STILL QUESTING
Unless
we are prepared to make demands on one another, we can enjoy only the most
rudimentary kind of common life.
(Christopher Lasch)
A
misplaced compassion degrades both the victims, who are reduced to objects of pity,
and their would-be benefactors, who find it easier to pity their fellow
citizens than to hold them up to impersonal standards, attainment of which
would entitle them to respect. (ibid)
FRIENDLESS - adj. Having no
favors to bestow. Destitute of fortune. Addicted to utterance of truth and
common sense. [The Devil's
Dictionary]
What kind of peace do I mean? What kind of peace do we
seek? Not a Pax Americana enforced on the world by American weapons of war. Not
the peace of the grave or the security of the slave. I am talking about genuine
peace, the kind of peace that makes life on earth worth living, the kind that
enables men and nations to grow and to hope and to build a better life for
their children - not merely peace for Americans but peace for all men and women
- not merely peace in our time but peace for all time. (President John F.
Kennedy at American University 10 June 1963)
If something happens that is not consistent
with our present knowledge, it is necessary for us to expand our awareness of
the variable space of nature and provide a modeling concept that included both
all that we know plus this new fact.
That is what we must start projecting to the people who say: 'Look, I don't understand it; therefore it
doesn't happen.' We have to get them to
start thinking along the lines of, 'Nature is so much more than I thought,
let's expand our thinking and include this.'
Then they can feel comfortable because they don't have to throw away
what they already know, because what they already know isn't wrong. It merely means that it's not complete. (Dr.
William Tiller)
Once, not long ago, there was a great drought in a province of China.
The situation was catastrophic. The Catholics made processions, the Protestants
made prayers, and the Chinese burned joss-sticks and shot off guns to frighten
away the demons of the drought; but to no avail. Finally the people said:
"We will fetch the rain-maker." And from another province a dried up
old man appeared. The only thing he asked for was a quiet little house
somewhere, and there he locked himself in for three days. On the fourth day the
clouds gathered and there was a great snow-storm at the time of year when no
snow was expected - an unusual amount - and the town was filled with rumors
about the wonderful rain-maker. Asked what he had been doing during the three
days that had caused the snow to fall on the fourth he said: "I come from
another country where things are in order. Here they are out of order; they are
not as they should be by the ordinance of heaven. Therefore the whole country
is not in Tao, and I also am not in the natural order of things because I am in
a disordered country. So I had to wait three days until I was back in Tao and
then naturally, the rain came.
The rain-maker did not do anything. He waited until he was in balance.
Then, his quality of being rectified the state of imbalance that existed around
him. Perhaps we need to become rain-makers... (Anne
Baring)
For me it was the Christian story in which I sheltered, but later I had
fallen out of it. I had fallen out of a world into a universe that seemed
infinitely indifferent, even hostile, to my purposes and yearnings - out of a
finite astrological cosmos into an infinite astronomical universe. This tipped
me into an existential abyss, even if it was a 'disinheritance from delusion'.
The mind and soul have unfathomable depths akin to the geological strata of the
past, or, as Hopkins put it, 'mind has mountains, cliffs of fall frightful,
sheer, no-man-fathomed ……..Eventually I may arrive home, only to find that I
never really left! Meanwhile, to survive, certainly to flourish, I must breathe
transcendentally, and that in a sense is what sacraments are, breathing-holes
in which we can breathe in blessedness. (John
Moriarty)
. . . Come my friends,
'tis not too late to seek a newer world. (Alfred Lord Tennyson)
What a piece of work is man, how noble in
reason, how infinite in faculty . . . In action how like an angel! In
apprehension how like a god.
(Shakespeare)
As in a Dream
As in a dream, this simple magic
Of space and time, of here and there.
What is this here, what is this there,
What is this magic of location?
This ocean of presence, these waves of arising,
The wonder of anything happening at all?
Time to be open; Space open to be,
Living the dream; Dreaming our life.
The most beautiful thing
we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and
science... To know that what is impenetrable to us really exists, manifesting
itself as the highest wisdom and the most radiant beauty which our dull
faculties can comprehend only in their most primitive forms--this knowledge,
this feeling, is at the center of true religiousness. (Einstein)
I have learned through
bitter experience the one supreme lesson to conserve my anger, and as heat
conserved is transmitted into energy, even so our anger controlled can be
transmitted into a power that can move the world. (Mahatma
Gandhi)
[In the Buddhist view, all separateness
is an illusion - individual selves are more or less arbitrary divisions across
the continuum of life. The Buddhist self lives in a world without frontiers and
must recognize a great range of others, human and otherwise, as literally
continuous with itself.]
Sincere forgiveness isn't
colored with expectations that the other person apologize or change. Don't
worry whether or not they finally understand you. Love them and release them.
Life feeds back truth to people in its own way and time -- just like it does
for you and me. (Sara Paddison, The Hidden Power of the Heart)
The
values of a society have much to do with the functional significance of dreams.
Awake and facing outward, we live in a society where a given set of values is
already in place. Facing inward while dreaming we bring an evaluative process
into play that reveals in a more consistently honest fashion the felt impact of
the current realities impinging on us. The discrepancy between the waking view
and the metaphorical portrayal of the situation in the dream creates the
opportunity for emotional growth. Dreaming, however, is a nighttime activity.
The remembered dream has to be "socialized" for its full informative
potential to be realized. That means work has to be done …. Truth is healing,
however we come by it.
…The
two different forms of consciousness [dreaming and waking] reflect the unique
and paradoxical predicament we are in. We are one with the material fabric of
the world and at the same time capable of observing that world, reflecting on
it and engaged in changing it. When awake we function in a world characterized
by its discreteness and patterning. When asleep and dreaming we shift to a more
diffuse imagistic portrayal of residual feeling tones. Awake, the
feeling tones that later surface in dreaming consciousness are dimly felt in a
manner akin to a Greek chorus registering the background dissonance between a
particular conscious response to a given experience and the seeming unawareness
of its actual felt impact. Asleep and dreaming there is a figure-ground
reversal highlighting the feelings involved while the waking ego is assigned to
a more reactive role. One can see the complementarities between waking and
dreaming consciousness. To the extent that one prevails the other is lessened
as if constrained by a kind of emotional uncertainty principle. (Montague Ullman)
One of the main functions of mainstream religion is to protect people
against direct experience of God. (Carl Jung)
I taught psychology of religion for almost 25
years and then had a personal mystical experience, after which I suddenly
understood what I had been teaching all those years. … Much of mainstream
religion reminds me of vaccination: you go to church and get a little something
that then protects you against the real thing. You think that you have already
arrived because you go to church on Sunday. That belief then becomes a serious
obstacle in any kind of spiritual quest that would have to involve some personal
practice leading to direct experiences.
(Walter
H. Clark, via Stanislav Grof)
It has been repeatedly observed that the consciousness of people in a
state of clinical death can detach from the body and move to various close or
remote locations while maintaining the capacity to perceive the environment.
... Ken Ring is now studying people who are congenitally blind because of
organic reasons and who have never seen anything in their entire life. In
near-death experiences when their consciousness leaves the body, they can see
without the mediation of the optical system. (Stanislav
Grof)
If there appears to be a conflict between
religion and science, it is very likely bogus religion and bogus science. (Ken Wilber)
The work of the Danish mystic Martinus (1890-1981)
substantiates what happens during an NDE. As human consciousness consists of
electromagnetic rays (ray-formed, non-physical matter) and as this type of
matter is indestructible, the human consciousness survives physical death.
Ray-formed matter is measurable and contains not only consciousness, but also
the life-force of the being (hence the flat line when the life force leaves the
body). The ray-formed matter constitutes a field of energy and this field
contains the self or "I". The physical body is only the instrument of
the "I" and the brain is the plug through which the energy field
electrifies the body. We are essentially the same whether we have a physical
body or not, as the core of our being consists of another type of matter than
physical matter. Death is an illusion. (Else
Byskov)
From “Mental Prisons” - Martinus
It is absolutely useless to want to fulfill the morality of a higher
step if we have not undergone precisely that evolution which is necessary to
make us identical with the beings on that higher step. No being can by an
effort of will suddenly, miraculously raise himself to a higher step in
evolution. The lion, the tiger or, in other words, the animal does not become a
human being simply by an act of will. This transformation or change is not an
act of will but a question of evolution. And in the same way, the transition
from one view of life or morality to another is not an act of will but a
question of evolution. One thus understands that it would be foolish and
glaringly against all justice to insist that one's fellow-beings absolutely
must manifest the same morality or view of life as oneself. It is this
foolishness which is the greatest undermining factor in the fate of the
uninitiated terrestrial human being.
Since he is still, in principle, a plant among a profusion of
plant-species in a meadow, he cannot possibly be happy as long as he lives in
the illusion that all the other plants or fellow-beings should have exactly the
same colour or mentality as himself. He will never be able to get this desire
fulfilled. Disappointment, feelings of martyrdom and depression will fill his
soul, since the flowers of the field do not change colour or allow themselves
to be standardized because a single little flower in its foolishness wishes it.
And this little flower, which is called "the terrestrial human
being", must therefore as quickly as possible learn to understand that it
is not a matter of getting all his fellow beings, the profusion of colours and
beauty of the flower-meadow, standardized according to his foolishness, lack of
wisdom or illusion, but that the absolutely only thing needful is, on the
contrary, to eliminate as quickly as possible this illusion or foolishness by
trying to come to an understanding of the fact that the profusion of
colour-orgies of the flower-meadow, whether in the form of fellow-beings or in
the form of plants, exists exclusively in order to be divine instructions to
the individual and not in order that the individual through this should
instruct the Godhead. As long as the individual hates and persecutes everything
which does not appear in his own image or his own favour he is taking part in
destroying and wiping out everything which creates "God's image" in
life.
The only way out of the mental prisons of life: Since the highest or the
most perfect form of happiness is to see in everything and everyone (which
means everything which is accessible to sense perception) only "God's
image", it is obvious that one is obliged to live unhappily when one, even
if unconsciously, takes part in sabotaging this "image of God". When
one is unhappy, one is shut out from the real life which is exclusively the very
highest happiness; and where one is shut out from the real life or the true
happiness one is mentally imprisoned. And as the confinement in this mental
prison is maintained exclusively through one's desire to standardize the world
and insist that everything and everyone should be otherwise than they are
precisely at the moment, one cannot possibly be happy. In this insistence one
is in total conflict with the Godhead. One wants the world in "one's own
image". But the world can only be in "God's image".
Life and the world will therefore be a mental imprisonment and
misfortune with the ensuing physical suffering or unhappy fate until one
understands that it is not "God's image" which should be turned into
one's image but, on the contrary, this image which should be transformed
to being in "God's image". The key to coming out of the dark, mental
imprisonment of superstition and illusion lies exclusively in coming to
understand that "everything is very good" and that our fellow-beings
cannot possibly manifest anything other than what is characteristic of their
step in evolution, and that this manifestation consequently cannot possibly be
a justifiable basis for intolerance, hatred or persecution of the being in
question. And in the full understanding of this, one will, in harmony with the
world-redeemer, "turn the right cheek when one is smitten on the
left" and cry to heaven: "Father, forgive them, for they know not
what they do". (Martinus)
Homo sapiens, the first truly free species, is about to decommission
natural selection, the force that made us.... Soon we must look deep within
ourselves and decide what we wish to become. (Edward O.
Wilson “Consilience”)
Our mental and emotional diets determine our overall energy levels,
health, and well-being to a far greater extent than most people realize. Every
thought and feeling, no matter how big or small, impacts our inner energy
reserves. (HeartMath)
Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:
The Soul that rises with us, our life's Star,
Hath had elsewhere its setting,
And cometh from afar:
Not in entire forgetfulness,
And not in utter nakedness,
But trailing clouds of glory do we come
From God, who is our home;
Heaven lies about us in our infancy!
Shades of the prison-house begin to close
Upon the growing Boy,
But He beholds the light, and whence it flows,
He sees it in his joy;
The Youth, who daily farther from the east
Must travel, still is Nature's Priest,
And by the vision splendid
Is on his way attended;
At length the Man perceives it die away,
And fade into the light of common day. (William
Wordsworth)
Although we have become accustomed to thinking of the universe as a huge
empty space - a vacuum - in which planets, stars, and other sundry things move
around, Ervin Laszlo reminded us in The Creative Cosmos that the
universe is not a vacuum, but rather a plenum, in the sense that there is no
such thing as empty space. Every cubic millimetre of what we think of as empty
space is packed with a bewildering variety of fields, all interpenetrating each
other. At any point in the universe, including any point on or in our own
bodies, there are an incalculable number of gravitational and electromagnetic
fields. (Christopher
Thomson)
SETH says:
·
Energy is the basis of the universe
·
Energy is consciousness: that is to say, mind is inherent in all matter
from the elementary particle to the human.
·
The universe is constructed from mental activity and from all
consciousness.
·
All conscious gestalts are constrained by their level of development but
willingly cooperate to create a consensus reality. In the simplest terms, all
is energy, energy is consciousness, and all cooperate for the development of
all.
(Jane
Roberts)
The Jews, I find, are very, very selfish. They care not how many Estonians,
Latvians, Finns, Poles, Yugoslavs or Greeks get murdered or mistreated... as
long as the Jews get special treatment. Yet, when they are in power ... neither
Hitler nor Stalin has anything on them for cruelty or mistreatment to the
underdog.
(President
Harry S. Truman)
We cannot teach people anything; we can only
help them discover it within themselves. (Galileo
Galilei)
I often use the analogy of a chess game: one can learn all the rules of
chess, but one doesn't know how to play well. The present situation in physics
is as if we know chess, but we don't know one or two rules. But in this part of
the board where things are in operation, those one or two rules are not
operating much and we can get along pretty well without understanding those rules.
That's the way it is, I would say, regarding the phenomena of life,
consciousness and so forth..
(Richard
Feynman)
God was invented to explain
mystery. God is always invented to explain those things that you do not
understand. Now, when you finally discover how something works, you get some
laws which you're taking away from God; you don't need him anymore. But you
need him for the other mysteries. So therefore you leave him to create the
universe because we haven't figured that out yet; you need him for
understanding those things which you don't believe the laws will explain, such
as consciousness, or why you only live to a certain length of time -- life and
death -- stuff like that. God is always associated with those things that you
do not understand. Therefore I don't think that the laws can be considered to
be like God because they have been figured out. (ibid)
Consciousness
converges with the self as a landing tern touches the outspread feet of its
shadow on the sand; precisely, toe hits toe. The tern folds its wings to sit;
its shadow dips and spreads over the sand to meet and cup its breast. (Anne Dillard ‘An American
Childhood’)
The sense of direction
Homing pigeons can find their way
back to their loft over hundreds of miles of unfamiliar terrain. Migrating
European swallows travel thousands of miles to their feeding place, and have to
cross unfamiliar terrain. Pigeons do not know their way home by remembering the
twists and turns of the outward journey, because birds taken in closed vans by
devious routes find their way home perfectly well, as do birds that have been
anaesthetized on the outward journey, or transported in rotating drums. They do
not navigate by the sun, because pigeons can home on cloudy days and can even
be trained to navigate at night. However, they may use the sun as a simple
compass to keep their bearings. Although they use landmarks in familiar
terrain, they can home from unfamiliar places hundreds of kilometres from their
home, where no familiar landmarks are visible. They cannot smell their home
from hundreds of miles away, especially when it is downwind, although smell may
play a part in their homing ability when they are close to familiar territory.
Pigeons deprived of their sense of smell by researchers were still able to find
their homes.
Some biologists hope that the homing
of pigeons might turn out to be explicable in terms of a magnetic sense. But
even if pigeons have a compass-sense (which is not proven), this could not explain
their ability to navigate. If you were taken blindfold to an unknown
destination and given a compass, you would know where north was, but not the
direction of your home. The failure of conventional attempts to explain pigeon
homing and many other kinds of animal navigation implies the existence of a
sense of direction as yet unrecognized by institutional science. This could
have major implications for the understanding of animal migrations, and would
shed light on the human sense of direction, much better developed in
traditional peoples, such as the bushmen of the Kalahari or Polynesian
navigators, than in modern urban people. (Rupert
Sheldrake)
Embryogenesis lies at the
heart of our riddle. It is the unadulterated text of both creation and evolution.
Every time a creature forms anew out of raw atoms it makes a replica of life
itself. The way in which it organizes its body and complexifies is the way in
which meaning was invented. (Richard
Grossinger)
In a sense our thoughts
are the explicate forms thrown up by the underlying movements of the implicate
orders of mind. Like
the vortex of a river . . . thoughts have no absolute, independent existence of
their own but are constantly being supported by the underlying processes of
their ground. Ultimately this movement of mind merges into that of matter so
that the two should not be considered as dual aspects of nature but as arising
out of the same underlying ground. In a similar sense, individual minds could
be said to arise out of the one ground. They represent relatively stable forms,
identities, as it were, within the underlying background. In this way it
appears that individual minds have a common or collective origin that has
something in common with that of matter. In a sense, therefore, mind is able to act upon
mind, and mind and matter exert an influence one on the other. But this should be thought of not as some
form of causal interaction since individual minds, and mind and matter, are not
fundamentally separate but are simply the explicate forms that emerge out of a
common, generative order. (David
Peat – colleague of David Bohm)
Synchronicities are
manifestations, in mind and matter, of the unknown ground that underlies them
both .... The parallelism between the objective and the subjective aspects of
the universe do not so much arise through causal connections, or linear
patterns in time, but out of underlying dynamics that arc common to both. (ibid)
I want to call attention to
something we often pay lip service to but fail to appreciate fully; namely,
that we are all much less separate than we think we are. The preoccupation with
separateness has come about by the way our personal lives have been
booby-trapped by the failures of history. We go about our daily tasks with a
limited and often expedient view of our connection to all other members
of the human species. Were we to allow a truer vision of this underlying state
of interconnectedness we would be more inclined to remedy rather than increase
the fragmentation and separateness among members of the human species that has
been our heritage and that we so blindly perpetuate. (Montague Ullman)
We avoid the things that
we're afraid of because we think there will be dire consequences if we confront
them. But the truly dire consequences in our lives come from avoiding things
that we need to learn about or discover. (Shakti
Gawain)
Electromagnetic
energy is used by the body to integrate, interrelate, harmonize, and execute
diverse physiological processes. Such intrinsic energy is in fact created and
transmitted in the body, and it controls specific biological functions.
Natural electromagnetic energy is an
omnipresent factor in the environment of each organism on earth. From an
evolutionary standpoint, nature would favor those organisms that developed a
capacity to accept information about the earth, atmosphere, and the cosmos in
the form of electromagnetic signals and to adjust their internal processes and
behavior accordingly. Thus it follows that natural environmental electromagnetic
energy could convey information to an organism about its surroundings, thereby
facilitating behavioral changes. Studies of biological cycles and animal
navigation support the thesis that environmental electromagnetic energy
mediates the transfer of information from the environment to the organism.
If nature gave certain organisms the
ability to receive information about the environment via unseen electromagnetic
signals, then there must also have been the gift of an ability to discriminate
between meaningful and meaningless signals. Signals having no information, or
those outside certain physiological bandwidths or intensity ranges, would have
to be recognized and responded to differently than informationally significant
signals (which lead to behavioral changes that are ultimately geared to help
the organism survive or compete). Based on these considerations, our original
hypothesis led to the further conclusion that organisms would be particularly
sensitive to artificial electromagnetic energy having electrical
characteristics - frequency and intensity - similar to those of natural
environmental electromagnetic fields. Signals outside this physiological range
would elicit a nonspecific systemic reaction geared toward the re-establishment
of homeostasis. Low-strength electromagnetic fields within the physiological
frequency range can alter the electroencephalogram, the electrocardiogram,
biological rhythms, calcium metabolism, and human and animal behavior.
Electromagnetic energy at non-physiological frequencies and intensities induces
adaptive homeostatic responses in animals and humans. (Robert
Becker and Andrew Marino)
A
work of art - expressing its implicit interpretation by its technique - is a
rotating, many-faceted gem against psychically darkened backgrounds; so too is
a dream. (Daniel E. Schneider, M.D ‘The
Psychoanalyst and the Artist’)
Analogously, our dreams
“digest” residual feelings triggered by recent events and evaluate them in
regard to their significance for our future. It does this by opening up our
remote memory bank and exploring the degree to which a current concern links up
with unresolved tensions in our past. Dreams arise spontaneously and
involuntarily. No one can consciously decide to have a particular dream or consciously
design the opening scene. (Montague
Ullman)
Akin to an aesthetic
experience, all of us have within us a musician endowed with perfect pitch who
knows when we are singing off key and has no hesitation in calling it to our
attention. He doesn’t persuade or preach. He simply presents. It’s up to us to
act on it. That way lies emotional (ibid)
In some strange way we do
not yet fully understand, unconscious domains resonate with each other more
spontaneously and effectively than do our conscious domains. Put differently,
it is as if, in our dreams, we are tapping into a single universal unconscious
domain. (ibid)
Metaphor is a frequent component of everyday discourse. As such, it renders speech more vivid and more expressive of the meaning to be conveyed. In the dream state the metaphor appears to function in a similar, but also somewhat different way. It is similar in regard to the concern with the qualities of dramatic presentation and vividness. It is different insofar as it is not concerned with the transfer of a meaningful statement from one person to another. In the dream state it is an integral part of a process of self-confrontation concerned not with the intelligibility and referential meaning of a given aspect of experience, but rather with the felt reactions associated with that experience. This technique does not solve the real problems at issue, but it does succeed in reducing an intangible and unknown set of operating causes to familiar and manipulable quantities, and in that way creates the possibility of resolving what, in the absence of more accurate knowledge, would be irreconcilable events. A personal myth is created which appears analogous to the mythopoetic process as it operates culturally.
The significant aspects of the mythopoetic process may be stated as follows:
We have the ongoing activities of a
given society, including undesirable effects arising apart from the will and
intent of the members of this society.
There are the associated felt reactions
of a distressing or disturbing nature.
There is the subjective
explanation, which is objectively false but expressed in terms of referents
external to the individual. The myth through the device of metaphor allows for
illusory solutions in the absence of real mastery over some of the harsher
realities of life. (ibid)
[Dreams
appear to be both a projection of the personality and a reflection of the
culture.]
Liberal democracy has never dared face the fact that
industrial capitalism is an intensely coercive form of organization of society
that cumulatively constrains men and all of their institutions to work the will
of the minority who hold and wield the economic power; and that this relentless
warping of men's lives and forms of association becomes less and less the
result of voluntary decisions by 'bad' or 'good' men and more and more an
impersonal web of coercions dictated by the need to 'keep the system running'. (sociologist Robert S.
Lynd)
The world of dreams is our real world whilst we are sleeping, because our attention then lapses from the sensible world. Conversely when we wake, the attention usually lapses from the dream-world and that becomes unreal. But if a dream haunts us and compels our attention during the day, it is very apt to remain figuring in our consciousness as a sort of sub-universe alongside of the waking world. Most people have probably had dreams which it is hard to imagine not to have been glimpses into an actually existing region of being. (William James)
I've
looked at life from both sides now,
From win and lose and still somehow
It's life's illusions I recall
I really don't know life at all. (Joni
Mitchell)
As all newspaper writers are aware, truth can be an error of judgment. (John
Kenneth Galbraith)
In any great organization,
it is far, far safer to be wrong with the majority than to be right alone. (ibid)
Trickle-down theory – this is the less than elegant metaphor that, if
one feeds the horse enough oats, some will pass through to the road for the sparrows.
(ibid)
There can be no knowledge without emotion. We may be aware of a truth,
yet until we have felt its force, it is not ours. To the cognition of the brain
must be added the experience of the soul. (Arnold
Bennett -1867-1931)
It is quite beyond me how anyone can believe God speaks to us in books
and stories. If the world does not directly reveal to us our relationship to
it, if our hearts fail to tell us what we owe ourselves and others, we shall
assuredly not learn it from books, which are at best designed but to give names
to our errors.
(Goethe)
"The
Artist"
Are you aware...
That within you dwells an Artist...
A Creator?
Your life is its handiwork...
A living canvas
Spread for all to see.
The Artist in you
Is destined to create a Masterpiece...
But, the Craftsman's work
Is not yet finished--
Nor shall it ever be.
In Truth...
The work has only just begun.
Glorious, wondrous, beautiful, exotic forms
Are being imaged now
In the artist's mind.
Mighty new brush strokes
Will soon bring new shape and color
To the canvas you know as your world. (Jack
Boland)
The thousand mysteries around us
would not trouble us but would rather interest us, if only we had cheerful,
healthy hearts.
(Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche)
Let a man be true to his intentions and his efforts to fulfill them, and the point is gained, whether he succeed or not. (Thomas Carlyle)
Like physical light (energy) and elementary particles (mass), consciousness (information) enjoys a wave/particle duality which allows it to circumvent and penetrate barriers, and to resonate with other consciousnesses and with appropriate aspects of its environment. Thereby it can both acquire and insert information, both objective and subjective, from and to its resonant partners. (Jahn)
If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a
hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory
gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor
yourself, you will succumb in every battle. (Sun
Tzu, The Art of War)
Truth is an illusion, and illusion is truth. Humanity has never lived except in error, and besides there is no truth, since the world is in perpetual change. If you succeed in building up a true image of the world, it will cease to be true to your grandchildren. (Remy de Gourmont)
Once one knows what really
matters, one ceases to be voluble. And what does really matter? That is easy:
thinking and doing, doing and thinking---and these are the sum of all
wisdom...Both must move ever onward in life, to and fro, like breathing in and
breathing out. Whoever makes it a rule to test action by thought, thought by
action, cannot falter, and if he does, will soon find his way back to the right
road. (Goethe)
The first and last thing required
of genius is the love of truth. (ibid)
After fifteen minutes nobody looks
at a rainbow. (ibid)
Everything is simpler than you
think and at the same time more complex than you imagine. (ibid)
Syncretism is the acknowledgement that a single Tradition runs through and nurtures all religions, all learning, all philosophy. The wise man does not discriminate; he gathers together all the shreds of light, from wherever they come (Umberto Eco – ‘Foucault´s Pendulum’)
Of course, you attribute to others what you’re doing yourself, and since what you’re doing yourself is hateful, the others become hateful. But since the others, as a rule, would like to do the same hateful thing that you’re doing, they collaborate with you, hinting that – yes – what you attribute to them is actually what they have always desired. God blinds those He wishes to destroy; you just have to lend Him a helping hand. (ibid)
Truth is within ourselves; it takes no rise from outward things, whatever you may believe. There is an inmost center in all of us where truth abides in fullness...To know consists in opening a way out whence the imprisoned splendor may escape, not in effecting entry for a light supposed to be without. ( Buddha )
These are the years when more and more people around the world have became aware that the industrial society has become paradoxically unlivable, incalculably immoral, and ultimately deadly. (Peter S. Beagle – intro to Tolkien’s ‘The Lord of The Rings’)
Many things I can command the Mirror [of Galadrial] to reveal – and to some I can show what they desire to see. But the Mirror will also show things unbidden, and those are often stranger and more profitable than things which we wish to behold. What you will see, if you leave the Mirror free to work, I cannot tell. For it shows things that were, and things that are, and things that yet may be. But which it is that he sees, even the wisest can not always tell. Do you wish to look?
(J.R.R. Tolkien)
Time does not tarry ever, but change and growth is not in all things and places alike - - - - The passing seasons are but ripples ever repeated in the long long stream. Yet beneath the Sun all things must wear to an end at last. (ibid)
[Although you have wronged me, we are yet both fallible humans, so ---]
“No, there is no need to grovel and rub the face in the dirt. Merely bow the
head, as you enter, ever so slightly.” (George R Stewart – ‘Earth Abides’)
“Young man,” the grandfather
said, “are you happy?”
The young man looked startled at
this question, and he glanced in both directions before answering, and then he
spoke-“Yes, I am happy. Things are as they are, and I am part of them.” (ibid)
He alone is great and happy who requires neither to command
nor to obey in order to secure his being of some importance in the world. (Goethe)
I can promise to be
sincere, but not to be impartial. (ibid)
The web of this world
is woven of Necessity and Chance. Woe to him who has accustomed himself from
his youth up to find something necessary in what is capricious, and who would
ascribe something like reason to Chance and make a religion of surrendering to
it. (ibid)
These are
the five ways in which a human being reacts toward a source of danger, or on
any given problem: attack, flee,
avoid, neglect or succumb.
If a child
is punished and thereafter obeys, he can be considered to have succumbed.
And the value of a child who will succumb to punishment is so slight that the
Spartans would long since have drowned him, for it means he has sunk into an
apathy unless it so happens that he himself has computed the idea, bypassing
all reaction, that the thing for which he was punished was not bright (he can’t
be assisted in this computation if punishment is entered into his reactive mind
by the source trying to assist him). He can flee the punishment source,
which at least is not apathy but cowardice by popular judgment. He can neglect
the matter entirely and ignore the punishment source - and would have been
called a Stoic by the ancients, but might be called merely dull witted by his
friends. He can avoid the punishment source, which might give him the
doubtful compliment of being sly or cunning or pandering. Or he can attack
the punishment source either by direct action or by upsetting or fouling the
person or the possessions of the source - in which instance he would be called,
on direct action, a valiant fool, taking parental size into account, or in a
less direct fashion he could be called “covertly hostile” or could be said to
be “negating”; as long as a human being will attack as a response to a valid
threat, he can be said to be in fair mental condition – “normal” – and a child
is said to be acting “just like any normal child”.
(L. Ron Hubbard – ‘Dianetics’)
Ally Computation: A man is not victimized by his enemies so much as he is
murdered by his friends.- - - For the ally computation – above all things –
encysts the life force of the individual. Here is caught the free feeling, the
very heartbeat of life itself. A pre-clear is only placed in apathy by ally
computations. The body can be almost dead in the presence of antagonism and
still rally and fight. But it cannot fight its friends. (ibid)
- - - Here, in the ally and the antagonist, we have
the age-old tale of the hero and the villain, the heroine and the villainess,
Mazda and Ahriman, the cowboy in the white hat and the cowboy in the black. The
Hindu trinity is found, as source, in father, mother and unborn baby. But the
war of “good and evil” is found as reactive data in the engram bank in the form
of ally and antagonist. (ibid)
There is an accurate measuring stick for sanity. Sanity
is the ability to tell differences. The better one can tell differences, no
matter how minute, and know the width of these differences, the more rational
he is. The less one can tell differences and the closer one comes to thinking
in identities (A=A) the less sane he is. - - - The point here is that monotone
importance in a class of facts leads to nothing but the most cluttered
confusion. Here is evaluation: opinions are nothing, authority is useless, data
is secondary: establishment of relative importance is the key. Given the world
and the stars as a laboratory and a mind to compute the relative importance of
what it perceives, no problems can remain unsolved. Given masses of data with
monotone evaluation and one may have something which looks pretty but isn’t
useful. (ibid)
A fool is he who soon forgets Depression’s lesson when ‘tis passed. (Sri Ratnasekharasuri – a Jain master)
No mode of conscious life could have been devised which provided unalloyed happiness and unmixed goodness at the same time that it provided the varied experiences and diverse states necessary to develop the knowledge, intelligence, character and spiritually of the human being. Although some facets of this development could have been obtained by a one-sided monotonous experience, yielding only the pleasurable enjoyment of life, important parts of the psyche would then necessarily have been untouched by it. Only by providing a course of changing experiences which took a wider, more varied route and also included the opposites of suffering and evil, could the full complete evolution of man have been achieved.
The memory of the past darkness of ignorance heightens his appreciation of the present light of knowledge. The vivid contrast between the two conditions makes him much more conscious of the meaning and value of the higher one. Without the experiences of both to complement each other, he could not distinguish good from evil, bliss from misery, reality from appearance and truth from falsity. How, without conditions productive of sacrifice and self-denial, for instance, could the spiritual widening of his consciousness be obtained? Good becomes significant to him only as it stands in contrast to evil, which is indeed the Not-good. The consciousness of sound as sound always needs to be accompanied by the consciousness of its opposite and differentiating number, silence. There could be no manifestation of a universe without this play of opposites running completely through it. As soon as the One became Two, it began. Hence birth and death appear everywhere in the universe, pleasure and pain in man! (Dr. Paul Brunton – ‘The Spiritual Crisis of Man’)
The truthful work of a carpenter is judged by the senses whereas the truthful understanding of the human being is judged by the intelligence. And in the evolution of man, his senses have arrived at a more developed state than his intelligence. Hence, experience alone does not bring immediate wisdom as its fruit. Only after it is well and honestly thought over, well reasoned upon, or deeply intuited in an impersonal manner, does the fruit appear. This takes time, yet it both implies and elicits growth. (ibid)
The world is not bereft, like a corpse, of life and sense. It has both. There is within and behind every bit of it, even when undiscerned by us, a directing Mind, a governing spiritual principle. This everywhere-present principle of life and the creative cosmic power are one and the same – God. In both stars and men we see the sign or evidence of its incomparable intelligence and unbelievable omnipotence. (ibid)
There are followers of mysticism who use it as an escapism, who hope by some magical power to get a transformation of themselves and their lives without having to make any hard effort or to undergo any hard discipline. Three mystical doctrines particularly appeal to them and are constantly taken advantage of to avoid this effort and discipline, this necessary work on themselves. A fatalistic view of the law of recompense (karma) is taken to justify their stagnation or failure. An infantile view of the relationship with a master is taken to thrust on his shoulders the entire responsibility for their worldly life or problems, and spiritual progress. Third, a too personal view of the doctrine of grace is taken to seek God’s favoritism and to support the ego. (ibid)
Be reasonable in indulging in spiritual retreat from the uncertainties of worldly affairs. Make retreat occasional in frequency and limited in duration. - - - It is not necessary to flee to monasteries for this self-training; anyone can practice it in his own home. Sometimes he can even practice it better - for the opposition overcome, the difficulties mastered will give him a tested strength which no monastery can give. Lecturing to a multi-millionaire of his time who wished to renounce the world, the Buddha, arch-apostle of world renunciation though he was, said: “I say unto thee, remain in thy station in life and apply thyself with diligence to thy enterprise. It is not life, wealth and power that enslave men, but the cleaving to life, wealth and power.” When a man is concerned about lifelong retreat from the world, he may be obedient to a genuine inner need which at that time will make for his true progress. But he may also be obedient, not to genuine need, but to a timid fear of becoming entangled in the affairs of troubled mankind. In that case, he has merely transferred his selfishness from a positive to a negative state. His virtue, having no strain upon it, becomes a cloistered, enfeebled thing. (ibid)
Nature! We are enveloped
and embraced by her, incapable of emerging from her and incapable of entering
her more deeply. Unbidden and unwarned, she receives us into the circuits of
her dance, drifting onward with us herself, until we grow tired and drop from
her arms.
(Goethe)
From inaccessible mountain range, by way of desert untrod by human foot, to the ends of the unknown seas, the breath of the everlasting creative spirit is felt, rejoicing over every speck of dust that hearkens to it and lives. (ibid)
It is better to fail in originality than to
succeed in imitation. (Herman
Melville)
It is one thing to show a man that
he is in error, and another to put him in possession of truth. (John Locke)
We see from recent experience that those princes have accomplished most
who paid little to keeping their promises but who knew how to craftily
manipulate the minds of men. A certain prince of our time who it's just as well
not to name, preaches nothing but peace and mutual trust, yet he is the
determined enemy of both. (Machiavelli)
["You
will remain in reverie as long as necessary to resolve the issue you have been
dealing with in as satisfactory a manner as is possible at this time. Your
subconscious (or 'inner mind') will then allow you to awaken entirely on your
own, feeling refreshed and alert."]
a
remedy therapeutic prescription - naturalistic self-hypnosis
The human mind evolved to believe
in gods... Acceptance of the supernatural conveyed a great advantage throughout
prehistory, when the brain was evolving.
Thus it is in sharp contrast to science which was developed as a
product of the modern age and is not underwritten by genetic algorithms. (E.O.
Wilson)
The brain is a filter of consciousness which transmits part of the Vaster Consciousness of Reality, like a partially opaque glass allowing through a few rays of a super-solar blaze. The “degree of opacity” or threshold of brain activity can vary so that under certain conditions “more light” or an awareness of a wider and more intense range of consciousness is possible. Thus the physical brain is necessary only as a means to transmit a part of this Larger Consciousness into the dimension of ordinary reality perceived by individual normal waking consciousness. If an individual brain is damaged, disintegrates, or dies, this Larger Consciousness does not cease. (William James – Ingersoll Lectures)
Even basic Buddhist teachings
such as refuge are now being taken theistically because of inadequate
explanation. When we chant prayers like "I take refuge in the
Buddha," we barely mention - and we therefore ignore - its essential
meanings, such as knowing that one's ultimate nature is the Buddha. (Dzongsar Khyentse Rinpoche)
A flourishing human life is not a
life lived with an ageless body or an untroubled soul, but rather a life lived
in rhythmed time, mindful of time’s limits, appreciative of each season and
filled first of all with those intimate human relations that are ours only
because we are born, age, replace ourselves, decline and die – and know it. It
is a life of aspiration, made possible and born of experienced lack, of the
disproportion between the transcendent longings of the soul and the limited
capacities of our bodies and minds. (The
President’s Council on Bioethics - Beyond Therapy: Biotechnology and the
Pursuit of Happiness)
Animal behavior can be deduced
by careful observation and explained by evolution theory. By carefully observing terriers, we can
deduce that they were selected to creep into burrows. By carefully observing people, we can deduce they were selected
to believe in virtually anything:
"Precisely what we believe is immaterial; what matters is the kind of behavior it generates. This is why humanity is characterized by such astonishing diversity in its belief systems. As far as our genes are concerned, we can believe that the universe is driven by an overweight fairy on a green cheese bicycle provided that such belief effectively coerces us into adopting genetically advantageous behavior in all matters of evolutionary consequence, such as feeding, mating, nurturing, bonding, and protecting family, tribe, and territory."
(Reg Morrison, Lynn Margulis “ The
Spirit in The Gene: Humanity’s Proud
Illusion and The Laws of Nature”)
A story from John O’Hara’s classic
1934 novel "Appointment in Samarra."
"There was a merchant in Bagdad who sent
his servant to market to buy provisions and in a little while the servant came
back, white and trembling, and said “Master, just now when I was in the
marketplace I was jostled by a woman in the crowd and when I turned I saw it
was Death that jostled me. She looked at me and made a threatening gesture;
now, lend me your horse, and I will ride away from this city and avoid my fate.
I will go to Samarra and there Death will not find me”. The merchant lent him
his horse, and the servant mounted it, and he dug his spurs in its flanks and
as fast as the horse could gallop he went. Then the merchant went down to the
marketplace and he saw me standing in the crowd and he came to me and said “Why
did you make a threatening gesture to my servant when you saw him this
morning?” “That was not a threatening gesture”, I said, “it was only a start of
surprise. I was astonished to see him in Bagdad, for I had an appointment with
him tonight in Samarra."
Had Allah willed He could have made you all one community. But He made
you as you are (diverse) as a test. So vie one with another in good works. Unto
Allah you will all return, and He will then inform you of the meaning of
differences within you. [Quran
5:48].
O humanity! We have indeed created you from one man and one woman, and
have made you into various nations and tribes so that you may know one another. [Quran
49:13].
And let there be amongst you a group of people who invite to goodness,
encouraging that which is right and forbidding that which is wrong; it is they
who are the successful. [Quran
3:104].
Those who believe (in the
Qur'an), and those who follow the Jewish (scriptures), and the Christians and
the Sabians,- any who believe in God and the Last Day, and do good deeds, shall
have their reward with their Lord; on them shall be no fear, nor shall they
grieve.
(Quran 2:62 and 5:69).
People who expect to be ignorant and
free expect what never was and never will be. (Thomas Jefferson)
Wakefulness is nothing other than a dream-like state modulated by the constraints
of sensory inputs. (Rudolfo
Llinas – neuroscientist)
In physics light is
absolute, not in space and time. In the mind, the light of consciousness is
absolute, the common ground of all experience. Both lights are intrinsically
unknowable - they cannot be known in the way everything else is known. Both are
universal. Every photon carries the same quantum of action. Similarly, the
light of consciousness is the same in me as in you. These parallels suggest
that the physical world and the world of mind share a common ground - one that
we experience as light. Monotheistic religions call this common ground God.
Many of their descriptions of God have the attributes and qualities of light.
God is said to be absolute; so is light. God lies beyond the manifest world of
matter, shape, and form; beyond space and time; so does light. God cannot be
known directly; nor can light. (Peter
Russell)
Nothing has to be achieved
in order to be at peace. All we have to do is stop doing - stop wanting things
to be different. Stop worrying, stop getting upset when things don’t go as we
wish, or when people don’t behave as we think they should. When we stop doing
all the things that obscure the peace that is there at the core, we find that
what we have been seeking all along is there, waiting silently for us. (ibid)
The Ultimate work of
civilization is the unfolding of ever-deeper Spiritual Understanding. (Arnold Toynbee)
Time and space are but the physiological colours the eye makes; the soul is light. (Emerson)
What is this “I”? You will, on close introspection, find that what you
really mean by “I” is the ground stuff upon which all experiences and memories
are collected. (Schroedinger
– physicist)
Baba Ram Das (aka Professor Richard Alpert) tells about visiting his brother in a mental institution and his brother asked, "Why is it that you go about the world saying you are God, and people buy your books, and worship you, and I say "I am God", and they stick me in here?" And Ram Das said, “I say everyone else is God, and that's the difference”.
A Sleep of Prisoners
So the human heart can go the length of God
Dark and cold we may be
But this is no winter now
The frozen misery of centuries
Clocks, breaks, begins to move
The thunder is the thunder of the flows,
The fill, the flat, the upstart spring.
Thank God our time is now
When one comes up to meet us everywhere
Never to leave us 'til we take the greatest stride
Of souls folk ever took
Affairs are now soul size
The enterprise is exploration into God
But where are you making for
It takes so many thousand years to wake
But will you wake, for pitys sake (Christopher Fry)
Whether the universe is a concourse of atoms, or nature is a system, let
this first be established, that I am part of the whole which is governed by
nature; next, I am intimately related to the parts, which are of the same kind
with myself. (Marcus
Aurelius)
To show how real astronomical wonder can be presented to children, I'll borrow from a book called Earthsearch by John Cassidy, which I brought back from America to show my daughter Juliet. Find a large open space and take a soccer ball to represent the sun. Put the ball down and walk ten paces in a straight line. Stick a pin in the ground. The head of the pin stands for the planet Mercury. Take another 9 paces beyond Mercury and put down a peppercorn to represent Venus. Seven paces on, drop another peppercorn for Earth. One inch away from earth, another pinhead represents the Moon, the furthest place, remember, that we've so far reached. 14 more paces to little Mars, then 95 paces to giant Jupiter, a ping-pong ball. 112 paces further, Saturn is a marble. No time to deal with the outer planets except to say that the distances are much larger. But, how far would you have to walk to reach the nearest star, Proxima Centauri? Pick up another soccer ball to represent it, and set off for a walk of 4200 miles. As for the nearest other galaxy, Andromeda, don't even think about it!
(Richard Dawkins)
You contain a trillion copies of a large, textual document written in a highly accurate, digital code, each copy as voluminous as a substantial book. I'm talking, of course, of the DNA in your cells. Textbooks describe DNA as a blueprint for a body. It's better seen as a recipe for making a body, because it is irreversible. But today I want to present it as something different again, and even more intriguing. The DNA in you is a coded description of ancient worlds in which your ancestors lived. DNA is the wisdom out of the old days, and I mean very old days indeed. …The messages that have come down to us are the ones that have survived millions, in some cases hundreds of millions, of generations. For every successful message that has reached the present, countless failures have fallen away like the chippings on a sculptor's floor. That's what Darwinian natural selection means. We are the descendants of a tiny élite of successful ancestors. Our DNA has proved itself successful, because it is here. Geological time has carved and sculpted our DNA to survive down to the present. (ibid)
The human body is the magazine of
inventions, the patent-office, where are the models from which every hint was
taken. All the tools and engines on earth are only extensions of its limbs and
senses. (R.
W. Emerson)
As William Blum writes:
If I were the
president, I could stop terrorist attacks against the United States in a few
days. Permanently. I would first apologize -- very publicly and very sincerely
-- to all the widows and orphans, the impoverished and the tortured, and all
the many millions of other victims of American imperialism. Then I would
announce that America's global military interventions have come to an end. I
would then inform Israel that it is no longer the 51st state of the union but
-– oddly enough -– a foreign country. Then I would reduce the military budget
by at least 90% and use the savings to pay reparations to the victims and
repair the damage from the many American bombings, invasions and sanctions.
There would be enough money. One year of our military budget is equal to more
than $20,000 per hour for every hour since Jesus Christ was born. That's one
year.
That's what I'd do on my first three days in the White House. On
the fourth day, I'd be assassinated.
The only myth that's going to be
worth thinking about in the immediate future is one talking about the planet --
not this city, not these people, but the planet and everybody on it. (Joseph
Campbell)
The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed, and thus clamorous to be led to safety, by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary. (H.L. Mencken)
Concrete
meetings between persons are the most important thing in being human. Here is
the infallible test: Imagine yourself in a situation where you are alone,
wholly alone on earth, and you are offered one of the two, books or men. I
often hear men prizing their solitude but that is only because there are still
men somewhere on earth even though in the far distance. (Martin
Buber)
I
knew nothing of books when I came forth from the womb of my mother, and I shall
die without books, with another human hand in my own. I do, indeed, close my
door at times and surrender myself to a book, but only because I can open the
door again and see a human being looking at me. (ibid)
When
I meet a man, I am not concerned about his opinions. I am concerned about the
man. My inclination is to meet people. What is important is the manner in which
I meet others; the quality of each relationship is vital.ber. I think no human
being can give more than this. Making life possible for the other, if only for
a moment. (ibid)
As to
my own books, I write them as a snake sheds its skins, because I must. But they
are not the most important part of my life. The most important part is my
relationship with others. (ibid)
It has been hypothesized that many forms of
psychological and holistic healing utilizing hypnosis, the relaxation response,
psychotherapy and meditation can facilitate stress reduction and healing right
down to the molecular-genetic level by simply providing a therapeutic context
for rest and recovery that can optimize ultradian rhythms. (Ernest
Lawrence Rossi)
I
teach entirely natural procedures whereby patients can learn to recognize the
meaning of their own sensations, emotions, thoughts, creativity and developing
points of view. I help patients discover the new frames of reference that their
inner mind-body is creating spontaneously at many levels within themselves.
Life is naturally creative - we are always in a state of creative flux to deal
with an ever-changing world. I help patients to create or, better, to discover
the naturally healing reframes that are taking place in themselves all the
time. In one of my books I call this "The Symptom Path to
Enlightenment." People learn how to listen to the message that
their stress induced symptoms may be telling them. They learn how to convert
their so-called "symptoms" into "signals" of how and when
they need to do their own inner healing. By heeding the message of their
symptoms they gradually acquire their own insights and "enlightenment"
about how to better their lives and facilitate their own healing.
(ibid)
Life may not be the party we hoped for, but while we are here, we might as well dance!!! *
Keep the country in fear if you want to remain in the leadership. Keep
the country always afraid that the neighbour is going to attack, that there are
countries who are designing an attack, that they are preparing to attack – go
on creating rumors. Never leave people at ease, because when they are at ease
they don’t bother about the politicians. When people are really at ease,
politicians are meaningless. Keep people always afraid, then the politician is
powerful. (Osho)
Trust is personal, belief is social. Trust you have to grow in, belief
you can remain in, whatsoever you are, and belief can be imposed on you. Drop
beliefs. (Osho)
You've got to be taught
To hate and fear,
You've got to be taught
From year to year,
It's got to be drummed
In your dear little ear
You've got to be carefully taught.
You've got to be taught
to be afraid
Of people whose eyes are oddly made,
And people whose skin is a diff'rent shade,
You've got to be carefully taught.
You've got to be taught
before it's too late,
Before you are six or seven or eight,
To hate all the people your relatives hate,
You've got to be carefully taught! South
Pacific
There are two parts to the human
dilemma. One is the belief that the end justifies the means. That push-button
philosophy, that deliberate deafness to suffering, has become the monster in
the war machine. The other is the betrayal of the human spirit: the assertion
of dogma that closes the mind, and turns a nation, a civilisation, into a
regiment of ghosts - obedient ghosts, or tortured ghosts.
It is said that science will dehumanize people and turn them into numbers. That is false, tragically false. Look for yourself. This is the concentration camp and crematorium at Auschwitz. This is where people were turned into numbers. Into this pond were flushed the ashes of some four million people. And that was not done by gas. It was done by arrogance. It was done by dogma. It was done by ignorance. When people believe that they have absolute knowledge, with no test in reality, this is how they behave. This is what men do when they aspire to the knowledge of gods.
(Jacob Bronowski, while standing in the human ashes at Auschwitz)
We are nature’s unique experiment to make the rational intelligence prove itself sounder than the reflex. (Jacob Bronowski)
America has little culture in the strict sense of the term. Culture -
the transmittable experience of one's antecedents - is the stuff from which we
weave the illusion of immortality. In the Old World one could not separate
religion and culture. Myths of national origin, poetry and song, cuisine and
geography fused into a shared experience of those who went before, with those
who come after. Culture means existential continuity.
What America offers, by contrast, is redemption through a new beginning, as
closely as anyone is likely to get to a realization of the original Christian
project. That is the subject of the Western, which passes as an American
original but in fact stems from the 16th century chivalresque novel. It finds
its highest expression in John Ford's 1939 film Stagecoach, the greatest
American work of narrative art (ignoring that insufferable allegory Moby
Dick and that poor-man's picaresque novel Huckleberry Finn.). (Spengler)
“Killing the Buddha” is a famous line from the Zen Buddhist
tradition. A monk, after years of meditation, reached what he believed was a
moment of supreme enlightenment. He described the experience to his master, who
told the monk that his experience was nothing special, and might even interfere
with his spiritual journey. The master told the now-dismayed monk that if he
should meet the Buddha, he should kill him. Why? Because the Buddha you meet is
not the true Buddha, but only an expression of your longing for what it is you
seek. If you do not kill that Buddha, he will only stand in your way.
(William
Rivers Pitt)
Truth does not change according
to our ability to stomach it. (Flannery
O'Conner)
There are veterans of all conflicts,
who fall in love with the terrible sweet beauty of war. Men who polish their armor
long after the parades have faded. Their glory is not in duty, honor, and
country; but in the carnival mirrors of their own warped reflections. These are
veterans who march with swagger and blaring brass, like small boys struggling
to be seen and heard. There are veterans who have paid passage through the
heart of darkness; who dedicate their lives to eliminating the horrors that
hide behind their eyes at night, when they dream. These veterans testify to the
unreal and repulsive acts of war that forever wound the soul. And there are
veterans who let it go and never look back again. Not that they forget, they
simply choose not to dwell in those memories. They seek peace of mind and hope. (John
Cory, Vietnam veteran)
Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, and have not charity, I am become as sounding brass, or a tinkling cymbal. And though I have the gift of prophecy, and understand all mysteries, and all knowledge; and though I have all faith, so that I could remove mountains, and have not charity, I am nothing. And though I bestow all my goods to feed the poor . . . and have not charity, it profiteth me nothing. Charity suffereth long, and is kind; charity envieth not; charity vaunteth not itself, is not puffed up, doth not behave itself unseemly, seeketh not her own, is not easily pr