THE PERENNIAL QUEST

Try to fill your consciousness with the representation of no-consciousness…and you will see the impossibility of it. The effort to comprehend it causes the most tormenting dizziness. (Miguel de Unamuno - The Tragic Sense of Life)

After sleeping through a hundred million centuries we have finally opened our eyes on a sumptuous planet, sparkling with color, bountiful with life. Within decades we must close our eyes again. Isn't it a noble, an enlightened way of spending our brief time in the sun, to work at understanding the universe and how we have come to wake up in it? (Richard Dawkins)

Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves. It is up to us. It's been said that astronomy is a humbling, and, I might add, a character-building experience. To my mind, there is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly and compassionately with one another and to preserve and cherish that pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known. (Carl Sagan - "Pale Blue Dot")

Tell me and I’ll forget; show me and I may remember; involve me and I’ll understand. (old Chinese proverb)

We are very good at preparing to live, but not very good at living. We know how to sacrifice ten years for a diploma, and we are willing to work very hard to get a job, a car, a house and so on. But we have difficulty remembering that we are alive in the present moment, the only moment there is for us to be alive. (Thich Nhat Hahn)

Time is too slow for those who wait, too swift for those who fear, too long for those who grieve, too short for those who rejoice, but for those who love, time is eternity. (Henry Van Dyke)

The desire for food is limited in every man by the narrow capacity of the human stomach; but the desire of the conveniences and ornaments of building, dress, equipage, and household furniture, seems to have no limit or certain boundary. (Adam Smith - "The Wealth of Nations”)

The pleasures of wealth and greatness ... strike the imagination as something grand and beautiful and noble, of which the attainment is well worth all the toil and anxiety which we are so apt to bestow upon it ... It is this deception which rouses and keeps in continual motion the industry of mankind. (Adam Smith - "The Theory of Moral Sentiments")

Six steps to avoid being a slave to the clock, to regain control of your time, and to live a more relaxed life:

1. Take sovereignty over your time. Many of us have a tendency to load up our schedules unnecessarily. For example, studies show that faced with a choice between a bigger paycheck and more free time, most people go for the money. When we get home from work, many of us are still taking business calls or checking our email. Yet much of this work is unessential or can wait until the next day.

2. Live in harmony with your biological clock. Our genes determine whether we are early birds or night owls. I know I do my best work in the morning, for example. If I get waylaid early in the day by non-work-related activities, it takes me twice as long to meet my deadlines in the late afternoon or evening.

3. Cultivate leisure time. The world seems to be made up of two types of people, those who must be goaded to work and those who have to be reminded to stop. The latter often develop the unconscious habit of believing that an hour without anything accomplished is an hour wasted.

4. Experience the moments. We all spend the majority of our time thinking about the future or reminiscing about the past rather than lingering in the present moment. It's a tough habit to break. But the present moment is all we have... or ever will have.

5. Learn to concentrate. Americans are famous for doing two things at once. We answer our email while listening to a conference call. We watch TV while we have lunch. We drive down the road, listening to the radio, nattering to the kids in the back seat and talking on the cell phone at the same time.

6. Set your priorities. Life is mostly about making good choices. Do you want to be the best production manager or the best father? Do you want to earn a higher income or spend more time playing tennis and getting in shape? It's tough to excel in one area without giving short shrift to others. (Stefan Klein "The Secret Pulse of Time")

Economists and psychologists have spent decades studying the relation between wealth and happiness, and they have generally concluded that wealth increases human happiness when it lifts people out of abject poverty and into the middle class but that it does little to increase happiness thereafter. Americans who earn $50,000 per year are much happier than those who earn $10,000 per year, but Americans who earn $5 million per year are not much happier than those who earn $100,000 per year. People who live in poor nations are much less happy than people who live in moderately wealthy nations, but people who live in moderately wealthy nations are not much less happy than people who live in extremely wealthy nations. Economists explain that wealth has 'declining marginal utility,' which is a fancy way of saying that it hurts to be hungry, cold, sick, tired, and scared, but once you've bought your way out of these burdens, the rest of your money is an increasingly useless pile of paper.

(Daniel Gilbert "Stumbling On Happiness")

When Newton saw an apple fall, he found
In that slight startle from his contemplation –
‘Tis said (for I’ll not answer above ground
For any sage’s creed or calculation) –
A mode of proving that the earth turn’d round
In a most natural whirl, called “gravitation;”
And this is the sole mortal who could grapple,
Since Adam, with a fall or with an apple. (Lord Byron)

In three words I can sum up everything I've learned about life: it goes on. (Robert Frost)

The Quakers say, "Build to last a hundred years; be ready to leave tomorrow."

The Buddhists say, "Though my heart is on fire, my eyes are cold as ashes."

Shakespeare ends a dying man's love sonnet to his young lover, "This thou perceivest, that makes thy love more strong, to love that well that thou must leave ere long."

[The lesson: An imperative for stronger love, not weaker. To burn with love while knowing that it too shall pass.]

Observance of customs and laws can very easily be a cloak for a lie so subtle that our fellow human beings are unable to detect it. It may help us to escape all criticism, we may even be able to deceive ourselves in the belief of our obvious righteousness. But deep down, below the surface of the average man's conscience, he hears a voice whispering, 'There is something not right,' no matter how much his rightness is supported by public opinion or by the moral code. (Carl Gustav Jung)

The cure for despair is not hope. It's discovering what we want to do about something we care about. (Margaret Wheatley)

Unlike animals, human beings require more than progeny: they require progeny who remember them. To overcome mortality we create culture, a dialogue among generations that links the dead with the yet unborn. Even the Neanderthals buried their dead with grave-gifts, a token of belief of life beyond the grave. Whether or not we pray to a personal god or confess a particular religion, the existential question remains the same.

Without the hope of immortality we cannot bear mortality. Cultures that have lost the hope of immortality also lose the will to live.

Culture is the stuff out of which we weave the perception of immortality. With sad frequency, ethnic groups will die rather than abandon their way of life. Historic tragedy occurs on the grand scale when economic or strategic circumstances undercut the material conditions of the life of a people, which nonetheless cannot accept assimilation into another culture. That is when entire peoples fight to the death.

We cannot make a future for ourselves without our past. All cultures worship at the shrine of their ancestors. They exist to ward off the presentiment of death. Breaking continuity with the past implies that our lives have no meaning past our own physical existence. If we do not continue the lives of those who preceded us, nor prepare the lives of those who will follow us, then we are defined by our physical existence and nothing more. In that case we will seek to maximize our pleasure. It is perfectly possible for entire peoples to live only for their own pleasure and feel nothing for their prospective obliteration. How else should we explain fertility rates in Europe and Japan at barely half of replacement?  (Spengler)

The stoic philosopher Epictetus said, "Learn to wish that everything should come to pass exactly as it does."

His student Marcus Aurelius agreed. "The first rule is to keep an untroubled spirit. The second is to look things in the face and know them for what they are."

Living beings are eddies in the stream of entropy. That is to say, while the universe gradually becomes more homogeneous and disordered, little parts of it can reverse the trend and become briefly more ordered and complex by capturing packets of energy. It happens each time a baby is conceived. Built by 20,000 genes that turn each other on and off in a symphony of great precision, and equipped with a brain of ten trillion synapses, each refined and remodelled by early and continuing experience, you are a thing of exquisite neatness, powered by glucose. Says Darwin, this came about by bottom-up emergence, not top-down dirigisme. Faithful reproduction, occasional random variation and selective survival can be a surprisingly progressive and cumulative force: it can gradually build things of immense complexity. Indeed, it can make something far more complex than a conscious, deliberate designer ever could: with apologies to William Paley and Richard Dawkins, it can make a watchmaker.

A school cannot work without a teacher, a firm without a manager, or an army without a general — just as a body is directed by a brain in its everyday operations. But hubristic human beings tend to exaggerate the degree to which they are in charge of, rather than at the mercy of, organizations.

The dark side of bottom-up Darwinism is that cumulative complexity can come about only through selective death or selective celibacy. Wonderful life may result, but it is born red in tooth and claw. The social Darwinists of the 19th century and the eugenicists of the 20th were of the view that the strong should therefore be encouraged to succeed, the better to keep natural selection going. But this is to misread human society. The human body may have come about through three billion years of natural selection among genes, but civilization and prosperity came from 50,000 years of much more rapid natural selection among ideas. It is easily possible to blunt genetic selection in the name of kindness, while allowing cultural selection to continue: the death of an idea need not be cruel.

There is, however, one more disturbing and topical parallel between biological and cultural evolution. Just as natural selection’s constructive capacity did not prevent mass extinctions, one of which, 251 million years ago, eradicated over 96 per cent of marine species, so the market’s ability to build order cannot prevent crashes. Even sophisticated, entropy-defying complex systems are subject to the weather-like vagaries of mathematical chaos — and there Darwin cannot help. (Matt Ridley – Essay “The Natural Order of Things”)

If we believe that if Britain had only been fortunate enough to have produced 30 percent instead of 2 percent of conscientious objectors to military service, Hitler’s heart would have been softened and he would not have dared attack Poland, we hold a faith which no historic reality justifies. Yet most modern forms of Christian pacifism are heretical, presumably inspired by the Christian gospel, they have really absorbed the Renaissance faith in the goodness of man, rejected the Christian doctrine of original sin as an outmoded bit of pessimism, have reinterpreted the cross so that it is made to stand for the absurd idea that perfect love is guaranteed a simple victory over the world, and have rejected all other profound elements of the Christian gospel. … This form of pacifism is not only heretical when judged by the standards of the total gospel. It is equally heretical when judged by the facts of human existence. There are no historical realities which remotely conform to it. It is important to recognize this lack of conformity to the facts of experience as a criterion of heresy.

((Reinhold Niebuhr - essay “Why the Christian Church Is Not Pacifist”)

The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to act. (F. Scott Fitzgerald)

Realism requires a discipline of thought that may be too austere for a culture that prizes psychological comfort above anything else, and it is a reasonable question whether western liberal societies are capable of the moral effort that is involved in setting aside hopes of world-transformation. (John N. Gray)

It may be hard for an egg to turn into a bird: it would be a jolly sight harder for it to learn to fly while remaining an egg. We are like eggs at present. And you cannot go on indefinitely being just an ordinary, decent egg. We must be hatched or go bad. (C.S. Lewis )

If you would be a real seeker of the truth, it is necessary that at least once in your life you doubt, as far as possible, all things. (Rene Descarte)

We are here and it is now. Further than that, all human knowledge is moonshine. (H.L Mencken)

We assume we can get to the business of health by dealing with illness….but if that’s your model, you will never get to health, because you will never eliminate illness.

(Corey Keyes, associate professor of sociology, Emory University)

The ideal tyranny is that which is ignorantly self-administered by its victims. The most perfect slaves are, therefore, those which blissfully and unawaredly enslave themselves. (Dresden James)

You measure democracy by the freedom it gives its dissidents, not the freedom given to its assimilated conformists. (Abbie Hoffman)

One evening an old Cherokee told his grandson about a battle that goes on inside all people. He said, "My son, the battle is between two 'wolves' inside us all. One is Evil. It is anger, envy, jealousy, sorrow, regret, greed, arrogance, self-pity, guilt, resentment, inferiority, lies, false pride, superiority, and ego. The other is Good. It is joy, peace, love, hope, serenity, humility, kindness, benevolence, empathy, generosity, truth, compassion and faith."
The grandson thought about it for a minute and then asked his grandfather: "Which wolf wins?"

The old Cherokee simply replied, "The one you feed."

Though I may have seniors, others may be elder than I, yet I have proceeded apace in a good university, and gone a great way in a little time, by the furtherance of a vehement fever. (John Donne - after being changed by a near-death experience)

There is a road from the eye to the heart that does not go through the intellect. (G. K. Chesterton)

Nothing in the world is permanent, and we're foolish when we ask anything to last, but surely we're still more foolish not to take delight in it while we have it. If change is of the essence of existence one would have thought it only sensible to make it the premise of our philosophy. (W. Somerset Maugham)

One of the best secrets of life: let your self go. If you can approach the world's complexities, both its glories and its horrors, with an attitude of humble curiosity, acknowledging that however deeply you have seen, you have only just scratched the surface, you will find worlds within worlds, beauties you could not heretofore imagine, and your own mundane preoccupations will shrink to proper size...  for if you can stay centered, and engaged, you will find the hard choices easier, the right words will come to you when you need them, and you will indeed be a better person. (Daniel Dennett)

It is reported that the Buddha once delivered a sermon to his devoted monks that consisted entirely of the Holy One sitting in complete silence, holding up a flower. It is said that only one monk in the crowd got the message, and smiled. There's a lesson in there somewhere. (Mark Morford)

Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. (C.S. Lewis)

Whoever continually strives to achieve a clearer and clearer vision of reality and our place in it - whoever is pulled forward by a passion for such clarity - is, to that extent, leading a spiritual life. (Nathaniel Branden - The Art of Living Consciously)

One definition of consciousness is the awareness of mortality, and so far as anyone knows we are the only species whose individuals are conscious of their own eventual death. This is quite a price to pay for the fantastic capacity to be aware of one's existence and to have the privilege of trying to make sense of the world - and of life - while we are here. (Niles Eldredge - Darwin: Discovering the Tree of Life)

Our cells are constantly eavesdropping on our thoughts and being changed by them. A bout of depression can wreak havoc with the immune system; falling in love can boost it. Despair and helplessness raise the risk of heart attacks and cancer, thereby shortening life. Joy and fulfillment keep us healthy and extend life. This means that the line between biology and psychology can't really be drawn with any certainty. A remembered stress, which is only a wisp of thought, releases the same flood of destructive hormones as the stress itself.

(Deepak Chopra)

Remember, your thoughts are sent to the body’s cells via neuro-chemicals and nerve transmission. If you are harsh on yourself, it’s your cells that are the ones that physically feel the brunt of your anger. Cell’s are generally very loyal, to the extent that if you so wish it, they will actually commit suicide (apoptosis in the cellular world). Positive and negative thoughts shape your biology, for your mind is actually “governing” 50 trillion cells….Cells are in fact, “miniature” people, for cells and humans have all the same systems (e.g., digestive, respiratory, reproductive, nervous and immune systems). Each cell, like every human, has receptors built into its skin so it can become aware of (perceive) the environment. Cells have receptor molecules built into their skin (cell membrane) that act in the same manner as receptors built into our skin—our eyes, ears, nose, taste and touch receptors.
Therefore cells live in their “world” in much the same manner as we live in our “world.” Cells have perceptions of their environment and are very aware as to what is going on in their massive, trillion-celled community. However, they receive broadcasts from the “government,” the mind, about the conditions of the world and the needs and demands upon the cellular community. Therefore if we have fears about life, then every one of our cells is reading our fear experience via the chemistry and electromagnetic vibrations sent throughout the body. When we are happy our cells are happy. Our beliefs are broadcast to, and shared with, all of our cellular citizens. In their own biochemistry, cells have chemical/vibrational experiences that we would sense as rage, anger, love, and bliss. Your cells experience the same life you experience! (Bruce Lipton)

The only function of economic forecasting is to make astrology look respectable. (John Kenneth Galbraith)

[In writing “A Calendar of Wisdom”, Leo Tolstoy reflected his belief in a higher ideal. And while he swore he couldn’t define it or explain it, it cured his existential despair, gave him direction and imbued his life with meaning.] Some excerpts:

· There are only two ways to live: Either without thinking of death… or with the thought that you approach death with every hour of your life.

· The more upset you are with other people and circumstances, and the more satisfied you are with yourself, the further you are from wisdom.  

· Don’t compare yourself with others. Compare yourself only with perfection. 

· It is not the place we occupy that is important, but the direction in which we move. 

· When you want to escape from rage, do not walk, do not move, do not speak. Your rage cannot be justified by anything. The reason for your rage is always inside you. 

· Speak only when your words are better than silence. For every time you regret that you did not say something, you will regret a hundred times that you did not keep your silence.  

· There are two ways not to suffer from poverty. The first is to acquire more wealth. The second is to limit your requirements. The first is not always in our power. The second is. 

· You do not have the right to be unhappy with your life. If you are not satisfied, see this as a reason to be unsatisfied with yourself. 

· The more strictly and mercilessly you judge yourself, the more just and kind you will be in the judgment of others. 

· Strive for goodness without any expectations for rapid or noticeable success. For the further you progress, the higher your ideal of perfection will rise. Yet it is the process itself, this striving, that justifies our lives.

· Nobody knows where the human race is going. The highest wisdom, then, is to know where you are going.

From Mohandas Gandhi:

· In matters of conscience, the law of the majority has no place.

· All of your scholarship, all your study of Shakespeare and Wordsworth would be in vain if at the same time you did not build your character and attain mastery over your thoughts and your actions.

· A man is but the product of his thoughts. What he thinks he becomes.

· The only tyrant I accept in this world is the ’still small voice’ within.

· Strength does not come from physical capacity. It comes from an indomitable will.

· I do not want to foresee the future. I am concerned with taking care of the present.

· What a great thing it would be if we in our busy lives, could retire into ourselves each day, for at least a couple of hours, and prepare our minds to listen to the voice of the great silence.

· Experience has taught me that silence is a part of the spiritual discipline of a votary of truth. Proneness to exaggerate, to suppress or modify truth, wittingly or unwittingly, is a natural weakness of man, and silence is necessary to surmount it. A man of few words will rarely be thoughtless in his speech. He will measure every word.

· True happiness is impossible without true health and true health is impossible without rigid control of the palate. All the other senses will automatically come under our control when the palate has been brought under control. And he who has conquered his senses has really conquered the whole world.

A wise man's meditation is not of death but of life. (Spinoza's dictum)

In nature cessation of function, followed by transformation of the physical elements, is part of life's continuity. It is a commonplace, but an important one, that death and decay are the servants of life. Fallen leaves change into humus on which next year's seedlings feed: so the death and transformation of autumn is essential to spring. Death is therefore a condition of life and constitutes half its rhythm.

Human death does, however, differ crucially from the death of other things. Most humans have self-reflexive consciousness, and most self-reflexively conscious beings regard death as a loss of supreme possessions: awareness and agency. It is not that most humans, if they thought about it, would wish to live forever, at least in this world; Shaw's Methuselah suggests that endless existence would be intolerable. Rather, it is that death comes too soon for most of us, before our interest in the world, and in those we care about, is exhausted.

… But it remains true that we never quite get over the sorrow caused by losing those most loved; we only learn to live with it, and to live despite it; which – and there is no paradox here – makes living a richer thing. That, perhaps, is the most valuable legacy sorrow leaves. (A. C. Grayling – ‘The Last Word on Death’)

While the brain has two halves, no matter how lateralized the brain can get, the two sides still work together. The pop psychology notion of a left brain and a right brain doesn’t capture their intimate working relationship. The left hemisphere specializes in picking out the sounds that form words and working out the syntax of the words, for example, but it does not have a monopoly on language processing. The right hemisphere is actually more sensitive to the emotional features of language, tuning in to the slow rhythms of speech that carry intonation and stress. (Carl Zimmer)

The person who finds his homeland sweet is still a tender beginner; he to whom every soil is as his native one is already strong; but he is perfect to whom the entire world is as a foreign place. The tender soul has fixed his love on one spot in the world; the strong person has extended his love to all places; the perfect man extinguished his. (Hugo St. Victor, 12^th Century)

Positive emotions make us more vulnerable than negative ones. One reason is that they’re future-oriented. Fear and sadness have immediate payoffs—protecting us from attack or attracting resources at times of distress. Gratitude and joy, over time, will yield better health and deeper connections – but in the short term actually put us at risk. That’s because, while negative emotions tend to be insulating, positive emotions expose us to the common elements of rejection and heartbreak.

(Joshua Wolf Shenk – “What makes us Happy” – Atlantic Mag 6-09 issue)

If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart? (Alexsandr Solzhenitsyn)

You can only have power over people so long as you don't take everything away from them. But when you've robbed a man of everything he's no longer in your power – he's free again. (Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn)

Those who are in favour of the death penalty have more affinity with assassins than those who are not. (Remy de Gourmont)

Even if you’re on the right track, you’ll get run over if you just sit there. (Will Rogers)

Belief in a sense of personal control appears to have a direct and positive impact on health, just as the experience of lack or loss of control has an adverse effect on health. What is clearly implicated in these studies is the importance of BELIEFS concerning control, not simply whether control is in fact present or absent in these stressful situations. Studies in which people have been led to believe that they have control over stressful events (even when they, in fact, have no control) demonstrate that the belief in control produces dramatic effects on neuroendocrine functioning. Compared with those who believe they are undergoing the same events with no control, in people undergoing stressful events that they perceive as uncontrollable, neuroendocrine functioning is dramatically altered in ways that can have a direct impact on immune functioning. It is no wonder, then, that controllable and uncontrollable stressful events have such different effects on health. Moreover, it is the belief or illusion of control, and not simply the existence of control, that is implicated in these relationships.

(Prof S.E. Taylor "Positive Illusions: Creative Self-Deception And The Healthy Mind")

[Belief ITSELF is therefore an evolutionary adaptation which contributes, positively or negatively, to fitness, via its impact on the neuroendocrine and immune systems. Religion as we know it bears little external similarity to the beliefs and practices of our Hunter/Gatherer ancestors, but still shares the underlying character of belief that in pleasing or displeasing the supernatural powers that be, we are participating, positively or negatively, in how the Universe will, in turn, treat us. ….Science frees us from this irrational method of belief, but the tendency towards it is still strong within, because it is an evolved adaptation in our genes, which then hardwire our brains, and in conjunction with our environment, manifest such irrational behaviors as belief in religion and ritual, as a means of maintaining the illusion of control, or loss thereof.]

We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born. The potential people who could have been here in my place but who will in fact never see the light of day outnumber the sand grains of Sahara. Certainly those unborn ghosts include greater poets than Keats, scientists greater than Newton. We know this because the set of possible people allowed by our DNA so massively outnumbers the set of actual people. In the teeth of these stupefying odds it is you and I, in our ordinariness, that are here… (Richard Dawkins)

Community is not about perfect people. It is about people who are bonded to each other, each of whom is a mixture of good and bad, darkness and light, love and hate. (Jean Vanier)

Thou shalt not be a victim. Thou shalt not be a perpetrator. Above all, thou shalt not be a bystander.

Quote displayed at the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C.)

If I am practicing spiritual poverty, which says that I own nothing, then the problems aren't mine and neither are the energy and compassion pouring through my heart to try to solve them. I am just a link in the process. If I don’t take anything personally, then I can do great work without flagging. The Dalai Lama once said, ‘Try with all your might -- to work very, very hard -- to make the world a better place, and if all your efforts are to no avail . . . no hard feelings!’ (Bo Lozoff - *Utne Reader*)

Never be discouraged from being an activist because people tell you that you will not succeed. You have already succeeded if you’re out there representing truth or justice or compassion or fairness or love. (Doris Haddock (Granny D), who walked across America at the age of 89, to highlight the need for campaign finance reform)

What is compassion? It is not simply a sense of sympathy or caring for the person suffering, not simply a warmth of heart toward the person before you, or a sharp clarity of recognition of their needs and pain; it is also a sustained and practical determination to do whatever is possible and necessary to help alleviate their suffering. (Sogyal Rinpoche)

Yesterday is already a dream,

And tomorrow but a vision;

But TODAY well lived

Makes every yesterday a dream of happiness

And every tomorrow a vision of hope.

(Sanskrit)

Rapport with the marvelously purposeless world of nature gives us new eyes for ourselves – eyes in which our very self-importance is not condemned, but seen as something quite other than what it imagines itself to be. In this light, all the weirdly abstract and pompous pursuits of men are suddenly transformed into natural marvels of the same order as the immense beaks of the toucans and hornbills, the fabulous tails of the birds of paradise, the towering necks of the giraffes, and the vividly polychromed posteriors of the baboons… Seen thus, the self-importance of man dissolves in laughter. (Alan Watt)

I don't make a nature/nurture division at all. I mean, part of what Ernst Mayr and evolutionary biologists talked about is that these are open-ended systems of genetics. It gives you a good best guess about what the life is going to be like, but these influences come from 10,000, 50,000, 100,000 years ago. There's no way for them to "know" what the role is going to be.

Kids can be taken at birth, moved to any place in the world, learn that language and culture just like they were born there. We're totally transportable which means we're totally open to be adapted to wherever we land no matter the people, the norms, the language, or culture. We just absorb it.

A lot of recent research on unconscious effects is showing that it's culture, early learning and culture, and not genetics that that is responsible for effects in adults. It's not that culture is an argument for free will or for some kind of agency separate from the genetic influences.

Just like young birds in the South Pacific that go on night flights with their mama and papa birds. They navigate by the stars, but there's no way they have in their head already a map of the night sky, because the night sky changes every 400 or 500 years as we move through the galaxy. They can't innately have a map to navigate. They have to go out and have experience, but once they get the experience and check out what is the night sky, they have it. Same with people.

My daughter can speak English fairly well for her age. But she couldn't do it at all four months ago. Then, all of a sudden, she did. I didn't have anything to do with it. I mean, I'm sure I'm helping or the family is helping, but she just soaked it up suddenly as if she was one of those birds soaking up the night sky. And that is what evolutionary biologists argued for a long time: the fine-tuning of the organism to its environment (where ever it happens to land in evolutionary time) is done through this quick absorption of the rules and the state of the earth — when you're born and who you're born to and with and all this kind of stuff. (John A. Bargh)

There has never been, and never will be, a radically new judgment of value in the history of the world.  What purport to be new systems or (as they now call them) 'ideologies,'  all consist of fragments from the Tao itself, arbitrarily wrenched from their context in the whole, and then swollen to madness, yet still owing to the Tao and to it alone such validity as they possess. (C.S. Lewis - The Abolition of Man)

Illusions commend themselves to us because they save us pain and allow us to enjoy pleasure instead. We must therefore accept it without complaint when they sometimes collide with a bit of reality against which they are dashed to pieces. (Sigmund Freud)

The size of the universe is very impressive, with us on a tiny particle whirling around the sun, among a hundred thousand million suns in this galaxy, itself among a billion galaxies… There are atoms of which all appears to be constructed, following immutable laws. Nothing can escape it; the stars are made of the same stuff, and the animals are made of the same stuff, but in such complexity as to mysteriously appear alive - like man himself… To see life as part of the universal mystery of greatest depth, is to sense an experience which is rarely described. It usually ends in laughter, delight in the futility of trying to understand. These scientific views end in awe and mystery, lost at the edge in uncertainty… (Richard Feyman - The Pleasure of Finding Things Out)

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

It is clear to anyone who looks carefully at any crowd that we are wasting our bodies exactly as we are wasting our land….Our bodies are fat, weak, joyless, sickly, ugly, the virtual prey of the manufacturers of medicine and cosmetics. Our bodies have become marginal; they are growing useless like our ‘marginal land’ because we have less and less use for them. After the games and idle flourishes of modern youth, we use them only as shipping cartons to transport our brains and our few employable muscles back and forth to work.

The people will eat what the corporations decide for them to eat. They will be detached and remote from the sources of their life, joined to them only by corporate tolerance. They will have become consumers purely –consumptive machines – which is to say, the slaves of producers. What model that farms very powerfully suggest, then, is that the concept of total control may be impossible to confine within the boundaries of the specialist enterprise – that it is impossible to mechanize production without mechanizing consumption, impossible to make machines of soil, plants, and animals without making machines also of people.

… The commercial] revolution did not stop with the subjugation of the Indians, but went on to impose substantially the same catastrophe upon the small farms and the farm communities, upon the shops of small local tradesmen of all sorts, upon the workshops of independent craftsmen, and upon the households of citizens. It is a revolution that is still going on. The economy is still substantially that of the fur trade, still based on the same general kinds of commercial items: technology, weapons, ornaments, novelties, and drugs. The one great difference is that by now the revolution has deprived the mass of consumers of any independent access to the staples of life: clothing, shelter, food, even water. Air remains the only necessity that the average user can still get for himself, and the revolution has imposed a heavy tax on that by way of pollution. Commercial conquest is far more thorough and final than military defeat.

… The inevitable result of such an economy is that no farm or any other usable property can safely be regarded by anyone as a home, no home is ultimately worthy of our loyalty, nothing is ultimately worth doing, and no place or task or person is worth a lifetime’s devotion. ‘Waste,’ in such an economy, must eventually include several categories of humans – the unborn, the old, ‘disinvested’ farmers, the unemployed, the ‘unemployable.’ Indeed, once our homeland, our source, is regarded as a resource, we are all sliding downward toward the ash heap or the dump. (Wendell Berry - “The Unsettling of America.”)

A truth that’s told with bad intent,
Beats all the lies you can invent.

(William Blake “Auguries of Innocence”)

After sleeping through a hundred million centuries we have finally opened our eyes on a sumptuous planet, sparkling with color, bountiful with life.  Within decades we must close our eyes again.  Isn’t it a noble, an enlightened way of spending our brief time in the sun, to work at understanding the universe and how we have come to wake up in it?… Who, with such a thought, would not spring from bed, eager to resume discovering the world and rejoicing to be a part of it? (Richard Dawkins)

Quotations from Charles Hoy Fort (August 6, 1874 – May 3, 1932)

· Now there are so many scientists who believe in dowsing, that the suspicion comes to me that it may be only a myth after all.

· One measures a circle, beginning anywhere.

· My own notion is that it is very unsportsmanlike to ever mention fraud. Accept anything. Then explain it your way.

· My liveliest interest is not so much in things, as in relations of things. I have spent much time thinking about the alleged pseudo-relations that are called coincidences. What if some of them should not be coincidence?

· If any spiritualistic medium can do stunts, there is no more need for special conditions than there is for a chemist to turn down lights, start operations with a hymn, and ask whether there's any chemical present that has affinity with something named Hydrogen.

· The Earth is a farm. We are someone else's property.

· If there is a universal mind, must it be sane?

· Do you want power over something? Be more nearly real than it.

· Everything is just the proper hat to wear for a while.

· There will be data.

Those who dwell, as scientists or laymen, among the beauties and mysteries of the earth are never alone or weary of life… There is symbolic as well as actual beauty in the migration of the birds, the ebb and flow of the tides, the folded bud ready for the spring. There is something infinitely healing in the repeated refrains of nature - the assurance that dawn comes after night, and spring after the winter. (Rachel Carson - The Sense of Wonder)

The educated elites in the Arab world are now as alienated as the educated elites in the United States. To speak with a vocabulary that the illiterate or semiliterate do not immediately grasp is to be ostracized, distrusted and often ridiculed. It is to impart knowledge, which fosters doubt. And doubt in calcified societies, which prefer to speak in the absolute metaphors of war and science, is a form of heresy. It was not accidental that the founding biblical myth saw the deliverer of knowledge as evil and the loss of innocence as a catastrophe. “This probably had less to do with religion than with the standard desire of those in authority to control those who are not,” John Ralston Saul wrote. “And control of the Western species of the human race seems to turn upon language.” (Chris Hedges - “The War on Language”)

It’s true that hard work never killed anybody, but I figure why take the chance? (Ronald Reagan)

The lifestyle of one who follows the Tao must be thought of as a form of intelligence. That is, knowing the patterns, structures, and trends of human and natural affairs so well that one uses the least amount of energy dealing with them. (Alan Watts)

It is no accident that we see green almost wherever we look. It is no accident that we find ourselves perched on one tiny twig in the midst of a blossoming and flourishing tree of life; no accident that we are surrounded by millions of other species, eating, growing, rotting, swimming, walking, flying, burrowing, stalking, chasing, fleeing, outpacing, outwitting. Without green plants to outnumber us at least ten to one there would be no energy to power us. Without the ever-escalating arms races between predators and prey, parasites and hosts, without Darwin's 'war of nature', without his 'famine and death' there would be no nervous systems capable of seeing anything at all, let alone of appreciating and understanding it. We are surrounded by endless forms, most beautiful and most wonderful, and it is no accident, but the direct consequence of evolution by non-random natural selection — the only game in town, the greatest show on Earth. (Richard Dawkins – The Greatest Show on Earth)

Famine seems to be the last, the most dreadful resource of nature. The power of population is so superior to the power in the earth to produce subsistence for man, that premature death must in some shape or other visit the human race. The vices of mankind are active and able ministers of depopulation. They are the precursors in the great army of destruction, and often finish the dreadful work themselves. But should they fail in this war of extermination, sickly seasons, epidemics, pestilence, and plague advance in terrific array, and sweep off their thousands and ten-thousands. Should success be still incomplete, gigantic inevitable famine stalks in the rear, and with one mighty blow, levels the population with the food of the world. (Thomas Malthus)

The Serenity Prayer:

Grant me the serenity to accept the things I can’t change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.

The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function. (F. Scott Fitzgerald)

The Darwinian controversy continues, but some things should be clear. If Darwin gives comfort and even delight to atheists who claim him as a patron, they are mistaken in their choice of hero. He never even divested himself entirely of a certain qualified belief in a Master Designer, though he rejected the sweetest blandishments of natural theology. For all his brilliance, he was prone to confusion about the most serious matters, including the far-reaching ramifications of his own theory. It was a robust confusion, however, the conflict of an austere intellect, a sense of the marvelous, and a lacerated heart. Compassion guided him toward his theory, and an icy mind confirmed its truth. That truth remains dubious for many, whether simple religious believers trying to live righteous lives or scientists and philosophers viewing life through the lens of intelligent design. To try to settle the questions they raise is far beyond my powers, although the simple and righteous who maintain the literal truth of Genesis do not figure in a serious discussion. But in any case the wonder of Darwin endures, that of a man who searched the world’s pain and tried to comprehend it, who like a great novelist truly bore in his mind and heart as much earthly life as they could hold. There is rich matter for all who seek it in his life and works.

(Algis Valiunas - Darwin’s World of Pain and Wonder)

I have seen slower people than I am - and more deliberate… and even quieter, more listless and lazier people than I am. But they were dead. (Mark Twain)

America is today the leader of a world-wide anti-revolutionary movement in the defense of vested interests. She now stands for what Rome stood for. Rome consistently supported the rich against the poor in all foreign communities that fell under her sway; and, since the poor, so far, have always and everywhere been far more numerous than the rich, Rome's policy made for inequality, for injustice, and for the least happiness of the greatest number. (Arnold Toynbee)

To what do I attribute my success in life? Economy of effort. Never stand up when you can sit down, and never sit down when you can lie down. (Winston Churchill)

The Five Remembrances of the Buddha

1. I am of the nature to grow old. There is no way to escape growing old.

2. I am of the nature to have ill health. There is no way to escape having ill health.

3. I am of the nature to die. There is no way to escape death.

4. All that is dear to me and everyone I love are of the nature to change. There is no way to escape being separated from them.

5. My actions are my only true belongings. I cannot escape the consequences of my actions. My actions are the ground on which I stand.

If religion be a function by which either God's cause or man's cause is to be really advanced, then he who lives the life of it, however narrowly, is a better servant than he who merely knows about it, however much.  Knowledge about life is one thing: effective occupation of a place in life with its dynamic currents passing through your being is another. (William James)

The opposite of a correct statement is a false statement. But the opposite of a profound truth may be another profound truth. (Niels Bohr)

The North American system only wants to consider the positive aspects of reality. Men and women are subjected from childhood to an inexorable process of adaptation; certain principles, contained in brief formulas are endlessly repeated by the Press, the radio, the churches, and the schools, and by those kindly, sinister beings, the North American mothers and wives. A person imprisoned by these schemes is like a plant in a flowerpot too small for it: he cannot grow or mature. (Octavio Paz)

On the origins of the specious

Can musicians feel the music,
Though they know the notes by name?

Can athletes play a death match
though they know it's just a game?

Could Vargas feel the heat and lust
From a pinup he had painted?

When materialists know it's glandular
Are their love affairs more tainted?

When you know it's lights on silver screen
Do the movies seem more pallid?

If you see through God to his creator
Does your creed become less valid?

No, apparently we are able to both see through and believe
What an awesome gift from God is this, our power to self-deceive. (Jeremy Sherman)

Do not go gently into that good night. Rage, rage against the dying of the light. (Dylan Thomas)

As democracy is perfected, the office of President represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart’s desire at last and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron. (H. L. Mencken)

Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge. (Charles Darwin)

The trouble with the world is that the stupid are cocksure and the intelligent are full of doubt. ( Bertrand Russell)

Science is not only compatible with spirituality; it is a profound source of spirituality. When we recognize our place in an immensity of light-years and in the passage of ages, when we grasp the intricacy, beauty, and subtlety of life, then that soaring feeling, that sense of elation and humility combined, is surely spiritual. (Carl Sagan - The Demon-Haunted World )

Hope has two beautiful daughters. Their names are anger and courage; anger at the way things are, and courage to see that they do not remain the way they are. (Augustine of Hippo)

If you lose hope, somehow you lose the vitality that keeps life moving, you lose that courage to be, that quality that helps you go on in spite of it all. And so today I still have a dream. (Martin Luther King, Jr.)

Our greatest pretenses are built up not to hide the evil and ugly in us, but our emptiness.  The hardest thing to hide is something that is not there.   (Eric Hoffer)

One of the only coherent philosophical positions is revolt. It is a constant confrontation between man and his obscurity. It is not aspiration, for it is devoid of hope. That revolt is the certainty of a crushing fate, without the resignation that ought to accompany it….. A living man can be enslaved and reduced to the historic condition of an object,… But if he dies in refusing to be enslaved, he reaffirms the existence of another kind of human nature which refuses to be classified as an object. (Albert Camus)

We human beings have been shaped by millions of years of genetic breakage and mutation, all of which is still on-going. We are compounds of chaos, ignorance and error. Our psyches are frail and variegated things, isolated, with each individual consciousness formed from a unique and ever-shifting coalescence of billions of brain cells firing (and misfiring) in infinite, unrepeatable combinations. Beneath this electrical superstructure lie mechanical rhythms and erratic surges of instinct and impulse, dark, hormonal tides and drives that never reach the plane of awareness….. In the infancy of our species we began to cling -- fiercely, in fear and desire -- to patterns of behavior, emotion and thought that seemed to bring some sort of order, some containment of the whirlwind within us, and some protection from the dangers, known and unknown, that lurked outside. We began to do "whatever it takes" to preserve these patterns from the ever-present threat of their dissolution in the whirlwind, to impose them, by violence if necessary, on the recalcitrant material of reality -- including the always-unknowable, impenetrable reality of the Other, those mysterious combinations outside our isolated consciousness…. The patterns become ingrained, they sink into the substrate where they operate unquestioned and unseen, they become "natural," the way that things must be. Domination and obedience are among the strongest, and most enduring, of these patterns, taking multitudinous forms -- a "local habitation and a name" -- in the ever-changing circumstances of existence. War is their expression writ large. It is in us, it comes from us. (Chris Floyd)

Diet, injections and injunctions will combine, from a very early age, to produce the sort of character and the sort of beliefs that the authorities consider desirable, and any serious criticism of the powers that be will become psychologically impossible. Even if all are miserable, all will believe themselves happy, because the government will tell them that they are so.

(Bertrand Russell - The Impact of Science on Society)

Do not let your fire go out, spark by irreplaceable spark, in the hopeless swamps of the approximate, the not-quite, the not-yet, the not-at-all. Do not let the hero in your soul perish, in lonely frustration for the life you deserved, but have never been able to reach. Check your road and the nature of your battle. The world you desired can be won. It exists, it is real, it is possible, it is yours. (Ayn Rand)

Hope is like a road in the country; there was never a road, but when many people walk on it, the road comes into existence. (Lin Yutang)

Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able, then He is not Omnipotent. Is he able but not willing, then he is malevolent. Is God both able and willing, then whence cometh evil. If God is neither willing nor able, then why call Him God ….. Why should I fear death? If I AM, then death is not. If death is, then I AM NOT. Why should I fear that which cannot exist when I do? ….. Fear is the mother of all gods. Nature does all things spontaneously by herself without their meddling. (Epicurus – 341-271 BC)

For a long time man lay oppressed with slavish fear.

Religions tyranny did domineer.

At length the mighty one of Greece began to assert the liberty of man. (Lucretius 99-55 BCE “Ode to Epicurus”)

A tyrant must put on the appearance of uncommon devotion to religion; subjects are less apprehensive of illegal treatment from a ruler whom they consider god-fearing and pious. On the other hand they less easily move against him if they consider that he has the gods on his side. (Aristotle 348-322 BCE)

In this subject of the nature of the gods, the first question is ‘Do the gods exist, or do they not?’ It is difficult, people say, to deny that they exist. I would agree – if we were arguing the matter in a public assembly; but in a private discussion of this kind, it is perfectly easy to do so. (Cicero 108-43 BCE)

Religion is regarded by the common people as true; by the wise as false; and by the rulers as useful. (Seneca 4-65 CE)

There is in every village a torch: The Schoolteacher. And an extinguisher: The Priest. (Victor Hugo)

The Universe: the whole mass of all things that are, is corporeal – that is to say BODY – and have the dimensions of magnitude length, breadth, and depth. Every part of the Universe is Body, and that which is not body – is no part of the Universe. And because the Universe is ALL, that which is no part of it is nothing – and consequently, NOWHERE. (Thomas Hobbs 1588-1679)

Civilization will not attain perfection until the last stone from the last church, falls on the last priest. (Emile Zola)

Generally speaking, errors in religion are dangerous; those in philosophy are only ridiculous. …. God’s power is infinite: whatever He wills is executed. But neither man nor any other animal is happy, therefore He does not will their happiness. Epicurus’ old questions are yet unanswered: Is He both willing and able to prevent evil. Then whence comes evil? ….. No one, I am confident, will mistake my intentions. No one has a deeper sense of religion, or pays more profound admiration to the Supreme Being. (David Hume 1711-1776)

So far as I can remember, there’s not one word in the gospels in praise of intelligence. (Bertrand Russell)

If we go back to the beginning, we find that ignorance and fear created the gods; that fancy, enthusiasm or deceit adorned them; that weakness worships them; that credulity preserves them; and that custom, respect and tyranny support them – in order to make the blindness of men serve their own interests. If the ignorance of nature gave birth to gods, the knowledge of nature is calculated to destroy them. …. It is only by dispelling the clouds and phantoms of religion that we shall discover truth, reason and morality. (Baron D’Holbach 1723-1789)

Of all the tyrannies that afflict mankind, tyranny in religion is the worst. Every other species of tyranny is limited to the world we live in, but this attempts to stride beyond the grave, and seeks to pursue us into eternity. …. All churches, whether Christian, Jewish or Muslim, appear to be no more than human inventions set up to terrify and enslave mankind, and to monopolize power and profit. It is from the Bible that man has learned cruelty, rapine and murder. For the belief in a cruel God makes a cruel man. And a Bible is a history of wickedness that has served to corrupt mankind. …. The most detestable wickedness, the most horrible cruelties, and the greatest miseries that have afflicted the human race – have had their origin in this thing called religion. (Thomas Paine 1737-1809)

Thomas Paine needs no monument made of hands; he has erected a monument in the hearts of all lovers of liberty. (U.S. President Andrew Jackson 1829-1837)

Religion is excellent stuff for keeping the people quiet. (Napoleon Bonaparte)

If He is infinitely good, what reason should we have to fear Him? If He is infinitely wise, why should we have doubts about our future? If He knows all, why warn Him of our needs and fatigue Him with our prayers? If He is everywhere, why erect temples to Him? (Percy Bysshe Shelley 1792-1822 “The Necessity of Atheism”)

All thinking men are atheists. (Ernest Hemingway)

I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent and omnipotent God would have created a parasite with the express purpose of feeding within the living bodies of caterpillars, or that a cat would have been designed to have played with mice. (Charles Darwin 1809-1882)

The fact that a believer is happier than a skeptic is no more to the point than a drunken man is happier than a sober one. (George Bernard Shaw)

The rest of our enquiry is made easier because this God Creator is openly called “Father”. The psychoanalysis of individual human beings teaches us that the God of each of them is nothing other than an exalted father. … Religious teachings are neurotic relics, and the time has probably come for replacing them with the results of the rational operation of the intellect

(Sigmund Freud)

Religious distress is at the same time the expression of real distress. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, just as it is the spirit of a spiritless situation. It IS the opium of the people. The demand to give up the illusion is the demand to give up the condition that needs illusions. (Karl Marx)

I do not believe in any religion. I will have nothing to do with immortality. We are miserable enough in this life without speculating upon another. (Lord Byron)

God is an essence we know nothing about. Until this awful blasphemy is gotten rid of, there will never be any liberal science in the world. (U.S. Pres John Adams – 1797-1801)

The clergy believe that any power confided in me will be exerted in opposition to their schemes….AND THEY BELIEVE RIGHTLY!

(U.S Pres Thomas Jefferson –1801-1809)

I have seldom met an intelligent person whose views were not narrowed and distorted by religion. (U.S. Pres James Buchanan – 1857-1861)

My earlier views on the unsoundness of the Christian scheme of salvation have become clearer – and stronger – with advancing years (Abraham Lincoln – 1861-1865)

I preach there are all kinds of truth, your truth and somebody else's, but behind all of them, there's only one truth and that is that there is no truth... No truth behind all truths is what I and this church preach! Where you come from is gone, where you thought you were going to never was there, and where you are is no good unless you can get away from it. Where is there a place for you to be? No place... In yourself right now is all the place you've got. (Flannery O'Connor)

Religion is one possible explanation, not for natural phenomena, but for highly complex experiences that the human brain generates. It does so in such a way that a whole range of further explanations (for natural events, death and so forth) becomes available. Moreover, religion makes possible powerful social and political hierarchies not based on sex or brute strength. The persistence of the neurology of the brain through time ensures that the "origin" of religion is always with us.

(David Lewis-Williams - Conceiving God: the Cognitive Origin and Evolution of Religion)

It is a curious fact that people are never so trivial as when they take themselves seriously. (Oscar Wilde)

A sense of humor keen enough to show a man his own absurdities, as well as those of other people, will keep him from the commission of all sins, or nearly all, save those that are worth committing. (Samuel Butler)

Madness is affected with a high degree of intellectual independence; at odds with the majority; in short, unusual. It is noteworthy that persons are pronounced mad by officials destitute of evidence that they themselves are sane. (Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914)

The crown of literature is poetry.  It is its end and aim. It is the sublimest activity of the human mind. It is the achievement of beauty and delicacy. The writer of prose can only step aside when the poet passes. (W. Somerset Maugham)

Paradoxically, I have found peace because I have always been dissatisfied. My moments of depression and despair turn out to be renewals, new beginnings. If I were to settle down and be satisfied with the surface of life, with its divisions and its clichés, it would be time to call in the undertaker. This dissatisfaction which sometimes used to worry me has helped me to move freely and even gaily with the stream of life. (Thomas Merton)

We're born alone, we live alone, we die alone. Only through our love and friendship can we create the illusion for the moment that we're not alone. (Orson Welles)

Like a saint's vision of beatitude.

Like the veil of things as they seem drawn back by an unseen hand.

For a second you see – and seeing the secret, are the secret.

For a second there is meaning!

Then the hand lets the veil fall and you are alone,

lost in the fog again, and you stumble on toward nowhere, for no good reason!

(Eugene O'Neill - Long Day's Journey into Night)

Mind is the forerunner of all actions.
All deeds are led by mind, created by mind.
If one speaks or acts with a corrupt mind,
suffering follows as the wheel follows the hoof of an ox pulling a cart.

Mind is the forerunner of all actions.
All deeds are led by mind, created by mind.
If one speaks or acts with a serene mind,
happiness follows, As surely as one’s shadow.

(Prologue - The Dhammapada – 300 BCE)

He who cherishes a beautiful vision, a lofty ideal in his heart, will one day realize it. Columbus cherished a vision of another world, and he discovered it. Copernicus fostered the vision of a multiplicity of worlds and a wider universe, and he revealed it; Buddha beheld the vision of a spiritual world of stainless beauty and perfect peace, and he entered it.

(James Allen - As a Man Thinketh)

Cherish your visions; cherish your ideals; cherish the music that stirs in your heart, the beauty that forms in your mind, the loveliness that drapes your purest thoughts, for out of them will grow all delightful conditions, all heavenly environment; of these, if you but remain true to them, your world will at last be built. (ibid)

Men are anxious to improve their circumstances, but are unwilling to improve themselves; they therefore remain bound. (ibid)

Let a man radically alter his thoughts, and he will be astonished at the rapid transformation it will effect in the material conditions of his life. Men imagine that thought can be kept secret, but it cannot; it rapidly crystallizes into habit, and habit solidifies into circumstance.   (ibid)

All that a man achieves and all that he fails to achieve is the direct result of his own thoughts … a man can only rise, conquer and achieve by lifting his thoughts. He can only remain weak, abject and miserable by refusing to lift up his thoughts.  (ibid)

As the plant springs from, and could not be without, the seed, so every act of man springs from the hidden seeds of thought, and could not have appeared without them. (ibid)

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.  (ibid)

Whatever your present environment may be, you will fall, remain or rise with your thoughts, your Vision, your Ideal. You will become as small as your controlling desire; as great as your dominant aspiration. (ibid)

Another source of equanimity and joy of solitude comes with an appreciation of nature. Even the most crowded cities evidence other forms of life. Animals and birds, as well as tiny, struggling plants, provide a rich metaphor that can sustain a thoughtful loner. Needless to say, the heart soars in wildness and in wilderness, and the great cosmos is both comfort and inspiration. Like a close and intimate friend, it speaks to you.   (Robert Genn)

Do not lose your desire to walk; every day, I walk myself into a state of well-being and walk away from every illness; I have walked myself into my best thoughts, and I know of no thought so burdensome that one cannot walk away from it. (Soren Kierkegaard in a letter to his niece Jette)

I’ll zone out in front of the TV for five or six hours, and then I feel depressed and empty. And I wonder why. Whereas if I eat candy for five or six hours, and then I feel sick, I know why … One of the reasons that I feel empty after watching a lot of TV is that it gives the illusion of relationships with people. It’s a way to have people in the room talking and being entertaining, but it doesn’t require anything of me. I receive entertainment and stimulation without having to give anything back but the most tangential kind of attention. And that is very seductive. (David Foster Wallace – Infinite Jest)

TV is creating not the dystopia of George Orwell’s 1984 but rather of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. Spiritual devastation is more likely to come from an enemy with a smiling face than from one whose countenance exudes suspicion and hate. In the Huxleyan prophecy, Big Brother does not watch us, by his choice. We watch him, by ours. There is no need for wardens or gates or Ministries of Truth. When a population becomes distracted by trivia, when cultural life is redefined as a perpetual round of entertainments, when serious public conversation becomes a form of baby-talk, when, in short, a people become an audience and their public business a vaudeville act, then a nation finds itself at risk.

(Neil Postman - Amusing Ourselves to Death)

The only thing we have to fear is fear itself—nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance. (President Franklin Delano Roosevelt)

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

A private businessman, by directing that industry in such a manner as its produce may be of the greatest value; he intends only his own gain, and he is in this, as in many other cases, led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention. Nor is it always the worse for the society that it was no part of it. By pursuing his own interest he frequently promotes that of the society more effectually than when he really intends to promote it. I have never known much good done by those who affected to trade for the public good. It is an affectation, indeed, not very common among merchants, and very few words need be employed in dissuading them from it. (Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations)

He who joyfully marches to music in rank and file has already earned my contempt. He has been given a large brain by mistake, since for him the spinal cord would suffice. (Albert Einstein)

I can calculate the movement of the stars, but not the madness of men. (Sir Isaac Newton, after losing a fortune on the South Seas bubble)

What we can or cannot do, what we consider possible or impossible, is rarely a function of our true capability. It is more likely a function of our beliefs about who we are. (Tony Robbins)

Fiat justitia ruat caelum. Let justice be done, though the heaven's fall.

Most people prefer to believe their leaders are just and fair even in the face of evidence to the contrary, because most people do not want to admit they do not have the courage to do anything about it.  Most propaganda is not designed to fool the critical thinker, but only to give moral cowards an excuse not to think at all. (Michael Rivero)

Remember democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide. (John Adams, letter to John Taylor, 1814)

Tell me not in mournful numbers
Life is but an empty dream.
For the soul is dead that slumbers
And things are not what they seem.

Life is real, life is earnest
And the grave is not its goal.
Dust thou art, to dust returnest
Was not spoken of the Soul.

Let us then be up and doing,
With a heart for any Fate.
Still achieving, still pursuing,
Learn to labor and to wait.

(Henry Wadsworth Longfellow – A Psalm of Life)

For the soul, if it's to know itself, it's into a soul that it must look. (Socrates, in conversation with Alcibiades)

If today you can take a thing like evolution and make it a crime to teach it in the public schools, tomorrow you can make it a crime to teach it in the private schools, and next year you can make it a crime to teach it in the church. At the next session you can ban books and the newspapers. Ignorance and fanaticism are ever busy... After a while, your honour, it is the setting of man against man, creed against creed, until the flying banners and beating drums are marching backwards to the glorious ages of the 16th century when bigots lighted fagots to burn the man who dared to bring any intelligence and enlightenment and culture to the human mind. (from Clarence Darrow's closing remarks in defending teacher John Scopes)

What we read with inclination makes a much stronger impression. If we read without inclination, half the mind is employed in fixing the attention; so there is but one half to be employed on what we read. (Samuel Johnson)

The greatest danger invariably arises from the ruthless application, on a vast scale, of partial knowledge. (E. F. Schumacher)

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to heaven, we were all going direct the other way - in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only. (Charles Dickens preamble to ‘Tale of Two Cities’)

We are born animals; we become human. We have humanity thrust upon us through the hundred channels whereby the past pours down into the present: that mental and cultural inheritance whose preservation, accumulation and transmission place mankind today, with all its defectives and illiterates, on a higher plane than any generation has ever reached before. (Will Durant - The Greatest Minds and Ideas of All Time)

HOPE has two children. The first is ANGER at the way things are. The second is COURAGE to DO SOMETHING about it. (St. Augustine)

True, the white man brought great change. But the varied fruits of his civilization, though highly colored and inviting, are sickening and deadening. And if it be the part of civilization to maim, rob, and thwart, then what is progress? I am going to venture that the man who sat on the ground in his tipi meditating on life and its meaning, accepting the kinship of all creatures, and acknowledging unity with the universe of things, was infusing into his being the true essence of civilization.... (Chief Luther Standing Bear - 1933 autobiography)

It is no measure of good health to be well-adjusted to a profoundly sick society. (Krishnamurti)

It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it. (Upton Sinclair)

In a sacred landscape in which every plant is a manifestation of the divine, the chewing of hayo, a variety of coca only found in the mountains of Colombia, represents the most profound expression of culture. Distance in the mountains is not measured in miles but coca chews. When two men meet, they do not shake hands, they exchange leaves. Their societal ideal is to abstain from sex, eating and sleeping while staying up all night, chewing hayo and chanting the names of ancestors. Each week the men chew about a pound of dry leaves, thus absorbing as much as a third of a gram of cocaine each day of their adults lives. (Wade Davis - One River)

The arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice. (Martin Luther King)

The sordid American drama, the one I am calling the New American Dark Age, will in all likelihood not be completed until well into this century or the next, with a slew of increasingly nasty episodes along the way. Until then, we are left to play out the game day by day. That being the case, we should elect to play it out with the best among us, the ones on humanity’s side, that hidden and unheralded aristocracy -- those quiet lamp lighters making their way through the deepening dusk of American civilization. E. M. Forster described them as:

“Not an aristocracy of power, but an aristocracy of the sensitive, considerate and the plucky. Its members are to be found in all nations and classes and through the ages, and they know each other when they meet. . . . Authority, seeing their value, tries to net them and to utilize them. . . . But they slip through the net and are gone; when the door is shut they are no longer in the room; Their temple is the Holiness of the Heart’s Imagination, and their kingdom, though they never possess it, is the wide open world.”

In this they are deathless. (Joe Bageant - ‘The Audacity of Depression’ )

Never think that war, no matter how necessary, nor how justified, is not a crime. (Ernest Hemingway)

If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear. During times of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act. (George Orwell)

The influences of the senses has in most men overpowered the mind to the degree that the walls of space and time have come to look solid, real and insurmountable; and to speak with levity of these limits in the world is the sign of insanity. (Ralph Waldo Emerson)

"One thing I have learned in a long life," said Einstein, "is that all our science, measured against reality, is primitive and childlike -- and yet it is the most precious thing we have." Science, like religion, must work with simple concepts the human mind can comprehend. But if biocentrism is right, nature has much bigger plans for us than just this or that life -- plans far beyond anything religion has ever projected to any god. And perhaps, if science is clever enough to see, it will realize that religion may not be too far off with its concrete imagery; and that relative to the supreme creator, we humans are much like the microorganisms we scrutinize under the microscope. (Robert Lanza, M.D)

Two things fill me with awe: the stars above and the moral universe within. (Immanuel Kant)

Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, is a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children.

(President Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1953 after being a 5-star general and the Supreme Commander of the Allied Forces in Europe during World War II)

In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist. We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together. (President Eisenhower, in his farewell presidential address in 1961)

I have lived on the lip of insanity, wanting to know reasons, knocking on a door. It opens. I've been knocking from the inside! (Rumi)

In accordance with Vedic traditions, pure consciousness is seen as a vast ocean pervading the universe, creating matter and everything else. It is Brahman, the quantum field, or spacetime geometry which includes 'qualia', the sights, sounds, and textures of the world. Atman, or self-consciousness is part and parcel of Brahman. (Deepak Chopra)

To stand in silence when they should be protesting makes cowards out of men. (Abraham Lincoln)

Those who give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety. (Ben Franklin)

The price of freedom is eternal vigilance. All tyranny needs to gain a foothold is for people of good conscience to remain silent. Dissent is the highest form of patriotism. (Thomas Jefferson)

It is from numberless diverse acts of courage and belief that human history is shaped. Each time a man stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring, those ripples build a current that can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance. (Robert F. Kennedy)

It does not require a majority to prevail, but rather an irate, tireless minority keen to set brush fires in people's minds. (Samuel Adams)

Patriotism means to stand by the country. It does not mean to stand by the president or any other public official save exactly to the degree in which he himself stands by the country. It is patriotic to support him insofar as he efficiently serves the country. It is unpatriotic not to oppose him to the exact extent that by inefficiency or otherwise he fails in his duty to stand by the country. To announce that there must be no criticism of the President, or that we are to stand by the President, right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable to the American public. (Teddy Roosevelt)

The citizen who sees his society’s democratic clothes being worn out and does not cry it out, is not a patriot, but a traitor. (Mark Twain)

This country, with its institutions, belongs to the people who inhabit it. Whenever they shall grow weary of the existing government, they can exercise their constitutional right of amending it, or their revolutionary right to dismember or overthrow it. (Abraham Lincoln, First Inaugural)

We hold these truths to be self evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. (Thomas Jefferson - American Declaration of Independence)

There is a contemporary form of violence to which the idealist fighting for peace by nonviolent methods most easily succumbs: activism and overwork. The rush and pressure of modern life are a form, perhaps the most common form, of its innate violence. To allow oneself to be carried away by a multitude of conflicting concerns, to surrender to too many demands, to commit oneself to too many projects, to want to help everyone in everything is to succumb to violence.

More than that, it is cooperation in violence. The frenzy of the activist neutralizes his or her work for peace. It destroys one's own inner capacity for peace. It destroys the fruitfulness of one's own work, because it kills the root of inner wisdom which makes work fruitful." (Thomas Merton)

If those in charge of our society - politicians, corporate executives, and owners of press and television - can dominate our ideas, they will be secure in their power. They will not need soldiers patrolling the streets. We will control ourselves. (Howard Zinn)

I am myself a dissenter from all known religions, and I hope that every kind of religious belief will die out. (Bertrand Russell)

Time and space are but the physiological colors which the eye maketh; but the soul is light; where it is, is day; where it was, is night.

(Ralph Waldo Emerson - Self-Reliance.)

The Bible? Oh yes, it is full of interest. It has noble poetry in it; and some clever fables; and some blood-drenched history; and a wealth of obscenity; and upwards of a thousand lies.

(Mark Twain - Letters From The Earth)

The most significant characteristic of modern civilization is the sacrifice of the future for the present, and all the power of science has been prostituted to this purpose. (William James)

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

The individual has always had to struggle to keep from being overwhelmed by the tribe. To be your own man is hard business. If you try it, you will be lonely often, and sometimes frightened. But no price is too high to pay for the privilege of owning yourself. (Rudyard Kipling)

Beannacht / Blessing

On the day when
the weight deadens
on your shoulders
and you stumble,
may the clay dance
to balance you.

And when your eyes
freeze behind
the grey window
and the ghost of loss
gets in to you,
may a flock of colours,
indigo, red, green,
and azure blue
come to awaken in you
a meadow of delight.

When the canvas frays
in the currach of thought
and a stain of ocean
blackens beneath you,
may there come across the waters
a path of yellow moonlight
to bring you safely home.

May the nourishment of the earth be yours,
may the clarity of light be yours,
may the fluency of the ocean be yours,
may the protection of the ancestors be yours.
And so may a slow
wind work these words
of love around you,
an invisible cloak
to mind your life.

(John O'Donohue 1956-2008)

The Universe in which we find ourselves and from which we can’t be separated is a place of Law and Order. It is not an accident, nor chaos. It is organized and maintained by an Electro-dynamic field capable of determining the position and movement of all charged particles. For nearly half a century, the logical consequences of this theory have been subjected to rigorously controlled conditions and met with no contradictions. … Electro-dynamic fields are invisible and intangible; and it is hard to visualize them. But a crude analogy may help to show what the fields of life – L-fields for short – do and why they are so important.

Most people who have taken high school science will remember that if iron filings are scattered on a card held over a magnet, they will arrange themselves in the pattern of the ‘lines of force’ of the magnet’s field. And if the filings are thrown away and fresh ones scattered on the card, the new filings will assume the same pattern as the old. Something like this happens in the human body. Its molecules and cells are constantly being torn apart and rebuilt with fresh material from the food we eat. But, thanks to the controlling L-fields, the new molecules and cells are rebuilt as before and arrange themselves in the same pattern as the old ones.

Until modern instruments revealed the existence of the controlling L-fields, biologists were at a loss to explain how our bodies ‘keep in shape’ through ceaseless metabolism and changes of material. Now the mystery has been solved: the electro-dynamic field of the body serves as a matrix or mould which preserves the ’shape’ or arrangement of any material poured into it, however often the material may be changed. … In the growth and development of every living system there is obviously some kind of control of the processes. As a distinguished zoologist once said, ‘The growth and development of any living system would appear to be controlled by someone sitting “on the organism” and directing its whole living process.’ The Field theory suggested that it should be possible to determine the polarity and direction of the flow of energy transformations in the living system. The organism, as a whole, depends on such directives for its continued existence; so also does atypical growth. (Harold Saxton Burr - Blueprint For Immortality)

Conscious love evokes the same in response. Emotional love evokes the opposite. Physical love depends on type and polarity.

Conscious faith is freedom. Emotional faith is slavery. Mechanical faith is foolishness.

Hope, when bold, is strength. Hope, with doubt, is cowardice. Hope, with fear, is weakness.

(Three of the Aphorisms of Georges Gurdjieff)

Most ignorance is vincible ignorance. We don’t know because we don’t want to know. … Most of one’s life is one prolonged effort to prevent oneself from thinking. People intoxicate themselves with work so they won’t see how they really are. (Aldous Huxley)

Every single empire, in its official discourse, has said that it is not like all the others, that its circumstances are special, that it has a mission to enlighten, civilize, bring order and democracy, and that it uses force only as a last resort. (Edward Said)

Psychologists and psychiatrists formally define substance dependence as a disorder characterized by criteria that include spending a great deal of time using the substance; using it more often than one intends; thinking about reducing use or making repeated unsuccessful efforts to reduce use; giving up important social, family or occupational activities to use it; and reporting withdrawal symptoms when one stops using it. All these criteria can apply to people who watch a lot of television.

(Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi & Prof Robert Kubey – Scientific American 2000)

The gift of thought enables us to let our hypotheses die in our stead. (Philosopher Karl Popper)

[by which he meant that instead of acting on a hypothesis and possibly dying, one can imagine acting on it, and the consequences, and then decide …]

It is not necessary to hope, in order to persevere. (William of Orange)

Men occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of them pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing ever happened. (Winston Churchill)

Ah, make the most of what we yet may spend,
Before we too into the Dust descend;
Dust into Dust, and under Dust, to lie,
Sans Wine, sans Song, sans Singer, and--sans End! (Omar Khayyam)

You wouldn't worry what people thought of you, if you knew how seldom they did. (Mark Twain)

The true effect of genuine politeness seems to be rather ease than pleasure. The power of delighting must be conferred by nature, and cannot be delivered by precept, or obtained by imitation; but though it be the privilege of a very small number to ravish and to charm, every man may hope by rules and caution not to give pain.

(Samuel Johnson)

The physician comes from nature, from nature he is born; only he who receives his experience from nature is a physician, and not he who writes, speaks, and acts with his head and with ratiocination’s aimed against nature and her ways. If you apply an art, let it be only in the light of nature, and not in superficial action. (Paracelsus)

It must not surprise the physician that nature is more than his art. For what can equal the forces of nature? He who has no expert knowledge of them has not mastered the art of medicine. In one herb there is more virtue and force than in all the folios that are read in the high colleges and that are not fated to live long. (ibid)

Every physician must be rich in knowledge, and not only of that which is written in books; his patients should be his book, they will never mislead him…and by them he will never be deceived. But he who is content with mere letters is like a dead man; and he is like a dead physician. As a man and as a physician, he kills his patient. (ibid)

The longer the book, the less the intelligence; the longer the prescriptions, the poorer their virtue. Therefore each physician should achieve great things by means of small things. (ibid)

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

To accept the price of a thing as certificate of its character and worth is to substitute the word for the deed. A further proof of Gresham’s law, the bad money driving out the good, degrading the distinction between the life courageously lived and the life heroically publicized. Because the lesson of an exemplary life unfolds over a period of time that doesn’t fit between the Viagra commercial and the top-of-the-hour station break, the constant viewer accustomed to the handling of disposable goods learns to discount the currency of human greatness, to distrust the tenders of mortal truth and beauty, loses sight of the nondisposable stars that might prompt a looking up from the wonder of his or her own navel. (Lewis Lapham)

Thought, I love thought.

But not the juggling and twisting of already existent ideas.

I despise that self-important game.

Thought is the welling up of unknown life into consciousness,

Thought is the testing of statements on the touchstone of consciousness,

Thought is gazing onto the face of life, and reading what can be read.

Thought is pondering over experience, and coming to conclusion.

Thought is not a trick, or an exercise, or a set of dodges,

Thought is a man in his wholeness, wholly attending.

(D.H. Lawrence)

The first key to wisdom is this -- constant and frequent questioning...for by doubting we are led to question and by questioning we arrive at the truth.

(Peter Abelard - Sic et non, c. 1120)

I maintain that cosmic religious feeling is the strongest and noblest incitement to scientific research…. You will hardly find one among the profounder sort of scientific minds without a peculiar religious feeling of his own. … The scientist’s religious feeling takes the form of a rapturous amazement at the harmony of natural law, which reveals an intelligence of such superiority that, compared with it, all the systematic thinking and acting of human beings is an utterly insignificant reflection. This feeling is the guiding principle of his life and work, in so far as he succeeds in keeping himself from the shackles of selfish desire. It is beyond question closely akin to that which has possessed the religious geniuses of all ages. (Albert Einstein – The World As I See It)

A man that hath no virtue in himself, ever envieth virtue in others … and whoso is out of hope to attain another’s virtue, will seek to come at even hand by depressing another’s fortune. … Deformed persons, and eunuchs, and old men, and bastards are envious. For he that cannot possibly mend his own case will do what he can to impair another’s.

(Sir Francis Bacon)

Whatever deserves to exist deserves also to be known, for knowledge is the image of existence, and things mean and splendid exist alike. (Sir Francis Bacon)

The supreme law of the State is self-preservation at any cost. All States, ever since they came to exist upon the earth, have been condemned to perpetual struggle – a struggle against their own populations, whom they oppress and ruin. A struggle against all foreign States, every one of which can be strong only if the others are weak. And since the States cannot hold their own in this struggle unless they constantly keep on augmenting their power against their own subjects as well as against other States, it follows that the supreme law of the State is the augmentation of its power to the detriment of internal liberty and external justice. (Mikhail Bakunin – The Immorality of the State, 1870)

Lying. Diplomacy has no other mission. Every time a State wants to declare war upon another State, it starts off by launching a manifesto addressed not only to its own subjects but to the whole world. In this manifesto it declares that right and justice are on its side, and it endeavors to prove that it is actuated only by love of peace and humanity and that, imbued with generous and peaceful sentiments, it suffered for a long time in silence until the mounting iniquity of its enemy forced it to bare its sword. At the same time it vows that, disdainful of all material conquest and not seeking any increase in territory, it will put an end to this war as soon as justice is reestablished. And its antagonist answers with a similar manifesto, in which naturally right, justice, humanity, and all the generous sentiments are to be found respectively on its side.

Those mutually opposed manifestos are written with the same eloquence, they breathe the same virtuous indignation, and one is just as sincere as the other; that is to say both of them are equally brazen in their lies, and it is only fools who are deceived by them. Sensible persons, all those who have had some political experience, do not even take the trouble of reading such manifestos. (Ibid)

From its very beginnings, the State has been – and still remains – the divine sanction of brutal force and triumphant iniquity. Even in the most democratic countries, like the United States and Switzerland, it is simply the consecration of the privileges of some minority and the actual enslavement of the vast majority...

This explains to us why ever since history began, that is, ever since States came into existence, the political world has always been and continues to be the stage for high knavery and brigandage – brigandage and knavery which are held in high honor, since they are ordained by patriotism, transcendent morality, and by the supreme interest of the State. This explains to us why all the history of ancient and modern States is nothing more than a series of revolting crimes; why present and past kings and ministers of all times and all countries – statesmen, diplomats, bureaucrats, and warriors – if judged from the point of view of simple morality and human justice, deserve a thousand times the gallows of penal servitude.

For there is no terror, cruelty, sacrilege, perjury, imposture, infamous transaction, cynical theft, brazen robbery, or foul treason which has not been committed and all are still being committed daily by representatives of the State, with no other excuse than this elastic, at times so convenient and terrible phrase Reason of State. (Ibid)

Nothing is more dangerous for man’s private morality than the habit of command. The best man, the most intelligent, disinterested, generous, pure, will infallibly and always be spoiled at this trade. Two sentiments inherent in power never fail to produce this demoralization; they are: contempt for the masses and the overestimation of one’s own merits.

(Mikhail Bakunin – Power Corrupts the Best, 1867)

Our minds do not merely gather information; they edit it and seek particular types of correlation. They have become efficient at extracting patterns in collections of information…. Beyond the scientific realm we might understand our penchant for religious and mystical explanations of experience as another application of this faculty for editing reality down to a few simple principles which make it seem under our control. (John D. Barrow)

The priest and the warrior. The charlatan who makes a profit out of superstition and, after freeing himself from the fear of the devil, cultivates it in others. And the bully, who procures the invasion and pillage of his neighbors, that he may return laden with booty and followed by slaves. These two, hand in hand, have succeeded in imposing upon primitive society customs advantageous to both, while tending to perpetuate their domination of the masses. Profiting by the indolence, the fears, and the inertia of the crowd, and thanks to the continual repetition of the same acts, they have permanently established customs which have become a solid basis for their own domination. (Peter Kropotkin – Law and Authority, 1886)

The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power. Not wealth or luxury or long life or happiness: only power, pure power. What pure power means you will understand presently. We are different from all the oligarchies of the past, in that we know what we are doing. All the others, even those who resembled ourselves, were cowards and hypocrites. The German Nazis and the Russian Communists came very close to us in their methods, but they never had the courage to recognize their own motives. They pretended, perhaps they even believed, that they had seized power unwillingly and for a limited time, and that just round the corner there lay a paradise where human beings would be free and equal. We are not like that. We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means; it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power…. Do you begin to see, then, what kind of world we are creating? It is the exact opposite of the stupid hedonistic Utopias that the old reformers imagined. A world of fear and treachery and torment, a world of trampling and being trampled upon, a world which will grow not less but more merciless as it refines itself. (George Orwell - “1984”)

A great deal of intelligence can be invested in ignorance when the need for illusion is deep. (Saul Bellow)

Whatever you can do or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power and magic in it. (Goethe)

The less toil there is, the more time and strength is left for artistic creativity. (E.F Schumacher – “Small Is Beautiful”)

In truth, in no instance has a system in regard to religion been ever established, but for the purpose – as well as the effect – of its being made an instrument of intimidation, corruption, and delusion, for the support of depredation and oppression in the hands of governments. (Jeremy Bentham - Constitutional Code)

Many highly intelligent people are poor thinkers. Many people of average intelligence are skilled thinkers. The power of a car is separate from the way the car is driven.

(Edward de Bono)

Now my friend Besso has departed from this strange world a little ahead of me. That means nothing. People like us...know that the distinction between past, present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion. (Albert Einstein, after the death of his old friend)

The most important thing I learned, was that when a person dies, he only appears to die. He is still very much alive in the past, so it is very silly for people to cry at his funeral. All moments, past, present and future, always have existed, always will exist. (Billy Pilgrim, a character in Kurt Vonnegut's novel Slaughterhouse Five)

Even though a crowd of persons does not have a collective nervous system, it is psychologically different from the same persons when they are by themselves. Their interaction in a crowd produces unique behavior patterns…. Under the spell of an emotional situation or owing to skillful manipulation by a leader, a typical crowd tends to accept irrational ideas as though they were rational. … As individuals we may lose ourselves so completely in the crowd that we may not only give up our rational ideas but actually increase our prestige and ego feelings by being one of the crowd and “joining in.” (S.H. Britt - Social Psychology of Modern Life, 1941)

I don’t believe people are looking for the meaning of life as much as they are looking for the experience of being alive. (Joseph Campbell)

Diet, injections and injunctions will combine, from a very early age, to produce the sort of character and the sort of beliefs that the authorities consider desirable, and any serious criticism of the powers that be will become psychologically impossible. Even if all are miserable, all will believe themselves happy, because the government will tell them that they are so. (Bertrand Russell, The Impact of Science on Society – 1953)

There are decades when nothing happens; and there are weeks when decades happen. (V. I. Lenin - 1870-1924)

The evil in the world almost always comes from ignorance. Good intentions may do as much harm as malevolence, if they lack understanding. (Albert Camus - The Plague)

Victory is accomplished through the perseverance of the last hour. (Prophet Muhammad (570-632 AD)

The beginning of wisdom is to call things by their right names. CHINESE PROVERB.

The effort to understand the universe is one of the very few things that lifts human life a little bit above the level of a farce and gives it some of the grace of a tragedy. (Nobel physicist Steven Weinberg)

For me, the principle fact of life is the free mind. For good and evil, man is a free creative spirit. This produces the very queer world we live in, a world in continuous creation and therefore continuous change and insecurity. A perpetually new and lively world, but a dangerous one, full of tragedy and injustice. A world in everlasting conflict between the new idea and the old allegiances, new arts and new inventions against the old establishment. (Joyce Cary - Writers At Work, 1958)

Reality isn't a thing, it's a process that involves our consciousness. Life is a melody so vast and eternal that human ears can't appreciate the tonal range of the symphony. Time is the mind's tool that animates the notes, the individual frames of the spatial world… You, the observer, collapse these possibilities, the cascade of events we call the universe. Our consciousness animates the universe like an old phonograph. Listening to it doesn't alter the record, and depending on where the needle is placed, you hear a certain piece of music. This is what we call "now." The songs before and after are the past and future. In like manner, you, your loved ones and friends (and sadly, the villains too) endure always. The record doesn't go away. All nows exist simultaneously, although we can only listen to the songs one by one. Time is On Demand. (Robert Lanza – Biocentrism)

Wise men are instructed by reason; men of understanding, by experience; the most ignorant, by necessity; and beasts, by nature. (Marcus Tullius Cicero 106-43BC)

A truer image of the world, I think, is obtained by picturing things as entering into the stream of time from an eternal world outside, than from a view which regards time as the devouring tyrant of all that is. (Bertrand Russell)

Knowledge comes and goes, but wisdom lingers. It may not be difficult to store up in the mind a vast quantity of facts within a comparatively short time, but the ability to form judgments requires the severe discipline of hard work and the tempering heat of experience and maturity. (Calvin Coolidge)

We have, in my view, created a society in which people find it harder and harder to show one another basic affection. … Despite the fact that millions live in close proximity to one another, it seems that many people, especially among the old, have no one to talk to but their pets. Modern industrial society often strikes me as being like a huge self-propelled machine. Instead of human beings in charge, each individual is a tiny, insignificant component with no choice but to move when the machine moves.

(Dalai Lama - Ethics For The New Millennium)

… And the great owners, who must lose their land in an upheaval, the great owners with access to history, with eyes to read history and to know the great fact: when property accumulates in too few hands it is taken away. And that companion fact: when a majority of the people are hungry and cold they will take by force what they need. And the little screaming fact that sounds through all history: repression works only to strengthen and knit the repressed. (John Steinbeck – Grapes of Wrath)

In faith there is enough light for those who want to believe and enough shadows to blind those who don't. (Blaise Pascal)

Natural selection, the blind, unconscious, automatic process which Darwin discovered … has no purpose in mind. It has no mind and no mind’s eye. It does not plan for the future. It has no vision, no foresight, no sight at all. If it can be said to play the role of watchmaker in nature, it is the blind watchmaker. (Richard Dawkins - The Blind Watchmaker)

I will love the light for it shows me the way. Yet I will endure the darkness for it shows me the stars. (Og Mandino)

Everyone is a prisoner of his own experiences. No one can eliminate prejudices – just recognize them. (Ed Murrow)

Reinhold Niebuhr, prompted by Martin Buber’s book I and Thou, stressed the freedom of self-transcendence of the self by emphasizing the three types of dialogue in which the self is involved. Niebuhr said that although there is no external evidence of the dialogue of the self with itself, every astute person knows it as an "empiric" fact. The internal dialogue of the self with itself means that the self in one of its aspects is using conceptual images to make another of its aspects its object of thought. The dialogue of the self with various neighbors takes place on endless levels, depending upon the neighbor to bring it to completion. The self is also in dialogue with God, a realm beyond limits of empirical verification. The dialogue of the self with God finds God as Judge and as Redeemer. (Howard G. Patton)

There are certain things that our age needs, and certain things that it should avoid. It needs compassion and a wish that mankind should be happy; it needs the desire for knowledge and the determination to eschew pleasant myths; it needs, above all, courageous hope and the impulse to creativeness.

Science could help determine what is needed for happiness and what should be avoided. Religion, especially Christianity, should be shunned for the great harm it has done humankind and because it encourages stupidity. (Bertrand Russell - The Impact of Science on Society)

Christians, like slaves and soldiers, ask no questions. (Jerry Falwell)

There is no meaning to life except the meaning man gives his life by the unfolding of his powers, by living productively. (Eric Fromm - Man For Himself)

The quest for certainty blocks the search for meaning. Uncertainty is the very condition to impel man to unfold his powers. (Ibid)

To act in such a way as to make our annihilation an injustice, in such a way as to make our brothers, our sons, and our brothers' sons (and their daughters), feel that we ought not to have died, this is the way we are impelled to stamp others with our seal, to perpetuate ourselves in them and in their children. This is the way we defeat death. ... This is the way death is defeated. (Miguel de Unamuno)

The lifestyle of one who practices doing-not doing [Wei Wu Wei] must be understood as a form of intelligence. That is knowing the patterns, structures and trends of human and natural affairs well enough that one uses the least energy dealing with them. (Alan Watts)

Billy Collins, the former U.S. poet laureate said “to major in English is to major in death”. Cicero said “To study philosophy is nothing but to prepare oneself to die.” Ernest Becker said, “The idea of death, the fear of it, haunts the human animal like nothing else; it is a mainspring of human activity - designed largely to avoid the fatality of death, to overcome it by denying in some way that it is the final destiny of man.” D.T. Susuki, the teacher who brought Zen to the US said, “Life is like getting on a boat that is about to set sail and sink.” The Quakers say “Build it to last 100 years; be ready to leave tomorrow.” (Jeremy Sherman – Essay: Expectation Management: How Spirituality Should Work)

A religion is:

(1) a system of symbols which acts to

(2) establish powerful, pervasive and long-lasting moods and motivations in men by

(3) formulating conceptions of a general order of existence and

(4) clothing these conceptions with such an aura of factuality that

(5) the moods and motivations seem uniquely realistic.

(Clifford Geertz - Religion As A Cultural System, 1966)

The mind can protect against anxiety by diminished awareness. This mechanism creates a blind spot; a zone of blocked attention and self-deception. Such blind spots occur at each major level of behavior from the psychological to the social. (Daniel Goleman - Vital Lies, Simple Truths: The Psychology of Self-Deception, 1985)

The most violent revolutions in an individual’s beliefs leave most of his old order standing. Time and space, cause and effect, nature and history, and one’s own biography remain untouched. New truth is always a go-between, a smoother-over of transitions. It marries old opinion to new fact so as ever to show a minimum jolt, a maximum of continuity. (William James - What Pragmatism Means)

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity. (William Butler Yeats - The Second Coming)

When plunder becomes a way of life for a group of men living together in society, they create for themselves in the course of time a legal system that authorizes it...and a moral code that glorifies it. (Frederic Bastiat)

I believe the struggle against death, the unconditional and self-willed determination to live, is the motive power behind the lives and activities of all outstanding men. (Herman Hesse – Steppenwolf)

The four cardinal or principal virtues: courage, wisdom, justice and moderation. (Plato)

Mankind is so much the same, in all times and places, that history informs us of nothing new or strange in this particular. Its chief use is only to discover the constant and universal principles of human nature. (David Hume)

The believer is happy, the doubter is wise. HUNGARIAN PROVERB

Religion is but a desperate attempt to find an escape from the truly dreadful situation in which we find ourselves. Here we are in this wholly fantastic universe with scarcely a clue as to whether our existence has any real significance. No wonder then that many people feel the need for some belief that gives them a sense of security, and no wonder that they become very angry with people like me who say that this is illusory. (Fred Hoyle - The Nature of the Universe, 1950)

We are what we think. All that we are arises in our minds.
With our minds, we make the world.
Speak or act with an impure mind and trouble will follow you...
As the wheel follows the ox that draws the cart.

Speak or act with a pure mind and happiness will follow you...
As your shadow, unshakeable."
('The Dhammapada: Sayings of the Buddha')

Whether found in books, or through observing and emulating human role models, when studied, wisdom eventually becomes personal to each of us and accumulates. One proverb has it that fools never learn from their mistakes, ordinary people do, and the wise learn from the mistakes of others. The wisest of all are those who actively seek out and study wisdom from the outset. These not only avoid mistakes but help others to avoid them as well. The life of such a person is a blessing to all. (Larry Culliford)

God was invented to explain mystery...When you finally discover how something works... you don't need him anymore. But you need him for other mysteries.  So therefore you leave him to create the universe because we haven't figured that out yet... and to explain consciousness....stuff like that. (Richard Feynman)

The strongest man in the world is he who stands alone. (Henrik Ibsen)

School prepares for the alienating institutionalization of life by teaching the need to be taught. Once this lesson is learned, people lose their incentive to grow in independence; they no longer find relatedness attractive, and close themselves off to the surprises which life offers. (Ivan Illich - Deschooling Society, 1971)

Like many people, I have no religion, and I am just sitting in a small boat drifting with the tide.  I live in the doubts of my duty....I think there is dignity in this, just to go on working. (Federico Fellini)

“However people approach Me, even so do I welcome them. For the path they take from every side is Mine.” (Bhagavad Gita 4.11)

“As the rivers flowing east and west merge in the sea and become one with it, forgetting they were ever separate streams, so do all creatures lose their separateness when they merge at last into pure Being.” (Chandogya Upanishad)

Nature, as far as we can discern, without passion and without intention, forms, transforms, and retransforms forever. She neither weeps nor rejoices. She produces man without purpose, and obliterates him without anger. (Robert G. Ingersoll - The Gods, 1872)

“By hundreds and then by thousands behold my manifold celestial forms of innumerable shapes and colours. See now the whole universe with all things that move and move not, and whatever your soul may yearn to see. See it all as One in me.” (Bhagavad Gita 11.5, 11)

A group experience takes place on a lower level of consciousness than the experience of an individual. This is due to the fact that, when many people gather together to share one common emotion, the total psyche emerging from the group is below the level of the individual psyche. If it is a very large group, the collective psyche will be more like the psyche of an animal.

(Carl Gustav Jung - Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious)

When I despair I remember that all through history there have been tyrants & murderers and for a time they seem invincible but in the end they always fall. Think of it always. (Mahatma Gandhi)

Curiosity is one of the permanent and certain characteristics of a vigorous intelligence. (Samuel Johnson - The Rambler, 1750)

The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man. (George Bernard Shaw)

The word “courage” should be reserved to characterize the man or woman who leaves the infantile sanctuary of the mass mind. (Sam Keen)

Security is mostly an illusion. It does not exist in nature, nor do the children of men as a whole experience it. Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. Life is either a daring adventure, or nothing. (Helen Keller - The Open Door, 1957)

I use the term “groupthink” as a quick and easy way to refer to a mode of thinking that people engage in when they are deeply involved in a cohesive in-group, when the members’ striving for unanimity override their motivation to realistically appraise alternative courses of action…. Groupthink refers to a deterioration of mental efficiency, reality testing, and moral judgment that results from in-group pressures. (Irving Janis - Victims of Groupthink, 1972)

In your mind’s eye imagine you are an eagle easily gliding above the rain forest canopy, and as far as you can see in every direction, there are billowing canopies of trees reaching upwards into the light. Each one of these trees might represent the branching history of a species, and the forest itself might be a crude representation of the density of the historical past. We shall never know every detail of every tree, but we can understand the vitality of the whole, and thus see the forest for the trees… A review of the history of life should provoke awe, above all else. (Richard Fortey - “Life”)

It is not power that corrupts but fear. Fear of losing power corrupts those who wield it; and fear of the scourge of power corrupts those who are subject to it.

(Aung San Suu Kyi - Nobel Peace Prize Laureate, Freedom From Fear)

I have six honest serving men:

They taught me all I knew

Their names are Where and What and When

And How and Why and Who. (Rudyard Kipling)

The individual has always had to struggle to keep from being overwhelmed by the tribe. To be your own man is hard business. If you try it, you will be lonely often, and sometimes frightened. But no price is too high to pay for the privilege of owning yourself. (Rudyard Kipling)

Language itself is never completely explicit. Words have suggestive, evocative powers; but at the same time they are merely stepping stones for thought. …. Language can become a screen that stands between the thinker and reality. This is the reason why true creativity often starts where language ends.

(Arthur Koestler - The Act of Creation)

The universe could so easily have remained lifeless and simple – just physics and chemistry, just the scattered dust of the cosmic explosion that gave birth to time and space. The fact that it did not – the fact that life evolved out of nearly nothing, some 10 billion years after the universe evolved out of literally nothing – is a fact so staggering that I would be mad to attempt words to do it justice. And even that is not the end of the matter. Not only did evolution happen: it eventually led to beings capable of comprehending the process, and even of comprehending the process by which they comprehend it. (Richard Dawkins - The Ancestor’s Tale)

Eternal truth needs a human language that alters with the spirit of the times. (C.G. Jung)

It's important to live life with the experience, and therefore the knowledge, of its mystery and of your own mystery. This gives life a new radiance, a new harmony, a new splendor. Thinking in mythological terms helps to put you in accord with the inevitables of this vale of tears. You learn to recognize the positive values in what appear to be the negative moments and aspects of your life. The big question is whether you are going to be able to say a hearty yes to your adventure. The adventure of a hero.

(Joseph Campbell - The Hero With a Thousand Faces)

Civilizations as yet have only been created and directed by a small intellectual aristocracy, never by crowds. Crowds are only powerful for destruction.

(Gustave Le Bon - The Crowd, 1896)

Whoever be the individuals who compose it, however like or unlike be their mode of life, their occupations, their character, or their intelligence, the fact that they have been transformed into a crowd puts them into possession of a sort of collective mind which makes them think, feel, and act in a manner quite different from that in which each individual of them would think, feel, and act were he in a state of isolation. (Ibid)

The leader has most often started as one of the led. He has himself been hypnotized by an idea, whose apostle he has since become. (Ibid)

At the bidding of a Peter the Hermit millions of men hurled themselves against the East; the words of an hallucinated enthusiast such as Mahomet created a force capable of triumphing over the Graeco-Roman world; an obscure monk like Luther bathed Europe in blood. The voice of a Galileo or a Newton will never have the least echo among the masses. The inventors of genius hasten the march of civilization. The fanatics and the hallucinated create history. (Ibid)

If you are depressed you are living in the past. If you are anxious you are living in the future. If you are at peace you are living in the present. (Lao Tsu)

What human beings have in common is revealed in myths. Myths are stories of our search through the ages for truth, for meaning, for significance... We need for life to signify, to touch the eternal, to understand the mysterious, to find out who we are. (Bill Moyers – with Joseph Campbell on PBS special The Power of Myth)

Any kind of experience – accidental impressions, observations, and even “inner experience” not induced by stimuli received from the environment – may initiate cognitive processes leading to changes in a person’s knowledge. Thus, new knowledge can be acquired without new information being received.

(Fritz Machlup & Una Mansfield - The Study of Information, 1983)

The big lie about capitalism is that everyone can be rich. That's impossible. Capitalism works only if the vast majority of the population are kept poor enough to never quit working, are kept poor enough to accept distasteful jobs society cannot function without. If everyone were a millionaire, who would empty the trash or repair the sewers? It follows that the poorer the general population is made, the greater the worth of the money held by the wealthy, in terms of the lives which may be bought and sold with it. (Michael Rivero)

Religious suffering is at one and the same time the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people. (Karl Marx - A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, 1844)

Reading is an act of resistance in a landscape of distraction.... It requires us to pace ourselves. It returns us to a reckoning with time. In the midst of a book, we have no choice but to be patient, to take each thing in its moment, to let the narrative prevail. We regain the world by withdrawing from it just a little, by stepping back from the noise.

(David Ulin - The Lost Art of Reading – Why Books Matter in a Distracted Time)

The world always makes the assumption that the exposure of an error is identical with the discovery of truth -- that error and truth are simply opposite. They are nothing of the sort. What the world turns to, when it has been cured of one error, is usually another error, and maybe one worse than the first one. (H.L. Mencken)

Books are the still point of the turning world. (TS Eliot)

Distrust all in whom the impulse to punish is powerful. They can be people of low stock and breeding; out of their countenances peer the hangman and the bloodhound. Distrust all those who talk much of their justice! (Friedrich Nietzsche - Thus Spoke Zarathustra)

Just as every dead soldier marks the eternal repetition of an error, so truth must eternally be repeated in a thousand forms. (Hermann Hesse)

The essence of the change function is that users will only change their habits when the pain of their current situation is greater than their perceived pain of adopting a possible solution. (Pip Coburn)

There’s a whiff of the lynch mob or the lemming migration about any over-large concentration of like-minded individuals, no matter how virtuous their cause.

(P.J. O’Rourke - Parliament of Whores, 1991)

What is it that breathes fire into the equations and makes a universe for them to describe? The usual approach of science cannot answer. (Stephen Hawking)

The great majority of us are required to live a life of constant, systematic duplicity. Your health is bound to be affected if, day after day, you say the opposite of what you feel, if you grovel before what you dislike and rejoice at what brings you nothing but misfortune. (Boris Pasternak - Dr. Zhivago, 1957)

Human communication is not just a transfer of information like two fax machines connected by a wire; it is a series of alternating displays of behavior by sensitive, scheming, second-guessing social animals. (Steven Pinker - The Language Instinct: How The Mind Creates Language, 2000)

The great mass of mankind is neither smart nor dumb, good nor bad. But it is subject to influence. And when it thinks it can vote itself someone else’s money it rushes to the ballot box as though to an over-turned beer truck. (Bill Bonner)

If we are uncritical we shall always find what we want: we shall look for, and find, confirmations, and we shall look away from, and not see, whatever might be dangerous to our pet theories. In this way it is only too easy to obtain what appears to be overwhelming evidence in favor of a theory which, if approached critically, would have been refuted. (Sir Karl Popper - The Poverty of Historicism, 1986)

What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. (Neil Postman - Amusing Ourselves to Death, 1986)

As gravity holds matter from flying off into space, so memory gives stability to knowledge; it is the cohesion which keeps things from falling into a lump, or flowing in waves.

(Emerson)

Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness. When change is absolute there remains no being to improve and no direction is set for possible improvement; and when experience is not retained, as among savages, infancy is perpetual. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.

(George Santayana - The Life of Reason, 1905)

The nature of “memory” is a bounded one. Although we like to think of our cortical hard drive as infinite in capacity, it’s actually pretty constrained, which is why we’re always looking for ways to not remember stuff. If we know that a fact is only a Google away, then we’re not going to waste precious synaptic space on it. Better to let a server remember…. Although we’ve been romanticizing human memory ever since Socrates, our recall is profoundly flawed. Every time we recall a memory we also remake it, subtly tweaking the neuronal details. (This is why the more we remember something, the less accurate the memory becomes.) Although we like to think of our memories as being immutable impressions, somehow separate from the act of remembering them, they aren’t. A memory is only as real as the last time you remembered it. … Why do we engage in reconsolidation and reconstruction? One theory is that reconsolidation helps ensure our memories are kept up to date, interpreted in light of recent experience. The brain has no interest in immaculate recall – it’s only interested in the past to the extent it helps us make sense of the present so as to deal with the future. By having memories that constantly change, we ensure that the memories stored inside our mental file cabinets are mostly relevant…. Although our memories always feel true – like a literal recording of the past – they’re mostly not, since they’re always being edited and bent by what we think now. (Jonah Lehrer)

Religions are like glow-worms; they shine only when it’s dark. A certain amount of general ignorance is the condition of all religions, the element in which alone they can exist. (Arthur Schopenhauer - Parerga and Paralipomena,1951)

A man of correct insight among those who are duped and deluded resembles one whose watch is right while all the clocks in town give the wrong time. He alone knows the correct time, but of what use is this to him? The whole world is guided by clocks that show the wrong time. (Ibid)

If a fact stored externally (eg. Internet) were the same as a memory of that fact stored in our mind, then the loss of internal memory wouldn’t much matter. But external storage and biological memory are not the same thing. When we form, or “consolidate,” a personal memory, we also form associations between that memory and other memories that are unique to ourselves and also indispensable to the development of deep, conceptual knowledge. The associations, moreover, continue to change with time, as we learn more and experience more. As Emerson understood, the essence of personal memory is not the discrete facts or experiences we store in our mind but “the cohesion” which ties all those facts and experiences together. What is the self but the unique pattern of that cohesion? (Nicholas Carr)

If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart.

(Alexandre Solzhenitsyn - The Gulag Archipelago, 1973)

God sleeps in the rock,

Dreams in the plant,

Stirs in the animal,

And awakens in man.

(Ben Al-‘Arabi – 12^th century Spanish mystic)

You are the entire universe. You are in all, and all is in you. Sun, moon, and stars revolve within you. (Baba Muktananda)

When the satisfaction or the security of another person becomes as significant to one as is one’s own satisfaction or security, then a state of love exists. So far as I know, under no other circumstances is a state of love present, regardless of the popular usage of the word. (Henry Stack Sullivan - The Human Organism and Its Necessary Environment, 1940)

The Universe produced phenomenally in me, is pervaded by me. . . From me the world is born, in me it exists, in me it dissolves. (The Ashtavakra Gita)

Physics is the study of the structure of consciousness. The "stuff" of the world is mindstuff. (Sir Arthur Eddington)

The mind experiences qualities which are purely offspring of the mind alone. (Alfred North Whitehead)

Space and Time are the framework within which the mind is constrained to construct its experience of reality. (Immanuel Kant)

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. (Erwin Schrodinger)

If I penetrate to the depths of my own existence, to the indefinable AM that is myself in its deepest roots, then through this deep center I pass into the infinite I Am, which is the very Name of the Almighty. (Thomas Merton)

Do I contradict myself? Very well, then, I contradict myself. I am large, I contain multitudes. (Walt Whitman)

Mysticism joins and unites; reason divides and separates. People crave belonging more than understanding. Hence, the prominent role of mysticism, and the limited role of reason, in human affairs. (Thomas Szasz - The Untamed Tongue, 1990)

People often say that this or that person has not yet found himself. But the self is not something one finds, it is something one creates. (Thomas Szasz - The Second Sin, 1973)

The struggle for definition is veritably the struggle for life itself....whoever first defines the situation is the victor; his adversary, the victim. In short, he who first seizes the word imposes reality on the other: he who defines thus dominates and lives; and he who is defined is subjugated... (Ibid)

The more man clings to religion, the more he believes. The more he believes, the less he knows. The less he knows, the more stupid he is. The more stupid, the easier he can be governed! The easier to govern, the better he may be exploited. The more exploited, the poorer he gets. The poorer he gets, the richer and mightier the domineering classes get, the more riches and power they amass, the heavier their yoke upon the neck of the people. (German philosopher Johann Most - The God Pestilence -1883)

Forgiveness is the fragrance that the violet sheds on the heel that has crushed it. (Mark Twain)

Little Black Dress

My carriage straight, your bosom taut,

I courted you smartly as young men ought,

Applauded your shape in a little black dress,

Followed your arms as they rose to undress.

Now frames are bent, our breastwork sags,

The little black dress is gone for rags,

And I court you gently, as old men must,

With a shade less ardour, a bit less fuss. (Dan Burt)

Monarchy first changes into its vicious allied form, tyranny; and next, the abolishment of both gives birth to aristocracy. Aristocracy by its very nature degenerates into oligarchy; and when the commons inflamed by anger take vengeance on this government for its unjust rule, democracy comes into being; and in due course the licence and lawlessness of this form of government produces mob-rule to complete the series…. And hence when by their foolish thirst for reputation they have created among the masses an appetite for gifts and the habit of receiving them, democracy in its turn is abolished and changes into a rule of force and violence. For the people, having grown accustomed to feed at the expense of others and to depend for their livelihood on the property of others, as soon as they find a leader who is enterprising but is excluded from the houses of office by his penury, institute the rule of violence; and now uniting their forces massacre, banish, and plunder, until they degenerate again into perfect savages and find once more a master and monarch. (Greek historian Polybius - The Histories)

Democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts and murders itself. There was never a democracy that did not commit suicide. (John Adams - Letter, April 15, 1814)

English historian Edward Gibbon wrote his masterpiece The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire in 1776, ironically in the year the American Empire was born. He detailed the societal collapse encompassing both the gradual disintegration of the political, economic, military, and other social institutions of Rome and the barbarian invasions that were its final doom in Western Europe. Gibbon concluded there were five marks of the Roman decaying culture:

1. Concern with displaying affluence instead of building wealth.

2. Obsession with sex and perversions of sex.

3. Art becomes freakish and sensationalistic instead of creative and original.

4. Widening disparity between very rich and very poor.

5. Increased demand to live off the state

Have you learned lessons only of those who admired you, and were tender with you, and stood beside you? Have you not learned great lessons from those who rejected you, and braced themselves against you, or disputed the passage with you? (Walt Whitman)

Of all the tyrannies that affect mankind, tyranny in religion is the worst; every other species of tyranny is limited to the world we live in, but this attempts to stride beyond the grave, and seeks to pursue us into eternity. (Thomas Paine - The Age of Reason 1794)

Turning a blind eye to the spiritist phenomena is turning a blind eye to the truth. (Victor Hugo)

Into the dim and misty past, we peer through ages of history to the time before history began. In that vast cemetery, called the past, most of the early religions of man lie dead and forgotten. From our present-day knowledge we can realize how it was that they began and developed. The etheric beings who produced these ideas live on, but Olympus is silent and Venus is now but a graven image. No longer does Jehova speak to his chosen people and Mount Sinai’s thunders have long since ceased.

Many of the sacred temples of India are in ruins and the ancient Religions of Peru and Mexico are forgotten. The Sacred Nile no longer harbors the wandering Isis searching for the dead Osiris. Memnon is no more. From the wild north we never hear the mighty Thor dashing the mountains to pieces, and with him has gone Odin, the giver of life and death. The Druids no longer dominate this fertile land of ours, which once was theirs, and with them have gone all the gods brought here with Caesar’s conquering legions, whose names are now borne by the planets of our solar system.

Religions, like nations, have their periods of birth, growth and decay. What is orthodox in one age is rejected in contempt by the next. The gods have passed away like those who created them. Those worshiped today will receive no reverence tomorrow. Mithra in Persia, Zeus in Greece, Isis and Osiris in Egypt, and Jove in Rome have all been dethroned and have been put in their place. What has happened in the past will happen in the future. (Arthur Findlay – The Rock of Truth)

Death, I am told, is as easy and as simple as going to sleep and then awakening. Our etheric body slips out of the physical body, carrying the mind with it, and we awake to our new surroundings to find our friends and relations ready to help and instruct us in our new life. Death is simply the severance of this etheric body or structure from the physical body. The physical body returns to earth, and the etheric body, controlled by the mind, continues to function in the etheric world which, though within and also without the physical, yet cannot be appreciated by us so long as we are inhabitants of the physical body. Our range of sight and touch is too confined for us to appreciate these finer vibrations. (Arthur Findlay - On the Edge of the Etheric)

In order to explain the phenomenon of terrestrial life there is no alternative but to accept the existence of an intelligent vital medium which, using the elements and compounds of the material world as bricks and mortar, acts as the architect of organic structures. All show evidence of extraordinary intelligence and purpose, built with such amazing skill and produced in such profusion and in so many diverse forms as to falsify any idea of spontaneous generation or chance. The existence of this medium cannot be proved empirically; human ingenuity and skill have not yet reached the perfection where one can experiment with media of such subtlety. (Gopi Krishna’s autobiography Kundalini—The Evolutionary Energy in Man)

The existence of mystical states absolutely overthrows the pretension of non-mystical states to be the sole and ultimate dictators of what we may believe. As a rule, mystical states merely add a super-sensuous meaning to the ordinary outward data of consciousness. They are excitements, like the emotions of love or ambition, gifts to our spirit by means of which facts, already objectively before us fall into a new expressiveness and make a new connection with our active life. They do not contradict these facts as such, or deny anything that our senses have immediately seized. It is the rationalistic critic rather who plays the part of denier in the controversy, and his denials have no strength, for there can never be a state of facts to which new meaning may not truthfully be added, provided the mind ascends to a more enveloping point of view. It must always remain an open question whether mystical states may not possibly be such superior points of view, windows through which the mind looks out upon a more extensive and inclusive world. (William James - Varieties of Religious Experience)

[From an article in Time Magazine of May 23, 1988]

As they probe the intricate workings of the immune system, scientists are awestruck. “It is an enormous edifice, like a cathedral,” says Nobel Laureate Baruj Benacerraf. . . The immune system is compared favorably with the most complex organ of them all, the brain. …. “The immune system has a phenomenal ability for dealing with information, for learning and memory, for creating and storing and using information,” explains immunologist William Paul….. Declares Dr. Stephen Sherwin, Director of Clinical Research at Genentech, “Its an incredible system. It recognizes molecules that have never been in the body before. It can differentiate between what belongs there and what doesn’t.”

The article goes on to remark, “The B-cell genes that dictate the production of antibodies occur in distinct segments. These pieces, like cards in the hands of a Las Vegas dealer, are constantly and speedily shuffled into different combinations.”

[The obvious question then arises—what agency is doing the `shuffling’ to produce the correct antibody needed to fight the infection? And lest it be assumed that a simple mechanical process is at work, the article further states ‘Thus within the slowly evolving human being, the immune system is undergoing a rapid internal evolution of its own. And a good thing too. “If all we had to meet the microorganisms (with) was true evolution,” says NIH’s William Paul, “We’d long ago have disappeared from the face of the earth.”]

In the history of education, the most striking phenomenon is that schools of learning, which at one epoch are alive with a ferment of genius, in a succeeding generation exhibit merely pedantry and routine. The reason is, that they are overladen with inert ideas. Education with inert ideas is not only useless: it is, above all things, harmful. . . . That is the reason why uneducated clever women, who have seen much of the world, are in middle life so much the most cultured part of the community. . . . The understanding which we want is an understanding of an insistent present. The only use of a knowledge of the past is to equip us for the present. . . . Passing now to the scientific and logical side of education, we remember that here also ideas which are not utilised are positively harmful. By utilising an idea, I mean relating it to that stream, compounded of sense perceptions, feelings, hopes, desires and of mental activities adjusting thought to thought, which forms our life. (A.N. Whitehead. The Aims of Education)

It is by the scientific method alone that we may make progress in the search for truth. Religious belief must not take the place of impartial analysis. We must be constantly on our guard against illusions. Spiritism is not a religion but a science. … I have no hesitation in saying that he who states that spiritist phenomena are contrary to science does not know what he is talking about. Indeed, there is nothing super-natural in nature. There is only the unknown: but what was unknown yesterday becomes the truth of tomorrow. (Camille Flammarion)

A rainbow described in the symbolism of physics is a band of ethereal vibrations arranged in systemic order to wave-lengths from about .00004 centimeters to .000072 centimeters. From one point of view, we are paltering with the truth whenever we admire the gorgeous bow of color, and should strive to reduce our minds to such a state that we receive the same impression from the rainbow as from a table of wave-lengths. But although that is how the rainbow impresses itself on an impersonal spectroscope, we are not giving the whole truth and significance of experience--if we suppress the factors wherein we ourselves differ from the spectroscope. We cannot say that the rainbow, as part of the world, was meant to convey the vivid effects of color; but we can perhaps say that the human mind, as part of the world, was meant to perceive it that way.

(A. S. Eddington - Science and Mysticism)

Conscience, if it’s more than lip service is expensive. To show conscientious consideration to others means exerting yourself on their behalf. You have finite powers of exertion, and therefore have to subordinate and prioritize whether consciously or unconsciously, where you expend conscientious care. (Jeremy Sherman)

In more recent times, Bertrand Russell has expressed what is essentially my argument in the words: 'So long as we adhere to the conventional notions of mind and matter, we are condemned to a view of perception which is miraculous. We suppose that a physical process starts from a visible object, travels to the eye, there changes into another physical process, causes yet another physical process in the optic nerve, and finally produces some effect in the brain, simultaneously with which we see the object from which the process started, the seeing being something "mental," totally different in character from the physical processes which precede and accompany it.' This view is so queer that metaphysicians have invented all sorts of theories designed to substitute something less incredible...

Everything that we can directly observe from the physical world happens inside our heads, and consists of mental events which form part of the physical world. The development of this point of view will lead us to the conclusion that the distinction between mind and matter is illusory. The stuff of the world may be called physical or mental or both or neither as we please; in fact the words serve no purpose….

Even if the two entities which we have hitherto described as mind and matter are of the same general nature, there remains the question as to which is the more fundamental of the two. Is mind only a by-product of matter, as the materialists claimed? Or is it, as Berkeley claimed, the creator and controller of matter? …

Before the latter alternative can be seriously considered, some answer must be found to the problem of how objects can continue to exist when they are not being perceived in any human mind. There must, as Berkeley says, be 'some other mind in which they exist.' Some still wish to describe this, with Berkeley, as the mind of God; others with Hegel as a universal or Absolute mind in which all our individual minds are comprised. The new quantum mechanics may perhaps give a hint, although nothing more than a hint, as to how this can be….

It seems, at least, conceivable that what is true of perceived objects may also be true of perceiving minds; just as there are wave-pictures for light and electricity, so there may be a corresponding picture for consciousness. When we view ourselves in space and time, our consciousness is obviously the separate individuals of a particle-picture, but when we pass beyond space and time, they may perhaps form ingredients of a single continuous stream of life. As it is with light and electricity, so it may be with life; the phenomena may be individuals carrying on separate existences in space and time, while in the deeper reality beyond space and time we may all be members of one body. In brief, modern physics is not altogether antagonistic to an objective idealism like that of Hegel. (Sir James Jeans - Some Problems of Philosophy)

… Most unexpectedly, the sense of immensity and that extraordinary benediction . . . that imminent feeling of sacredness, began to take place . . . the pressure and the strain were intense and there was acute pain at the back of the head. There was only this state and there was no observer. The whole body was wholly in it and the feeling of sacredness was so intense that a groan escaped from the body . . . .It was as though one was looking not with eyes only but with a thousand centuries; it was altogether a strange occurrence. (Jiddu Krishnamurti – from his Notebook, commenting on the “Benediction” phase of his enlightenment at age 26)

I hold that there is an eternal life which is the Source and the Goal, the beginning and the end, and yet it is without end or beginning. In that Life alone is there fulfillment. And anyone who fulfills that Life has the key to Truth without limitation. That Life is for all. Into that Life the Buddha, the Christ entered. From my point of view I have attained, I have entered into that Life. That Life has no form as Truth has no form, no limitation. And to that Life, everyone must return.

(Jiddu Krishnamurti – from his Notebook at age 33)

Question with boldness even the existence of a god; because if there be one he must more approve of the homage of reason than that of blindfolded fear . . . if it ends in a belief that there is no god, you will find incitements to virtue in the comfort and pleasantness you feel in its exercise and the love of others which it will procure for you. If you find reason to believe there is a god, a consciousness that you are acting under his eye and that he approves you will be a vast incitement.

(Thomas Jefferson – letter to his nephew)

To realize that we are one with the Creator, as Beethoven did, is a wonderful and awe-inspiring experience. Very few human beings ever come into that realization and that is why there are so few great composers or creative geniuses in any line of human endeavor. I always contemplate all this before commencing to compose. This is the first step. When I feel the urge I begin by appealing directly to my Maker and I first ask Him the three most important questions pertaining to our life here in this world—whence, wherefore, whither? I immediately feel vibrations that thrill my whole being. These are the spirit illuminating the soul-power within, and in this exalted state, I see clearly what is obscure in my ordinary moods; then I feel capable of drawing inspiration from above, as Beethoven did.

Above all, I realize at such moments the tremendous significance of Jesus’ supreme revelation, ‘I and my Father are One’. Those vibrations assume the forms of distinct mental images, after I have formulated my desire and resolve in regard to what I want—namely, to be inspired so that I can compose something that will uplift and benefit humanity – something of permanent value. Straightaway the ideas flow in upon me, directly from God, and not only do I see distinct themes in my mind’s eye, but they are clothed in the right forms, harmonies and orchestration. Measure by measure, the finished product is revealed to me when I am in those rare, inspired moods, as they were to Tartini when he composed his greatest work—the Devil’s Trill Sonata. I have to be in a semi-trance condition to get such results—a condition when the conscious mind is in temporary abeyance and the subconscious is in control, for it is through the subconscious mind, which is a part of Omnipotence, that the inspiration comes. I have to be careful, however, not to lose consciousness, otherwise, the ideas fade away………

I always have had a definite purpose in view before invoking the Muse and entering into such a mood; and as I pointed out to you before, contemplating what Goethe, Milton and Tennyson said stimulated by fantasy to a powerful degree. Then when I felt those higher Cosmic vibrations, I knew that I was in touch with the same Power that inspired those great poets and also Bach, Mozart and Beethoven. Then the ideas which I was consciously seeking flowed in upon me with such force and speed, that I could only grasp and hold a few of them; I never was able to jot them all down; they came in instantaneous flashes and quickly faded away again, unless I fixed them on paper. The themes that will endure in my compositions all come to me in this way. It has always been such a wonderful experience that, I never before could induce myself to talk about it. I felt that I was, for the moment, in tune with the Infinite, and there is no thrill like it. I can understand why the great Nazarene attached so little importance to this life. He must have been in much closer rapport with the Infinite force of the Universe, than any poet or composer ever was, and He, no doubt had glimpses of that next plane, He called ‘Heaven’. (Johannes Brahms – Source - Arthur Abell ‘Talks with Great Composers’)

‘But I have nothing left to give you. My apples are gone.' Said the tree. 'My teeth are too weak for apples,' said the boy. 'My branches are gone,' said the tree. 'You cannot swing on them.' 'I am too old to swing on branches,' said the boy. 'My trunk is gone,' said the tree. 'You cannot climb.' 'I am too tired to climb,' said the boy. 'I am sorry,' sighed the tree. 'I wish that I could give you something, but I have nothing left. I am just an old stump.' 'I don't need very much now,' said the boy. 'just a quiet place to sit and rest. I am very tired.' 'Well,' said the tree, straightening herself up as much as she could, 'well, an old stump is good for sitting and resting. Come, Boy, sit down. Sit down and rest.' And the boy did. And the tree was happy. (from The Giving Tree by Shell Silverstein)

I need to be alone. I need to ponder my shame and my despair in seclusion; I need the sunshine and the paving stones of the streets without companions, without conversation, face to face with myself, with only the music of my heart for company. (Henry Miller)

There is no subtler, no surer means of overturning the existing basis of society than to debauch the currency. The process engages all the hidden forces of economic law on the side of destruction, and does it in a manner which not one man in a million is able to diagnose. (John Keynes - The Economic Consequences of the Peace)

The universe is made of stories, not atoms. (Muriel Rukeyser)

The governing pattern a culture obeys is a master story – one narrative in society that takes over the others, shrinking diversity and forming a monoculture. When you’re inside a master story at a particular time in history, you tend to accept its definition of reality. You unconsciously believe and act on certain things, and disbelieve and fail to act on other things. That’s the power of the monoculture; it’s able to direct us without us knowing too much about it….

A monoculture doesn’t mean that everyone believes exactly the same thing or acts in exactly the same way, but that we end up sharing key beliefs and assumptions that direct our lives.

Because a monoculture is mostly left unarticulated until it has been displaced years later, we learn its boundaries by trial and error. We somehow come to know how the mater story goes, though no one tells us exactly what the story is or what its rules are. We develop a strong sense of what’s expected of us at work, in our families and communities – even if we sometimes choose not to meet those expectations. We usually don’t ask ourselves where those expectations came from in the first place. They just exist – or they do until we find ourselves wishing things were different somehow, though we can’t say exactly what we would change, or how.….

The independent life begins with discovering what it means to live alongside the monoculture, given your particular circumstances, in your particular life and time, which will not be duplicated for anyone else. Out of your own struggle to live an independent life, a parallel structure may eventually be birthed. But the development and visibility of that parallel structure is not the goal – the goal is to live many stories, within a wider spectrum of human values.

(F. S. Michaels - Monoculture: How One Story Is Changing Everything)

Once we’ve thrown off our habitual paths, we think all is lost; but it’s only here that the new and the good begins. (Leo Tolstoy)

The [Bush] aide said that guys like me were ''in what we call the reality-based community,'' which he defined as people who ''believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.'' I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. ''That's not the way the world really works anymore,'' he continued. ''We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality -- judiciously, as you will -- we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.'' (Ron Suskind)

We make sense of the present only through the lens of the past… our conceptions of the past are affected by the mental images we employ to solve present problems, so that collective memory is essentially a reconstruction of the past in the light of the present. … Memory needs continuous feeding from collective sources and is sustained by social and moral props. (French philosopher Maurice Halbwachs)

The first panacea for a mismanaged nation is inflation of the currency; the second is war. Both bring a temporary prosperity; both bring a permanent ruin. But both are the refuge of political and economic opportunists. (Ernest Hemingway)

It is good to have an end to journey toward; but it is the journey that matters, in the end. (Ernest Hemingway)

Solitude produces to some extent a divine bewilderment. It is the smoke of the burning bush. (Victor Hugo)

The true division of humanity is this: the luminous and the dark. To diminish the number of the dark - to increase the number of the luminous, there is the aim. That is why we cry - Education! Knowledge! To learn to read is to kindle a fire. Every syllable spelled sparkles. But, whoever says ‘Light’ does not necessarily say ‘Joy’. There is suffering in the light, as excess burns. Flame is hostile to the wing. To burn and yet to fly! This is the miracle of genius. (Victor Hugo - Les Miserables)

If the radical is the Ideal, yes I am a radical. A society which admits poverty, a religion which admits Hell, a humanity which sanctions war seems to me an inferior society, religion and humanity and it is towards the higher society, the higher religion and humanity that I turn, society without a king, humanity without frontiers, religion without a book. Yes, I fight the priest who sells a lie and the judge who metes out injustice. Every man is a proprietor and no man a master. That is to me the true social and political economy. (Victor Hugo – in defending Les Miserables)

God. The Soul. Responsibility. This three-fold idea is sufficient for mankind. It has been sufficient for me. It is the true religion. I have lived in it. I die in it. Truth, light, justice, conscience. It is God. (Victor Hugo – from his will)

Don’t be daunted. Just do your job. Continue to show up for your piece of it, whatever that might be. If your job is to dance, do your dance. If the divine, cockeyed genius assigned to your case decides to let some sort of wonderment be glimpsed, for just one moment through your efforts, then ‘Ole!’ And if not, do your dance anyhow. And ‘Ole!’ to you, nonetheless. I believe this and I feel that we must teach it. ‘Ole!’ to you, none-the-less, just for having the sheer human love and stubbornness to keep showing up.

(Elizabeth Gilbert)

When words fail us, we need to look into the silence in order to find the answers. (sculptress May Ayres - God’s Wars)

From the brutal clash of ideas, light shines forth: Some it makes gods, some it makes men … some it makes slaves, some free. (Heraclitus)

We live in a universe which has neither past nor future. A strange world in which we are alive and dead in the same instant. In this eternal present, our sense of the passage of time is nothing more than a giant cosmic illusion…. My basic idea is that time as such does not exist. There is no invisible river of time. But there are things that you could call instants of time, or 'Nows'. As we live, we seem to move through a succession of Nows, and the question is, what are they? They are arrangements of everything in the universe relative to each other in any moment, for example, now. (Julian Barbour, physicist)

When you think about it, here we are, we started off on this planet — this fragment of dust spinning around the sun — and in 4 billion years we gradually changed from bacteria into us. That is a spellbinding story. (Richard Dawkins)

Five Arguments Against the Extraterrestrial Origin of Unidentified Flying Objects", Journal of Scientific Exploration, 1990:

Scientific opinion has generally followed public opinion in the belief that unidentified flying objects either do not exist (the "natural phenomena hypothesis") or, if they do, must represent evidence of a visitation by some advanced race of space travellers (the extraterrestrial hypothesis or "ETH"). It is the view of the author that research on UFOs need not be restricted to these two alternatives. On the contrary, the accumulated data base exhibits several patterns tending to indicate that UFOs are real, represent a previously unrecognized phenomenon, and that the facts do not support the common concept of "space visitors." Five specific arguments articulated here contradict the ETH:

· unexplained close encounters are far more numerous than required for any physical survey of the earth;

· the humanoid body structure of the alleged "aliens" is not likely to have originated on another planet and is not biologically adapted to space travel;

· the reported behavior in thousands of abduction reports contradicts the hypothesis of genetic or scientific experimentation on humans by an advanced race;

· the extension of the phenomenon throughout recorded human history demonstrates that UFOs are not a contemporary phenomenon; and

· the apparent ability of UFOs to manipulate space and time suggests radically different and richer alternatives.

(Jacques F. Vallée – propounder of The Multidimensional Visitation Hypothesis – MVH)

Beauty: I can live with doubt and uncertainty and not knowing. I think it's much more interesting to live not knowing than to have answers that might be wrong… I don't feel frightened by not knowing things, by being lost in the mysterious universe without having any purpose…

Honours: I don’t see that it makes any point that someone in the Swedish academy just decides that this work is noble enough to receive a prize — I’ve already gotten the prize. The prize is the pleasure of finding a thing out, the kick in the discovery, the observation that other people use it — those are the real things. The honors are unreal to me. I don’t believe in honors...

Curiosity: The Big Bang is a much more exciting story to many people than the tales which other people used to make up, when wondering about the universe we lived in on the back of a turtle or something like that. They were wonderful stories, but the truth is so much more remarkable. And, so, what’s the wonder in physics to me is that it’s revealed the truth is so remarkable… (physicist & Nobel Prize winner Richard Feynman)

Take your profession seriously; don’t take yourself seriously. Don’t take yourself seriously in the process, because you really only matter to a certain degree in the whole circus out here. If a person is confident enough in the way they feel, whether it’s an art form or whether it’s just in life, it comes off — you don’t have anything to prove; you can just be what you are.

(Clint Eastwood)

It is what we make out of what we have, not what we are given, that separates one person from another. Peace is the greatest weapon for development that any people can have. (Nelson Mandela)

Love something. I think we’ve got to learn to love something deeply. I think it’s love. It sounds sentimental as hell, but I really think it is. (Andrew Wyeth, artist)

Our ability to reconstruct the past, to interpret the present, and to construct the future gives us the power to be happy. (Philip Zimbardo - The Time Paradox)

Death is very likely the single best invention of life. It is life’s change agent. … Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. (Steve Jobs)

Creativity is just connecting things. When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn’t really do it, they just saw something. It seemed obvious to them after a while. That’s because they were able to connect experiences they’ve had and synthesize new things. And the reason they were able to do that was that they’ve had more experiences or they have thought more about their experiences than other people. Unfortunately, that’s too rare a commodity. A lot of people haven’t had very diverse experiences. So they don’t have enough dots to connect, and they end up with very linear solutions without a broad perspective on the problem. The broader one’s understanding of the human experience, the better design we will have. (Steve Jobs)

This is about the nature of time, the beginning of the universe, and the underlying structure of physical reality. We’re not thinking small here. The questions we’re tackling are ancient and honorable ones: Where did time and space come from? Is the universe we see all there is, or are there other ‘universes’ beyond what we can observe? How is the future different from the past?

We find ourselves, not as a central player in the life of the cosmos, but as a tiny epiphenomenon, flourishing for a brief moment as we ride a wave of increasing entropy. Purpose and meaning are not to be found in the laws of nature, or in the plans of any external agent. It is our job to create them. One of those purposes — among many — stems from our urge to explain the world around us the best we can. If our lives are brief and undirected, at least we can take pride in our mutual courage as we struggle to understand things much greater than ourselves.

(Sean Carroll - From Eternity to Here: The Quest for the Ultimate Theory of Time)

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