The evocation of self-knowledge as the model for understanding another, because of similarities or congruencies that make the knowing possible, is properly called sympathy – in current usage empathy. We need not limit ourselves here to the empathy between therapist and client, for surely the farmer whose crops are parched knows something of the death of his fields in his own body.                                                                                   (ibid)

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

Rather than believing in any particular religion, “believe in” the sacred, integrated fabric of mental process that envelopes all our lives; this fabric can be approached through the vast interconnected metaphorical systems such as meditation on the religious traditions.        (ibid)

Those are my principles… If you don't like them, I have others.                                                   (Groucho Marx)

It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.                         (Aristotle)

A man's mind may be likened to a garden, which may be intelligently cultivated or allowed to run wild; but whether cultivated or neglected, it must – and will – bring forth. If no useful seeds are put into it, then an abundance of useless weed-seeds will fall therein, and will continue to produce their kind.                                                                                                                                                         (James Allen)

I began my education at a very early age -- in fact, right after I left college.                                             (Sir Winston Spencer Churchill)

To every being, accordingly, I say - not lightly but with all my heart: Here in the depths of me, as Who I really, really am, I am the One you really, really are. Though we may belong to vastly different regions and eras, wear vastly different faces, enjoy vastly different experiences of the world, all these are peripheral matters, matters of accident and time and content, and are transcended in the one central, timeless Container and Essence in which I'm aware of myself as you, and you, and you, ad infinitum. The barriers are down, our wounds are healed, and we are well again because we are One again.                                                                                                                      (Douglas Harding)

Only in this Root, only as this Root, are we all One and the Same for ever. This meditation infallibly unites you with all creatures at the one Spot where all converge, where we are at last wholly relieved of those manifest peculiarities and hidden feelings and thoughts which distinguish and part us from one another. The Void, just because It really is void, is identical in all beings everywhere and at all times. If It could be experienced as loving in me, bright in you, and specially empty in him, It would only serve to thrust us still further apart. But in fact you are him and me, without the slightest doubt or anxiety, directly you find the Spot where there's Nothing to come between us.     (ibid)

Seeing Who you are is seeing that you are all beings, and the principle is established, whether consciously or semi-consciously, that your commitment to them is infinite. That you are One with every sentient being, whether it is a spider, or a visitor from a galaxy far away, or the people in your own house, or the people you find especially trying or stupid. Your involvement with them is basically total, for the simple reason that intrinsically you are that person, you are that strange being, you are that horrible monster, and there are in the last resort no horrible monsters. This means that in fact one's behaviour after seeing is more altruistic, more giving, though it may be more shocking than before. (ibid)

The material universe, as most scientists describe it today, began with a huge explosion of energy they call the Big Bang. Some say this explosion was more like a great wave of energy rising out of an even greater sea of energy; others talk about continuous creation as well as an initial event; some of those tell us matter is continually created from an underlying intelligent source, such as consciousness. Whatever happened to start our universe, our current scientific story is that it began as very hot, explosively fast-moving energy that has been spreading and cooling ever since, creating spacetime as it does so.            (Elisabet Sahtouris)

Life becomes ever more stable as it becomes more complex. Mechanical systems may be more vulnerable to breakdown as they become more complex, but the opposite seems to be true of living systems.                                                                                                                                    (ibid)

The word evolution, when used in the field of dance, means the changing patterns of steps, the transformative movements, in any particular dance. A dance thus evolves as its movement patterns, and perhaps its costumes, change into new ones. A good dance has overall harmony, each of its movements contributing to the entire piece. In exactly this sense, the evolution of Gaia's dance -- of Earthlife -- is the changing patterns of steps, ever transforming  the interwoven self-organization of all creatures and their habitats over time. This is a very different view from that of biological evolution as survival of the fittest.             (ibid)

No creature, even with a brain as sophisticated as ours, sees what is really out there in its world. Our eyes do not photograph a     world independent of us. There is nothing remotely like a photographic mechanism in our eye-brain system, nor is there a world apart from that which we create moment by moment within our own consciousness.                                                                                                                                                                         (ibid)

Stop to consider this deeply for a moment. Have you ever had any experience outside your own consciousness? It simply is not     possible -- not for anyone, not even for a scientist. Now, have you ever had any direct experience outside of the present moment? You are not alone or strange, for neither has any scientist. This is very profound. All experience of the world is through consciousness in the present moment. Everything else is stories and images created by ourselves -- including the image of linear time. Consider that you have a mental story of reading this book over a period of hours or days, but are always, always in the present moment. This is exactly what the Eastern philosophies meant -- that the world is illusion. Now science begins telling us the same thing -- that we create reality with our brains from moment to moment, as cosmic consciousness, which includes our individual consciousness, creates our brains from moment to moment. It shakes one up to think that deeply, for all humans across apparent linear time and cultures have made up stories of their reality. If there had been a reality really `out there' apart from our perceptions and stories, you would think cultural `descriptions' of reality would have been much more uniform.

Instead, we find that every culture believes its own story and no one else's -- more on this shortly. It even means that the story of evolution is just that -- our story of how things came to be, not some ultimate truth.                                                                                                                                (ibid)

We see the human in the world as existing in three parts: one's interior personal world, the external world of artefacts and others and the interface – the sensory and affective channels through which one perceives and manipulates the external world.
The experience of self/consciousness resides at the interface, able to look within or without, toward 'imagination' or 'reality'. Self is a semi-permeable boundary.                                                                                                                               (Timothy Leary)

In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act.                                                          (George Orwell)

I see no poverty in the world of tomorrow--no wars, no revolutions, no bloodshed. And in that world, there will be a faith in God greater and deeper than ever in the past.                                                                                                                                    (Mohandas Gandhi)

Imagine all the people living life in peace. You may say I’m a dreamer, but I’m not the only one. I hope someday you’ll join us, and the world will live as one.                                                                                                                                              (John Lennon)

If a state is governed by the principles of reason, poverty and misery are subjects of shame; if a state is not governed by the principles of reason, riches and honours are the subjects of shame.                                                                              (Confucius)

The State never intentionally confronts a man's sense, intellectual or moral, but only his body, his senses. It is not armed with superior wit or honesty, but with superior physical strength. I was not born to be forced. I will breathe after my own fashion. Let us see who is the strongest. What force has a multitude? They only can force me who obey a higher law than I. They force me to become like themselves. I do not hear of men being forced to have this way or that by masses of men. What sort of life were that to live? When I meet a government which says to me, "Your money or your life," why should I be in haste to give it my money? It may be in a great strait, and not know what to do: I cannot help that. It must help itself; do as I do. It is not worth the while to snivel about it. I am not responsible for the successful working of the machinery of society. I am not the son of the engineer. I perceive that, when an acorn and a chestnut fall side by side, the one does not remain inert to make way for the other, but both obey their own laws, and spring and grow and flourish as best they can, till one, perchance, overshadows and destroys the other. If a plant cannot live according to its nature, it dies; and so a man.                    (Thoreau – Civil Disobedience)

They who know of no purer sources of truth, who have traced up its stream no higher, stand, and wisely stand, by the Bible and the Constitution, and drink at it there with reverence and humility; but they who behold where it comes trickling into this lake or that pool, gird up their loins once more, and continue their pilgrimage toward its fountain-head.                                                                                                   (ibid)

Shallow men believe in luck. Strong men believe in cause and effect. The days come and go like muffled and veiled figures sent from a distant friendly party, but they say nothing, and if we do not use the gifts they bring, they carry them as silently away.      (Ralph Waldo Emerson)

Hollow and ineffectual, for the most part, is our ordinary conversation. Surface meets surface. When our life ceases to be inward and private, conversation degenerates into mere gossip. We rarely meet a man who can tell us any news which he has not read in a newspaper, or been told by his neighbour; and, for the most part, the only difference between us and our fellow is that he has seen the newspaper, or been out to tea, and we have not. In proportion as our inward life fails, we go more constantly and desperately to the post-office. You may depend on it, that the poor fellow who walks away with the greatest number of letters, proud of his extensive correspondence, has not heard from himself this long while.                              (Thoreau – Life Without Principle)

What difference does it make to the dead, the orphans, and the homeless, whether the mad destruction is wrought under the name of totalitarianism or the holy name of liberty and democracy?                                                                          (Mahatma Ghandi)

It does not behoove us to despise a man by reason of his present lowly estate, because only God knows what potentialities that man may store within himself. Neither is it fitting to scorn words which today are heard only in the slums or within the restricted confines of a trade. Tomorrow those same words may sweep the nation and find their way into the everyday vocabulary of a twenty-first-century Shakespeare.                     (Mario Pei - “The Story of Language”)

Everything taking form in nature incurs a debt which must be paid by dissolving again so that other things may form.   (Anaximander)

An individual in a crowd is a grain of sand amid other grains of sand, which the wind stirs up at will…. the isolated individual possesses the capacity of dominating his reflex actions, while a crowd is devoid of this capacity…. Any display of premeditation by crowds is out of the question.  They may be animated in succession by the most contrary sentiments, but they will always be under the influence of the exciting causes of the moment.  They are like the leaves which a tempest whirls up and scatters in every direction and then allows to fall…. Crowds are everywhere distinguished by feminine characteristics, but Latin crowds are the most feminine of all.  Whoever trusts in them may rapidly attain a lofty destiny, but to do so is to be perpetually skirting the brink of a Tarpeian rock, with the certainty of one day being precipitated from it…. A crowd scarcely distinguishes between the subjective and the objective.  It accepts as real the images evoked in its mind, though they most often have only a very distant relation with the observed fact…. In crowds the foolish, ignorant, and envious persons are freed from the sense of their insignificance and powerlessness, and are possessed instead by the notion of brutal and temporary but immense strength…. A long time is necessary for ideas to establish themselves in the minds of crowds, but just as long a time is needed for them to be eradicated…. Crowds being only capable of thinking in images are only to be impressed by images. Crowds are to some extent in the position of the sleeper whose reason, suspended for the time being, allows the arousing in his mind of images of extreme intensity which would quickly be dissipated could they be submitted to the action of reflection…. It is only images that terrify or attract them and become motives of action.                                                                               (Gustave LeBon “The Crowd”)

The religious sentiment has very simple characteristics, such as worship of a being supposed superior, fear of the power with which the being is credited, blind submission to its commands, inability to discuss its dogmas, the desire to spread them, and a tendency to consider as enemies all by whom they are not accepted.  Whether such a sentiment apply to an invisible God, to a wooden or stone idol, to a hero or to a political conception, provided that it presents the preceding characteristics, its essence always remains religious.  The supernatural and the miraculous are found to be present to the same extent.  Crowds unconsciously accord a mysterious power to the political formula or the victorious leader that for the moment arouses their enthusiasm…. A person is not religious solely when he worships a divinity, but when he puts all the resources of his mind, the complete submission of his will, and the whole-souled ardour of fanaticism at the service of a cause or an individual who becomes the goal and guide of his thoughts and actions…. It is a very useless commonplace to assert that a religion is necessary for the masses, because all political, divine, and social creeds only take root among them on the condition of always assuming the religious shape--a shape which obviates the danger of discussion.                                                                                                   (ibid)

A people(race)is an organism created by the past, and, like every other organism, it can only be modified by slow hereditary accumulations. It is tradition that guides men, and more especially so when they are in a crowd.  The changes they can effect in their traditions with any ease, merely bear, as I have often repeated, upon names and outward forms.                                                                          (ibid)

In social as in biological problems, time is one of the most energetic factors.  It is the sole real creator and the sole great destroyer.         (ibid)

The masses have never thirsted after truth. They turn aside from evidence that is not to their taste, preferring to deify error, if error seduce them.  Whoever can supply them with illusions is easily their master; whoever attempts to destroy their illusions is always their victim.                            (ibid)

Crowds are not to be influenced by reasoning, and can only comprehend rough-and-ready associations of ideas.  The orators who know how to make an impression upon them always appeal in consequence to their sentiments and never to their reason.  The laws of logic have no action on crowds.            (ibid)

The multitude is always ready to listen to the strong-willed man, who knows how to impose himself upon it.  Men gathered in a crowd lose all force of will, and turn instinctively to the person who possesses the quality they lack…. The arousing of faith--whether religious, political, or social, whether faith in a work, in a person, or an idea--has always been the function of the great leaders of crowds, and it is on this account that their influence is always very great.  Of all the forces at the disposal of humanity, faith has always been one of the most tremendous, and the gospel rightly attributes to it the power of moving mountains.  To endow a man with faith is to multiply his strength tenfold.  The great events of history have been brought about by obscure believers, who have had little beyond their faith in their favour.  It is not by the aid of the learned or of philosophers, and still less of skeptics, that have been built up the great religions which have swayed the world, or the vast empires which have spread from one hemisphere to the other.                                                                (ibid)

When an affirmation has been sufficiently repeated and there is unanimity in this repetition--as has occurred in the case of certain famous financial undertakings rich enough to purchase every assistance-- what is called a current of opinion is formed and the powerful mechanism of contagion intervenes.  Ideas, sentiments, emotions, and beliefs possess in crowds a contagious power as intense as that of microbes.                                   (ibid) 

Great power is given to ideas propagated by affirmation, repetition, and contagion by the circumstance that they acquire in time that mysterious force known as prestige…. The greatest measure of prestige is possessed by the dead, by beings, that is, of whom we do not stand in fear--by Alexander, Caesar, Mahomet, and Buddha, for example…. It would be seen that prestige constitutes the fundamental element of persuasion.  Consciously or not, the being, the idea, or the thing possessing prestige is immediately imitated in consequence of contagion, and forces an entire generation to adopt certain modes of feeling and of giving expression to its thought.  This imitation, moreover, is, as a rule, unconscious, which accounts for the fact that it is perfect.      (ibid)

This basic power of the universe cannot be fitted into the outmoded concept of narrow nationalisms; For there is no secret and there is no defense; there is no possibility of control except through the aroused understanding and insistence of the peoples of the world.

                                                            (Albert Einstein – in the first years when the U.S. government still held a monopoly on the split atom.)

 

Late in the nineteenth century, the great Russian writer Feodor Dostoevsky identified the problem of accepting responsibility for     freedom as humanity's essential crisis. Dostoevsky presents the crisis of human freedom in a myth within his novel “The Brothers Karamazov”, by having one brother tell it to another. In this myth, Christ reappears in sixteenth-century Seville at the time when the Holy Christian Fathers, in that city alone, were burning as many as a hundred heretics a day at the stake in actual fact. A Grand Inquisitor condemns Christ to his second death -- this time at the stake -- for preaching freedom to mankind. The grounds given by the Inquisitor for this sentence is that "nothing has ever been more unendurable to man and to human society than freedom."

Men cannot bear, and so do not want, the responsibility of freedom, the Inquisitor claims, and the church has relieved them of that burden. Men will endure slavery for the sake of being fed and they will be happy only when their rebelliousness is turned to     obedience, he insists, for they are sheep, preferring to believe they are free while actually doing as they are told by authorities     who give them work, bread, rules to live by, and forgiveness for their sins.

                                    (Elizabet Sahtouris)

Human ideas, concepts or pieces of information that become known and passed on by large numbers of people have come to be called memes. This name is intended to show a parallel with genes -- in the sense that memes can spread through human populations in patterns that influence their social evolution as genes are passed on in patterns influencing biological evolution. It is from memes -- particular ideas about ourselves and our world -- that we construct the worldviews that shape our societies.                                                                                                                                                    (ibid)

Many people wonder how long we have to turn things around. It is really not a question of some critical turning point, but of     nurturing more viable systems even as the old ones decay. One metaphor for our changing world is Norie Huddle's story of a     caterpillar's metamorphosis into a butterfly. After consuming hundreds of times its own weight daily as it munches its way     through its ecosystem, the bloated caterpillar forms its chrysalis. Inside its body, new biological entities called imaginal discs arise, at first destroyed by its immune system. But as they grow more in number and begin to link up, they begin to survive. Eventually the caterpillar's immune system fails, its body goes into meltdown and the imaginal discs become the cells that build the butterfly from the spent materials that had held the blueprint for the butterfly all along. In just this way, a healthy new world, based on the principles of living systems, can emerge through today's chaotic transformation. There are as many ways to build a new world of living systems as there are creative people who want to do it! Remember that all evolution is an improvisational dance. Each person, as an imaginal disc, can contribute to the process of today's metamorphosis in some unique way.                  (ibid)

Our consciousness creates our reality -- that our assumptions, our beliefs as individuals, as societies and as humanity are the basis of the world we produce for ourselves and co-produce together, along with all living systems, from moment to moment. Jane Roberts has given us the most complete description of how our world works in these terms in her Seth books, more and more corroborated by physics. One of Seth's more challenging questions is, how much we can really learn about the deep nature of the universe by measuring matter with material instruments? If we chase ever smaller material particles with material measurement devices, he says, we create the particles we find from consciousness as we create the rest of reality, and can play the game till we tire of it and learn to study consciousness itself.                                                                                                                                                                               (ibid)

We can see Earthlife as part of a self-creating galaxy, as planetary crust transforming itself into a web of creatures and     environments, and it is clear that living things are not built up from pieces as is machinery. Life forms are not assembled by accident from molecules here and there on some non-living planets and then in turn assembled into ecological systems. Rather, some whole planets develop the metabolism of living beings, coming ever more alive in the great flow of energy between their stars and themselves, gradually packaging their crustal material into ever more creatures that weave their own changing environments.                                                                                                                                     (ibid)

One of the central elements in Vedic science is that reality, including matter, is created by consciousness, and that matter itself is a created illusion, rather like the matter in our dreams. Now western physicists, as Sally Goerner points out, are also coming to understand matter as an illusion of energy in motion. Physicists have long been talking about fields -- traditionally taken to mean all matter, or mass, and energy in a particular region. Einstein's E = mc2 -- meaning there is a relationship between mass and energy that is mediated by the speed of light squared -- was taken to be a conversion formula for matter into energy or vice versa. But more recently some physicists tell us that the interaction of massless electric charges within an electromagnetic field creates the appearance of mass. In this scenario, Einstein's formula becomes "a statement about how much energy is required to give the appearance of a certain amount of mass."     (ibid)

Through these fields of destruction
Baptisms of fire
I've watched all your suffering
As the battles raged higher
And though they did hurt me so bad
In the fear and alarm
You did not desert me
My brothers in arms

  Dire Straits, 'Brothers in Arms'

 

People never lie so much as after a hunt, during a war or before an election.

(Otto Von Bismarck - Prussian Prime Minister 1815-1898)

 

Here I would like to quote a passage concerning the Bushmen of Africa that was written some time ago by Laurens Van Der Post. The passage describes a communication being made by a tribal elder to a young boy, a communication that we might take as a primary lesson in ethics for ourselves.

"Remember Little Cousin, that no matter how awful or insignificant, how ugly or beautiful it might look to you, everything in the bush has its own right to be there. No one can challenge this right unless compelled by some necessity of life itself. Everything has its own dignity, however absurd it might seem to you, and we are all bound to recognize and respect it as we wish our own to be recognized and respected. Life in the bush is necessity, and it understands all forms of necessity. It will always forgive what is imposed upon it out of necessity, but it will never understand and accept anything less than necessity. And remember that, everywhere, it has its own watchers to see whether the law of necessity is being observed. You may often think that deep in the darkness and the density of the bush you are alone and unobserved, but that, Little Cousin, would be an illusion of the most dangerous kind. One is never alone in the bush, one is never unobserved."                            (Thomas Berry)

It Takes a Universe
The child awakens to a universe.
The mind of the child to a world of meaning.
Imagination to a world of beauty.
Emotions to a world of intimacy.

It takes a universe to make a child
both in outer form and inner spirit.
It takes a universe to educate a child.
A universe to fulfill a child.                                                                            (Thomas Berry)

Below are the laws of the inner universe according to Seth – Universal Truths or Characteristics that impact all aspects of All-That-Is:

·        value fulfillment

·        energy transformation

·        spontaneity

·        durability

·        creation

·        consciousness

·        capacity for infinite mobility

·        changeability and transmutation

·        cooperation

·        quality depth

·         

Below are inner senses according to Seth:

·        inner vibrational touch

·        psychological time

·        perception of past, present, and future

·        conceptual sense

·        cognition of knowledgeable essence

·        innate working knowledge of the basic vitality of the universe

·        expansion or contraction of the tissue capsule

·        disentanglement from camouflage

·        diffusion by the energy personality [essence]

 

A little patience, and we shall see the reign of witches pass over, their spells dissolve, and the people, recovering their true sight, restore their government to its true principles. It is true that in the meantime we are suffering deeply in spirit, and incurring the horrors of a war and long oppressions of enormous public debt... If the game runs sometimes against us at home we must have patience till luck turns, and then we shall have an opportunity of winning back the principles we have lost, for this is a game where principles are at stake.

                                                                                                (Thomas Jefferson, 1798, after the passage of the Sedition Act)

 

Intellectual science has been observed to beget invariably a doubt of the existence of matter. Turgot said, "He that has never doubted the existence of matter, may be assured he has no aptitude for metaphysical inquiries." It fastens the attention upon immortal necessary uncreated natures, that is, upon Ideas; and in their presence, we feel that the outward circumstance is a dream and a shade. Whilst we wait in this Olympus of gods, we think of nature as an appendix to the soul. We ascend into their region, and know that these are the thoughts of the Supreme Being. "These are they who were set up from everlasting, from the beginning, or ever the earth was. When he prepared the heavens, they were there; when he established the clouds above, when he strengthened the fountains of the deep. Then they were by him, as one brought up with him. Of them took he counsel."                                                                                              

Their influence is proportionate. As objects of science, they are accessible to few men. Yet all men are capable of being raised by piety or by passion, into their region. And no man touches these divine natures, without becoming, in some degree, himself divine. Like a new soul, they renew the body. We become physically nimble and lightsome; we tread on air; life is no longer irksome, and we think it will never be so. No man fears age or misfortune or death, in their serene company, for he is transported out of the district of change. Whilst we behold unveiled the nature of Justice and Truth, we learn the difference between the absolute and the conditional or relative. We apprehend the absolute. As it were, for the first time, we exist. We become immortal, for we learn that time and space are relations of matter; that, with a perception of truth, or a virtuous will, they have no affinity.                                         (Ralph Waldo Emerson – Nature)

But when, following the invisible steps of thought, we come to inquire, Whence is matter? and Whereto? many truths arise to us out of the recesses of consciousness. We learn that the highest is present to the soul of man, that the dread universal essence, which is not wisdom, or love, or beauty, or power, but all in one, and each entirely, is that for which all things exist, and that by which they are; that spirit creates; that behind nature, throughout nature, spirit is present; one and not compound, it does not act upon us from without, that is, in space and time, but spiritually, or through ourselves: therefore, that spirit, that is, the Supreme Being, does not build up nature around us, but puts it forth through us, as the life of the tree puts forth new branches and leaves through the pores of the old. As a plant upon the earth, so a man rests upon the bosom of God; he is nourished by unfailing fountains, and draws, at his need, inexhaustible power. Who can set bounds to the possibilities of man? Once inhale the upper air, being admitted to behold the absolute natures of justice and truth, and we learn that man has access to the entire mind of the Creator, is himself the creator in the finite. This view admonishes me where the sources of wisdom and power lie, and points to virtue as to "The golden key Which opens the palace of eternity".                                                                                                               (ibid)

A man is a god in ruins. When men are innocent, life shall be longer, and shall pass into the immortal, as gently as we awake from dreams. Now, the world would be insane and rabid, if these disorganizations should last for hundreds of years. It is kept in check by death and infancy. Infancy is the perpetual Messiah, which comes into the arms of fallen men, and pleads with them to return to paradise.                                                             (ibid)

As to external beauty, it is the frail and weary weed, in which God dresses the soul, which he has called into time.            (Michael Angelo)

It is in our idleness, in our dreams, that the submerged truth sometimes comes to the top.                         (Virginia Woolf)

The moment one gives close attention to anything, even a blade of grass, it becomes a mysterious, awesome, indescribably magnificent world in itself.                                                                                                                                                                  (Henry Miller)

Neither a pre-industrial Luddite retreat nor a mandate to operate at a snail's pace, the Slow philosophy is all about "balance." Be fast when it makes sense to be fast, and be slow when slowness is called for. Seek to live at what musicians call the tempo giusto -- the right speed.

                                                                        (Carl Honore - In Praise of Slowness: How a Worldwide Movement Is Challenging the Cult of Speed)

 

Idleness is not just a psychological necessity. . . . It constitutes as well a kind of political space, a space . . . necessary to . . . democracy . . . by allowing us time to figure out who we are, and what we believe; by allowing us time to consider what is unjust, and what we might do about it.

                                                                                                                                                                        (Mark Slouka)

It is in deep solitude that I find the gentleness with which I can truly love my brothers. The more solitary I am, the more affection I have for them. . . . Solitude and silence teach me to love my brothers for what they are, not for what they say.                                                            (Thomas Merton)

Stephen Leacock Quotes

 

  1. On Americans   "The Ameri­cans are a queer people; they don't give a damn. The entire world criticizes them and they don't give a damn. The Americans don't give a damn; don't need to; never did need to. That is their salvation. Seventeen brilliant books analyze them every month. They don't read them."

 

  1. On Advertising - "Ad­vertising is the sci­ence of arresting the human ­intelligence long enough to make money out of it. "

 

  1. On Belief  "I remember a perplexed cu­rate of the Church of England telling me that 'after all there must be a kind of something.' That’s exactly how I feel about it. There must be something to believe in; life must have its Santa Claus."

 

  1. On British Columbia  "If I had known what it was like, I wouldn't have been content with a mere visit. I'd have been born there."

 

  1. On Conversa­tion -  "There are two things in ordinary conversation which ordi­nary people dislike ... information and wit."

 

  1. On Elections - "In or of itself, a vote is nothing. It neither warms the skin nor fills the stomach; Very often the privilege of a vote confers nothing more than the right to ex­press one's opinion as to which of two crooks is crookeder."

 

  1. On Humour - "Charles Dickens creation of Mr.Pickwick did more for the elevation of the human race - I say in all seriousness - than Cardinal Newman's 'Lead Kindly Light Amid the Encircling Gloom'. Newman only cried out for the light, Dickens gave it."

 

"If a man has a genuine sense of humour he is apt to take a somewhat melancholy, or at least dis­illusioned view of life. Humour and' disillusionment are twin sisters."

 

"The word's humour, in its best and greatest sense is perhaps the highest product of our civilization."

 

  1. On Luck - "I am a great believer in luck and I find the harder I work the more of it l have." It SOUNDS like Stephen yet no scholar has been able to track it down among the millions of words he wrote. It could as easily be attributed to Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson or Mark Twain.

 

  1. On Journalism - "A person who writes for a newspaper very soon learns certain tricks of the trade, arousing out of sheer necessity Thus he must learn to call a murderer an 'alleged' murderer, and the King of England the 'alleged' King of Eng­land. This forestalls libel suits."

 

  1. On Canadian speech a century ago - "In Canada we have enough to keep up with the two spoken lan­guages without trying to invent slang, so we just go ahead and use English for literature, Scotch for ser­mons and American for conversa­tion."

 

  1. On Love - "Many a man in love with a dimple makes the mis­take of marrying the whole girl."

 

  1. On Teaching -  "The subject is called Political Science because it has nothing to do with Politics and nothing to do with Economy."

 

  1. On Politics - "For Conservatism we merely need to mix a pint of pure economics and a gallon of wash and strain it through an old flag. For Liberalism, much the same warmed over in hot air."

 

As Ouspensky tells us: on the noumenal plane, the plane of Reality, multi-dimensional, Time exists spatially, and temporal events exist - they don't happen. 'Effects' co-exist with their 'causes', and moments of different epochs exist simultaneously and contiguously. Points far apart in tri-dimensional space can touch one another, proximity and separation become affinity and repulsion, sympathy and antipathy. There is neither matter nor movement. Nothing is dead, nothing is unconscious. If that is what he said, need he have said anything else?                                                                                    (Wei Wu Wei)

 

There are elements which, if added to one's experience, make life better; there are other elements which, if added to one's experience make life worse. But what remains when these are set aside is not merely neutral: it is emphatically positive. Therefore life is worth living even when the bad elements of experience are plentiful, and the good ones too meager to outweigh the bad ones on their own. The additional positive weight is supplied by experience itself, rather than by any of its contents.                                                                                                                                               (Tom Nagel)

 

George Santayana wrote, "Those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it." It is an old adage, yet one that applies to an arrogant nation that continues to overestimate its own power and underestimates the power of "rag-tag armies" seems incapable of learning.

Santayana, however, was too kind for German philosopher George Wilhelm Hegel. "What experience and history teach is this: that people and governments never have learned anything from history, or acted on principles."

Arnold Toynbee looked at the rise and fall of over 20 civilizations and summarized civilizational growth with his Law of Progressive Simplification. In accord with this law, Toynbee said that the essence of civilizational growth is not power over land, or power over people (and I think now he would also say it's not how much we consume.) The essence of a civilization's growth is its ability to transfer increasing increments of energy and attention from the material side of life to the psychological, spiritual, cultural, and aesthetic.                                                                                       (Duane Elgin)

 

Why do I call myself a Buddhist? If it should be necessary to attach oneself to any denomination, and in daily life there may be circumstances which render that necessary, Buddhism is the only religion which is large enough, in spirit and in practice, to include all the others.                 (Wei Wu Wei)

 

Why are you unhappy?
Because 99.9 per cent
Of everything you think,
And of everything you do,
Is for yourself -
And there isn't one.
                            (Wei Wu Wei)

 

We are not responsible for being born. But from the moment we acquire the power of self-reflection, we are, increasingly as we age, responsible for how we live--and how we die…. The suicide is a person who feels trapped, often because he has suffered a grave defeat. The defeats that most damage a person's will to live are loss of child, spouse, or lover; loss of health, especially mobility; loss of income or savings; and loss of honor, reputation, or status…. It follows that if we want to avoid killing ourselves, we must try to avoid becoming trapped. Living a virtuous life may be regarded as an effective program of personal suicide prevention... The capacity to choose our own death--whether we exercise this capacity or not, which certainly depends upon the circumstances of each individual's life--constitutes the basis of our capacity to live as free, autonomous beings. For in the power to claim our own lives lies also the power to avoid the traps in which suicide offers escape, and thus the power to live. In order to fully enjoy personhood, we have to learn to live for ourselves. When the "therapeutic state" attempts to intervene, to tell us how to live or to force us not to die, we are deprived of this capacity.                                     (Thomas Szasz)

 

It is not proper to understand the Intelligible with vehemence, but if you incline your mind, you will apprehend it: not too earnestly, but bringing a pure and inquiring eye. You will not understand it as when understanding some particular thing, but with the flower of the mind. Things divine are not attainable by mortals who understand sensual things, but only the light-armed arrive at the summit.                    (Zoroaster)

 

There is every reason, total evidence, to suppose that we are in fact lived – entirely and absolutely lived. Like all dreamed figures in every sort and degree of dream, there cannot be any such factor as volition in the serial development of our lives.                                                                        (Wei Wu Wei)

 

I do not understand where the 'beauty' and 'harmony' of nature are supposed to be found. Throughout the animal kingdom, animals ruthlessly prey upon each other. Most of them are either cruelly killed by other animals or slowly die of hunger. For my part, I am unable to see any very great beauty or harmony in the tapeworm. Let it not be said that this creature is sent as a punishment for our sins, for it is more prevalent among animals than among humans. I suppose what is meant by this 'beauty' and 'harmony' are such things as the beauty of the starry heavens. But one should remember that the stars every now and again explode and reduce everything in their neighbourhood to a vague mist.                                                                                                (Bertrand Russell)

 

Time is only an inference, devised in an effort to explain growth, development, extension and change, which constitute a further direction of measurement beyond the three that we know and at right-angles to volume; and 'past', 'present' and 'future' are inferences derived from this temporal interpretation of the further dimension in which extension appears to occur. All forms of temporality, therefore, are conceptual and imagined.                       (Wei Wu Wei)

 

Whoever thinks as, from, or on behalf of, an entity which he believes himself to be, the more so if he tries to work on himself, by, with, or for such an entity - which is only a concept in mind - has not yet begun to understand what it is all about.                                                      (Wei Wu Wei)

 

In order to be effective truth must penetrate like an arrow - and that is likely to hurt.                                           (Wei Wu Wei)

 

Human beings show their superiority to the brutes by their capacity for boredom, though I have sometimes thought in examining the apes at the zoo, that they, perhaps, have the rudiments of this tiresome emotion. However that may be, experience shows that escape from boredom is one of the really powerful desires of almost all human beings. When white men first effect contact with some unspoiled race of savages, they offer them all kinds of benefits, from the light of the gospel to pumpkin pie. These, however, much as we may regret it, most savages receive with indifference. What they really value among the gifts that we bring to them is intoxicating liquor, which enables them to have the illusion, for a few brief moments, that it is better to be alive than dead.      (Bertrand Russell)

 

In the East, concentration, contemplation and meditation are all mental activities.

Zen is going beyond the mind, where no object exists. And remember, the moment the object is no more there, you cannot maintain the subject; they are two sides of the same coin. On the outside the object drops, on the inside the subject disappears, and then what remains is that spotless cleanness, that silence out of which everything arises and disappears. That is dhyan in Sanskrit, jhan in Pali, ch'an in Chinese and zen in Japanese.                                                                                                                                      (Osho)

 

Those who spread their sails in the right way to the winds of the earth will always find themselves borne by a current towards the open seas. The more nobly a person wills and acts, the more avid they become for great and sublime aims to pursue. They will no longer be content with family, country and the remunerative aspect of their work. They will want wider organizations to create, new paths to blaze, causes to uphold, truths to discover, an ideal to cherish and defend. So, gradually, they no longer belong to themselves. Little by little the great breath of the universe has insinuated itself into them through the fissure of their humble but faithful action, and has broadened them, and raised them up, borne them on.                     (Teilhard de Chardin)

 

There are these three cultures in the world: one culture, called the materialist -- very predominant in the West; another culture, called the spiritualist -- very predominant in India; and China has a third kind of culture, neither materialist nor spiritualist. It is Taoist: live the moment and don't bother for the future, because to bother about heaven and hell and paradise and moksha is basically to be continuously concerned about yourself. It is very selfish, it is very self-centered. According to Lao Tzu, according to Buddha too, and according to me also, a person who is trying to reach heaven is a very, very self-centered person, very selfish. And he does not know a thing about his own inner being -- there is no self.

                                                                        (Osho)

 

Time is the concept we develop to account for the fact that we observe changes and movements. If there were no such thing as change or movement we would not need the notion of time. In other words, we need time to explain processes, the fact that phenomena progress from one form to another. We invent the dimension of time to account for this prolongation of phenomena, for it is not in space. However, we have seen that change is not from the past to the present, but rather from non-manifestation to manifestation. Each stage of the progress of phenomena simply means that new creations have emerged. We need time, and feel the passage of time, only when we are in the midst of the changing phenomena. But when we are outside of all phenomena, and are experiencing ourselves from the vantage point of the logos, we directly perceive how all phenomena arise, and that nothing moves from past to future. It simply flows out, always in a new condition. We recognize that no time ever passes on anything, for all forms and objects are eternally new.                                 (A. H. Almaas)

 

If you will not fight for the right when you can easily win without bloodshed, if you will not fight when your victory will be sure and not so costly, you may come to the moment when you will have to fight with all the odds against you and only a precarious chance for survival. There may be a worse case. You may have to fight when there is no chance of victory, because it is better to perish than to live as slaves.

            (Winston Churchill)

 

Reality? An object is 'sensed', i.e. a perception occurs in mind: the notion of an object arises in mind, produced by stimulus and obtaining body from memory. Such is the genesis of a thought.

Then this impression is repeated again and again with incalculable rapidity until the impression assumes 'form' and is cognised as a 'table' or a 'star'. Each of these repetitions is a separate quanta, and the object is composed of these quanta, and so is built-up as a supposedly material unit. Such is the 'reality' of the object, and its dimensions, shape and distance are judged by these quanta, the quanta being attributed to the light by which the object is perceived, whereas they lie exclusively in the perceiving mind.                                                           

All light being presumed quanta, all distance is presumed quanta, and all velocity, and all are only in the observing mind. All, therefore, depend upon succession, the sequence of time, which itself is nothing but seriality - the repetition of quanta.                                                   (Wei Wu Wei)

 

The Buddhist meditator's microscopic awareness becomes so sensitive that it is able to dissect the sense of self into its component stimuli. Thus the meditator perceives not a solid unchanging ego or self-sense, but rather a ceaseless flux of thoughts and images of which that ego is composed. This is the experience of 'no self' in which the sense of a permanent egoic self is recognized as an illusion. This illusion of a continuous self or ego is a product of imprecise awareness that arises in much the same way as an apparently continuous movie arises from a series of still frames. The meditator's precise awareness sees through this egoic illusion and hence frees the meditator from egocentric ways of thinking and acting.
The yogi's experience is different... In the highest reaches of meditation, attention is fixed immovably on consciousness. Nothing remains in awareness but consciousness itself, and consequently this is what the yogi now experiences him (or her)self  to be – pure consciousness, ineffable, blissful, beyond time, space or any limitation. This is samadhi, the highest reach of yoga. It is this experience - the union of self and Self - that gives yoga, which means union, its name. This blissful union contrasts dramatically with the sometimes pleasant, sometimes painful experiences of both the shaman and the Buddhist meditator.

                                                                                                (Roger N. Walsh, The Spirit of Shamanism)

 

Mani had preached a synchretic doctrine combining Buddhist, Zoroastrian, and Christian ideas, wherein the Old Testament Creator was identified with the Zoroastrian power of darkness and deception, Angra Mainyu, and these two, in turn, with the Buddhist principle of delusion (maya), by which the mind is turned from the pure light of unconditioned consciousness and made captive by the fascination of those things, mixed of light and darkness, that are the passing phenomena of this spatially and temporally conditioned universe of names and forms. Mani correlated both the Christian and Zoroastrian prophecies of a literal end of the world with the purely psychological Buddhist doctrine of illumination (bodhi) as the end of delusion (maya), declaring that the former, the literal end, would result when the latter, a total realization of illumination, had been achieved. And he associated the world-abandoning doctrine of social disengagement preached by Jesus and illustrated by his forty days in the desert with the Great Departure and world-abandonment of the Buddha.                                                      (Joseph Campbell, Creative Mythology)

 

All sensation will be the reconstruction of objects in space and time from apparent or virtual images of those objects recorded in the cortex. All that we sense as 'out there' is projected from our 'witness' of the recorded virtual images.                               (Fred Alan Wolf, Parallel Universes)

 

There are moments when one feels free from one's own identification with human limitations and inadequacies. At such moments one imagines that one stands on some spot of a small planet, gazing in amazement at the cold yet profoundly moving beauty of the eternal, the unfathomable; life and death flow into one, and there is neither evolution nor destiny; only Being.                (Albert Einstein)

 

Society can have no quantitative standards by which to add up the negative value of illusion, social control, prolonged suffering, loneliness, genetic deterioration and frustration produced by medical treatment.                                                                                    (Ivan Illich)

 

I was at one time a great lover of the medical profession. . . . I no longer hold that opinion. . . . Doctors have almost unhinged us. . . . I regard the present system as black magic. . . . Hospitals are institutions for propagating sin. Men take less care of their bodies and immorality increases. . . . ignoring the soul, the profession puts men at its mercy and contributes to the diminution of human dignity and self control. . . . I have endeavoured to show that there is no real service of humanity in the profession, and that it is injurious to mankind. . . . I believe that a multiplicity of hospitals is not test of civilization. It is rather a symptom of decay.  (Mahatma Gandhi - referring to selective medicine's central focus on absolving mankind from giving due respect to the natural laws of cause and effect)          (ibid)

 

The compulsion to do good is an innate American trait. Only North Americans seem to believe that they always should, may, and actually can choose somebody with whom to share their blessings. Ultimately this attitude leads to bombing people into the acceptance of gifts.                                      (ibid)

 

Physicians are taught today to consider themselves responsible for lives from the moment the egg is fertilized through the time of organ harvest. They have become the socially responsible professional manager not of a patient, but of a life from sperm to worm. Physicians have become the bureaucrats of the brave new biocracy that rules from womb to tomb.                                                                                                                                                      (ibid)

 

Life is a mystery play.  Its players are cosmic principles wearing the mortal masks of mountain and man.  We have only to lift the masks which cloak us to find at last the immortal gods who walk in our image across the stage.                                       (Frank Waters)

 

There are three forces, the only three forces capable of conquering and enslaving forever the conscience of these weak rebels in the interests of their own happiness. They are: the miracle, the mystery and authority.                                                       (F. Dostoyevsky The Brothers Karamazov)

 

Religion can serve a purpose, and it can be a wonderful mechanism for humanity, yet the philosophies of great prophets such as Gandhi, Jesus and Martin Luther King need to be incorporated into today's spirituality, replacing the hatred-filled, vengeance-seeking, violence-laden, arrogant and callous god of the Old Testament. If you are a follower of Christianity, then follow Christ's teachings, do not become the hypocrite espousing but rarely, if ever, implementing his words into action. 

We need to evolve religion, for if not, it will regress humankind back to days dark and perilous, never allowing us to move forward in a warm embrace of new understandings and knowledge. If you must believe in something, then believe in humanism, in compassion, in peace, love and togetherness. Believe in the Earth and the splendors of her surface. Believe in nature and in saving it from ourselves. Believe in the human race, for divided we stand not a chance yet united we will thrive. If we fail to embrace in locking arms then soon we will perish as a species, for the day is fast approaching when the human animal will once again resurrect itself inside us. Together, however, we hold the keys to unchaining humankind from the grips of self-annihilation and corrosive and divisive theology. It is time to evolve forward in time, expelling the demons of the opiate, leaving behind the cancerous beliefs holding man in perpetual bondage, hindering our incredible potential. 
The Evolution of Revolution is upon us, for, until proven otherwise, there is but one god, and that is humanity.                             (Manuel Valenzuela)

 

The lamps are different but the Light is the same: it comes from Beyond.                                                                        (Jalaluldin Rumi)

 

Concerning the different, and indeed often conflicting, belief systems of the religions: our earth is a three-dimensional globe. But when you map it on a two dimensional surface, such as a piece of paper, you have to distort it. You cannot get three dimensions into two without distortion. And there are a variety of projections used by cartographers which are different systematic ways of distorting the earth’s curvature to represent it on a flat surface. But if a map made in one projection is correct it does not follow that maps made in other projections are incorrect. If they are properly made they are all correct, and yet they all distort. Perhaps our different theologies, both within the same religion and between different religions, are human maps of the infinite divine reality made in different projections, i.e. different conceptual systems. These all necessarily distort, since that infinite reality as it is in itself cannot be represented in our finite human terms. But perhaps all are equally useful in enabling us make our journey through life.

But finally, let us return to the point at which we started, namely prayer, particularly petitionary prayer, prayer for other people. In my opinion it is an observable fact that such prayer does sometimes ‘work’. I do not however see this as a matter of our asking an omnipotent God to intervene miraculously on earth and of his then acting accordingly. I see it rather as depending upon a mental field or network, below the level of normal consciousness, within which we are all connected and through which our thoughts, and even more our emotions, are all the time affecting one another. These influences are usually largely filtered out by the mechanism that preserves our individual autonomy. But when in ‘prayer’, or what Buddhists call loving-kindness meditation, we concentrate upon some particular individual who is in a distressed state of anxiety, fear, anger, despair, etc., concretely visualizing a better possibility for them, this can have a positive effect. Even in the case of bodily distress our thought may affect the patient’s mind and sometimes through this his or her bodily state. And I would suggest – outrageously, from the point of view of the contemporary secular mindset – that quite possibly the thou of whom we are sometimes aware in prayer is a reality, but is what the eastern religions call a deva, a god in distinction from God, or in western terms an angel.

So here is a large-scale hypothesis which constitutes a religious, as distinguished from a naturalistic, interpretation of religion. And like all such hypotheses, it presents itself for consideration and invites others who find it inadequate to offer a better hypothesis.                                           (John Hick)

 

Cognita sunt in cognoscente secundum modum cognoscentis (things known are in the knower according to the mode of the knower)

                                                                                    (St Thomas Aquinas - Summa Theologica)

 

All concepts are dualistic, therefore in order to transcend dualism (the opposites and complementaries) we must transcend concepts. That is known as direct cognition.                                                                                                                                          (Wei Wu Wei)

 

From The Dhammapada:

 

A nation can survive its fools, and even the ambitious, but it cannot survive treason from within. An enemy at the gates is less formidable, for he is known and carries his banner openly, but the traitor moves amongst those within the gate freely, his sly whispers rustling through all the alleys, heard in the very halls of government itself. For the traitor appears not as a traitor, he speaks in accents familiar to his victims, and he wears their face and garments, he appeals to the baseness that lies deep in the hearts of all men. He rots the soul of a nation, he works secretly and unknown in the night to undermine the pillars of the city, he infects the body politic so that it can no longer resist. A murderer is less to be feared.                                         (Marcus Tullius Cicero, 42BC)

 

First, much of what we call illness is not due to physiological dysfunction but the body's own self-healing. Temperature rises as part of a strategy to kill pathogens — pathogens if they had a choice would keep temperature stable. Likewise, we feel sick to conserve energy — pathogens do not in themselves make us feel groggy. "Sickness" therefore is not so much a physiological input as a physiological output.
Second, such top down self-healing is organized by goals that have been fined tuned by evolution to maximize our long term survival. The body, for example, needs to be run on the assumption that it can dip into reserves if the unexpected happens — hungry Panthera leo tend to turn up when they are least expected. And the body might not bother with self-healing if it can see it will get better by doing nothing. There is thus not one path to health but a variety of options. The health management system makes a top down choice upon them — and that introduces the possibility of such decisions being shaped by beliefs.

If you get infected with a rhinovirus, your body has choices. It could decide to go on an all out defence that ups body temperature, diverts energy resources into T cell attack, and ends up with fatigue and 'queasiness'. But it might also decide to tolerate the bug and gamble it will not cause major damage. That latter option is not as rare as might be expected. 20% of two year old infants in one study (van Benten et al., 2003, Pediatric Allergy and Immunology, 14, 363) were found to have rhinovirus infection but none of the physiological responses, 'illness', that go with clearing respiratory viruses. The health management system can decide to fight or to leave alone. Thus if a person's health management system predicts the body will get rid of a virus without needing to fight it physiologically then they might decide to abort having a "cold". It does not take much for that to happen — swallowing a few tablets prescribed by a doctor is enough. It does not matter that in reality that they are inert sugar pills — if the health management system thinks it has had external help (even if it does not — as with a placebo), it can decide to turn off having a cold.                                                                                                                                    (John R. Skoyles)

 

It is less the medicine than the doctor that cures. It is less the doctor than the organic consciousness that heals. Always the organic consciousness is responsible for illness and for its cure. The doctor inspires, gives the impulsion that leads to health, the medicine helps or hinders locally to that end. Medicine-only is an attempt at healing despite the organic consciousness.

How may the organic consciousness be persuaded to re-establish balance, health (wholeness)? It is not a question of functional and nervous ailments more than of organic and lesional. When that is understood Lourdes will be understood, Jesus will be understood, healers of all techniques will be understood, and medicine will at last become rational, i.e. in accordance with relative reality, with the psycho-somatic entity as we can know it.         (Wei Wu Wei)

 

Suffering is exclusive to the false 'me'. It is therefore self-imposed. What we think is its cause is merely some phenomenon that releases the machinery of self-torture.                                                                                                                                                         (Wei Wu Wei)

 

There is a profound wisdom in the body, in the pulsing of the blood, the rhythm of the breath, the turning of the joints. Once we are aware of its subtle power, the body becomes a sensitive antenna for tuning into nature and other people. It can serve as a metaphor for every human thought, emotion, and action. It is the royal road to the unconscious. It is a small, handy model of the universe. All the books, computers, and electronic networks in the world contain only a minuscule fraction of the information it takes to create one human body.                     (George Leonard and Michael Murphy – “The Body as Teacher”)

 

The Void: What is it?

Have we a greater difficulty than the famous 'Void' which forms the principal subject of so many sutras and statements of the Masters as of the Buddha himself? How many hair-splitting definitions, negations of negations and contradictions of contradictions have been attempted in order to suggest its meaning to our tridimensional minds?

Supposing we ask Hui Hai?
'The Void is simply non-attachment'

* * *

It may be necessary to regard the Void in a more metaphysical aspect. 'Emptiness', 'the Void' - if one thinks about it, surely the epithet most suggestive and least misleading to us today should be just 'Non-Manifestation'?

If anything is clear it is that the Taoist conception of Non-Action is the basis of all action. Similarly Non-manifestation must be the basis of all manifestation.

Most, if not all, sects of most, if not all, superior religions seek to transmute hate into love, that is negative into positive. Zen alone requires no such transmutation between two aspects of a single thing, which are evaluations of an affective manifestation. Instead it requires absolute non-attachment, the exclusion of both hate and love, which may be defined as the abolition of affectivity itself. One may look for the origin of this in the original Taoism.

But if Caritas, impersonal compassion, be an accurate description of the resulting state, one must envisage it as a strictly non-affective condition of the mind…. Detachment is a state; it is not a totalisation of achieved indifferences.                                                    (Wei Wu Wei)

 

Wise men don't judge: they seek to understand.

Judging is an automatic response of the ego asserting itself: in so far as pure-intelligence (buddhi) has reduced the power of the ego the automatic response to stimulus is understanding.                                                                                                                                           (Wei Wu Wei)

 

While every cell contains intelligence, the heart – because of its powerful, rhythmic beating and role as supplier of blood and oxygen to the other parts of the body – acts as a kind of conductor for the "cellular symphony" that takes place within us in each moment.                           (Renee A. Levi)

 

No action is right or wrong in itself, or by virtue of belonging to a category of actions so classed for purposes of social order.

Every action should be an adequate response to circumstances, whether that be slaughter or self-sacrifice.

Since our egos hinder us from responding adequately to circumstances we are well-advised to abide by the classification into 'good' and 'bad' devised for purposes of social order, but do not let us imagine that they are really such.                                                                                     (Wei Wu Wei)

 

Eternity: That which is born dies. That which is not born cannot die. We do not think clearly in this matter. Some of us think that what is born may live 'forever', but that is a concept dependent on the time-illusion. Our difficulty arises in conceiving anything that is not born.

We tend to conceive everything as subject to our notion of time. But 'living for ever', i.e. going on living, is not the same thing as being eternal. The former is impossible, a pure illusion; the latter the only reality. Being eternal is never having been subject to the conception of time.

Being eternal is not 'going on living': it involves no process of becoming: being eternal consists simply in Being.                (Wei Wu Wei)

 

Is not the idea of liberation in the domain of maya? Does not the Vedanta teach that the Atman (the I-reality) is always free? Why then should I struggle for my liberation?                                                                                                                                                                 (Vivekananda)

 

'Union': Human love is a will-o'-the-wisp. How could any human being either possess or unite with another? Psychically, there is nothing possessible to possess, nothing dispossessible to give, nothing with which to effect union. Physically, contact of surfaces is only juxtaposition, and no simulation of penetration can ever go deeper than surfaces.

Whatever we may do we find a surface opposed to another surface.

On the plane of Manifestation each of us is utterly separate and alone. Union is only on the plane of Reality, and thereon mutual possession is universal and absolute.

Our notion of love is perhaps a nostalgia for that.                                                                                                           (Wei Wu Wei)

 

Love: The positive and negative elements, in the form known as masculinity and femininity, two aspects of a single manifestation, are in a state of imbalance in male and female respectively, each manifesting an excess of one element.

The association of male and female has the apparent effect of restoring this double imbalance to a state of equilibrium. Since the attainment of equilibrium is constantly and automatically sought throughout manifestation, the mutual attraction of male and female and the mutual need of one another thereby becomes comprehensible.

But it is a need that can never attain fulfillment during life, nor anything but a simulation thereof. From this, there results all sexual performances on the one hand, and all specific conflict between the sexes on the other.                                                                                                    (Wei Wu Wei)

 

Sacred Mind is the unbounded awareness within which all individualized experience occurs, the living matrix within which minds meet and engage, which we fail to recognize it because we habitually restrict our experience of mind to the nearby territory of ego and…to a culture that has not taught us to recognize the presence of this broader mental field, let alone how it functions. As a teacher, I am concerned with a different kind of knowing than the one offered in the current model of Western education. Using concepts from quantum theory, I suggest that – if mind is a field phenomenon, if it registers not only as our particle-like sensory awareness but also as a wavelike, intuitive awareness that extends beyond our bodies, then teaching is more than just sending out information across an ontological chasm for students to catch. It is in addition a direct energetic engagement of the mental fields of our students within the encompassing matrix of Sacred Mind.                                                                                                                           (Christopher Bache-“Dark Night, Early Dawn)

 

Play your part in the comedy, but don't identify yourself with your role!                                                  (Wei Wu Wei)

 

Life is not measured by the number of breaths we take, but by the moments that take our breath away.                                                  *

 

When you give a shilling to a beggar - do you realise that you are giving it to yourself?
When you help a lame dog over a stile - do you realise that you yourself are being helped?
When you kick a man when he is down - do you realise that you are kicking yourself?
Give him another kick - if you deserve it!                                                                                   (Wei Wu Wei)

 

Knowledge can be communicated, but not wisdom.                                                                               (Herman Hesse)

 

I never did give them hell. I just told the truth, and they thought it was hell.                                 (Harry Truman)

 

By three methods we may learn wisdom: First, by reflection, which is noblest; second, by imitation, which is easiest; and third, by experience, which is the bitterest.                                                                                                                                                         (Confucius)

 

Truth has no special time of its own. Its hour is now – always.                                                       (Albert Schweitzer)

 

It is so hard to forget what it is worse than useless to remember! If I am to be a thoroughfare, I prefer that it be of the mountain brooks, the Parnassian streams, and not the town sewers. There is inspiration, that gossip which comes to the ear of the attentive mind from the courts of heaven. There is the profane and stale revelation of the bar-room and the police court. The same ear is fitted to receive both communications. Only the character of the hearer determines to which it shall be open, and to which closed. I believe that the mind can be permanently profaned by the habit of attending to trivial things, so that all our thoughts shall be tinged with triviality. Our very intellect shall be macadamized, as it were,—its foundation broken into fragments for the wheels of travel to roll over; and if you would know what will make the most durable pavement, surpassing rolled stones, spruce blocks, and asphaltum, you have only to look into some of our minds which have been subjected to this treatment so long.                                                                                                        (Henry David Thoreau)

 

Mix a little foolishness with your serious plans: it's lovely to be silly at the right moment.         (Horace, 65-8 BC)

 

Trivers-Willard Effect: Typically, there is thought of a 50/50 sex ratio in local breeding populations, but under certain conditions this is not true. Under certain conditions natural selections favors deviations from the typical 50/50 split. In 1973 Trivers and Willard theorized that a mother can adjust her offspring's gender ratio to maximize her reproductive success. Consider first that a mother in good condition will produce offspring in better condition. Second, consider that condition affects male reproductive success more than female reproductive success. For a male in top condition will exclude other males from reproducing and, therefore, will impregnate more females himself. So, a mother in good condition that produces a son will have more surviving offspring than if she produced a female. Trivers found that as maternal condition declines, the adult female tends to produce a lower ratio of males to females. "This is due to natural selection driving the sex ratio to favor the sex that will best reproduce in a poor condition - the female"                                                       (Robert Trivers)

 

People running away from themselves as fast as wheels can take them, always hoping they have left themselves behind, putting their feet more firmly on the accelerator every time they perceive that they are still there, like animals with a tin can tied to their tails. Neither ever seems to stop and try to find out what is there; if they did they would realise that it is only a tin can, quite empty - or void as the Buddhists like to describe it.    (Wei Wu Wei)

 

Every moment death was dying and being reborn, just like life. For thousands of years young girls and boys have danced beneath the tender foliage of the trees in spring – beneath the poplars, firs, oaks, planes and slender palms – and they will go on dancing for thousands more years, their faces consumed with desire. Faces change, crumble, return to earth; but others rise to take their place. There is only one dancer, but he has a thousand masks. He is always twenty. He is immortal.                                                                       (Nikos Kazantzakis – Zorba The Greek)

 

This world is a passing dream which the sleeper is convinced is real, until unexpectedly the dawn of death frees him from this fantasy.             (Rumi)

 

All methods and techniques - and of course all human beings who propound them - are merely instruments to help the student to attain a methodless, technique-free, teacherless state. Let him not get enslaved by the thought of their necessity. Let him not confuse the attitudes towards life which they provide with life itself. Let him neither turn the way into the goal, nor the means into the end. All techniques were originated for the purpose of opening a door to the inner essence. But undiscriminating people cling stubbornly to the door and do not permit it to open! The wise student will keep his attitude subtle, elastic and dogma-free.                                                                                                     (Dr. Paul Brunton)

 

I have spent many days stringing and unstringing my instrument while the song I came to sing remains unsung.            (Rabindranath Tagore)

 

Sometimes when we perceive the world, we perceive without language.  We perceive spontaneously....But sometimes when we view the world, first we think a word and then we perceive.  In other words, the first instance is directly feeling or perceiving the universe; the second is talking ourselves into seeing the universe.  So either you look or see beyond language - as first perception, or you see the world through the filter of your thoughts, by talking to yourself.

(Chögyam Trungpa)

 

The evil of our time is the loss of consciousness of evil.                                                                             (J. Krishnamurti)

 

An individual's karma is similar to the karma of the nation that she/he was born into.                                           (Sri Aurobindo)

 

One of the great attractions of patriotism, it fulfills our worst wishes. In the person of our nation, we are able, vicariously, to bully and cheat. Bully and cheat, what's more, with a feeling that we are profoundly virtuous.

                                    (Aldous Huxley illuminating the dark side of the force underlying "patriotism")

 

The theologians may indulge the pleasing task of describing religion as she descended from Heaven, arrayed in her native purity. A more melancholy duty is imposed on the historian [read: journalist] He must discover the inevitable mixture of error and corruption which she contracted in a long residence upon earth, among a weak and degenerate race of beings.                                                                                                                     (Edward Gibbon - historian)

 

God's violence in the sacred texts of both faiths [Judeo-Christian and Muslim] reflect a deep and troubling pathology so pervasive, vindictive, and destructive that it contradicts and subverts the collective weight of other passages that exhort ethical behavior or testify to a loving God.

                                                                        (Jack Nelson-Pallmayer)

 

The attack against reason and objectivity is fast reaching the proportions of a crusade. To save the American Dream, we desperately need to reaffirm the principle that it is possible to carry out an analysis of social life which rational human beings will recognize as being true, regardless of whether they happen to be women or men, whites or black, straights or gays, employers or employees, Jews or born-again Christians. The alternative is to stand by helplessly as special interest groups tear the United States apart in the name of their "separate realities' or to wait until one of them grows strong enough to force its irrational and subjective brand of reality on all the rest.                                                                                                                                   (Marvin Harris – anthropologist)

 

When we talk about love we have to become mature or we will become sentimental. Basically love means...being responsible, responsibility to our family, toward our civilization, and now by the pressures of history, toward the universe of humankind.         (Reinhold Niebuhr)

 

Winston Churchill spoke after Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain's infamous 1938 appeasement of Hitler, "They are decided to be undecided, resolved to be irresolute, adamant for drift, solid for fluidity, all powerful to be impotent - This is only the beginning of the reckoning. This is only the first sip, the first foretaste of a bitter cup which will be proffered to us year by year unless by a supreme recovery of moral health and martial vigour, we arise again and take our stand for freedom as in the olden time.                                                                                                                                          (Al Gore)

 

What is this world? I wondered. What is its aim and in what way can we help to attain it during our ephemeral lives? The aim of man and matter is to create joy, according to Zorba – others would say “to create spirit”, but that comes to the same thing on another plane. But why? With what object? And when the body disolves, does anything at all remain of what we have called the soul? Or does nothing remain, and does our unquenchable desire for immortality spring, not from the fact that we are immortal, but from the fact that during the short span of our life we are in the service of something immortal?                                                                                                                 (Nikos Kazantzakis - Zorba The Greek)

 

I think, Zorba – but I may be wrong – that there are three kinds of men: those who make it their aim, as they say, to live their lives, eat, drink, make love, grow rich, and famous; then come those who make it their aim not to live their own lives but to concern themselves with the lives of all men – they feel that all men are one and they try to enlighten them, to love them as much as they can and do good to them; finally there are those who aim at living the life of the entire universe – everything, men, animals, trees, stars, we are all one, we are all one substance involved in the same terrible struggle. What struggle?…Turning matter into spirit.                                                        (Nikos Kazantzakis – Zorba The Greek)

 

Worldviews have four components:

So there are four questions, four components to a worldview.  From a Christian perspective you could label them as creation, the fall, redemption, and eschatology, or where this is all going.                                                                        (Charles Colson and Nancy Pearcey, How Now Shall We Live?)

 

Hamlet’s Soliloquy:

To be, or not to be: that is the question:

Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer

The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,

Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,

And by opposing end them? To die: to sleep;

No more; and by a sleep to say we end

The heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks

That flesh is heir to, ’tis a consummation

Devoutly to be wish’d. To die, to sleep;

To sleep: perchance to dream: ay, there’s the rub;

For in that sleep of death what dreams may come

When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,

Must give us pause: there’s the respect

That makes calamity of so long life;

For who would bear the whips and scorns of time,

The oppressor’s wrong, the proud man’s contumely,

The pangs of despised love, the law’s delay,

The insolence of office and the spurns

That patient merit of the unworthy takes,

When he himself might his quietus make

With a bare bodkin? who would fardels bear,

To grunt and sweat under a weary life,

But that the dread of something after death,

The undiscover’d country from whose bourn

No traveller returns, puzzles the will

And makes us rather bear those ills we have

Than fly to others that we know not of?

Thus conscience does make cowards of us all;

And thus the native hue of resolution

Is sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought,

And enterprises of great pith and moment

With this regard their currents turn awry,

And lose the name of action. - Soft you now!

The fair Ophelia! Nymph, in thy orisons

Be all my sins remember’d.

 

Error is not only the absolute error of believing what is false, but also the quantitative error of believing more or less strongly than is warranted by the degree of credibility properly attaching to the proposition believed in relation to the believer’s knowledge. A man who is quite convinced that a certain horse will win the Derby is in error even if the horse does win.                                                              (Bertrand Russell – commenting on the nature of error)

 

In an immense universe a little globe revolves around a star; it is the third in a row – Mercury, Venus, Earth – of the planetary family. It is of a solid core covered over most of its surface with liquid. Living creatures fill the liquid; other living creatures fly in the gas; and still others creep and walk upon the ground on the bottom of the gaseous ocean. 

 

Man, a being of erect stature, thinks himself the prince of creation. He felt like this long before he, by his own efforts, came to know how to fly on wings of metal around the globe. He felt godlike long before he could talk to his fellow-man on the other side of the globe.

 

Today he can see the microcosm in a drop and the elements in the stars. He knows the laws governing the living cell with its chromosomes, and the laws governing the macrocosm of the sun, moon, planets, and stars. He assumes that gravitation keeps the planetary system together, man and beast on their planet, the sea within its borders. For  millions and millions of years, he maintains, the planets have rolled along on the same paths, and their moons around them, and man in these eons has arisen from a one-cell infusorium all the long way up the ladder to his status of Homo sapiens.

 

Is man's knowledge now nearly complete? Are only a few more steps necessary to conquer the universe: to extract the energy of the atom [since these pages were written this has already been done], to cure cancer, to control genetics, to communicate with other planets and learn if they have living creatures, too?

 

Here begins Homo ignoramus.

 

He does not know what life is or bow it came to be and whether it originated from inorganic matter. He does not know whether other planets of this sun or of other suns have life on them, and if they have, whether the forms of life there are like those around us, ourselves included. He does not know how this solar system came into being, although he has built up a few hypotheses about it. He knows only that the solar system was constructed billions of years ago. He does not know what this mysterious force of gravitation is that holds him and his fellow man on the other side of the planet with their feet on the ground, although he regards the phenomenon itself as "the law of laws." He does not know what the earth looks like five miles under his feet. He does not know how mountains came into existence or what caused the emergence of the continents, although he builds hypotheses about these, nor does he know from where oil came- again hypotheses.

 

He does not know why, only a short time ago, a thick glacial sheet pressed upon most of Europe and North America, as he believes it did; nor how palms could grow above the polar circle, nor how it came about that the same fauna fill the inner lakes of the Old and the New World. He does not know where the salt in the sea came from."                         (Immanuel Velikovsky - "Worlds in Collision" Published 1950)

 

The beginning of wisdom lies in calling things by their right name.                                                (Chinese proverb)

 

In "The Flight of the Eagle", J. Krishnamurti points to the difference between conceptual seeing and actual seeing, in that we often live and relate through images, rather than directly.

"Have you ever looked at your wife - without the image that you have about her, the image that you have put together over thirty or so years? You have an image of her and she has an image about you; these images have relationship; you and she do not have relationship. These images come into being when you are not attentive in your relationship - it is inattention that breeds images. Can you look at your wife without condemning, evaluating, saying she is right, she is wrong, just observe without bringing in your prejudices? Then you will see that there is a totally different kind of action that comes from that observation."

 

Some biologists still argue that you can get to high evolutionary forms purely through natural selection. That involves more faith in chance than religious people have in the Bible.                                                                                                                            (Theodore Roszak)

 

“The Light of Life Glows Beyond Its Span” [Epitaph on tombstone of Marnie’s paternal grandfather –George William Denby –1866- 1951]

 

Contradictions are tonic; paradox is a kind of purgative; and irony provides scar tissue. These I call imaginary medicine.             (Andrei Codrescu)

 

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)

 

The strongest principle of growth lies in human choice.                                                                                                   (George Elliot)

 

The tongue can paint what the eye can't see.                                                                                                           (Chinese proverb)

 

For a man to achieve all that is demanded of him he must regard himself as greater than he is.                             (Johann Wolfgang von Goethe)

 

There is a great deal of difference between an eager man who wants to read a book and the tired man who wants a book to read.

                                                                                                                        (Gilbert K. Chesterton)

 

My books are water, those of the great geniuses are wine. Fortunately, everyone drinks water.                          (Mark Twain)

 

Sometimes I have good luck and write better than I can.                                                                            (Ernest Hemingway)

 

To be what we are, and to become what we are capable of becoming, is the only end of life.                              (Robert Louis Stevenson)

 

In all of us there is an eagle. Our eagle is beautiful, strong and noble, eager to be free of some humiliating cage. In freedom we can forage on our own and take part in the competition that is life. We are not made to be contained or managed in some warm zoo. We need to feel the air in our feathers, to know the potential of our eyes and the capability of our talons.                                               (Robert Genn)

 

Thomas Merton, the late Christian mystic, clarified further the journey into hopelessness. In a letter to a friend, he advised: "Do not depend on the hope of results . . .you may have to face the fact that your work will be apparently worthless and even achieve no result at all, if not perhaps results opposite to what you expect. As you get used to this idea, you start more and more to concentrate not on the results, but on the value, the rightness, the truth of the work itself. . . .you gradually struggle less and less for an idea and more and more for specific people. . . In the end, it is the reality of personal relationship that saves everything."

I believe that religion, generally speaking, has been a curse to mankind - that its modest and greatly overestimated services on the ethical side have been more than overcome by the damage it has done to clear and honest thinking. I believe that no discovery of fact, however trivial, can be wholly useless to the race, and that no trumpeting of falsehood, however virtuous in intent, can be anything but vicious. I believe that all government is evil, in that all government must necessarily make war upon liberty… I believe that the evidence for immortality is no better than the evidence of witches, and deserves no more respect. I believe in the complete freedom of thought and speech… I believe in the capacity of man to conquer his world, and to find out what it is made of, and how it is run. I believe in the reality of progress. I - But the whole thing, after all, may be put very simply. I believe that it is better to tell the truth than to lie. I believe that it is better to be free than to be a slave. And I believe that it is better to know than be ignorant.                                                           (H.L. Mencken)

 

The Lie of progress. The Lie of unlimited expansion. The Lie of 'grow-or-perish.' Listen. We built ourselves a fine commercial bonfire, but then instead of basking in its warmth, toasting marshmallows over it, and reading the classics by its light, we became obsessed with making it bigger and hotter, bigger and hotter, until if the flames didn't leap higher from one quarter to the next, it was cause for great worry and dissatisfaction. Well, any Bozo on the riverbank could have told us that if you keep feeding and feeding and feeding a bonfire, sooner or later you burn up all the fuel and the fire goes cold; or else the fire gets too huge to manage and eventually engulfs the countryside and chars its inhabitants. Nature has always set limits on growth: limits on the physical size of individual species, limits on the size of populations. Did we really believe capitalism was exempt from the laws of nature? Did we really confuse endless consumption with endless progress?                                            (Tom Robbins)

 

 

 

Keith and Marnie Elliott’s “REMEDY” Site

 

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