User:Kalki/Vox Box
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We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
T. S. Eliot
in
Little Gidding of The Four Quartets (full text online)
… Ω …
This page was started on 7 November 2010, in response to continuing controversies regarding the types of activities and actions that are appropriate here. It serves to provide a highly concentrated Vox Box — a "soapbox" for presenting voices and views which I find significant, including expressions of a few of my own personal perspectives on many things. It shall be created with alphabetically listed headings for various selected subjects, with some subheadings for some of them.
So it goes…
ABSURDLY yours —
~ ♞☮♌Kalki·†·⚓⊙☳☶⚡ ~
I am definitely a madman with a box!
The 11th Incarnation of The Doctor in The Eleventh Hour
Some say I have a beautiful voice, some say I have not. It is a matter of opinion.
All I can say, those who don't like it shouldn't come to hear me.
Μαρία Κάλλας
I believe that ALL traditions of science, religion, history, myth, poetry, music and many other arts have very important things to contribute to humanity — whether they be focused primarily upon the sensual, selfish, social or spiritual levels of human interests and involvement — and that most also have profound deficiencies and flaws not always clearly apparent to their most zealous advocates and practitioners.
Kalki
Opinions alter, manners change, creeds rise and fall, but the moral law is written on the tablets of eternity.
James Anthony Froude
Creeds matter very little...
The optimist proclaims that we live in the best of all possible worlds; and the pessimist fears this is true.
So I elect for neither label.
James Branch Cabell
All Faith is false, all Faith is true: Truth is the shattered mirror strown
In myriad bits; while each believes his little bit the whole to own.
Richard Francis Burton
The Truth Shall Make Ye Fret.
Terry Pratchett
All religions speak about death during this life on earth.
Death must come before rebirth.
But what must die?
False confidence in one’s own knowledge, self-love and egoism.
Our egoism must be broken.
We must realize that we are very complicated machines, and so this process of breaking is bound to be a long and difficult task.
Before real growth becomes possible, our personality must die.
G. I. Gurdjieff
The growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.
George Eliot
Sin lies only in hurting others unnecessarily. All other "sins" are invented nonsense.
Robert A. Heinlein
Do not wait for the Last Judgment.
It takes place every day.
Albert Camus
I prefer to present many interesting and important ideas in ways that are familiar and welcome to others when I can do so, but I know that it is also vitally important to sometimes present many that might be very unfamiliar and even unwelcome by many, because they challenge both their intellectual and imaginative abilities and the propriety of many of their most habitual attitudes and practices. Thus far I have generally avoided presenting many of my peculiar perspectives on many things unless directly challenged to produce some reasons for some of my peculiar activities, but I have recognized that to forestall or prevent many significant misunderstandings I should at least provide a few clear indications of many of the ideas which normally are active in my thought processes.
I had intended to create such a page as this on another site (not a Wikimedia site) under another name, where I was going to use quotes and short essays on subjects (much in the tradition of Montaigne), to make many of my perspectives more understandable to others — but if I am going to be impelled to present many of my ideas here to defend myself and my activities, it is probably best that I create at least a rudimentary presentation of many of them here. I still intend to keep in reserve many of my most significant ideas and expressions, to eventually be presented elsewhere, where I am less constrained by many concerns and considerations that are present here. I am certainly in no great hurry to present all that I might wish, simply so much as I can, within the time and options available to me here. Others are welcome to make comments or objections to some of the assertions and revelations I make here on the talkpage for this page, or on my User talk:Kalki page.
The titles of sections currently presented are just preliminary ideas for brief comments, quotes, images and essays on closely or loosely related subjects, developed in a rather informal way, and which might slightly change or be transformed radically, as I gradually indicate, consolidate and express many of my thoughts and ideas over time. I expect this to be a slowly expanding page, worked upon in short bouts of activity to the extent it is convenient for me, much as Worldsong, Restorations, and Chronology currently are.
I am very pleased with the very free-form development the lack of formal structure on this page allows me. I expect it shall become one of the most interesting of my user sub-pages. Worldsong and Chronology are structured primarily chronologically, Restorations alphabetically by username, but this page alphabetically by section title — which allows me a much greater versatility of presenting the ideas of others which I value highly, and eventually many short or long comments of my own attitudes and perspectives on many things.
Kalki
Art is the symbol of the two noblest human efforts: to construct and to refrain from destruction.
Simone Weil
Religion is a great force — the only real motive force in the world; but what you fellows don't understand is that you must get at a man through his own religion and not through yours.
Instead of facing that fact, you persist in trying to convert all men to your own little sect, so that you can use it against them afterwards.
You are all missionaries and proselytizers trying to uproot the native religion from your neighbor's flowerbeds and plant your own in its place.
You would rather let a child perish in ignorance than have it taught by a rival sectary.
"Hotchkiss" in Getting Married (1908)
by
George Bernard Shaw
_-_Dettaglio_-_Foto_Giovanni_Dall%27Orto,_31-Aug-2007.jpg)
Oh, East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet,
Till Earth and Sky stand presently at God's great Judgment Seat;
But there is neither East nor West, border, nor breed, nor birth,
When two strong men stand face to face, though they come from the ends of the earth!
Rudyard Kipling, in The Ballad of East and West (1889)
The imperialist ideology of force, from whatever side it comes, must be shattered for all time.
The White Rose
Absolutely Absurd Absolutism and Angelic Absurdist Ambiguities
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Rigveda
Anachronisms and Anarchism against Antagonisms of Aggravated Authoritarians
editKalki
As a young child, this was something I was told in dreams that I would one day declare to many others, but that it would be many years before I would openly do so. Upon awakening, and later thinking upon much that was in the dream I realized I couldn't clearly remember all that was implied by such a statement and had to look up the word to confirm much about what it actually meant. I realized it could be interpreted in various ways, and was quite impressed with a few definite facts that were confirmed in my further investigations and explorations of many matters. This was just a relatively minor detail of a childhood dream, but it is but one of many that have led me into paths of explorations others shun, because they are often very inconvenient, painful, or extremely dangerous. I live to face dangers no other can — and I have already survived a few that few others would have been able to — and I mean that literally.
Many would call me anarchist and I am well aware that the word can be used in admiring or pejorative ways. I can transcend the deficiencies and flaws of its uses in either way, and accept it as an expression of someone's level of awareness, ignorance and confusion about me and Reality and the ways words and meanings can be used, misused and abused. As I can and do admire many who have called themselves anarchists or been called that, I myself have used the term as a provisionally convenient but in many ways flawed and deficient one to describe my attitudes, but I am such a profound foe of absolutism and authoritarianism, especially such forms of it as derive their powers largely from the misuse of words and deficient labels that I cannot accept it as entirely appropriate term to describe myself. Though I fiercely reject most forms of authoritarianism, I can usually perceive much merit in even the vilest of authoritarians, and do not seek to enter into or remain in a state of bitterness or resentment towards any of them — I simply recognize some aspects of their profound stupidity, and usually try to avoid confronting them directly, so long as there are honorable ways to do so. Sometimes I simply run out of such options — and when that happens the authoritarians, bullies, bigots, and other cravenly conceited cowards I have been impelled to confront have usually regretted that fact far more than I myself ever have. So my life has gone — and so it continues to go. So ALL wins ALWAYS — and so it goes…
Kalki
The Silver Surfer
in
Silver Surfer : Requiem # 3 (August 2007) written by J. Michael Straczynski
I know that I use the words in ways that others might find awkward, absurd or even laughable, but I believe all people are angels — in the sense that all people are messengers of important and sometimes vitally important information to others — and that all people are avatars — in the sense of being manifestations of a divine Awareness and Being — which I often refer to as the Ultimate Spirit of ALL — and ALL often signifying ALL Awareness, Life, and Love.
Kalki
When I say I am the Avatar, there are a few who feel happy, some who feel shocked, and many who hearing me claim this, would take me for a hypocrite, a fraud, a supreme egoist, or just mad. If I were to say every one of you is an Avatar, a few would be tickled, and many would consider it a blasphemy or a joke. The fact that God being One, Indivisible and equally in us all, we can be nought else but one, is too much for the duality-conscious mind to accept. Yet each of us is what the other is. I know I am the Avatar in every sense of the word, and that each one of you is an Avatar in one sense or the other.
It is an unalterable and universally recognized fact since time immemorial that God knows everything. God does everything, and that nothing happens but by the Will of God. Therefore it is God who makes me say I am the Avatar, and that each one of you is an Avatar. Again, it is He Who is tickled through some, and through others is shocked. It is God Who acts, and God Who reacts. It is He Who scoffs, and He Who responds. He is the Creator, the Producer, the Actor and the Audience in His own Divine Play.
Meher Baba
in
"How to Love God" (12 September 1954)
All thing that is done, it is well done: for our Lord God doeth all.
Julian of Norwich
You shall know the truth, and the truth shall set you free.
Yeshua (Jesus Christ)
God put the rainbow in the clouds, not just in the sky... It is wise to realize we already have rainbows in our clouds, or we wouldn't be here. If the rainbow is in the clouds, then in the worst of time, there is the possibility of seeing hope... We can say "I can be a rainbow in the cloud for someone yet to be." That may be our calling.
You may not control all the events that happen to you, but you can decide not to be reduced by them. Try to be a rainbow in someone's cloud.
Angelic Avatars and Idiotic Avatars
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Though I assert that all people are angels — and that all people are avatars of a holy Awareness which is referred to in many diverse ways in many different traditions — I also believe that all people are also idiots — limited in their capacities to appreciate the divine essences in themselves and others. I KNOW that I myself am definitely ALWAYS what I would call an idiot, and certainly very often, an extremely limited idiot — and thus I don't usually feel too uncomfortable in sometimes calling other people idiots, in an honest and instructive manner — especially when they are clearly behaving in very foully idiotic ways such as merit censure, or very admirable ways, by which they have earned my trust in their capacity to understand the term in broader meanings than those simplistic ones most often used by idiots of low intelligence and integrity. I am quite aware that many other idiots definitely become uncomfortable when anyone else dares to speak with such awareness and candor as to declare them idiots — but I assert that always aiming to keep idiots comfortable with many of their worst forms of idiocy is certainly not an entirely charitable or wise thing to do. They often are inclined to be mistaken about the use of terms, as used by the wise and as they are commonly used by the most foolish and brutal. The wisest angels and idiots are not out to set themselves up as "judges" over others — and certainly do not seek to punish anyone needlessly — they are rather intent on simply making rational and clear assessments of what situations exist, and providing themselves and others honest opinions and perspectives on the truth, and what indications they can of what they find to be the best options available. The most befouled often have vested interests in maintaining many of the foulest of lies and distortions, thinking that they give them power — and to some extent they might, for a time — but in truth they mostly direct them and others to misapply their powers in extremely destructive and futile ways — ravaging the world, their own lives, and the lives of others with irrational and often truly insane presumptions based upon very little fact. People are especially idiotic in the most deplorable ways when they believe they know so much that they can absolutely judge and absolutely determine the values of other people's lives and essences and efforts. I hold that the most that any mortal can do at any time is make very provisional and conditional assessments of how they themselves should act, advise or aim to act and advise — and not presume to absolutely judge how others should or should not act or aim to act, or what rules they should be impelled to follow, respect, or even come to know. ~ Kalki
Such is the privilege of genius; it perceives, it seizes relations where vulgar eyes see only isolated facts.
The calculus of probabilities, when confined within just limits, ought to interest, in an equal degree, the mathematician, the experimentalist, and the statesman. In the experimental sciences, the epochs of the most brilliant progress are almost always separated by long intervals of almost absolute repose.
On certain occasions, the eyes of the mind can supply the want of the most powerful telescopes, and lead to astronomical discoveries of the highest importance.
Let us then
Consider rather the incessant Now of
The traveler through time, his tired mind
Biased towards bigness since his body must
Exaggerate to exist, possessed by hope... The Age of Anxiety (1948)
The nature of the All moved to make the universe.
The universe is change; our life is what our thoughts make it.
The universe is flux, life is opinion.
All things are implicated with one another, and the bond is holy; and there is hardly anything unconnected with any other things. For things have been co-ordinated, and they combine to make up the same universe. For there is one universe made up of all things, and one god who pervades all things, and one substance, and one law, and one reason.
Everything harmonizes with me, which is harmonious to thee, O Universe. Nothing for me is too early or too late, which is in due time for thee. There is one light of the sun, though it is interrupted by walls, mountains and infinite other things. There is one common substance, though it is distributed among countless bodies which have their several qualities. There is one soul, though it is distributed among several natures and individual limitations. There is one intelligent soul, though it seems to be divided.
Constantly regard the universe as one living being, having one substance and one soul; and observe how all things have reference to one perception, the perception of this one living being; and how all things act with one movement; and how all things are the cooperating causes of all things which exist; observe too the continuous spinning of the thread and the contexture of the web.
Life is brief; there is but one harvest of earthly existence, a holy disposition and neighborly acts.
Search men's governing principles, and consider the wise, what they shun and what they cleave to.
Every man is worth just so much as the things are worth about which he busies himself.
Remember this— that there is a proper dignity and proportion to be observed in the performance of every act of life.
Whatever happens at all happens as it should; you will find this true, if you watch narrowly.
If mind is common to us, then also the reason, whereby we are reasoning beings, is common. If this be so, then also the reason which enjoins what is to be done or left undone is common. If this be so, law also is common; if this be so, we are citizens; if this be so, we are partakers in one constitution; if this be so, the Universe is a kind of Commonwealth.
Say to yourself in the early morning: I shall meet today inquisitive, ungrateful, violent, treacherous, envious, uncharitable men. All these things have come upon them through ignorance of real good and ill.
Never esteem anything as of advantage to you that will make you break your word or lose your self-respect.
Whatever may befall you, it was preordained for you from everlasting.
The supreme truths are neither the rigid conclusions of logical reasoning nor the affirmations of credal statement, but fruits of the soul's inner experience. Intellectual truth is only one of the doors to the outer precincts of the temple. And since intellectual truth turned towards the Infinite must be in its very nature many-sided and not narrowly one, the most varying intellectual beliefs can be equally true because they mirror different facets of the Infinite. However separated by intellectual distance, they still form so many side-entrances which admit the mind to some faint ray from a supreme Light. There are no true and false religions, but rather all religions are true in their own way and degree. Each is one of the thousand paths to the One Eternal.
Indian religion has always felt that since the minds, the temperaments and the intellectual affinities of men are unlimited in their variety, a perfect liberty of thought and of worship must be allowed to the individual in his approach to the Infinite.
Evolution is not finished; reason is not the last word nor the reasoning animal the supreme figure of Nature. As man emerged out of the animal, so out of man the superman emerges.
Indian religion has always felt that since the minds, the temperaments and the intellectual affinities of men are unlimited in their variety, a perfect liberty of thought and of worship must be allowed to the individual in his approach to the Infinite.
Spirituality is the master key of the Indian mind. It is this dominant inclination of India which gives character to all the expressions of her culture. In fact, they have grown out of her inborn spiritual tendency of which her religion is a natural out flowering. The Indian mind has always realized that the Supreme is the Infinite and perceived that to the soul in Nature the Infinite must always present itself in an infinite variety of aspects. The aggressive and quite illogical idea of a single religion for all mankind, a religion universal by the very force of its narrowness, one set of dogmas, one cult, one system of ceremonies, one ecclesiastical ordinance, one array of prohibitions and injunctions which all minds must accept on peril of persecution by men and spiritual rejection or eternal punishment by God, that grotesque creation of human unreason which has been the parent of so much intolerance, cruelty and obscurantism and aggressive fanaticism, has never been able to take firm hold of the Indian mentality.
We speak often of the Hindu religion, of the Sanatan Dharma, but few of us really know what that religion is. Other religions are preponderatingly religions of faith and profession, but the Sanatan Dharma is life itself; it is a thing that has not so much to be believed as lived.
That which we call the Hindu religion is really the eternal religion, because it is the universal religion which embraces all others. If a religion is not universal, it cannot be eternal. A narrow religion, a sectarian religion, an exclusive religion can live only for a limited time and a limited purpose. This is the one religion that can triumph over materialism by including and anticipating the discoveries of science and the speculations of philosophy. It is the one religion which impresses on mankind the closeness of God to us and embraces in its compass all the possible means by which man can approach God. It is the one religion which insists every moment on the truth which all religions acknowledge that He is in all men and all things and that in Him we move and have our being. It is the one religion which enables us not only to understand and believe this truth but to realise it with every part of our being.
Hinduism, which is the most skeptical and the most believing of all, the most skeptical because it has questioned and experimented the most, the most believing because it has the deepest experience and the most varied and positive spiritual knowledge, that wider Hinduism which is not a dogma or combination of dogmas but a law of life, which is not a social framework but the spirit of a past and future social evolution, which rejects nothing but insists on testing and experiencing everything and when tested and experienced, turning in to the soul's uses, in this Hinduism, we find the basis of future world religion. This Sanatana Dharma has many scriptures: The Veda, the Vedanta, the Gita, the Upanishads, the Darshanas, the Puranas, the Tantras, nor could it reject the Bible or the Koran, but its real, the most authoritative scripture is in the heart in which the Eternal has his dwelling.
The seers of ancient India had, in their experiments and efforts at spiritual training and the conquest of the body, perfected a discovery which in its importance to the future of human knowledge dwarfs the divinations of Newton and Galileo, even the discovery of the inductive and experimental method in Science was not more momentous...
Whatever plans we may make, we shall find quite useless when the time for action comes. Revolutions are always full of surprises, and whoever thinks he can play chess with a revolution will soon find how terrible is the grasp of God and how insignificant the human reason before the whirlwind of His breath. That man only is likely to dominate the chances of a Revolution, who makes no plans but preserves his heart pure for the will of God to declare itself. The great rule of life is to have no schemes but one unalterable purpose. If the will is fixed on the purpose it sets itself to accomplish, then circumstances will suggest the right course; but the schemer finds himself always tripped up by the unexpected.
There are times of great change, times when old landmarks are being upset, when submerged forces are rising, and just as we deal promptly or linger over the solution of these problems, our progress will be rapid or slow, sound or broken...
You say that you ask only for the Truth and yet you speak like a narrow and ignorant fanatic who refuses to believe in anything but the religion in which he was born. All fanaticism is false, because it is a contradiction of the very nature of God and of Truth. Truth cannot be shut up in a single book, Bible or Veda or Koran, or in a single religion. The Divine Being is eternal and universal and infinite and cannot be the sole property of the Mussulmans or of the Semitic religions only, — those that happened to be in a line from the Bible and to have Jewish or Arabian prophets for their founders. Hindus and Confucians and Taoists and all others have as much right to enter into relation with God and find the Truth in their own way. All religions have some truth in them, but none has the whole truth; all are created in time and finally decline and perish. Mahomed himself never pretended that the Koran was the last message of God and there would be no other. God and Truth outlast these religions and manifest themselves anew in whatever way or form the Divine Wisdom chooses. You cannot shut up God in the limitations of your own narrow brain or dictate to the Divine Power and Consciousness how or where or through whom it shall manifest; you cannot put up your puny barriers against the divine Omnipotence. These again are simple truths which are now being recognised all over the world; only the childish in mind or those who vegetate in some formula of the past deny them.
In God's providence there is no evil, but only good or its preparation.
When thou callest another a fool, as thou must, sometimes, yet do not forget that thou thyself hast been the supreme fool in humanity.
Even soul-force, when it is effective, destroys. Only those who have used it with eyes open, know how much more destructive it can be than the sword and the cannon; and only those who do not limit their view to the act and its immediate results, can see how tremendous are its after-effects, how much is eventually destroyed and with that much all the life that depended upon it and fed upon it. Evil cannot perish without the destruction of much that lives by the evil, and it is no less destruction even if we personally are saved the pain of a sensational act of violence.
Turn all things to honey; this is the law of divine living.
The sense of impossibility is the beginning of all possibilities. Because this temporal universe was a paradox and an impossibility, therefore the Eternal created it out of His being.
To listen to some devout people, one would imagine that God never laughs; Heine was nearer the mark when he found in Him the divine Aristophanes. God's laughter is sometimes very coarse and unfit for polite ears; He is not satisfied with being Molière, He must needs also be Aristophanes and Rabelais.
A God who cannot smile, could not have created this humorous universe.
The meeting of man and God must always mean a penetration and entry of the divine into the human and a self-immergence of man in the Divinity.
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Wit and Wisdom of TRIMTAB (Buckminster Fuller)
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Dare to be naïve.
Don't fight forces, use them.
It is one of our most exciting discoveries that local discovery leads to a complex of further discoveries. Corollary to this we find that we no sooner get a problem solved than we are overwhelmed with a multiplicity of additional problems in a most beautiful payoff of heretofore unknown, previously unrecognized, and as-yet unsolved problems.
The procedure we are pursuing is that of true democracy. Semi-democracy accepts the dictatorship of a majority in establishing its arbitrary, ergo, unnatural, laws. True democracy discovers by patient experiment and unanimous acknowledgement what the laws of nature or universe may be for the physical support and metaphysical satisfaction of the human intellect's function in universe.
Topology provides the synergetic means of ascertaining the values of any system of experiences. Topology is the science of fundamental pattern and structural relationships of event constellations.
Beauty, Benevolence, Berry, Boldness and Bolding
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Do not think me gentle
because I speak in praise
of gentleness, or elegant
because I honor the grace
that keeps this world. I am
a man crude as any,
gross of speech, intolerant,
stubborn, angry, full
of fits and furies. That I
may have spoken well
at times, is not natural.
A wonder is what it is.
Laugh.
Laughter is immeasurable. Be joyful
though you have considered all the facts.
can predict the motions of your mind,
lose it. Leave it as a sign
to mark the false trail, the way
you didn't go. Be like the fox
who makes more tracks than necessary,
some in the wrong direction.
Practice resurrection.
The logic of governmental efficiency, unchecked, runs straight on, not only to dictatorship, but also to torture, assassination, and other abominations.
We have more than we can know. We know more than we can say. The constructions of language (which is to say the constructions of thought) are formed within experience, not the other way around. Finally we live beyond words, as also we live beyond computation and beyond theory. There is no reason whatever to assume that the languages of science are less limited than other languages.
We are living in the most destructive and, hence, the most stupid period of the history of our species.
A man with a machine and inadequate culture … is a pestilence. He shakes more than he can hold.
Individualism is going around these days in uniform, handing out the party line on individualism.
Professional standards, the standards of ambition and selfishness, are always sliding downward toward expense, ostentation, and mediocrity. They tend always to narrow the ground of judgment. But amateur standards, the standards of love, are always straining upward toward the humble and the best. They enlarge the ground of judgment. The context of love is the world.
What I stand for is what I stand on.
Whether we and our politicians know it or not, Nature is party to all our deals and decisions, and she has more votes, a longer memory, and a sterner sense of justice than we do.
— Bias of Bias of Priene —
Accept of things, having procured them by persuasion, not by force.
Bear a change of fortune for the worse with magnanimity.
Cherish wisdom as a means of travelling from youth to old age, for it is more lasting than any other possession.
Do not speak fast, for that shows folly.
I am silent because you are putting questions about things with which you have no concern.
Whatever good fortune befalls you, attribute it to the gods.
'Tis the gift to come down where we ought to be,
And when we find ourselves in the place just right,
'Twill be in the valley of love and delight.
When true simplicity is gain'd
To bow and to bend we shan't be asham'd,
To turn, turn will be our delight
'Till by turning, turning we come round right.
~ Simple Gifts (1848) ~
There is more than one way to burn a book. And the world is full of people running about with lit matches. Every minority, be it Baptist/Unitarian, Irish/Italian/Octogenarian/Zen Buddhist, Zionist/Seventh-day Adventist, Women's Lib/Republican, Mattachine/FourSquareGospel feels it has the will, the right, the duty to douse the kerosene, light the fuse. Every dimwit editor who sees himself as the source of all dreary blanc-mange plain porridge unleavened literature, licks his guillotine and eyes the neck of any author who dares to speak above a whisper or write above a nursery rhyme.
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It is not enough to have a beautiful voice.
What does that mean?
When you interpret a role, you have to have a thousand colors to portray happiness, joy, sorrow, fear. How can you do this with only a beautiful voice?
Even if you sing harshly sometimes, as I have frequently done, it is a necessity of expression. You have to do it, even if people will not understand. But in the long run they will, because you must persuade them of what you're doing.
Don't talk to me about rules, dear. Wherever I stay I make the goddamn rules.
I would not kill my enemies, but I will make them get down on their knees.
I will, I can, I must.
Our job as entertainers is to ease some pain. So to begin with, you have to know what and where the pain is.
My advice is precisely the advice my mother gave me. If you believe you have talent, the next thing you must have is determination. If you keep working, keep striving, and try always to move forward a little bit with every job you do, you’ll eventually make it. And I believe that!
I think the unique thing about music and graphic art is as opposed to, say, acting and directing, that if you are good you can always create a place for yourself. In acting, for instance, there's only a certain amount of good parts; you have to find the right vehicle. But if you're making good music, man, there's so much room. I think that any group that's really good can make it, anytime.
I've heard that story about kids are high naturally, but I've seen kids that aren't high, kids who've had the high taken out of them.
I think everybody who has a brain should get involved in politics. Working within. Not criticizing it from the outside. Become an active participant, no matter how feeble you think the effort is.
My philosophy is I'm gonna fight as hard as I can to keep all the bad things from happening. But if they are gonna happen and I happen to be in the city where they are happening — like in the song, "California Earthquake" — then there's not much I can do about it.
Everything I've learned in life I've learned either by doing it or watching the changes other people go through. And when you're famous, you don't get to meet people — because they want you to like them when they present themselves to you, present the best sides of themselves, and you don't see the real people. Which is why I don't really go anywhere. And when I do, I put on my silly face and do what they expect me to do. Actually, I never do what they expect me to do. It's the only way I could go on doing what I have to do.
I say, "Look, I'm here now. There must be a reason I'm here." If that's fatalistic, be that as it may.
Where my work is, is where my life is, and if we're falling in the ocean, we're falling into the ocean.
Chess, Chess, Chesterton and Circles
edit"Oxford from Without" in All Things Considered (1908)
He drew a circle that shut me out —
Heretic, rebel, a thing to flout.
But Love and I had the wit to win:
We drew a circle that took him in.
Edwin Markham
in
"Outwitted"
from
The Shoes of Happiness, and Other Poems (1913)
Here I stand, I'm your man.
Now I've heard there was a secret chord
That David played, and it pleased the Lord
But you don't really care for music, do you?
It goes like this the fourth, the fifth
The minor fall, the major lift
The baffled king composing Hallelujah
"Hallelujah"
1984 performance - 2009 stage performance
You say I took the name in vain
I don't even know the name
But if I did, well really, what's it to you?
There's a blaze of light in every word
It doesn't matter which you heard
The holy or the broken Hallelujah
"Hallelujah"
I remember when I moved in you
And the holy dove she was moving too,
And every single breath that we drew was
Hallelujah.
"Hallelujah"
I did my best, it wasn't much
I couldn't feel, so I tried to touch
I've told the truth, I didn't come to fool you.
And even though it all went wrong
I'll stand before the Lord of Song
With nothing on my tongue but Hallelujah.
"Hallelujah"
There are heroes in the seaweed,
There are children in the morning,
They are leaning out for love,
And they will lean that way forever,
While Suzanne holds the mirror.
"Suzanne"
And Jesus was a sailor
When he walked upon the water
And he spent a long time watching
From his lonely wooden tower
And when he knew for certain
Only drowning men could see him
He said "All men will be sailors then
Until the sea shall free them"
But he himself was broken
Long before the sky would open
Forsaken, almost human
He sank beneath your wisdom like a stone
"Suzanne"
I told you when I came I was a stranger.
"The Stranger Song"
It's you my love, you who are the stranger.
"The Stranger Song"
Please understand, I never had a secret chart
to get me to the heart of this
or any other matter.
When he talks like this
you don't know what he's after.
"The Stranger Song"
_-_The_Dance_(1856).jpg)
Oh the sisters of mercy, they are not departed or gone.
They were waiting for me when I thought that I just can't go on.
And they brought me their comfort and later they brought me this song.
Oh I hope you run into them, you who've been travelling so long.
"Sisters of Mercy"
When I left they were sleeping, I hope you run into them soon.
Don't turn on the lights, you can read their address by the moon.
And you won't make me jealous if I hear that they sweetened your night:
We weren't lovers like that and besides it would still be all right.
"Sisters of Mercy"
I loved you in the morning, our kisses deep and warm,
Your hair upon the pillow like a sleepy golden storm,
Yes many loved before us, I know that we are not new,
In city and in forest they smiled like me and you,
But let's not talk of love or chains and things we can't untie,
your eyes are soft with sorrow,
Hey, that's no way to say goodbye.
"Hey, That's No Way To Say Goodbye"
What is a saint? A saint is someone who has achieved a remote human possibility. It is impossible to say what that possibility is. I think it has something to do with the energy of love. Contact with this energy results in the exercise of a kind of balance in the chaos of existence. A saint does not dissolve the chaos; if he did the world would have changed long ago. I do not think that a saint dissolves the chaos even for himself, for there is something arrogant and warlike in the notion of a man setting the universe in order. It is a kind of balance that is his glory. He rides the drifts like an escaped ski. His course is the caress of the hill. His track is a drawing of the snow in a moment of its particular arrangement with wind and rock. Something in him so loves the world that he gives himself to the laws of gravity and chance. Far from flying with the angels, he traces with the fidelity of a seismograph needle the state of the solid bloody landscape. His house is dangerous and finite, but he is at home in the world. He can love the shape of human beings, the fine and twisted shapes of the heart. It is good to have among us such men, such balancing monsters of love.
Beautiful Losers
God is alive. Magic is afoot.
God is alive. Magic is afoot.
God is afoot. Magic is alive.
Alive is afoot. Magic never died.
God never sickened. Many poor men lied.
Many sick men lied.
Magic never weakened. Magic never hid.
Magic always ruled. God is afoot.
God was ruler though his funeral lengthened.
Though his mourners thickened Magic never fled...
Beautiful Losers
They sentenced me to twenty years of boredom
For trying to change the system from within
I'm coming now, I'm coming to reward them
First we take Manhattan, then we take Berlin.
"First We Take Manhattan"
Leonard Cohen video - Jennifer Warnes & Leonard Cohen video
I'm guided by a signal in the heavens
I'm guided by this birthmark on my skin
I'm guided by the beauty of our weapons
First we take Manhattan, then we take Berlin.
"First We Take Manhattan"
Ah, you loved me as a loser, but now you're worried that I just might win
You know the way to stop me, but you don't have the discipline
How many nights I prayed for this, to let my work begin
First we take Manhattan, then we take Berlin.
"First We Take Manhattan"
Everybody knows that the dice are loaded
Everybody rolls with their fingers crossed
Everybody knows that the war is over
Everybody knows the good guys lost
Everybody knows the fight was fixed
The poor stay poor, the rich get rich
That's how it goes
Everybody knows.
"Everybody Knows" (co-written with Sharon Robinson) - YouTube video
My friends are gone and
My hair is grey.
I ache in the places where I used to play.
And I'm crazy for love but
I'm not coming on.
I'm just paying my rent everyday
In the Tower Of Song.
"Tower Of Song"
"Tower Of Song" - Tower of Song with Bono, Video
Like a bird on the wire,
like a drunk in a midnight choir
I have tried in my way to be free.
"Bird on the Wire"
You who build these altars now
to sacrifice these children,
you must not do it anymore.
A scheme is not a vision
and you never have been tempted
by a demon or a god.
"Story of Isaac"
When it all comes down to dust I will kill you if I must, I will help you if I can.
When it all comes down to dust I will help you if I must, I will kill you if I can.
"Story of Isaac"
I finally broke into the prison
I found my place in the chain
Even damnation is poisoned with rainbows
"The Old Revolution"
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With most men, unbelief in one thing springs from blind belief in another.
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
No matter how much one might agree with others, I believe a stance of prudent reserve and true skepticism is appropriate — skepticism NOT to be confused with cynicism in the modern sense, where doubt or denial of some things is largely based upon a far-too-small conception of human potentials for awareness and good will.
I believe that there is immense value in ALL human perspectives, immense error in many, and at least some deficiencies or dangers in most.
I also strongly assert that there is no way that anything which even approaches a proper reverence for all the splendors of the whole of Reality are ever going to be adequately summarized or explained for all people in such deficient and limited means as mortally devised words or combinations of them provide. I am especially appalled by such rules and strictures as are often devised by such dimwits as are under the demonically depraved delusions that it is their deserved right or even their duty to absolutely decide for others what the deeds, beliefs, and even the ideas and ideals of others can or cannot be, or should or should not be. Since I was barely more than an infant I have had such courage and resolve as to maintain an extreme disgust and contempt for such life-diminishing forms of truly infantile idiocy. Though I often hide or disguise this out of respect for the angelic and divine qualities I also perceive in others, even the most stupidly confused, and with often acute awareness of the limitations evident in their own particular levels of awareness, ignorance and confusion, I have never sought to deny that fact. Such discernments have made me an intensely committed servant to the ideals of Liberty, and such social cohesion as can only occur where there is a widespread awareness of the vital need of liberty, as well as agreement on at least a minimal level of mutually desirable aims.
Cynicism (Greek: κυνισμός), in its original form, refers to the beliefs of an ancient school of Greek philosophers known as the Cynics (Greek: Κυνικοί, Latin: Cynici). Their philosophy was that the purpose of life was to live a life of Virtue in agreement with Nature. This meant rejecting all conventional desires for wealth, power, health, and fame, and by living a simple life free from all possessions. As reasoning creatures, people could gain happiness by rigorous training and by living in a way which was natural for humans. They believed that the world belonged equally to everyone, and that suffering was caused by false judgments of what was valuable and by the worthless customs and conventions which surrounded society. Many of these thoughts were later absorbed into Stoicism. — Wikipedia intro for classical Cynicism as of 2010·11·13
Cynicism is a distrust of the apparent motives of others. It is sometimes seen as a form of jaded negativity, and other times merely as realistic criticism or skepticism. The term originally derives from a group of philosophers in ancient Greece called the Cynics who rejected all conventions, whether of religion, manners, housing, dress, or decency, advocating the pursuit of virtue in a simple and unmaterialistic lifestyle. By the 19th century, emphasis on the negative aspects of Cynic philosophy led to the modern understanding of cynicism to mean a disposition to disbelieve in the sincerity or goodness of human motives and actions. Modern cynicism, as a product of mass society, is a distrust toward professed ethical and social values, especially when there are high expectations concerning society, institutions and authorities which are unfulfilled. It can manifest itself as a result of frustration, disillusionment, and distrust perceived as due to organizations, authorities and other aspects of society, and thus "cynical" is sometimes used as if it were synonymous with "jaded", and the opposite of "optimistic". Other times, "cynicism" is used as if it were merely the opposite of "naiveté". — Wikipedia intro for Cynicism (contemporary) as of 2010·11·13
Kalki
Da, Dada, and the Dalai Lama
editMy true religion is Kindness.
It is very important to generate a good attitude, a good heart, as much as possible. From this, happiness in both the short term and the long term for both yourself and others will come.
Religion does not mean just precepts, a temple, monastery, or other external signs, for these as well as hearing and thinking are subsidiary factors in taming the mind. When the mind becomes the practices, one is a practitioner of religion, and when the mind does not become the practices one is not.
The Great Vehicle path requires the vast motivation of a Bodhisattva, who, not seeking just his or her welfare, takes on the burden of bringing about the welfare of all sentient beings. When a person generate this attitude, they enter within the Great Vehicle, and as long as it has not been generated, one cannot be counted among those of the Great Vehicle. This attitude really has great power; it, of course, is helpful for people practicing religion, but it also is helpful for those who are just concerned with the affairs of this lifetime. The root of happiness is altruism — the wish to be of service to others.
I feel that the essence of spiritual practice is your attitude toward others. When you have a pure, sincere motivation, then you have right attitude toward others based on kindness, compassion, love and respect. Practice brings the clear realisation of the oneness of all human beings and the importance of others benefiting by your actions.
Don't compare me with Jesus. He is a great master, a great master...
Human happiness and human satisfaction must ultimately come from within oneself.
Bodhicitta is the medicine which revives and gives life to every sentient being who even hears of it. When you engage in fulfilling the needs of others, your own needs are fulfilled as a by-product.
If you want others to be happy, practice compassion. If you want to be happy, practice compassion.
Within the body there are billions of different particles. Similarly, there are many different thoughts and a variety of states of mind. It is wise to take a close look into the world of your mind and to make the distinction between beneficial and harmful states of mind. Once you can recognize the value of good states of mind, you can increase or foster them.
Compassion without attachment is possible. Therefore, we need to clarify the distinctions between compassion and attachment. True compassion is not just an emotional response but a firm commitment founded on reason. Therefore, a truly compassionate attitude towards others does not change even if they behave negatively. Genuine compassion is based not on our own projections and expectations, but rather on the needs of the other...
From the moment of birth every human being wants happiness and freedom and wants to avoid suffering. In this we are all the same; and the more we care for the happiness of others the greater our own sense of each other becomes. Many of our problems are created by ourselves based on divisions due to ideology, religion, race, resources, economic status or other factors. The time has come to think on a deeper, more human level and appreciate and respect our sameness as human beings. And to have a respect for endangered cultures that share these principles. We are at the dawn of an age in which many people feel that extreme political concepts should cease to dominate human affairs. We should use this opportunity to replace them with universal human and spiritual values and ensure that these values become the fiber of the global family that is emerging.
At every level of society, familial, tribal, national and international, the key to a happier and more peaceful and successful world is the growth of compassion. We do not necessarily need to become religious, nor even believe in an ideology. We need only to develop our good human qualities and know that love and compassion are the most essential concepts for human survival. So long as human beings live and suffer, the only world open to our present knowledge, the brotherhood of man will seem an unattainable principle. In order for us to achieve real lasting peace among one another, the effort to realize that noblest and most satisfactory moral value must be occupation of every individual intelligence.
According to Buddhism, individuals are masters of their own destiny. And all living beings are believed to possess the nature of the Primordial Buddha Samantabhadra, the potential or seed of enlightenment, within them. So our future is in our own hands. What greater free will do we need?
My confidence in venturing into science lies in my basic belief that as in science so in Buddhism, understanding the nature of reality is pursued by means of critical investigation: if scientific analysis were conclusively to demonstrate certain claims in Buddhism to be false, then we must accept the findings of science and abandon those claims.
If science proves some belief of Buddhism wrong, then Buddhism will have to change. In my view, science and Buddhism share a search for the truth and for understanding reality. By learning from science about aspects of reality where its understanding may be more advanced, I believe that Buddhism enriches its own worldview.
All major religious traditions carry basically the same message, that is love, compassion and forgiveness ... the important thing is they should be part of our daily lives.
The time has come to educate people, to cease all quarrels in the name of religion, culture, countries, different political or economic systems. Fighting is useless. Suicide.
By deceiving one another through false assumptions and misrepresentations there has been, in reality, a great lapse and delay in achieving the real goals.
On my part, I remain committed to contribute my efforts for the welfare of all human beings, and in particular the poor and the weak to the best of my ability without any distinction based on national boundaries.
I believe all suffering is caused by ignorance. People inflict pain on others in the selfish pursuit of their happiness or satisfaction. Yet true happiness comes from a sense of inner peace and contentment, which in turn must be achieved through the cultivation of altruism, of love and compassion and elimination of ignorance, selfishness and greed.
The problems we face today, violent conflicts, destruction of nature, poverty, hunger, and so on, are human-created problems which can be resolved through human effort, understanding and the development of a sense of brotherhood and sisterhood. We need to cultivate a universal responsibility for one another and the planet we share. Although I have found my own Buddhist religion helpful in generating love and compassion, even for those we consider our enemies, I am convinced that everyone can develop a good heart and a sense of universal responsibility with or without religion.
With the ever-growing impact of science on our lives, religion and spirituality have a greater role to play by reminding us of our humanity. There is no contradiction between the two. Each gives us valuable insights into the other. Both science and the teachings of the Buddha tell us of the fundamental unity of all things. This understanding is crucial if we are to take positive and decisive action on the pressing global concern with the environment. I believe all religions pursue the same goals, that of cultivating human goodness and bringing happiness to all human beings. Though the means might appear different the ends are the same.
As we enter the final decade of this century I am optimistic that the ancient values that have sustained mankind are today reaffirming themselves to prepare us for a kinder, happier twenty-first century.
I pray for all of us, oppressor and friend, that together we succeed in building a better world through human understanding and love, and that in doing so we may reduce the pain and suffering of all sentient beings.
Because we all share this small planet earth, we have to learn to live in harmony and peace with each other and with nature. That is not just a dream, but a necessity. We are dependent on each other in so many ways, that we can no longer live in isolated communities and ignore what is happening outside those communities, and we must share the good fortune that we enjoy.
I speak not with a feeling of anger or hatred towards those who are responsible for the immense suffering of our people and the destruction of our land, homes and culture. They too are human beings who struggle to find happiness and deserve our compassion. I speak to inform you of the sad situation in my country today and of the aspirations of my people, because in our struggle for freedom, truth is the only weapon we possess.
Today, we are truly a global family. What happens in one part of the world may affect us all. This, of course, is not only true of the negative things that happen, but is equally valid for the positive developments. We not only know what happens elsewhere, thanks to the extraordinary modern communications technology. We are also directly affected by events that occur far away.
Our own security is enhanced when peace breaks out between warring parties in other continents.
But war or peace; the destruction or the protection of nature; the violation or promotion of human rights and democratic freedoms; poverty or material well-being; the lack of moral and spiritual values or their existence and development; and the breakdown or development of human understanding, are not isolated phenomena that can be analysed and tackled independently of one another. In fact, they are very much interrelated at all levels and need to be approached with that understanding.
Peace can only last where human rights are respected, where the people are fed, and where individuals and nations are free. True peace with oneself and with the world around us can only be achieved through the development of mental peace.
Inner peace is the key: if you have inner peace, the external problems do not affect your deep sense of peace and tranquility. In that state of mind you can deal with situations with calmness and reason, while keeping your inner happiness. That is very important. Without this inner peace, no matter how comfortable your life is materially, you may still be worried, disturbed or unhappy because of circumstances.
Responsibility does not only lie with the leaders of our countries or with those who have been appointed or elected to do a particular job. It lies with each one of us individually.
Old friends pass away, new friends appear. It is just like the days. An old day passes, a new day arrives. The important thing is to make it meaningful: a meaningful friend — or a meaningful day.
Whether one believes in a religion or not, and whether one believes in rebirth or not, there isn't anyone who doesn't appreciate kindness and compassion.
If I say, "I am a monk." or "I am a Buddhist," these are, in comparison to my nature as a human being, temporary. To be human is basic.
This is my simple religion. There is no need for temples; no need for complicated philosophy. Our own brain, our own heart is our temple; the philosophy is kindness.
To study Buddhism and then use it as a weapon in order to criticize others' theories or ideologies is wrong. The very purpose of religion is to control yourself, not to criticize others.
Sectarian feelings and criticism of other teachings or other sects is very bad, poisonous, and should be avoided.
It is necessary to help others, not only in our prayers, but in our daily lives. If we find we cannot help others, the least we can do is to desist from harming them.
If there are sound reasons or bases for the points you demand, then there is no need for violence. On the other hand, when there is no sound reason that concessions should be made to you but mainly your own desire, then reason cannot work and you have to rely on force. Thus using force is not a sign of strength but rather a sign of weakness.
As a result of more contact with people from other traditions, as time passes I have firmed my conviction that all religions can work together despite fundamental differences in philosophy. Every religion aims at serving humanity. Therefore, it is possible for the various religions to work together to serve humanity and contribute to world peace. So, during these last few years, at every opportunity I try to develop closer relations with other religions.
Buddhism does not accept a theory of God, or a creator. According to Buddhism, one's own actions are the creator, ultimately. Some people say that, from a certain angle, Buddhism is not a religion but rather a science of mind. Religion has much involvement with faith. Sometimes it seems that there is quite a distance between a way of thinking based on faith and one entirely based on experiment, remaining skeptical. Unless you find something through investigation, you do not want to accept it as fact. From one viewpoint, Buddhism is a religion, from another viewpoint Buddhism is a science of mind and not a religion. Buddhism can be a bridge between these two sides. Therefore, with this conviction I try to have closer ties with scientists, mainly in the fields of cosmology, psychology, neurobiology and physics. In these fields there are insights to share, and to a certain extent we can work together.
In the West, you have bigger homes, yet smaller families; you have endless conveniences — yet you never seem to have any time. You can travel anywhere in the world, yet you don’t bother to cross the road to meet your neighbours.
Some say I am a good person, some say I am a charlatan — I am just a monk.
I don't want to convert people to Buddhism — all major religions, when understood properly, have the same potential for good.
Fundamentalism is terrifying because it is based purely on emotion, rather than intelligence. It prevents followers from thinking as individuals and about the good of the world.
We have inherited an incredibly beautiful and complex garden, but the trouble is that we have been appallingly bad gardeners. We have not bothered to acquaint ourselves with the simplest principles of gardening. By neglecting our garden, we are storing up for ourselves, in the not very distant future, a world catastrophe as bad as any atomic war, and we are doing it with all the bland complacency of an idiot child chopping up a Rembrandt with a pair of scissors.
The attitude of the average person to the world they live in is completely selfish. When I take people round to see my animals, one of the first questions they ask (unless the animal is cute and appealing) is, "what use is it?" by which they mean, "what use is it to them?" To this one can reply "What use is the Acropolis?" Does a creature have to be of direct material use to mankind in order to exist? By and large, by asking the question "what use is it?" you are asking the animal to justify its existence without having justified your own.
There is no first world and third world. There is only one world, for all of us to live and delight in.
Faith lived in the incognito is one which is located outside the criticism coming from society, from politics, from history, for the very reason that it has itself the vocation to be a source of criticism. It is faith (lived in the incognito) which triggers the issues for the others, which causes everything seemingly established to be placed in doubt, which drives a wedge into the world of false assurances.
Propaganda tries to surround man by all possible routes in the realm of feelings as well as ideas, by playing on his will or on his needs, through his conscious and his unconscious, assailing him in both his private and his public life. It furnishes him with a complete system for explaining the world, and provides immediate incentives to action. We are here in the presence of an organized myth that tries to take hold of the entire person. Through the myth it creates, propaganda imposes a complete range of intuitive knowledge, susceptible of only one interpretation, unique and one-sided, and precluding any divergence. This myth becomes so powerful that it invades every arena of consciousness, leaving no faculty or motivation intact. It stimulates in the individual a feeling of exclusiveness, and produces a biased attitude.
What is at issue here is evaluating the danger of what might happen to our humanity in the present half-century, and distinguishing between what we want to keep and what we are ready to lose, between what we can welcome as legitimate human development and what we should reject with our last ounce of strength as dehumanization. I cannot think that choices of this kind are unimportant.
It is not enough to be in the right place at the right time. You should also have an open mind at the right time.
He was an absolutely wonderful man. He was interested in everything. You felt right away that you are not dealing with one of your colleagues or an average guy. He was a genius, his thoughts were all over the place. I've met very smart people. I have never met a genius before. ... He basically disregarded any disciplined approach to anything.
Jonas Gellert
Nothing bothered Erdős more than political strictures which did not allow for complete freedom of expression and the ability to travel freely. ... Always traveling with a single shabby suitcase which doubled as a briefcase, he had little need or interest in the material world.
Peter Schumer
A conjecture thought to be sound
Was that every circle was round
In a paper of Erdős
written in Kurdish
A counterexample is found!
Anon
Facts, Fictions, Fantasies, Feelings, Faraday, Feyerabend, Feynman, and Foch
edit
the moment you feel, you're nobody-but-yourself.
To be nobody-but-yourself — in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else — means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight; and never stop fighting.
E. E. Cummings
in
A Poet's Advice (1958)
Faraday could not write otherwise than as a gentleman; but … had he willed it he could have hit hard.
We have heard much of Faraday's gentleness and sweetness and tenderness. It is all true, but it is very incomplete.
You cannot resolve a powerful nature into these elements, and Faraday's character would have been less admirable than it was had it not embraced forces and tendencies to which the silky adjectives "gentle" and "tender" would by no means apply.
Underneath his sweetness and gentleness was the heat of a volcano. He was a man of excitable and fiery nature; but through high self-discipline he had converted the fire into a central glow and motive power of life, instead of permitting it to waste itself in useless passion.
"He that is slow to anger" saith the sage, "is greater than the mighty, and he that ruleth his own spirit than he that taketh a city."
Faraday was not slow to anger, but he completely ruled his own spirit, and thus, though he took no cities, he captivated all hearts.
John Tyndall
in
Faraday as a Discoverer (1868)
"Points of Character"
ALL THIS IS A DREAM.
Still examine it by a few experiments.
Nothing is too wonderful to be true, if it be consistent with the laws of nature; and in such things as these experiment is the best test of such consistency.
The lecturer should give the audience full reason to believe that all his powers have been exerted for their pleasure and instruction.
I am no poet, but if you think for yourselves, as I proceed, the facts will form a poem in your minds.
I have far more confidence in the one man who works mentally and bodily at a matter than in the six who merely talk about it — and I therefore hope and am fully persuaded that you are working. Nature is our kindest friend and best critic in experimental science if we only allow her intimations to fall unbiassed on our minds. Nothing is so good as an experiment which, whilst it sets an error right, gives us (as a reward for our humility in being reproved) an absolute advancement in knowledge.
We learn by such results as these, what is the kind of education that science offers to man. It teaches us to be neglectful of nothing, not to despise the small beginnings — they precede of necessity all great things. Vesicles make clouds; they are trifles light as air, but then they make drops, and drops make showers, rain makes torrents and rivers, and these can alter the face of a country, and even keep the ocean to its proper fulness and use. It teaches a continual comparison of the small and great, and that under differences almost approaching the infinite, for the small as often contains the great in principle, as the great does the small; and thus the mind becomes comprehensive. It teaches to deduce principles carefully, to hold them firmly, or to suspend the judgment, to discover and obey law, and by it to be bold in applying to the greatest what we know of the smallest. It teaches us first by tutors and books, to learn that which is already known to others, and then by the light and methods which belong to science to learn for ourselves and for others; so making a fruitful return to man in the future for that which we have obtained from the men of the past.
There is no more open door by which you can enter into the study of natural philosophy than by considering the physical phenomena of a candle.
Bacon in his instruction tells us that the scientific student ought not to be as the ant, who gathers merely, nor as the spider who spins from her own bowels, but rather as the bee who both gathers and produces. All this is true of the teaching afforded by any part of physical science. Electricity is often called wonderful, beautiful; but it is so only in common with the other forces of nature. The beauty of electricity or of any other force is not that the power is mysterious, and unexpected, touching every sense at unawares in turn, but that it is under law, and that the taught intellect can even now govern it largely. The human mind is placed above, and not beneath it, and it is in such a point of view that the mental education afforded by science is rendered super-eminent in dignity, in practical application and utility; for by enabling the mind to apply the natural power through law, it conveys the gifts of God to man.
Speculations? I have none. I am resting on certainties.
I know whom I have believed and am persuaded that he is able to keep that which I have committed unto him against that day.
I shall be with Christ, and that is enough.
At all times man approached his surroundings with wide open senses and a fertile intelligence, at all times he made incredible discoveries, at all times we can learn from his ideas.
I do not see why I should be polite to tyrants, who slobber of humanitarianism and think only of their own petty interests.
Unanimity of opinion may be fitting for a church, for the frightened or greedy victims of some (ancient, or modern) myth, or for the weak and willing followers of some tyrant. Variety of opinion is necessary for objective knowledge. And a method that encourages variety is also the only method that is comparable with a humanitarian outlook.
If we want to understand nature, if we want to master our physical surroundings, then we must use all ideas, all methods, and not just a small selection of them. The assertion, however, that there is no knowledge outside science — extra scientiam nulla salus — is nothing but another and most convenient fairy-tale.
One can show the following: given any rule, however "fundamental" or "necessary" for science, there are always circumstances when it is advisable not only to ignore the rule, but to adopt its opposite.
Not only are facts and theories in constant disharmony, they are never as neatly separated as everyone makes them out to be.
Taking experimental results and observations for granted and putting the burden of proof on the theory means taking the observational ideology for granted without having ever examined it.
No single theory ever agrees with all the facts in its domain.
We've learned from experience that the truth will come out.
Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts.
I never pay attention to anything by "experts".
I calculate everything myself.
A great deal more is known than has been proved.
Our imagination is stretched to the utmost, not, as in fiction, to imagine things which are not really there, but just to comprehend those things which are there.
Looking back at the worst times, it always seems that they were times in which there were people who believed with absolute faith and absolute dogmatism in something.
And they were so serious in this matter that they insisted that the rest of the world agree with them.
And then they would do things that were directly inconsistent with their own beliefs in order to maintain that what they said was true.
Let's look at the bird and see what it's doing — that's what counts.
I learned very early the difference between knowing the name of something and knowing something.
For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled.
The scientist has a lot of experience with ignorance and doubt and uncertainty, and this experience is of very great importance, I think. When a scientist doesn’t know the answer to a problem, he is ignorant. When he has a hunch as to what the result is, he is uncertain. And when he is pretty damn sure of what the result is going to be, he is still in some doubt. We have found it of paramount importance that in order to progress, we must recognize our ignorance and leave room for doubt. Scientific knowledge is a body of statements of varying degrees of certainty — some most unsure, some nearly sure, but none absolutely certain. Now, we scientists are used to this, and we take it for granted that it is perfectly consistent to be unsure, that it is possible to live and not know. But I don’t know whether everyone realizes this is true. Our freedom to doubt was born out of a struggle against authority in the early days of science. It was a very deep and strong struggle: permit us to question — to doubt — to not be sure. I think that it is important that we do not forget this struggle and thus perhaps lose what we have gained.
The worthwhile problems are the ones you can really solve or help solve, the ones you can really contribute something to. ...
No problem is too small or too trivial if we can really do something about it.
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My centre is giving way, my right is retreating, situation excellent, I am attacking.
None but a coward dares to boast that he has never known fear.
There is but one means to extenuate the effects of enemy fire: it is to develop a more violent fire oneself.
The most powerful weapon on earth is the human soul on fire.
The distribution of troops devoted to the defence of a place includes a garrison, an occupying force, numerically as weak as possible; a reserve as strong as possible, designed for counterattacking and for providing itself, at the moment it goes into action, with a security service which will guard it from any possible surprise.
To inform, and, therefore to reconnoitre, this is the first and constant duty of the advanced guard.
To be disciplined does not mean being silent, abstaining, or doing only what one thinks one may undertake without risk; it is not the art of eluding responsibility; it means acting in compliance with orders received, and therefore finding in one's own mind, by effort and reflection, the possibility to carry out such orders. It also means finding in one's own will the energy to face the risks involved in execution.
In war there are none but particular cases; everything has there an individual nature; nothing ever repeats itself.
In the first place, the data of a military problem are but seldom certain; they are never final.
Everything is in a constant state of change and reshaping.
The truth is, no study is possible on the battle-field; one does there simply what one can in order to apply what one knows.
Therefore, in order to do even a little, one has already to know a great deal and to know it well.
Men called to the conduct of troops should prepare themselves to deal with cases more and more varied upon an ever-increasing horizon of experience. They can only be given the capacity to arrive at a prompt and judicious position by developing in them through study their power of analysis and of synthesis; that is, of conclusion in a purely objective sense, conclusion upon problems which have been actually lived and taken from real history. Thus also can they be founded through the conviction that comes from knowledge in a confidence sufficient to enable them to take such decisions upon the field of action.
Far from being a sum of distinct and partial results, victory is the consequence of efforts, some of which are victorious while others appear to be fruitless, which nevertheless all aim at a common goal, all drive at a common result: namely, at a decision, a conclusion which alone can provide victory.
A war not only arises, but derives its nature, from the political ideas, the moral sentiments, and the international relations obtaining at the moment when it breaks out.
This amounts to saying : try and know why and with the help of what you are going to act; then you will find out how to act.
The military art is not an accomplishment, an art for dilettante, a sport.
You do not make war without reason, without an object, as you would give yourself up to music, painting, hunting, lawn tennis, where there is no great harm done whether you stop altogether or go on, whether you do little or much.
Everything in war is linked together, is mutually interdependent, mutually interpenetrating.
When you are at war you have no power to act at random.
Each operation has a raison d'etre, that is an object; that object, once determined, fixes the nature and the value of the means to be resorted to as well as the use which ought to be made of the forces.
The unknown is the governing condition of war.
Humans are allergic to change. They love to say, "We've always done it this way." I try to fight that. That's why I have a clock on my wall that runs counter-clockwise.
If it's a good idea, go ahead and do it. It is much easier to apologize than it is to get permission.
Grace Hopper
I think there's so much good in the worst of us, and so many of the worst of us get the best of us, that the rest of us aren't even worth talking about.
Try to understand me. Nothing is impossible.
I don’t pretend to know all the answers. I’m just a plain, ordinary, everyday genius who loves her fellow-man whenever possible.
While breeding isn’t everything, it is said to be lots of fun.
It’s silly to think that Presidents are born, because very few people are 35 years old at birth, and those who are won’t admit it.
Let them call us nonentities. Who cares?
A nonenitiy can be just as famous as anybody else if enough people know about him.
But let’s leave personalities out of this and just talk about me.
As I always say, as long as we have issues, we can’t have everything.
Cultivate friendships.
If you don’t have time to cultivate all of them, plow under every fifth one and collect your bonus.
A platform is something a candidate stands for and the voters fall for.
I’m having my platform run up by a movie set designer, so it will be very impressive from the front, but not too permanent.
After all, there’s no sense putting a lot of time and thought into something you’ll have no use for after you’re elected.
Never place a period where God has placed a comma.
One of my favorite kind-of-dark jokes is, "How do you make God laugh?"
"You make a plan."
Ben Gibbard
If you tell certain people that you like Kerouac, they assume that’s all you read, like you don’t know anything else about literature. I recognize all the things that people dislike about the way he writes — his tone and the sentimentality of it all. But those books were there for me at a very important point in my life.
Ben Gibbard
Leo Rosten has the answer.
Remember, Hope is a good thing, maybe the best of things, and no good thing ever dies.
Stephen King
in
"Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption"
The only medicine for suffering, crime, and all the other woes of mankind, is wisdom.
The known is finite, the unknown infinite; intellectually we stand on an islet in the midst of an illimitable ocean of inexplicability. Our business in every generation is to reclaim a little more land, to add something to the extent and the solidity of our possessions.
For every man the world is as fresh as it was at the first day, and as full of untold novelties for him who has the eyes to see them.
The foundation of morality is to have done, once and for all, with lying; to give up pretending to believe that for which there is no evidence, and repeating unintelligible propositions about things beyond the possibilities of knowledge.
I am too much of a sceptic to deny the possibility of anything — especially as I am now so much occupied with theology — but I don't see my way to your conclusion.
Science seems to me to teach in the highest and strongest manner the great truth which is embodied in the Christian conception of entire surrender to the will of God. Sit down before fact as a little child, be prepared to give up every preconceived notion, follow humbly wherever and to whatever abysses nature leads, or you shall learn nothing. I have only begun to learn content and peace of mind since I have resolved at all risks to do this.
My business is to teach my aspirations to conform themselves to fact, not to try and make facts harmonise with my aspirations.
Agnosticism is not properly described as a "negative" creed, nor indeed as a creed of any kind, except in so far as it expresses absolute faith in the validity of a principle which is as much ethical as intellectual. This principle may be stated in various ways, but they all amount to this: that it is wrong for a man to say that he is certain of the objective truth of any proposition unless he can produce evidence which logically justifies that certainty. This is what agnosticism asserts; and, in my opinion, it is all that is essential to agnosticism. That which agnostics deny and repudiate as immoral is the contrary doctrine, that there are propositions which men ought to believe, without logically satisfactory evidence; and that reprobation ought to attach to the profession of disbelief in such inadequately supported propositions. The justification of the agnostic principle lies in the success which follows upon its application, whether in the field of natural or in that of civil history; and in the fact that, so far as these topics are concerned, no sane man thinks of denying its validity.
The extent of the region of the uncertain, the number of the problems the investigation of which ends in a verdict of not proven, will vary according to the knowledge and the intellectual habits of the individual agnostic. I do not very much care to speak of anything as unknowable. What I am sure about is that there are many topics about which I know nothing, and which, so far as I can see, are out of reach of my faculties. But whether these things are knowable by any one else is exactly one of those matters which is beyond my knowledge, though I may have a tolerably strong opinion as to the probabilities of the case.
When I reached intellectual maturity and began to ask myself whether I was an atheist, a theist, or a pantheist; a materialist or an idealist; Christian or a freethinker; I found that the more I learned and reflected, the less ready was the answer; until, at last, I came to the conclusion that I had neither art nor part with any of these denominations, except the last. The one thing in which most of these good people were agreed was the one thing in which I differed from them. They were quite sure they had attained a certain "gnosis," — had, more or less successfully, solved the problem of existence; while I was quite sure I had not, and had a pretty strong conviction that the problem was insoluble.
So I took thought, and invented what I conceived to be the appropriate title of "agnostic." It came into my head as suggestively antithetic to the "gnostic" of Church history, who professed to know so much about the very things of which I was ignorant. To my great satisfaction the term took.
Try to learn something about everything and everything about something.
The saying that a little knowledge is a dangerous thing is, to my mind, a very dangerous adage. If knowledge is real and genuine, I do not believe that it is other than a very valuable possession, however infinitesimal its quantity may be. Indeed, if a little knowledge is dangerous, where is the man who has so much as to be out of danger?
Perhaps the most valuable result of all education is the ability to make yourself do the thing you have to do, when it ought to be done, whether you like it or not; it is the first lesson that ought to be learned; and, however early a man's training begins, it is probably the last lesson that he learns thoroughly.
The great end of life is not knowledge but action.
God give me strength to face a fact though it slay me.
If the question is put to me would I rather have a miserable ape for a grandfather or a man highly endowed by nature and possessed of great means of influence and yet who employs these faculties and that influence for the mere purpose of introducing ridicule into a grave scientific discussion, I unhesitatingly affirm my preference for the ape.
The man who is all morality and intellect, although he may be good and even great, is, after all, only half a man.
Life is too short to occupy oneself with the slaying of the slain more than once.
I have never had the least sympathy with the a priori reasons against orthodoxy, and I have by nature and disposition the greatest possible antipathy to all the atheistic and infidel school. Nevertheless I know that I am, in spite of myself, exactly what the Christian would call, and, so far as I can see, is justified in calling, atheist and infidel.
No human being can arbitrarily dominate over another without grievous damage to his own nature … no slavery can be abolished without a double emancipation, and the master will benefit by freedom more than the freed-man.
The man of science has learned to believe in justification, not by faith, but by verification.
The only freedom I care about is the freedom to do right; the freedom to do wrong I am ready to part with on the cheapest terms to any one who will take it of me.
The improver of natural knowledge absolutely refuses to acknowledge authority, as such. For him, scepticism is the highest of duties; blind faith the one unpardonable sin.
In an ideal University, as I conceive it, a man should be able to obtain instruction in all forms of knowledge, and discipline in the use of all the methods by which knowledge is obtained. In such a University, the force of living example should fire the student with a noble ambition to emulate the learning of learned men, and to follow in the footsteps of the explorers of new fields of knowledge. And the very air he breathes should be charged with that enthusiasm for truth, that fanaticism of veracity, which is a greater possession than much learning; a nobler gift than the power of increasing knowledge; by so much greater and nobler than these, as the moral nature of man is greater than the intellectual; for veracity is the heart of morality.
I do not advocate burning your ship to get rid of the cockroaches.
Ideas, Ideals, Idiots, idolatry and ideologies
editAll the wisest people consider themselves idiots and forgive other people for being so. The most stupid of fools believe they are beyond any forms of genuine idiocy and are unforgiving of those whose idiocy seems obvious to them — and thus confirm their stupidity to the wise. ~ ♞☤☮♌Kalki·†·⚓⊙☳☶⚡ 01:35, 28 March 2013 (UTC) + tweak
All our best men are laughed at in this nightmare land.
I want to work in revelations, not just spin silly tales for money. I want to fish as deep down as possible into my own subconscious in the belief that once that far down, everyone will understand because they are the same that far down.
I went one afternoon to the church of my childhood and had a vision of what I must have really meant with "Beat"... the vision of the word Beat as being to mean beatific... People began to call themselves beatniks, beats, jazzniks, bopniks, bugniks and finally I was called the "avatar" of all this.
Ah, life is a gate, a way, a path to Paradise anyway, why not live for fun and joy and love or some sort of girl by a fireside, why not go to your desire and LAUGH...
I like ecstasy of the mind. I'm a wretch. But I love, love.
I will die, and you will die, and we all will die, and even the stars will fade out one after another in time.
Who knows, my God, but that the universe is not one vast sea of compassion actually, the veritable holy honey, beneath all this show of personality and cruelty?
All human beings are also dream beings. Dreaming ties all mankind together.
The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones that never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes "Awww!"
All is well, practice kindness, heaven is nigh.
The power of simple Truth and Honesty is far greater than the power of all the most elaborate lies and deceits which have ever been created, and the power of the Love of Reality is far greater than any form of hatred for any of its aspects or apparent qualities which have ever existed, or which ever shall or ever could exist in the ignorant and confused minds of mortal beings.
The wise KNOW this to be FACT, in ways which transcend all doubts and confusions, while the very ignorant and confused are often prone to ignore, deny, or remain largely oblivious to it, and think expressions of such truth merely incredible fantasy.
Such is an indication of my faith, and that faith has stood steadfast and beyond the reach of destruction, even when many an idol of mind has been shattered forever.
"There is nothing hidden that shall not be revealed."
Yet, there are no mortal minds which can encompass all that IS revealed to the Immortal Spirit.
Kalki
Wrong Prong
Bong Gong
- When very young, Hannali would sit on the black ground and chuckle till it was feared he would injure himself.
Whatever came over him, prenatal witticism or ancestral joke, he seldom was able to hold his glee.
In all his life he never learned to hold it in.
- I sometimes tackle ideas and notions that are relatively complex, and it is very difficult to be sure that I am conveying them in the best way.
Anyone who goes beyond cliche phrases and cliche ideas will have this trouble.
- Do not be deceived by the way men of bad faith misuse words and names ...Things are set up as contraries that are not even in the same category. Listen to me: the opposite of radical is superficial, the opposite of liberal is stingy; the opposite of conservative is destructive. Thus I will describe myself as a radical conservative liberal; but certain of the tainted red fish will swear that there can be no such fish as that.
Beware of those who use words to mean their opposites. At the same time have pity on them, for usually this trick is their only stock in trade.
- True love is that we should hate whatever interferes with our vision of the high and the lowly.
- A crisis should have thunder in it.
- Listen now to a series of sayings that always come hard to brave people.
Our own great movement will grow with its own impetus wherever it is not blighted.
We will break up persons of blight and centers of blight.
But often, and this will be the hard part for all of you to understand, we will warn and advise before we kill.
And quite often we will not kill at all.
Try to understand this.
- We ourselves become the bridges out over the interval that is the world and time.
It is a daring thing to fling ourselves out over that void that is black and scarlet below and green and gold above.
A bridge does not abandon its first shore when it grows out in spans towards the further one.
- In this growing there are no really new things or new situation.
There are only things growing out right, or things growing out deformed or shriveled.
There is nothing new about railways or foundries or lathes or steel furnaces.
They also are green-growing things.
There is nothing new about organizations of men or of money.
All these growing things are good, if they grow towards the final answers that were given in the beginning.
- In its flexibility and in its wide-open opportunities, this is the total Utopia. Anything that you can conceive of, you can do in this non-world. Nothing can stop you except a total bankruptcy of creativity. The seedbed is waiting. All the circumstances stand ready. The fructifying minerals are literally jumping out of the ground. And nothing grows. And nothing grows. And nothing grows. Well, why doesn't it?
- This myth filter was necessary.
The ship logs could not tell it rightly nor could any flatfooted prose.
And the deeds were too bright to be viewed direct.
They could only be sung by a bard gone blind from viewing suns that were suns.
- To you who are scattered and broken, gather again and mend.
Rebuild always, and again I say rebuild.
Renew the face of the earth.
It is a loved face, but now it is covered with the webs of tired spiders.
Expressions of sharp and even violent criticism of religion and the church have been welcomed, for they usually imply sincerity of thought. If caustic criticism of religious institutions and practices is irreligious, then Amos, Isaiah, and Jesus were very irreligious men. In fact, that is exactly what many of their contemporaries took them to be.
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Many years ago Rudyard Kipling gave an address at McGill University in Montreal. He said one striking thing which deserves to be remembered. Warning the students against an over-concern for money, or position, or glory, he said: "Some day you will meet a man who cares for none of these things. Then you will know how poor you are."
That has happened on a grand scale.
Jesus cared for none of these things.
And for nineteen centuries he has led many people to see how poor they are with only a collection of things to show for their journey through life, and no spiritual resources.
There is the liability of accepting prematurely an artificial horizon for our own character and personality, of losing the horizon of the possible person we might be. It is the danger of considering our character as something static, rather than as something emerging.
We ought to recognize that uncertainty of mind is not all a bad thing. It is a sign that your mind is still alive, still sensitive.
When and if fascism comes to America it will not be labeled "made in Germany"; it will not be marked with a swastika; it will not even be called fascism; it will be called, of course, "Americanism."
The words "God is love" have this deep meaning: that everything that is against love is ultimately doomed and damned.
May, May, May Day, Maypoles, McKenna, Mindfulness, Mindfulness and Morality
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Live each moment with freedom, honesty and responsibility.
Therapy isn't curing somebody of something; it is a means of helping a person explore himself, his life, his consciousness. My purpose as a therapist is to find out what it means to be human. Every human being must have a point at which he stands against the culture, where he says, "This is me and the world be damned!" Leaders have always been the ones to stand against the society — Socrates, Christ, Freud, all the way down the line.
Dogmatists of all kinds — scientific, economic, moral, as well as political — are threatened by the creative freedom of the artist. This is necessarily and inevitably so. We cannot escape our anxiety over the fact that the artists together with creative persons of all sorts, are the possible destroyers of our nicely ordered systems. For the creative impulse is the speaking of the voice and the expressing of the forms of the preconscious and unconscious; and this is, by its very nature, a threat to rationality and external control.
Artists are generally soft-spoken persons who are concerned with their inner visions and images. But that is precisely what makes them feared by any coercive society. For they are the bearers of the human being's age old capacity to be insurgent. They love to immerse themselves in chaos in order to put it into form, just as God created form out of chaos in Genesis. Forever unsatisfied with the mundane, the apathetic, the conventional, they always push on to newer worlds.
_-_The_Flagellation_of_Our_Lord_Jesus_Christ_(1880).jpg)
One does not become fully human painlessly.
Lacking positive myths to guide him, many a sensitive contemporary man finds only the model of the machine beckoning him from every side to make himself over into its image.
The value of dreams, like ... divinations, is not that they give a specific answer, but that they open up new areas of psychic reality, shake us out of our customary ruts, and throw light on a new segment of our lives.
The self is made up, on its growing edge, of the models, forms, metaphors, myths, and all other kinds of psychic content which give it direction in its self-creation. This is a process that goes on continuously. As Kierkegaard well said, the self is only that which it is in the process of becoming.
Whereas moral courage is the righting of wrongs, creative courage, in contrast, is the discovering of new forms, new symbols, new patterns on which a new society can be built.
Communication leads to community — that is, to understanding, intimacy, and the mutual valuing that was previously lacking.
Community can be defined simply as a group in which free conversation can take place.
The authentic rebel knows that the silencing of all his adversaries is the last thing on earth he wishes: their extermination would deprive him and whoever else remains alive from the uniqueness, the originality, and the capacity for insight that these enemies — being human — also have and could share with him. If we wish the death of our enemies, we cannot talk about the community of man. In the losing of the chance for dialogue with our enemies, we are the poorer.
There is no meaningful "yes" unless the individual could also have said "no."
However it may be confounded or covered up or counterfeited, this elemental capacity to fight against injustice remains the distinguishing characteristic of human beings.
Revolution may do more harm than good.
The rebel, on the other hand, is "one who opposes authority or restraint: one who breaks with established custom or tradition." ... He seeks above all an internal change, a change in the attitudes, emotions, and outlook of the people to whom he is devoted. He often seems to be temperamentally unable to accept success and the ease it brings; he kicks against the pricks, and when one frontier is conquered, he soon becomes ill-at-ease and pushes on to the new frontier. He is drawn to the unquiet minds and spirits, for he shares their everlasting inability to accept stultifying control. He may, as Socrates did, refer to himself as the gadfly for the state — the one who keeps the state from settling down into a complacency, which is the first step toward decadance. No matter how much the rebel gives the appearance of being egocentric or of being on an "ego trip," this is a delusion; inwardly the authentic rebel is anything but brash.
We are more apt to feel depressed by the perpetually smiling individual than the one who is honestly sad. If we admit our depression openly and freely, those around us get from it an experience of freedom rather than the depression itself.
Power is required for communication. To stand before an indifferent or hostile group and have one's say, or to speak honestly to a friend truths that go deep and hurt — these require self-affirmation, self-assertion, and even at times aggression. ... My experience in psychotherapy convinces me that the act which requires the most courage is the simple communication, unpropelled by rage or anger, of one's deepest thoughts to another.
Violence is the daimonic gone awry. It is "demon possession" in its starkest form. Our age is one of transition, in which the normal channels for utilizing the daimonic are denied; and such ages tend to be times when the daimonic is expressed in its most destructive form.
_-_Dante_And_Virgil_In_Hell_(1850).jpg)
Not to recognize the daimonic itself turns out to be daimonic, it makes us accomplices on the side of the destructive possession.
The denial of the daimonic is, in effect, a self-castration in love and a self-nullification in will. And the denial leads to the perverted forms of aggression we have seen in our day in which the repressed comes back to haunt us.
Poets often have a conscious awareness that they are struggling with the daimonic, and that the issue is their working something through from the depths which push the self to a new plane.
Vanity and narcissism — the compulsive need to be admired and praised — undermine one's courage, for one then fights on someone else's conviction rather than one's own.
We define religion as the assumption that life has meaning. Religion, or lack of it, is shown not in some intellectual or verbal formulations but in one's total orientation to life. Religion is whatever the individual takes to be his ultimate concern. One's religious attitude is to be found at that point where he has a conviction that there are values in human existence worth living and dying for.
To love means to open ourselves to the negative as well as the positive — to grief, sorrow, and disappointment as well as to joy, fulfillment, and an intensity of consciousness we did not know was possible before.
Joy, rather than happiness, is the goal of life, for joy is the emotion which accompanies our fulfilling our natures as human beings. It is based on the experience of one's identity as a being of worth and dignity, who is able to affirm his being, if need be, against all other beings and the whole inorganic world.
Many people feel they are powerless to do anything effective with their lives. It takes courage to break out of the settled mold, but most find conformity more comfortable. This is why the opposite of courage in our society is not cowardice, it's conformity.
Finding the center of strength within ourselves is in the long run the best contribution we can make to our fellow men. ... One person with indigenous inner strength exercises a great calming effect on panic among people around him. This is what our society needs — not new ideas and inventions; important as these are, and not geniuses and supermen, but persons who can be, that is, persons who have a center of strength within themselves.
My early book learning came to me as naturally as the seasons in … the little town in which I grew up.
… Quite early I began to find a special charm in an unpeopled world … of lava rock and sagebrush desert. …
I was often more purely happy at such times than I think I have ever been since.
The Sand Pebbles (1962)
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- Jake Holman knew he was a strange bird and he was used to going aboard new ships. By the time they realized they were in a struggle Jake Holman would already have made for himself the place he wanted on their ship and they could never dislodge him. Or wish to.
- "At home in America, when today reaches them, it will be Flag Day. They will gather to do honor and hear speeches. For us who wear the uniform, every day is Flag Day. We pay our honor in act and feeling and we have little need of words. But on this one day it will not hurt us to grasp briefly in words the meaning of our flag. That is what I want to talk about this morning.
"Our flag is the symbol of America. I want you to grasp what America really is," Lt. Collins said, nodding for emphasis. "It is more than marks on a map. It is more than buildings and land. America is a living structure of human lives, of all the American lives that ever were and ever will be. We in San Pablo are collectively only a tiny, momentary bit of that structure. How can we, standing here, grasp the whole of America?" He made a grasping motion. "Think now of a great cable," he said, and made a circle with his arms. "The cable has no natural limiting length. It can be spun out forever. We can unlay it into ropes, and the ropes, into strands, and the strands into yarns, and none of them have any natural ending. But now let us pull a yarn apart into single fibers —" he made plucking motions with his fingers " — and each man of us can find himself. Each fiber is a tiny, flat, yellowish thing, a foot or a yard long by nature. One American life from birth to death is like a single fiber. Each one is spun into the yarn of a family and the strand of a home town and the rope of a home state. The states are spun into the great, unending, unbreakable cable that is America."
His voice deepened on the last words. He paused, to let them think about it. ...
"No man, not even President Coolidge, can experience the whole of America directly," Lt. Collins resumed. "We can only feel it when the strain comes on, the terrible strain of hauling our history into a stormy future. Then the cable springs taut and vibrant. It thins and groans as the water squeezes out and all the fibers press each to each in iron hardness. Even then, we know only the fibers that press against us. But there is another way to know America."
He paused for a deep breath. The ranks were very quiet.
"We can know America through our flag which is its symbol," he said quietly. "In our flag the barriers of time and space vanish. All America that ever was and ever will be lives every moment in our flag. Wherever in the world two or three of us stand together under our flag, all America is there. When we stand proudly and salute our flag, that is what we know wordlessly in the passing moment. ...
"Understand that our flag is not the cloth but the pattern of form and color manifested in the cloth," Lt. Collins was saying. "It could have been any pattern once, but our fathers chose that one. History has made it sacred. The honor paid it in uncounted acts of individual reverence has made it live. Every morning in American schoolrooms children present their hearts to our flag. Every morning and evening we render it our military salutes. And so the pattern lives and it can manifest itself in any number of bits of perishable cloth, but the pattern is indestructible."
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- Civilians are only morally bound to salute our flag. We are legally bound. All Americans are morally bound to die for our flag, if called upon. Only we are legally bound. Only we live our lives in a day to day readiness for that sacrifice. We have sworn our oaths and cut our ties. We have given up wealth and home life, except as San Pablo is our home. It marks us. It sets us apart. We are uncomfortable reminders, in time of peace. Those of you who served in the last war know what I mean.
- It is said there will be no more war. We must pretend to believe that. But when war comes, it is we who will take the first shock and buy time with our lives. It is we who keep the faith. We are not honored for it. We are called mercenaries on the outposts of empire. … We serve the flag. The trade we follow is the give and take of death. It is for that purpose the American people maintain us. Any one of us who believes he has a job like any other, for which he draws a money wage, is a thief of the food he eats and a trespasser in the bunk in which he lies down to sleep!
- He had a light in his gaunt face and his voice and manner were strangely solemn. The were all a bit afraid of him. …
"We're mixing our lives together, Maily, and we'll never be able to unmix them again, and we'll never want to." His voice was strong but tender, and he was smiling down at here. "I take you for what you are, and all that you are, and mix you with all of me, and I don't hold back nothing. Nothing! When you're cold, and hungry, and afraid, so am I. When you're happy, so am I. I'm going to stay with you all that I can, take the very best care of you that I can, and love you every minute until I die." He took a deep, slow breath. "Now you say it"
"I will always love you and honor you and serve you, Frenchy, and stay as near to you as I can, and do everything for you, and live for you, and I won't have any life except our life together…" Tears welled out of her eyes but she smiled steadily up without blinking. "I will just love you, Frenchy, all of me there is just loving you forever."
Nature, Nurture, Noetics, the Noosphere, and Nimitz against Nazi Nitwits and Nihilstic Numbskulls
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Our armament must be adequate to the needs, but our faith is not primarily in these machines of defense but in ourselves.
God grant me the courage not to give up what I think is right even though I think it is hopeless.
Obnoxious Orthodoxies opposing Obnoxious Orthodoxies and Overstanding Orthodoxy
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Authority has always attracted the lowest elements in the human race. All through history mankind has been bullied by scum. Those who lord it over their fellows and toss commands in every direction and would boss the grass in the meadows about which way to bend in the wind are the most depraved kind of prostitutes. They will submit to any indignity, perform any vile act, do anything to achieve power. The worst off-sloughings of the planet are the ingredients of sovereignty. Every government is a parliament of whores. The trouble is, in a democracy, the whores are us.
Everything that's fun in life is dangerous. Horse races, for instance, are very dangerous. But attempt to design a safe horse and the result is a cow (an appalling animal to watch at the trotters.) And everything that isn't fun is dangerous too. It is impossible to be alive and safe.
Anyone who thinks he has a better idea of what's good for people than people do is a swine.
One of the annoying things about believing in free will and individual responsibility is the difficulty of finding somebody to blame your problems on. And when you do find somebody, it's remarkable how often his picture turns up on your driver's license.
Freedom is not empowerment. Empowerment is what the Serbs have in Bosnia. Anybody can grab a gun and be empowered. It's not entitlement. An entitlement is what people on welfare get, and how free are they? It's not an endlessly expanding list of rights — the "right" to education, the "right" to food and housing. That's not freedom, that's dependency. Those aren't rights, those are the rations of slavery — hay and a barn for human cattle.
The idea of a news broadcast once was to find someone with information and broadcast it. The idea now is to find someone with ignorance and spread it around.
I don't have any answers. Use your common sense. Be nice. This is the best I can do. All the trouble in the world is human trouble. Well, that's not true. But when cancer cells run amok and burst out of the prostate and take over the liver and lymph glands and end up killing everything in the body including themselves, they certainly are acting like some humans we know.
Don't fight a battle if you don't gain anything by winning.
Wars may be fought with weapons, but they are won by men. It is the spirit of the men who follow and of the man who leads that gains the victory.
Never tell people how to do things. Tell them what to do, and they will surprise you with their ingenuity.
Fixed fortifications are a monument to the stupidity of man.
We herd sheep, we drive cattle, we lead people. Lead me, follow me, or get out of my way.
Always do everything you ask of those you command.
You can't run an army without profanity; and it has to be eloquent profanity.
An army without profanity couldn't fight its way out of a piss-soaked paper bag.
...
As for the types of comments I make, sometimes I just, by God, get carried away with my own eloquence.
Some goddamn fool once said that flanks have got to be secure.
Since then sonofabitches all over the globe have been guarding their flanks.
I don't agree with that.
My flanks are something for the enemy to worry about, not me.
Before he finds out where my flanks are, I'll be cutting the bastard's throat.
Through the travail of the ages,
Midst the pomp and toil of war,
Have I fought and strove and perished
Countless times upon this star.
The age long strife I see
Where I fought in many guises,
Many names, but always me.
And I see not in my blindness
What the objects were I wrought,
But as God rules o'er our bickerings
It was through His will I fought.
So forever in the future,
Shall I battle as of yore,
Dying to be born a fighter,
But to die again, once more.
Phantom of the Opera, Phantom of the Paradise, and Phantoms of Phantoms of Phantoms
edit- "Old Souls" by "Winslow Leach" (lyrics actually by Paul Williams)
Jessica Harper (Phoenix), performing the song in the film
Phantompalooza2
shorter clip from Phantompalooza, but better quality
Our love is an old love, baby.
It's older than all our years.
I have seen in strange young eyes
Familiar tears.
We're old souls in a new life baby.
They gave us a new life
To live and learn.
Our paths have crossed and parted,
This love affair was started
Long, long ago.
This love survives the ages
In its story lives are pages
Fill them up, may ours turn slow.
Our love is a strong love, baby.
We give it all
And still receive.
All souls last forever
So we need never fear goodbye.
In time, we kiss … Hello.
Principles and Profound Politics against Pernicious Policies of Putrid Partisan Politicians
editPythagoras, Pythagoreans, Parmenides, Plays, Play, Playgrounds, and Playful Polemics
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I am Don Quixote! The Man of La Mancha!
I come in a world of iron to make a world of gold.
The mission of each true knight, his duty — nay — his privilege...To dream the impossible dream
To fight the unbeatable foe
To bear with unbearable sorrow
To run where the brave dare not go.
To right the unrightable wrong
To love pure and chaste from afar
To try when your arms are too weary
To reach the unreachable star.
This is my quest —
To follow that star
No matter how hopeless
no matter how far.
To fight for the right
Without question or pause
To be willing to march into Hell
For a heavenly cause.
And the world will be better for this
That one man scorned and covered with scars
Still strove with his last ounce of courage
To reach the unreachable star.
"The Impossible Dream (The Quest)"
Performances from the 1972 film
Reality ever rules and impels all things within a splendorous and complex Kosmos — and ever lets the Lore of Light, Liberty, Life, and Love rule, glorify, enhance, and multiply the splendors of all existences. Language is always limited, but ultimately Awareness, Life, and Love are not — not in any mortally conceivable ways — and therefore are never-ending aspects of ALL Awareness, Life, and Love every perceived to be expanding their potential and actual presences and processes — or diminishing those of others. Within lives and lifetimes of individuals, societies and ages, language and any use of it can always be corrupted or enhanced in many diverse ways. Any statement of truth which can ever be made can be well understood or extremely misunderstood in slightly or immensely different ways from different perspectives. The wise know this well, and have as little dependence or reliance upon words or assertions as are necessary to circumstances — and teach others to do the same in whatever ways they honorably can.
Ultimate Love is ever and always the most glorious aspect of Reality. And the highest and most glorious form of love is certainly not that of love of perceptual self, nor personal self — nor even love of another, or many others or all others, which are only partial and incomplete manifestations of the Ultimate Love and Ultimate Life. Quests for Ultimate Awareness ever lead to Ultimate Love and quests for Ultimate Love ever lead to Ultimate Awareness — and a love of the Ultimate Spirit of ALL Awareness, Life, and Love to such a degree that one can abide in hatred of no person or appearance or mysteries — but transcend all limited concerns and accept the necessary reality of all. Though any mortal mind or personalty can be perceived to rightfully or properly fall or descend into states of hatred and harmfulness to some aspects of one's condition or that of others when one perceives that it is so helpful as to be needful or indeed necessary to do so to prevent or limit even further harm, the wisest cannot abide in deep or permanent resentment of anyone or anything, and are always aiming to optimize their capacities to properly react to and apply the lessons of all that they encounter.
Kalki
Reich, Robin Hood, and Robinson
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Shared pain is lessened; shared joy, increased — thus do we refute entropy.
Just as there are Laws of Conservation of Matter and Energy, so there are in fact Laws of Conservation of Pain and Joy. Neither can ever be created or destroyed.
But one can be converted into the other.
A person should live forever, or die trying.
To all the Callahan's Places there ever were or ever will be, whatever they may be called — and to all the merry maniacs and happy fools who are fortunate enough to stumble into one: may none of them arrive too late!
The delusion that one's sexual pattern is The Only Right Way To Be is probably the single most common sexual-psychosis syndrome of this era, and it is virtually almost always the victim's fault. You cannot acquire this delusion by observing reality.
God is an iron.
If a person who indulges in gluttony is a glutton, and a person who commits a felony is a felon, then God is an iron.
Man has historically devoted much more subtle and ingenious thought to inflicting cruelty than to giving others pleasure — which, given his gregarious nature, would seem a much more survival-oriented behavior. Poll any hundred people at random and you'll find at least twenty or thirty who know all there is to know about psychological torture and psychic castration — and maybe two who know how to give a terrific back-rub.
Call it… joy. The thing like pleasure that you feel when you've done a good thing or passed up a real tempting chance to do a bad thing. Or when the unfolding of the universe just seems especially apt. It's nowhere near as flashy and intense as pleasure can be. Believe me! But it's got something going for it. Something that can make you do without pleasure, or even accept a lot of pain, to get it.
It took a couple of hundred million years to develop a thinking ape and you want a smart one in a lousy few hundred thousand?
To live outside the law, you must be lucky.
Shakespeare, Soliloquies, and Solitude
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Starhawk, Spirals, and Spires of Science, Society, Skepticism, and Spirituality
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Stoicism (Greek Στοά) was a school of Hellenistic philosophy founded in Athens by Zeno of Citium in the early 3rd century BC. The Stoics considered destructive emotions to be the result of errors in judgment, and that a sage, or person of "moral and intellectual perfection," would not suffer such emotions. Stoics were concerned with the active relationship between cosmic determinism and human freedom, and the belief that it is virtuous to maintain a will (called prohairesis) that is in accord with nature. Because of this, the Stoics presented their philosophy as a way of life, and they thought that the best indication of an individual's philosophy was not what a person said but how he behaved. Later Stoics, such as Seneca and Epictetus, emphasized that because "virtue is sufficient for happiness," a sage was immune to misfortune. This belief is similar to the meaning of the phrase "stoic calm", though the phrase does not include the "radical ethical" Stoic views that only a sage can be considered truly free, and that all moral corruptions are equally vicious.
Stoic doctrine was a popular and durable philosophy, with a following throughout Greece and the Roman Empire, from its founding until the closing of all philosophy schools in 529 AD by order of the Emperor Justinian I, who perceived their pagan character to be at odds with the Christian faith. From then on, almost all philosophers were bishops, priests and monks of the Church. ~ Wikipedia intro for Stoicism as of 2010·11·29
Supremacy and Stupidity
edit- There are few more stupid claims that a mortal mind can make than to claim absolute supremacy of understanding of vitally important facts of Ultimate Reality. Everyone has unique and in some ways valuable perspectives — and has some forms of understanding arguably supreme to others in some regards, but the most certain supremacy of anyone is that of their particular forms of stupidity — and certainly NOT in any presumed worthiness to seek absolute control or command over the activities of others — which I wish to emphasize is ALWAYS one of the most obnoxious and intolerably dangerous forms of stupidity people can engage in.
Because, you see,
we live in Eden.
Genesis has got it all wrong — we never left the Garden.
Look about you.
This is paradise.
It's hard to find, I'll grant you, but it is here.
Under our feet, beneath the surface, all around us is everything we want.
The earth is shining under the soot.
We are all fools.
Justin Playfair/"Sherlock Holmes"
Unique Unicorns, Unitarian Universalism, Universe and Universal Unity
editV for Vital Victory — Viva Veritas Vis Vitalis
edit "V" in V for Vendetta by Alan Moore
Voilà! In view, a humble vaudevillian veteran cast vicariously as both victim and villain by the vicissitudes of Fate. This visage, no mere veneer of vanity, is a vestige of the vox populi, now vacant and vanished. However, this valorous visitation of a bygone vexation stands vivified and has vowed to vanquish these venal and virulent vermin vanguarding vice and vouchsafing the violently vicious and voracious violation of volition! The only verdict is vengeance; a vendetta held as a votive, not in vain, for the value and veracity of such shall one day vindicate the vigilant and the virtuous.
Verily, this vichyssoise of verbiage veers most verbose, so let me simply add that it's my very good honor to meet you and you may call me "V".
"V" in V for Vendetta by the Wachowski brothers adapted from the work of Moore
Vis
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Vis \Vis\, n.
1. Force; power.
2. (Law)
- (a) Physical force.
- (b) Moral power.
Principle of vis viva (Mech.), the principle that the difference between the aggregate work of the accelerating forces of a system and that of the retarding forces is equal to one half the vis viva accumulated or lost in the system while the work is being done.
Vis impressa [L.]
- (Mech.), force exerted, as in moving a body, or changing the direction of its motion; impressed force.
Vis inerti[ae]. [L.]
- (a) The resistance of matter, as when a body at rest is set in motion, or a body in motion is brought to rest, or has its motion changed, either in direction or in velocity.
- (b) Inertness; inactivity.
- Note: Vis interti[ae] and inertia are not strictly synonymous. The former implies the resistance itself which is given, while the latter implies merely the property by which it is given.
Vis mortua [L.]
- (Mech.), dead force; force doing no active work, but only producing pressure.
Vis vit[ae], or Vis vitalis [L.]
- (Physiol.), vital force.
Vis viva [L.]
- (Mech.), living force; the force of a body moving against resistance, or doing work, in distinction from vis mortua, or dead force; the kinetic energy of a moving body; the capacity of a moving body to do work by reason of its being in motion. See Kinetic energy, in the Note under Energy. The term vis viva is not usually understood to include that part of the kinetic energy of the body which is due to the vibrations of its molecules.
Veterans, Veterans Day and Vonnegut
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I will come to a time in my backwards trip when November eleventh, accidentally my birthday, was a sacred day called Armistice Day. When I was a boy, and when Dwayne Hoover was a boy, all the people of all the nations which had fought in the First World War were silent during the eleventh minute of the eleventh hour of Armistice Day, which was the eleventh day of the eleventh month.
It was during that minute in nineteen hundred and eighteen, that millions upon millions of human beings stopped butchering one another. I have talked to old men who were on battlefields during that minute. They have told me in one way or another that the sudden silence was the Voice of God. So we still have among us some men who can remember when God spoke clearly to mankind.
Armistice Day has become Veterans' Day. Armistice Day was sacred. Veterans' Day is not.
So I will throw Veterans' Day over my shoulder. Armistice Day I will keep. I don't want to throw away any sacred things.
What else is sacred? Oh, Romeo and Juliet, for instance.
And all music is.
Kurt Vonnegut
in
Breakfast of Champions, Or Goodbye Blue Monday (1973)
Vortex of Vitalic Vortices and VALIS
editWashington, Watcher, Watcher, & Watchmen
editWeird Wyrd Words, Wordsmiths, Worldsmiths, WE Wizards, and Who
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Star Wars is adolescent nonsense; Close Encounters is obscurantist drivel; Star Trek can turn your brains to puree of bat guano; and the greatest science fiction series of all time is Doctor Who! And I'll take you all on, one-by-one or all in a bunch to back it up!
Harlan Ellison
I am not so harsh towards these other imaginative productions as Ellison is — but I can agree with him that Doctor Who is definitely the most imaginative of them all — and full of good drama and good humour, especially many of the episodes of the most recent productions.
Kalki
The real intent of my writing is not to say, you must think in this way. The real intent is: here are some of the many important facets of this extraordinary Kosmos; have you thought about including them in your own worldview? My work is an attempt to make room in the Kosmos for all of the dimensions, levels, domains, waves, memes, modes, individuals, cultures, and so on ad infinitum. I have one major rule: Everybody is right. More specifically, everybody — including me — has some important pieces of truth, and all of those pieces need to be honored, cherished, and included in a more gracious, spacious, and compassionate embrace. To Freudians I say, Have you looked at Buddhism? To Buddhists I say, Have you studied Freud? To liberals I say, Have you thought about how important some conservative ideas are? To conservatives I say, Can you perhaps include a more liberal perspective? And so on, and so on, and so on... At no point I have ever said: Freud is wrong, Buddha is wrong, liberals are wrong, conservatives are wrong. I have only suggested that they are true but partial. My critical writings have never attacked the central beliefs of any discipline, only the claims that the particular discipline has the only truth — and on those grounds I have often been harsh. But every approach, I honestly believe, is essentially true but partial, true but partial, true but partial.
And on my own tombstone, I dearly hope that someday they will write: He was true but partial...
There is arguably no more important and pressing topic than the relation of science and religion in the modern world. Science is clearly one of the most profound methods that humans have yet devised for discovering truth, while religion remains the single greatest force for generating meaning. Truth and meaning, science and religion; but we still cannot figure out how to get the two of them together in a fashion that both find acceptable.
These two enormous forces — truth and meaning — are at war in today's world. ...And something sooner or later has to give.
Within the scientific skeleton of truth, religious meaning attempts to flourish, often by denying the scientific framework itself — rather like sawing off the branch where you cheerily perch. The disgust is mutual because modern science gleefully denies virtually all the basic tenets of religion in general. According to the typical view of modern science, religion is not much more than a holdover from the childhood of humanity, with about as much reality as, say, Santa Claus.
If some sort of reconciliation between science and religion is not forthcoming, the future of humanity is, at best, precarious.
The human organism itself seems to be hardwired for these deep spiritual patterns, although not necessarily for the specific ways that they show up in a particular religion important as those are. Rather, the human being seems imbued by the realities suggested by these cross-cultural spiritual currents and patterns, with which individual religions and spiritual movements resonate, according to their own capacities and to their own degrees of fidelity. The simple recognition of these deep spiritual patterns would be the glimmering of an integral spirituality.
That recognition would also imply that, any practices that would help individual human beings attune themselves to these patterns would increase humanity's understanding of, and attunement with, the spiritual patterns of the universe. This attunement could occur through any of the great religions, but would be tied exclusively to none of them. A person could be attuned to an "integral spirituality" while still be a practicing Christian, Buddhist, New-Age advocate, or Neopagan. This would be something added to one's religion, not subtracted from it. The only thing it would subtract (and there's no way around this) is the belief that one's own path is the only true path to salvation.
Does the integral approach believe that all religions are saying essentially the same thing from a different perspective? No, almost the opposite.
Yet the integral approach does claim to be able to "unite," in some sense, the world's great spiritual traditions, which is what has caused much of the interest in this approach. If humanity is ever to cease its swarming hostilities and be united in one family, without squashing the significant and important differences among us, then something like an integral approach seems the only way. Until that time, religions will continue to brutally divide humanity, as they have throughout history, and not unite, as they must if they are to be a help, not a hindrance, to tomorrow's existence.
An integral approach acknowledges that all views have a degree of truth, but some views are more true than others, more evolved, more developed, more adequate. And so let's get that part out of the way right now: homophobia in any form, as far as I can tell, stems from a lower level of human development — but it is a level, it exists, and one has to make room in one's awareness for those lower levels as well, just as one has to include third grade in any school curriculum. Just don't, you know, put those people in charge of anything important.
Human beings undergo psychological development. At each level or stage of development, they will see the world in a different way. Hence, each level of development has, as it were, a different religious belief or worldview. This does not make God or Spirit the result of human development; it does, however, make the ways in which humans conceive of God or Spirit the result of development. And this is where it gets really interesting.
There are several different meanings of the words "religion" and "spirituality," all of which are important. The whole point about an integral or comprehensive approach is that it must find a way to believably include all of those important meanings in a coherent whole.
Integral spirituality — as the very name "integral" implies — transcends and includes science, it does not exclude, repress, or deny science. To say that the spiritual currents of the cosmos cannot be captured by empirical science is not to say that they deny science, only that they show their face to other methods of seeking knowledge, of which the world has an abundance.
Most of the great wisdom traditions agree that:
1. Spirit, by whatever name, exists.
2. Spirit, although existing "out there," is found "in here," or revealed within to the open heart and mind.
3. Most of us don't realize this Spirit within, however, because we are living in a world of sin, separation, or duality — that is, we are living in a fallen, illusory, or fragmented state.
4. There is a way out of this fallen state (of sin or illusion or disharmony), there is a Path to our liberation.
5. If we follow this Path to its conclusion, the result is a Rebirth or Enlightenment, a direct experience of Spirit within and without, a Supreme Liberation, which
6. marks the end of sin and suffering, and
7. manifests in social action of mercy and compassion on behalf of all sentient beings.
Does a list something like that make sense to you? Because if there are these general spiritual patterns in the cosmos, at least wherever human beings appear, then this changes everything. You can be a practicing Christian and still agree with that list; you can be a practicing Neopagan and still agree with that list.
An argument can be legitimately sustained only if the participants are speaking about the same level. Argumentation would — for the most part — be replaced with something akin to Niels Bohr's principle of complementarity. Information from and about the different vibratory levels of bands of consciousness — although superficially as different as X-Rays and radio waves — would be integrated and synthesized into one spectrum, one rainbow. ... Each band or level, being a particular manifestation of the spectrum, is what it is only by virtue of the other bands. The color blue is no less beautiful because it exists along side the other colors of a rainbow, and "blueness" itself depends upon the existence of the other colors, for if there were no color but blue, we would never be able to see it. In this type of synthesis, no approach, be it Eastern or Western, has anything to lose — rather, they all gain a universal context.
Are the mystics and sages insane? Because they all tell variations on the same story, don't they? The story of awakening one morning and discovering you are one with the All, in a timeless and eternal and infinite fashion. Yes, maybe they are crazy, these divine fools. Maybe they are mumbling idiots in the face of the Abyss. Maybe they need a nice, understanding therapist. Yes, I'm sure that would help. But then, I wonder. Maybe the evolutionary sequence really is from matter to body to mind to soul to spirit, each transcending and including, each with a greater depth and greater consciousness and wider embrace. And in the highest reaches of evolution, maybe, just maybe, an individual's consciousness does indeed touch infinity — a total embrace of the entire Kosmos — a Kosmic consciousness that is Spirit awakened to its own true nature. It's at least plausible. And tell me: is that story, sung by mystics and sages the world over, any crazier than the scientific materialism story, which is that the entire sequence is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying absolutely nothing? Listen very carefully: just which of those two stories actually sounds totally insane?
The real problem is not exterior. The real problem is interior. The real problem is how to get people to internally transform, from egocentric to sociocentric to worldcentric consciousness, which is the only stance that can grasp the global dimensions of the problem in the first place, and thus the only stance that can freely, even eagerly, embrace global solutions.
Global consciousness is not an objective belief that can be taught to anybody and everybody, but a subjective transformation in the interior structures that can hold belief in the first place, which itself is the product of a long line of inner consciousness development.
At this point in history, the most radical, pervasive, and earth-shaking transformation would occur simply if everybody truly evolved to a mature, rational, and responsible ego, capable of freely participating in the open exchange of mutual self-esteem. There is the "edge of history." There would be a real New Age.
"Saving the biosphere" depends first and foremost on human beings reaching mutual understanding and unforced agreement as to common ends. And that intersubjective accord occurs only in the noosphere. Anything short of that noospheric accord will continue to destroy the biosphere.
Spirit slumbers in nature, awakens in mind, and finally recognizes itself as Spirit in the transpersonal domains.
There is intersubjectivity woven into the very fabric of the Kosmos at all levels.
An acknowledgment of the full spectrum of consciousness would profoundly alter the course of every one of the modern disciplines it touches — and that, of course, is an essential aspect of integral studies... A full-spectrum approach to human consciousness and behavior means that men and women have available to them a spectrum of knowing — a spectrum that includes, at the very least, the eye of flesh, the eye of mind, and the eye of spirit.
The integral vision, I believe, is more than happy to welcome empirical science as a part — a very important part — of the endeavor to befriend the Kosmos, to be attuned to its many moods and flavors and facets and forms. But a more integral psychology goes beyond that . . . With science we touch the True, the "It" of Spirit. With morals we touch the Good, the "We" of Spirit. What, then, would an integral approach have to say about the Beautiful, the "I" of Spirit itself? What is the Beauty that is in the eye of the Beholder? When we are in the eye of Spirit, the I of Spirit, what do we finally see?
Anybody can they say they are being "spiritual" — and they are, because everybody has some type and level of concern. Let us therefore see their actual conception, in thought and action, and see how many perspectives it is in fact concerned with, and how many perspectives it actually takes into account, and how many perspectives it attempts to integrate, and thus let us see how deep and how wide runs that bodhisattva vow to refuse rest until all perspectives whatsoever are liberated into their own primordial nature.
The Realization of the Nondual traditions is uncompromising: There is only Spirit, there is only God, there is only Emptiness in all its radiant wonder. All the good and all the evil, the very best and the very worst, the upright and the degenerate — each and all are radically perfect manifestations of Spirit precisely as they are. There is nothing but God, nothing but the Goddess, nothing but Spirit in all directions, and not a grain of sand, not a speck of dust, is more or less Spirit than any other.
My ankle hurts from dancing last night so there is pain. But the pain doesn't hurt me for there is no me.
We move from part to whole and back again, and in that dance of comprehension, in that amazing circle of understanding, we come alive to meaning, to value, and to vision: the very circle of understanding guides our way, weaving together the pieces, healing the fractures, mending the torn and tortured fragments, lighting the way ahead — this extraordinary movement from part to whole and back again, with healing the hallmark of each and every step, and grace the tender reward.
I don't feel special … I was just full of energy and loved to learn.
I like to play any character that allows me the freedom to explore it and teach the audience something they didn't know, and show them a journey they identify with... or be inspired, or moved.
Anything that touches someone's heart is important for me.
I just tend to admire people who go for what they believe in, like David Lynch for example, and just say what goes through their heads, and are not afraid of people not accepting them.
I have no respect for people who deliberately try to be weird to attract attention, but if that's who you honestly are, you shouldn't try to "normalize yourself". It's a fine line.
Everything was okay, as long as I could dream. Its amazing, really, the difference between having a dream and not having any left that can come true.
It's the difference between living and dying.
Belinda's Swan Song (2006)
Whatever you've accomplished there's always more to experience.
Anyway
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I wear it well,
The self-inflicted tale they tell.
I singed my hair,
I broke my nails.
You'd love me then,
If all else failed.
The night was long and dark and just
Another dagger to my trust.
I thrust it in until I bleed
I wiped my point for you to see.
And anyway,
It's over now.
Nothing left to say.
I don't care how,
It's over anyway.
You're not that strong.
I don't belong here!
I constructed all this tragedy.
Go tell them all it's all my fault
You'll tell them I was crazy.
And anyway it's over now
Nothing left to say.
Wonder, Wondrous Wonderfalls and Wyrd Wordplay within the Whirling Whorls of Worlds
editThe Cat and the Fiddle,
The Cow jump'd over the Moon,
The little dog laugh'd to see such Craft,
And the Dish ran away with the Spoon.
"Hi Diddle Diddle"
in
Mother Goose's Melody
(c. 1765)
I wonder wonder why the wonder falls
I wonder why the wonder falls on me
I wonder wonder why the wonder falls
With everything I touch and hear and see.
There’s something out there and it’s laughing at us.
I’m not in existential crisis! Just the opposite.
I was fine when existence had no meaning.
Meaninglessness in a universe that has no meaning — that I get.
But meaninglessness in a universe that has meaning... what does it mean?
Xenophon
in
Memorabilia of Socrates
This is a portion of the famous passage from Ulysses by James Joyce often known as "Molly Bloom's Soliloquy" which ends the book. The passage has been used as the basis for the song "The Sensual World" by Kate Bush, and another called "Yes" by Amber.
I love flowers Id love to have the whole place swimming in roses God of heaven theres nothing like nature the wild mountains then the sea and the waves rushing then the beautiful country with the fields of oats and wheat and all kinds of things
_-_Spring_Breeze_(1895).jpg)
the sun shines for you he said the day we were lying among the rhododendrons on Howth head in the grey tweed suit and his straw hat the day I got him to propose to me yes first I gave him the bit of seedcake out of my mouth and it was leapyear like now yes 16 years ago my God after that long kiss I near lost my breath yes he said I was a flower of the mountain yes so we are flowers all a womans body yes that was one true thing he said in his life and the sun shines for you today yes that was why I liked him because I saw he understood or felt what a woman is and I knew I could always get round him and I gave him all the pleasure I could leading him on till he asked me to say yes and I wouldnt answer first only looked out over the sea and the sky I was thinking of so many things he didnt know
I was a Flower of the mountain yes when I put the rose in my hair like the Andalusian girls used or shall I wear a red yes and how he kissed me under the Moorish wall and I thought well as well him as another and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes.
Life! We are all living it — or are we?
Terrence Bundley (Terence Stamp)
I know our music isn't that mainstream — I love doing it.
It's like my photography. I know there isn't that much demand for blurry photographs taken while running — but ... you know, who cares?
The world's a playground!
You know that when you are a kid, but somewhere along the way everyone forgets it.
Allison (Zooey Deschanel)
The old Carl didn't think he was enough for anybody.
I thought if I said yes to things, and got involved with people, then sooner or later they'd find out I'm not enough.
I didn't think I had anything to share.
But now I know that what I have to share is pretty huge, and I want to share it with you.
Carl Allen (Jim Carrey)
∞
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Once you do know what the question actually is, you'll know what the answer means...
Douglas Adams
in
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
A serious and good philosophical work could be written consisting entirely of jokes.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
