The Wisdom

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Be here now.
Belief, itself, is the Great Sin.
Baby in my drink.
I meet no one but me.
I do not search. I find.
I am. Therefore I think.
A stone is frozen music.
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Seek truth - not victory.
The door opens inward.
Thank God I'm an Atheist.
History never repeats itself.
A real initiation never ends.
Think globally. Act locally.
Whatever you resist persists.
All things deep end in song.
To a fish the water isn't wet.
The map is not the territory.
80% of success is showing up!
Take the best. Leave the rest.
Heroes are a nuisance at home.
Science is Magic plus Evidence.
Rights are nonsense upon stilts.
You can't unmake a distinction.
A school is for those who need it.
Seek refuge in silence, not dogma.
Chance favors the prepared mind.
Reality is the only choice you have.
Death is like taking off a tight shoe.
This statement is not self-referential.
'Tis an ill wind that blows no minds.
Truth, like roses, comes with thorns.
Colorless green ideas sleep furiously.
It's better to wear out than to rust out.
Change is inevitable. Pain is optional.
We have no art. We do all things well.
Sex is the world's second biggest thrill.
Failing to plan is like planning to fail.
Knowledge keeps no better than fish.
Following tolerates no old prejudices.
A problem clearly stated is half-solved.
Pain is inevitable. Suffering is optional.
If you think in English, you're confused.
Start living as if your life depended on it.
Unlearning is the beginning of wisdom.
Freedom is the recognition of necessity.
No matter where you go; there you are!
Truth awaits eyes unclouded by longing.
The grass doesn't pay the clouds for rain.
Without imagination calculations mislead.
If not you... Who? If not now... When?
Whatever you think you are... you aren't.
I've decided to live forever - or die trying.
There is no failure. There is only feedback.
My commitment is to truth, not consistency.
Gradients, not boundaries, determine form.
Words obscure what they don't make clear.
Evolution not only continues, it accelerates.
The search for meaning gives life meaning.
Life is either a daring adventure, or nothing.
Nature, to be commanded, must be obeyed.
Few people achieve more than they aspire to.
Luck is where preparation meets opportunity.
Truth hath better deeds than words to grace it.
If you've seen one redwood, you've seen 'em all.
If you know who you are, you know who I am.
Never sacrifice anything for the sake of security.
No person is free who is not master of himself.
Genius is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration.
You don't have to be a genius to think like one.
Everything in moderation; including moderation.
I didn't say it was possible. I only said it was true.
The search for happiness is itself unhappiness.
The pursuit of pleasure is the pursuit of the past.
Only the truly religious dare to question their faith.
When the pupil is ready, the teacher will appear.
Only the hand that erases can write the true thing.
The only love we keep is the love we give away.
Love your enemies for they tell you your faults.
The best things in life are very expensive indeed.
Without a port of call, no wind is the right wind.
I do not choose to speak more clearly than I think.
All questions are answered by the state of Silence.
A first-rate soup is better than a second-rate poem.
A friend is one before whom I may think aloud.
For everything that lives is holy. Life delights in life.
You don't have to be a Christian to be born again.
A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.
Turn your stumbling blocks into stepping stones.
Love is the triumph of imagination over intelligence.
There's nothing at all unique about being unique.
People without convictions have little power to resist.
It's better to do nothing than to be busy doing nothing.
Some things can't be taught. They must be learned.
You don't so much have a purpose in life as it has you.
The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom.
Inertia, unchallenged, promotes careless philosophy.
Think of yourself as an artist working in protoplasm.
If you aren't making mistakes, you aren't growing.
Doubt is uncomfortable, but certainty is ridiculous.
There is no way to happiness. Happiness is the way.
The road to success is always under construction.
Neurosis is always a substitute for legitimate suffering.
You can't commit yourself to a path you can't articulate.
You gotta know the rules before you can break'em.
There is no doubt about it, I am definitely confused.
The only way to overcome temptation is to yield to it.
If something is worth doing, it's worth doing half-assed.
First we raise the dust and then claim we cannot see.
If a fool will persist in his folly, he will become wise.
First listen, my friend, then you may shriek and bluster.
If you see someone without a smile, give them yours.
If they called you a Ford, would you put gas in your ear?
Facts do not cease to exist just because they are ignored.
"No"s are just part of the process of getting what I want.
Every man is self-made. Only the successful will admit it.
The human body is the best picture of the human soul.
It is arrogant to feel a failure. Your mission is beyond you.
Unconscious metaphysics tend to be bad metaphysics.
Argue for your limitations, and sure enough they're yours.
It's not so much what you believe as how you believe it.
Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies.
One thing only I know, and that is that I know nothing.
You can be/do/have/etc. anything you want - or die trying.
One repays a teacher badly if one remains always a pupil.
To keep a lamp burning we have to keep putting oil in it.
Diplomacy is the art of letting someone else have your way.
Just because you have something to say is no reason to say it.
Things should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler.
A house of delusions is cheap to build but drafty to live in.
Only those who can see the invisible can do the impossible.
A miracle remains a miracle, even if it happens every day.
If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the problem.
There are no passengers on Spaceship Earth. We are all crew.
Truth emerges more readily from error than from confusion.
The opposite of determinism is not freedom. It's randomness.
Life is not only a pleasure but a kind of eccentric privilege.
Philosophical problems arise when language goes on holiday.
God offers every mind a choice between truth and repose.
An educated person is a learning person, not a learned person.
The only thing more expensive than education is ignorance.
What great thing would you do if you knew you couldn't fail?
But software has no physical properties, only logical properties.
It takes two to speak the truth: one to say it and one to hear it.
The greatest freedom lies buried within the greatest discipline.
For spiritual cretins, morality is merely not breaking the rules.
Liberation is when words no longer get in the way of reality.
Show me a thoroughly satisfied man and I'll show you a failure.
A religious outlook need not incorporate a dogmatic theology.
Be wiser than other people if you can; but do not tell them so.
A Christian admits he's a sinner. A Scientist realizes he's a Fool.
Accuracy in the use of words is the basis of all serious thinking.
I don't know who discovered water, but I'm sure it wasn't a fish.
The lion will lie down with the lamb if only it rain hard enough.
You can be very successful and still be a robot 98% of the time.
If you can't be with the one you love, love the one you're with.
Reason is not man's primitive endowment, but his achievement.
The truth will set you free, but first it will make you miserable.
Thinking Error #1: attributing to one cause what is due to many.
When you become afraid of dying you become afraid of living.
Commitment is surrendering to a decision you've already made.
If you don't do your own thinking, someone else will do it for you.
Alas, after a certain age, every person is responsible for his face.
Life is not a problem to be solved, but a reality to be experienced.
By appreciation, we make excellence in others our own property.
Before you can know who you are, you must know who you aren't.
I am the vessel. The draught is God's. And God is the thirsty one.
All too often we are what we have been carefully taught not to see.
Achievement is the inevitable and natural by-product of awareness.
Hope is the feeling that what is desired is possible of attainment.
Convictions cause convicts. Whatever you believe imprisons you.
Not what we have, but what we enjoy, constitutes our abundance.
Evolution proceeds by choice not by chance from this stage onward.
It's often easier to fight for one's principles than to live up to them.
Let us see how high we can fly before the sun melts the wax in our wings.
Whether you play with shit or honey, a little of it always sticks to you.
We will either live together as brothers or we will die together as fools.
Science deals with other people's emotions. Religion deals with mine.
Simple things should be simple. Complex things should be possible.
While we pursue the unattainable we make impossible the realizable.
An old pine tree preaches wisdom, and a wild bird is crying "Truth".
Rules are to facilitate common transactions, not to inhibit unusual ones.
We cannot hold a torch to light another's path without brightening our own.
A good idea is like a weed. It persists in spite of our best efforts to stop it.
I crave ideas that probe and am surrounded by recipes for tuna surprise.
As far as we know, these chimps can't count and do not know numbers.
All men are ordinary men; the extraordinary men are those that realize it.
Paranoid systems are consistent and often well anchored at key points.
You don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.
Those who do not study are only cattle dressed up in men's clothing.
For all that has been. . . Thanks! To all that shall be. . . Yes!
Try to learn something about everything and everything about something.
It's not what you know that counts. It's what you do with what you know.
The real problem is not whether machines think but whether people do.
If you don't do your own thinking, someone else will have to do it for you.
Just because a Mozart symphony comes to an end doesn't mean it's a failure.
The longer you chew fear, the bigger it gets; better to swallow it right away.
What disturbs peoples' minds is not events, but their judgements of events.
For it is known that language does not so much reflect reality as create it.
Where understanding fails, there immediately comes a word to take its place.
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If we don't change our direction, we're likely to end up where we're headed.
When the only tool you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail.
The persom rowing the boat generally doesn't have the time to rock it.
Never attribute to malice what can be adequately explained by stupidity.
We shall, sooner or later, arrive at a mechanical equivalent of consciousness.
If you haven't written your purpose in life, you don't have a purpose in life.
Liberation is the nervous system devoid of mental/conceptual redundancy.
When people care about other people, you don't have to care about yourself.
Great spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds.
A gentleman is a man who never hurts anyone's feelings unintentionally.
The only serious philosophical question is whether or not to commit suicide.
The most incomprehensible thing about the world is that it is comprehensible.
There is no greater burden than a lot of potential hanging around your neck.
It's as simple as changing your mind. And it's as difficult as changing your mind.
Life is a relationship among molecules and not a property of any one of them.
The divine does not want you to be good. The divine wants you to be happy.
Reality is not only stranger than we conceive, but stranger than we can conceive.
It's not what you don't know that hurts you. It's what you do know that ain't so.
In our era, the road to holiness necessarily passes through the world of action.
A little learning is a dangerous thing. Drink deep, or taste not the Perian spring.
What you are is God's gift to you. What you make of yourself is your gift to God.
Not only must we understand the truth, but we must be prepared to withstand it.
God does not enter alike unto all hearts. He comes according to the preparation.
Of those things about which we can say nothing, let us therefore remain silent.
A difference between givers and takers is that givers always have something to give.
As our case is new, so must we think and act anew. We must disenthrall ourselves.
It's not only what we do, but also what we do not do, for which we are accountable.
A coherent credo can neither be derived from science nor arrived at without science.
When I am happy, I am always good, but when I am good, I am seldom happy.
You cannot teach a man anything; you can only help him to find it within himself.
The most comprehensible thing about the Universe is that it is incomprehensible.
Here is a test to find whether your mission on Earth is finished: If you're alive, it isn't.
The future depends not only on what man is, but even more on what he thinks he is.
Even if I don't always succeed, I recognize success when someone else achieves it.
Save for the first nine months of life, no person conducts his affairs as well as a tree.
Experience is not what happens to you, but what you do with what happens to you.
What is man... but a minutely set, ingenious machine for turning red wine into urine.
Not to encumber Earth - No pathetic confetti, but just this: not to encumber Earth.
There is no technique for love; it is an awakening which springs from your very core.
What's whispered in the darkness of your room shall be shouted from the rooftops.
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Program testing can be used to show the presence of bugs, but never their absence!
Ignorance is no excuse when once we know that ignorance is the only possible excuse.
In order to draw a limit to thinking, we should have to think both sides of this limit.
The purpose of art is to lay bare the questions which have been hidden by the answers.
A billion here. A billion there... First thing you know, you're talkin' about real money.
Out of loyalty to others he was compelled to be aggressive by their feelings of inferiority.
Proof is often no more than a lack of imagination in providing an alternative explanation.
The survival of a civilization or an individual depends upon its ability to adapt to change.
Anyone can spot wrong answers. It takes a truly creative mind to spot wrong questions.
There are two tragedies in life. One is not to get your heart's desire. The other is to get it.
Blessed are those who expect nothing much out of life, for they shall not be disappointed.
What we call "I" is a swinging door which moves when we inhale and when we exhale.
Just because the message may never be received does not mean it is not worth sending.
Do not meddle in the affairs of Earthling primates, for they are subtle and quick to anger.
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.
We place no reliance in virgin or pigeon. Our method is science. Our aim is religion.
The only way out of today's misery is for people to become worthy of each other's trust.
Discovery consists in seeing what everyone has seen, and thinking what none has thought.
If you can't think of three ways of abusing a tool, you don't really understand how to use it.
If you don't get everything you want, think of all the things you don't get that you don't want.
The man who insists upon seeing with perfect clearness before he decides, never decides.
I and mine do not convince by arguments, similes, rhymes. We convince by our presence.
Anyone who hasn't seriously questioned his/her sanity is either crazy or not paying attention.
One weakness of our age is our apparent inability to distinguish our needs from our greeds.
The man who never alters his opinion is like standing water, and breeds reptiles of the mind.
It's all very well to forgive one's enemies, but one likes to give them something to forgive also.
...the ultimate redemption of the West is the redemption from the need for redemption itself.
Some are born great; some achieve greatness; and some have greatness thrust upon Ôem.
The only freedom which deserves the name is that of pursuing our own good in our own way.
Nobody ever made a greater mistake than he who did nothing because he could only do a little.
It only takes twenty years for a liberal to become a conservative without changing a single idea.
It would be difficult to exaggerate the degree to which we are influenced by those we influence.
We cannot know without the intellect; we do not know until we experience with the emotions.
The trouble with the world is that the stupid are cocksure and the intelligent are full of doubt.
Men must be taught as if you taught them not. And things unknown proposed as things forgot.
The greatest penalty paid by the victims of intolerance is that they become intolerant themselves.
After the final "no" there comes a "yes" and upon that "yes" the future of the world depends.
But the known world in which we live is not the Universe, only a universe of our own contriving.
You make yourself and others suffer just as much when you take offense as when you give offense.
Fairness? Decency? How can you expect fairness and decency on a planet of sleeping people?
Life is a comedy for those who think; a tragedy for those who feel. Or is it the other way around?
Never justify your actions... your friends don't need it, and your enemies won't buy it anyway.
Activity, change, process - these are the "substance" of our bodies, of our world, of the universe.
To be free, to be able to stand up and leave everything behind... without looking back. To say Yes...
My aim is to teach you to pass from a piece of disguised nonsense to something that is patent nonsense.
The optimist believes that this is the best of all possible worlds and the pessimist fears that he is right.
To wait for purpose means that you value the subject of your desires enough to give of your time.
Matter has reached the point of beginning to know itself. Man is a star's way of knowing about stars.
...governments will continue to react to each other's reactions rather than pay attention to circumstances.
The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious... It is the source of all art and science.
The absence of clear thinking should not be mistaken for the presence of confused thinking; and vice versa.
The struggle between men or nations is not between Good and Evil. It is between different ideas of Good.
People demand freedom of speech as a compensation for the freedom of thought which they seldom use.
People are more violently opposed to fur than to leather because it's safer to harass rich women than motor cycle gangs.
Life only demands from you the strength you possess. Only one feat is possible... not to have run away.
...people imagine they are pursuing the Glory of God when actually they are only pursuing their own.
Outside of pure mathematics, he who utters the word "impossible" is wanting in prudence and good sense.
We are left with a crisis in decision. Our main test involves our will to change rather than our ability to change.
Language: the one tool that enables us to grasp hold of our lives and transcend our fate by understanding it.
The basic thing is therefore to dispel, by experiment and experience, the illusion of oneself as a separate ego.
A successful analysis is not one that reconstructs the past, but one that creates a useful fiction for the future.
Think not that you can guide the course of Love, for Love, if it finds you worthy, shall guide your course.
Reason is itself a matter of faith. It is an act of faith to assert that our thoughts have any relation to reality at all.
In denying responsibility for the stuff in your life you say you don't like, you give up your power to change it.
There is no fear greater than the fear of loneliness - yet there is no need greater than the need to stand alone.
Your cravings as a human animal do not become a prayer just because it is God whom you ask to attend to them.
Destiny is not a matter of chance; it is a matter of choice. It is not a thing to be waited for; it is a thing to be achieved.
Nothing is true unless it makes you laugh, but you don't really understand it until it makes you cry. Or is it vice-versa?
I am nobody.
A red sinking autumn sun
took away my name.
Communication may be regarded as a game in which the speaker and listener battle against the forces of confusion.
If you can express yourself satisfactorily in language, then your thoughts are no bigger than your language machine.
Science and religion are not so different in the end, except that in science the ultimate sin is believing too strongly.
There are no excuses for anything. You change things or you don't. Excuses rob you of power and induce apathy.
Once a photograph of Earth, taken from outside, is available... a new idea as powerful as any in history will let loose.
The key resource of the future is not oil or other forms of natural energy, but the force of our collective imaginations.
The devil enters uninvited when the house stands empty. For other kinds of guests, you have first to open the door.
If, on the other hand, men do not trust their nature or the universe of which it is a part, how can they trust their mistrust?
Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world: it's the only thing that ever has.
Magick is merely to be and to do. I should add: "to suffer"... It is not my fault if being is baffling, and doing desperate!
The history of mankind is strewn with habits, creeds and dogmas that were essential to one age and disastrous in another.
Man is never completely and permanently a stranger to his fellow man. Man belongs to man. Man has claims on man.
The essence of greatness is the ability to choose personal fulfillment in circumstances where others choose madness.
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A humility which never makes comparisons, never rejects what there is for the sake of something "else" or something "more".
I am not yet so lost in lexicography as to forget that words are the Daughters of Earth, and that things are the Sons of Heaven.
Impossibility is only "logical" impossibility. Universe is not constrained by what primates imagine to be or not to be possible.
It's important to determine not only what a person's 'true' intentions are, but also what that person thinks its 'true' intentions are.
We must live more in the world that is and less in the world that should be if we're ever going to create the world that could be.
Let everything be consumed by the fire in the hope that something of value may be left which can be riddled out of the ashes.
Only in the quest for love will you find love. Only when you are willing to let love conquer you can you be the love that you seek.
If you're absolutely certain that you are right and everyone else is wrong, you probably haven't looked very deeply into the issue.
The evolution of symbolism is the basic problem of anthropogenesis. All other human achievements are minor or derived from it.
Imagine the universe beautiful and just and perfect, then be sure of one thing: the IS has imagined it quite a bit better than you have.
I believe that happiness is the by-product of the search for meaning and that emptiness is the by-product of the search for happiness.
He was one of those who has had the wilderness for a pillow, and called a star his brother. Alone. But loneliness can be a communion.
The Age of Nations is past. The task before us now, if we would not perish, is to shake off our ancient assumptions, and to build Earth.
We are entering an age where knowledge and the use of information are becoming more important than money and the use of capital.
Either God is everything or there is no God. If God is, God is. If God isn't, God isn't. Your beliefs don't determine what is and what isn't.
I slept with Faith and found her a corpse in the morning. I drank and danced all night with Doubt and in the morning found her a virgin.
Language (in and of itself), used properly, cannot achieve liberation. Language (in and of itself), used improperly, can prevent liberation.
When the need arises - and it does - you must be able to shoot your dog. Don't farm it out. It doesn't make it nicer. It makes it worse.
An act of speech is a happening in the world and, as such, an object of science; the branch of science which studies it is called "linguistics".
People often say that this or that person has not yet found himself. But the Self is not something that one finds. It is something one creates.
The test of a first rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.
We first make our linguistic habits, and then our habits make us. Ill habits gather, by unseen degrees, as brooks make rivers, rivers run to seas.
Since we invented the atomic bomb, everything has changed save our modes of thought and thus we drift toward unparalleled destruction.
We should remember that on a map will be information which is not about the landscape at all, but which merely concerns how to read the map.
Being enlightened doesn't guartantee that you won't act like an idiot... just that you'll now you're acting like an idiot... as you're doing it.
Forgive yourself for past errors. You are no longer the same person who made them, and you can no longer blame a person who does not exist.
The link is not between the word and the object; it is between the word and the concept of the object which exists in the speaker's mind.
Five percent of the people think. Ten percent of the people think they think. And the other eighty-five percent would rather die than think.
With intelligence you can get out of a problem you're in. With wisdom you could have avoided getting into the problem in the first place.
At any rate, your contempt for your fellow human beings does not prevent you, with a well-guarded self-respect, from trying to win their respect.
When a recollection is put into words, those words tend to take the place of the original experience, which thenceforth becomes unrecoverable.
So walk I on uplands unbounded, and know that there is hope for that which Thou didst mold out of dust to have consort with things eternal.
...but it does not seem like a profitable procedure to make odd noises on the off chance that posterity will find a significance to attribute to them.
God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.
No great improvements in the lot of mankind are possible, until a great change takes place in the fundamental constitution of the modes of thought.
Few of our ancestors were perfect ladies and gentlemen. The majority of them weren't even mammals and looked like alligators and Gila monsters.
In the last analysis, what does the word "sacrifice" mean? Or even the word "gift"? He who has nothing can give nothing. The gift is God's - to God.
Dare he, for whom circumstances make it possible to realize his true destiny, refuse it simply because he is not prepared to give up everything else?
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How easy Psychology has made it for us to dismiss the perplexing mystery with a label which assigns it a place in the list of common aberrations.
You have to become an individual before you can transcend individuality. The paradoxical truth here is that in achieving individuality, you transcend it.
Among the storied heroes I can't recall one who studied up and carefully selected his (or her) crisis. Yet most of our real-life heroes do precisely this.
There are three types of people in the world: those who make things happen, those who watch things happen, and those who wonder what happened.
He who has placed himself in God's hand stands free vis-‡-vis men: he is entirely at his ease with them, because he has granted them the right to judge.
We should have a great many fewer disputes in the world if words were taken for what they are, the signs of our ideas only, and not for things themselves.
The brain is unstable, and we live on the edge of disorganization, whether we allow ourselves to be conscious of it or not. Wisdom is knowing the limits.
To get into the core of God at his greatest, one must first get into the core of himself at his least, for no one can know God who has not first known himself.
The mark of your ignorance is the depth of your belief in tragedy and injustice. What the caterpillar calls the end of the world, the master calls the butterfly.
Ask not for the return of love you extend to others. As your love fulfills others, you will be fulfilled. In the process of loving, you become capable of being loved.
I really hate this damn machine, I wish that they would sell it. It never does quite what I want, But only what I tell it.
Your capacity to receive love depends not upon how much others love you - but upon how much, in the process of loving others, you have opened your heart.
A grace to pray for - that our self-interest, which is inescapable, shall never cripple our sense of humor, that fully conscious self-scrutiny which alone can save us.
You can expend a lot of time/energy/etc. trying to figure out why people do the things they do. You'll be doing well if you can figure out what they're going to do.
Self-realization can be achieved in its full form only when all achieve it. We are vested in the well-being of all "others" and all things in our planetary community.
When we first begin to believe anything, what we believe is not a single proposition, it is a whole system of propositions. Light dawns gradually over the whole.
I used to think I know I know,
but now I must confess,
The more I know I know I know,
I know I know the less.
...the impoverishments and enrichments of a self in a world are not necessarily the same as the impoverishments and enrichments of an organism in an environment.
Nature is the effusion , deafening and life-hungry, of a fantastic diaspora in myriads of diverse fruits, a self-fulfilling process, an iron fist sprouting ineffable flowers.
The universe is an intelligence test. Prison is an intelligence test, too. If a mutant can't survive severe testing, it doesn't deserve to instigate the next evolutionary stage.
The emotions are not always subject to reason. But they are always subject to action. When thoughts will not neutralize an undesirable emotion, an action will.
"I", you say, and are proud of the word. But greater is that in which you do not wish to have faith - your body and its great reason: that does not say "I", but does "I".
Knowledge is not creativity, but within any particular field it is difficult to come up with new ideas unless you have some ideas to play around with in the first place.
It is easier to perceive error than to find truth for the former lies on the surface and is easily seen while the latter lies in the depths where few are willing to search for it.
Upon the whole, I came to the conclusion that the optimist thought everything good except the pessimist, and the pessimist thought everything bad, except himself.
Flowers do not work to spread their fragrance; it is an effortless happening. When the heart opens, love awakens and spreads like the fragrance of a blooming flower.
The world we have made as a result of the level of thinking that we have done so far creates problems we cannot solve at the same level at which we created them.
If the future is to remain open and free, we have to rear individuals who can tolerate the unknown... who will not need the support of completely worked out systems.
Behind your thoughts and feelings, my brother, there stands a mighty ruler, and unknown sage - whose name is self. In your body he dwells; he is your body.
No truth so sublime but it may be trivial tomorrow in the light of new thoughts. People wish to be settled; only as far as they are unsettled is there any hope for them.
Anyone who cannot cope with mathematics is not fully human. At best, he is a tolerable sub-human who has learned to wear shoes, bathe and not make messes in the house.
Remember that you are at an exceptional hour in a unique epoch, that you have this great happiness, this invaluable privilege, of being present at the birth of a new world.
...he knows that there are separate things and events, and that he and others are independent agents, just as he knows the comedian's casual remarks are howlingly funny.
We speak of provinces of meaning and not of sub-universes because it is the meaning of our experience and not the ontological structure of the objects which constitutes reality.
What makes loneliness an anguish
Is not that I have no one to share my burden,
But this:
I have only my own burden to bear.
I suspect that a good deal of philosophy has had its origin in the endeavor to find verbally satisfactory answers to questions that sounded as though they ought to have answers.
True, we love life, not because we are used to living but because we are used to loving. There is always some madness in love. But there is always some reason in madness.
Nobody can stand truth if it is told to him or her. Truth can be tolerated only if you discover it yourself, because then, the pride of discovery makes the truth palatable.
The glitter of glib debate is despised by the sage. The contrived "Eureka!" he does not use, but finds things in their places as usual. This is called throwing things open to the light.
The only man who behaves sensibly is my tailor; he takes my measure anew each time he sees me, whilst all the rest go on with their old measurements and expect them to fit me.
There is a point at which everything becomes simple and there is no longer any question of choice, because all you have staked will be lost if you look back. Life's point of no return.
Mediocrity is not measured by intelligence tests but by the degree of honesty and commitment one is willing to exercise. Mediocrity is a moral deficiency, a cowardice of the mind.
To exist in the fleet joy of becoming, to be a channel for life as it flashes by in its gaiety and courage, cool water glittering in the sunlight - in a world of sloth, anxiety, and aggression.
What we know of other people is only our memory of the moments during which we knew them. And they have changed since then. At every meeting we are meeting a stranger.
Let Athens, he'd declare, be never so splendid; nonetheless, of a man whose every day is passed within its walls one says, not that he's been to Athens, but that he's been nowhere.
Arguably then, ambivalence is the mirror image within a person of certain characteristics of hierarchically organized systems, where the individual is a subsystem in some larger system.
There are three types of people in the world: those who think they make things happen, those who think they watch things happen, and those who think they wonder what happened.
Religion is a purely personal matter. A genuine theology is the outcome of a single complex personality; it cannot be transferred. No two persons, if sincere, can have the same religion.
Maturity: among other things - not to hide one's strength out of fear and, consequently, live below one's best and to exist for the future of others without being suffocated by their present.
As a result of its metabolism, which is characteristic of every living organism, its components are not the same from one moment to the next. Living forms are not in being, They are happening.
Love comes from within you. When you ask for love from the other, you miss the very source of love. When you give love to the other, you reach into the source of love within you.
In the whole history of human knowledge, there is scarcely any other notion more liberating, more conducive to clearheadedness, than the notion that some questions are unanswerable.
...this special and supreme order of happiness is not a result to be obtained through action, but a fact to be realized through knowledge. The sphere of action is to express it, not to gain it.
"Come to the edge", he said.
"But we're afraid", they said.
"Come to the edge and face your fear", he said.
They came to the edge.
He pushed them.
They flew.
As a climber you will have a wide sphere of activity even after, if that should happen, you reach your goal. You can, for instance, try to prevent others from becoming better qualified than yourself.
Getting acquainted with the new neighbors happens quickly when aided by one of several catalysts: dogs or small children. They seem to serve the same function in society as enzymes do in the body.
There are two types of people in the world: those who seek happiness, and those who seek truth. Those who seek truth believe it will make them happy. Those who seek happiness don't believe in truth.
Every passing hour brings the Solar System forty-three thousand miles closer to Globular Cluster M13 in Hercules - and still there are some misfits who insist that there is no such thing as progress.
There is a sharp disagreement among competent men as to what can be proved and what cannot be proved, as well as an irreconcilable divergence of opinion as to what is sense and what is nonsense.
It cannot be denied that the Sacred Books of the East are full of rubbish, and that the same stream which carries down fragments of pure gold carries also sand and mud and much that is dead and offensive.
All knowledge is conditioned and limited, at present, by the properties of light and human symbolism. The solutions to all human problems depend on inquiries into these two conditions and limitations.
A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.
Love perpetually tests our patience. It robs us of all comfort; it shakes the very foundation of our adopted identity. It remakes us and remolds us in a way which we never before could have imagined.
The person who has five ideas but throws out four of them because they are wrong appears less creative than the person who has five ideas and keeps them all because he does not realize they are wrong.
We must never forget that, while the modern world has produced grounds for complaint, it has also produced the person doing the complaining, a person who expects more than any of his forebears expected.
Irrevocable commitment to any religion is not only intellectual suicide; it is positive unfaith because it closes the mind to any new vision of the world. Faith is, above all, openness - an act of trust in the unknown.
...showing the world the strength and joy of people who have deep convictions without being fanatical, who are loving without being sentimental, imaginative without being unrealistic, disciplined without submission.
He was a member of the crew on Columbus's caravel - he kept wondering whether he would get back to his home village in time to succeed the old shoemaker before anybody else could grab the job.
He believes himself to be essentially evil. He dwells on Nazi atrocities. He thinks that the current project - using the planet's finest minds to build a doomsday weapon - is proof of humanity's pathological nature.
A person would do well to carry a pencil in his pocket and write down the thoughts of the moment. Those that come unsought are commonly the most valuable and should be secured, because they seldom return.
When the sense of Earth unites with the sense of one's body, one becomes Earth of Earth, a plant among plants, an animal born from the soil and fertilizing it. In this union, the body is confirmed in its pantheism.
To compromise in this matter is to decide; to postpone and evade decision is to decide; to hide the matter is to decide. There are a thousand ways to say "no"; one way of saying "yes"; and no way of saying anything else.
To undertake a project as the word's derivation indicates means to cast an idea out ahead of oneself so that it gains autonomy and is fulfilled not only by the efforts of its originator, but, indeed, independently of him as well.
Controlled, universal disarmament is the imperative of our time. The demand for it by the hundreds of millions will, I hope, become so universal and so insistent that no man, no government anywhere can withstand it.
Through the process of sitting still and following your breath as it goes out and dissolves, you are connecting with your heart. By simply letting yourself be, as you are, you develop genuine sympathy towards yourself.
I believe there is the tragedy of a man who works very hard and never gets what he wants. And then I believe there is the even more bitter tragedy of a man who finally gets what he wants and finds out that he doesn't want it.
The language we use influences the thoughts we think much more than the thoughts we think influence the language we use. We are encased in fossil metaphors; verbal chains guide us through our daily reality-labyrinth.
As a boy, when I was confronted with a statement I couldn't or didn't want to believe, my reaction was simple. I would say, emphatically and in a whining voice, "Oh yeah? Prove it!" Now that I'm older I try not to whine.
Are you in earnest? Seize this very minute; What you can, or dream you can, begin it; boldness has genius, power and magic in it; only engage and then the mind grows heated; begin and then the work will be completed.
History is not made by parties, unions, groupings, demonstrations. It is discreetly woven in the souls and hearts, the successes, failures, pains and joys which are a thousand times nearer to the daily life of each person.
The range of what we think and do is limited by what we fail to notice. And because we fail to notice that we fail to notice there is little we can do to change until we notice how failing to notice shapes our thoughts and deeds.
It cost you Americans $70,000 to kill each North Korean during that little war. Simple rationality would suggest that a certified check to each of those men would have produced significantly better results - for both parties.
By middle age most of us carry in our heads a tremendous catalogue of things we have no intention of trying again because we tried them once and failed - or tried them once and did less well than our self-esteem demanded.
The courage not to betray what is noblest in oneself is considered, at best, to be pride. And the critic finds his judgment confirmed when he sees consequences which, to him, must look very like the punishment for a mortal sin.
A language, as e.g., English, is a system of activities or, rather, of habits, i.e., dispositions to certain activities, serving mainly for the purposes of communication and co-ordination of activities among the members of a group.
Indeed, it does not seem fantastic to believe that the concept of 'sign' may prove as fundamental to the sciences of man as the concept of 'atom' has been for the physical sciences or the concept of 'cell' for the biological sciences.
I do not believe in the creed professed by the Jewish church, by the Roman church, by the Greek church, by the Turkish church, by the Protestant church, nor by any church that I know of. My own mind is my own church.
It is our task to discover which of our terms are undefined or partially defined or draggled with fringes of connotation, and to catch our hypotheses and exhibit them by clear statements, instead of letting them haunt us in the dark.
One reason the individual can rarely think clearly about the renewal of society or of an institution to which he belongs is that it never occurs to him that he may be part of the problem, that he may be part of what needs renewing.
Whoso would be a man, must be a nonconformist. He who would gather immortal palms must not be hindered by the name of goodness, but must explore if it be goodness. Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind.
Fishing is the chance to wash one's soul with pure air. It brings meekness and inspiration, reduces our egotism, soothes our troubles and shames our wickedness. It is discipline in the equality of men, for all men are equal before fish.
Every force tends to induce an equal and opposite counterforce. Thus, the preferred strategy for change, other things being equal, is the weakening of forces resisting change rather than the addition of new positive forces toward change.
When the conflicting currents of the unconscious create engulfing whirlpools, the waters can again be guided into a single current if the dam sluice be opened into the channel of prayer - and if the channel has been dug deep enough.
The self-acceptance love requires is achieved by a relationship of mutual trust and mutual acceptance. When you can't trust yourself, trusting others becomes self-trust. When you can't accept yourself, accepting others becomes self-acceptance.
...the time is right, the soil is ready, spring is near. Begin the conversion to hope by spreading the message of humanity's potentials to the members of the planetary body. Help them experience that the birth they are witnessing is their own.
As a singer, an individual wears his heart in his throat; as an everyday interactant he is likely to less expose himself. As one can say that it is only qua singer that he emotes on call, so one can say that it is only qua conversationalist that he doesn't.
...the philosophical basis of reality has been the subject of critical discussions for some two hundred years, ever since Immanuel Kant claimed that, in the last analysis, "the real world" is a subjective concept rather than an objective fact.
Excellence is an art won by training and habituation. We do not act rightly because we have virtue or excellence, but rather have those because we have acted rightly. We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act but a habit.
Men spoke much in my boyhood of restricted or ruined men of genius: and it was common to say that many a man was a Great Might-Have-Been. To me it is a more solid and startling fact that any man in the street is a Great Might-Not- Have-Been.
Words grant us the great power to perform a 'controlled' focus of our attention/awareness/etc. This amounts to the ability to ignore some data in favor of other data. "Ignore" is the key word. This ability is our greatest and most dangerous power.
It was all a machine yesterday. It is something like a hologram today. Who knows what intellectual rattle we shall be shaking tomorrow to calm the dread of the emptiness of our understanding of the explanations of our meaningless correlation?
We use the term "causality" to refer to the blind effect of nature and the intended effect of man, the first seen as an infinitely extended chain of caused and causing effects and the second something that somehow begins with a mental decision.
...we must now administer our planet well, learn the art of fulfilled living, practice justice, love and tolerance, and celebrate the miracle of life through individual peace, happiness, joy, altruism and harmony in the endless stream of a changing world.
We are the generation born when humankind is born. We are the first generation to be aware of yourself as one and responsible for the future of the whole. Our capacity as united humankind is infinitely greater than as individuals, separate and alone.
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In the time it takes you to read this sentence more than four people in the world will have starved to death, and most of them will be children. To constantly feel the tension between that fact and your own full stomach is to become a true citizen of Earth.
If I were conducting a telephone fund-raising campaign and I ask you for the "second number" on a list of five telephone numbers, I expect to hear the seven digits of the second telephone number and not the second digit on the first telephone number.
The critical issue for every student of world order is the fate of the nation-state. In the nuclear age, the fragmentation of the world into countless units, each of which has a claim to independence, is obviously dangerous for peace and illogical for welfare.
Today's civilization is full of people who have not the slightest notion of the character or poetry of the night - who have never even seen the night. Especially away from the city where it is truly night and there are no artificial lights to stab or trouble the dark.
This does not imply that the poor are destined to be poor, but rather that the most intelligent of men can reduce a fortune to ruin simply by how well or poorly they have been able to manage their personal selves in reference to the opportunities presented.
All in all, then, I am suggesting that often what talkers undertake to do is not to provide information to a recipient but to present dramas to an audience. Indeed, it seems that we spend most of our time not engaged in giving information but in giving shows.
Even if I was alone of the four billion people on this planet who believed in the superiority, sanctity and divinity of life, I would proclaim and practice this truth fearlessly, joyously and proudly to the very end, be it in prison or at the top of the United Nations.
I can only suggest that he who would combat false consciousness and awaken people to their true interests has much to do, because the sleep is very deep. And I do not intend here to provide a lullaby but merely to sneak in and watch the way the people snore.
There is a tide in the affairs of men which, when taken at the flood, leads on to fortune; omitted, all the voyage of their lives is bound in shallows... On such a full sea are we now afloat, and we must take the current when it serves or lose our ventures.
Smiling, sincere, incorruptible-
His body disciplined and limber.
A man who had become what he could,
And was what he was-
Ready at any moment to gather everything
Into one simple sacrifice.
Whoever writes in blood and aphorisms does not want to be read but to be learned by heart. In the mountains the shortest way is from peak to peak: But for that one must have long legs. Aphorisms should be peaks - and those who are addressed, tall and lofty.
Society provides us with warm, reasonably comfortable caves, in which we can huddle with our fellows, beating on the drums that drown out the howling hyenas of the surrounding darkness. "Ecstasy" is the act of stepping outside the caves, to face the night.
Once you have committed yourself to evolution rather than extinction, you set in motion an irreversible process. Once the baby starts down the birth canal, it cannot return to the womb. What one hour before was a safe home has become a lethal, suffocating place.
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...the path of intelligence is all hard work, low pay, and a high probability that the fanatics of all ideologies will gang up on you. If a person can't accept that cheerfully, he or she should give up such a dangerous occupation, and join one of the coalitions of true believers.
To be "sociable" - to talk merely because convention forbids silence, to rub against one another in order to create the illusion of intimacy and contact: what an example of la condition humaine. Exhausting, naturally, like any improper use of our spiritual resources.
First of all, creativity requires the capacity to be puzzled. But once they are through the process of education, most people lose the capacity of wondering, of being surprised. They feel they ought to know everything, and hence it is a sign of ignorance to be surprised by anything.
How far both from muscular heroism and from the soulfully tragic spirit of unselfishness which unctuously adds its little offering to the spongecake at a Kaffeeklatsch, is the plain simple fact that a person has given himself completely to something he finds worth living for.
A modest wish: that our doings and dealings may be of a little more significance to life than a man's dinner jacket is to his digestion. Yet not a little of what we describe as our achievement is, in fact, no more than a garment in which, on festive occasions, we seek to hide our nakedness.
The overtones are lost, and what is left are conversations which, in their poverty, cannot hide the lack of real contact. We glide past each other. But why? Why? We reach out towards the other. In vain - because we have never dared to give ourselves.
An individual may base himself upon a purely practical, an artistic, a religious, or a scientific acceptance of the universe, and that aspect which he takes as basic will transcend and include the others. The choice, at the present state of our knowledge, can be made only by an act of faith.
The person who is unwilling to accept the axiom that he who chooses one path is denied the others must try to persuade himself, I suppose, that the logical thing to do is to remain at the crossroads. But do not blame the person who does take a path - nor commend him, either.
One of the major impacts of the printing press was to reinforce or enhance a transition that was already in progress when it was invented, namely, the transition from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance. The exact point when this transition took place is impossible to determine...
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In creating a new world/civilization/era/etc., the fact that some people are against it is not nearly as important as the fact that the vast majority of people haven't really thought about it very deeply or very much or even at all. This emerges as an enormous opportunity for Agents of Evolution.
In science it often happens that scientists say, "You know that's really a good argument, my position is mistaken", and then they actually change their minds and you never hear that old view from them again... I cannot recall the last time something like that has happened in politics or religion.
Frequently questions cannot be answered because they contain high-level abstractions that cannot be reduced to lower level abstractions. If we cannot reduce them to lower level abstractions (preferably examples or descriptions), for all practical purposes we do not know what we are talking about.
Nothing causes as much destruction, misery, and death as obsession with a truth believed absolute. Every crime in history is a product of some fanaticism. Every massacre is performed in the name of virtue, in the name of legitimate nationalism, a true religion, a just ideology, the fight against Satan.
...999/1000 of our activity is purely automatic and habitual, from our rising in the morning to our lying down each night. Our dressing and undressing, our greetings and partings, even most forms of our common speech, are things of a type so fixed by repetition as almost to be classed as reflexes.
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Total perspective is an illusion. We do not know the whole of man's history. We must operate with partial knowledge, and be provisionally content with probabilities. Perhaps within these limits, we can learn enough from our history to bear reality patiently, and to respect one another's delusions.
My brother, if you are fortunate you have only one virtue and no more: then you will pass over the bridge more easily. It is a distinction to have many virtues, but a hard lot; and many have gone into the desert and taken their lives because they had wearied of being the battle and battlefield of virtues.
What are called structures are slow processes of long duration, functions are quick processes of short duration. If we say that a function such as the contraction of a muscle is performed by a structure, it means that a quick and short process wave is superimposed on a long lasting and slowly running wave.
For a long time it seemed to me that life was about to begin - real life. But there was always some obstacle in the way; something to be got through first; some unfinished business; time still to be served; a debt to be paid. Then life would begin. At last it dawned on me. These obstacles were my life.
...the setting of the psychological problem, the natural group in which it occurs, is also taken into account. Inner space is, of course, limited to one individual; outer space is not. It is now common to refer to the individual with symptoms as the "index" of group pathology rather than the "patient".
Moral seriousness does not resolve complex problems; it only impels us to face the problems rather than run away. Clearheadedness does not slay dragons; it only spares us the indignity of fighting paper dragons while the real ones are breathing down our necks. But those are not trivial advantages.
One should not think slightingly of the paradoxical; for the paradox is the source of the thinker's passion, and the thinker without a paradox is like a lover without a feeling: a paltry mediocrity... The supreme paradox of all thought is the attempt to discover something that thought cannot think.
Tomorrow we shall meet,
Death and I-
And he shall thrust his sword
Into one who is wide awake.
But in the meantime how grievous the memory
Of hours frittered away.
One of the most interesting times to observe impression management is the moment when a performer leaves the back region and enters the place where the audience is to be found, or when he returns therefrom, for at these moments one can detect a wonderful putting on and taking off of character.
The Vedanta was not originally moralistic; it did not urge people to ape the saints without sharing their real motivation, or to ape motivations without sharing the knowledge which sparks them.
...Genuine love comes from knowledge, not from a sense of duty or guilt.
How my dog frets each time he sees me packing my suitcase, and how sorry I am that I cannot explain to him that there is no need for his dejection, for the whimpers that accompany me to the front gate. There is no way to tell him that I'll be back tomorrow; with each parting he suffers the same martyrdom.
If others do not respond to their own inner growth, they are not meant to evolve - that is the impersonal justice in the whole system. If you do not choose to evolve, you do not evolve. It is up to you. No one can choose for you. Nor can anyone deny you the choice. Freedom is inherent in the nature of reality.
There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling according to the fixed laws of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are, being evolved.
Perhaps, as has often been said, the trouble with people is not so much with their ignorance as it is with their knowing so many things that are not so... So that it is always important to find out about these fears, and if they are based upon the knowledge of something that is not so, they may perhaps be corrected.
Your fancy dress, the mask you put on with such care so as to appear to your best advantage was the wall between you and the sympathy you sought. A sympathy you won on the day when you stood there naked. The voice which gave orders was only obeyed when it became a helpless wail.
The kindergarten class of Earth will be over. Humankind's collective power is too great to be inherited by self-centered, infantile people. Nuclear bombs, biospheric collapse, the destruction of life itself is the power that has been given us through the maturation of the intellect and its servants, science and technology.
The notion of strict, independent sovereignty is a hopeless anachronism in a century of intercontinental ballistic missiles, multi-national corporations and ecological interdependence. But people everywhere are still willing to go to war and die for the myth, dressed up as national honor, tradition, pomp and circumstance.
Our knowledge of the brain is in a very primitive state. While for some regions we have developed some kind of functional concept, there are others, the size of one's fist, of which it can almost be said that we are in the same state of knowledge as we were with regard to the heart before we realized it pumped blood.
Most of us take our theories or interpretations of life for granted, not questioning them or examining them consciously. We move through life drunk with habit, at least as long as the habit seems to work for us. At times we even come to believe we really have a handle on "The Truth". We come to believe in our own objectivity.
I am suggesting that explanation does not exhaust the capacities of understanding nor is it particularly fruitful in some domains. Furthermore, it is possible to provide some illumination of the subject - illumination tantamount to a fruitful and an appropriate understanding - without pretending to furnish an explanation.
We are at the dawn of a new world. Scientists have given to men considerable powers. Politicians have seized hold of them. The world must choose between the unspeakable desolation of mechanization for profit or conquest, and the lusty youthfulness of science and technique serving the social needs of a new civilization.
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The quantum instant of transformation is at hand. Therefore, be sober; that is, be sensitive and aware to what is happening both around you and within you. Around you, confusion will increase. Within you, focus will sharpen, until you are like a laser beam of coherent light in the dark forest of the night.
It makes me very happy that, in the last three years of his life, he [Dag Hammarskjold] took to writing poems, for it is proof to me that he had at last acquired a serenity of mind for which he had long prayed. When a man can occupy himself with counting syllables, either he has not yet attempted any spiritual climb, or he is over the hump.
As an indicator of intellect, language can be misleading. Many small children pick up sophisticated phrases and use them in exactly the right context without the slightest idea of what they mean; their felicity can be confused with wisdom. Many foreign visitors speak halting English; their infelicity can be confused with stupidity.
We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all people are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; that to secure these rights, governments are instituted among people, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.
Why this desire in all of us that, after we have disappeared, the thoughts of the living shall now and again dwell upon our name? Our name. Anonymous immortality we cannot even escape. The consequences of our lives and actions can no more be erased than they can be identified and duly labeled - to our honor or our shame.
A scientist's message is not devoid of universality but its universality is disembodied and anonymous. While the artist's communication is linked forever with its original form, that of the scientist is modified, amplified, fused with the ideas and results of others and melts into the stream of knowledge and ideas which forms our culture.
The mega-crisis, however, is fundamentally an opportunity. Let us determine to see it in that light. There is no rational reason for leaving the mega-crisis unmet. There is no inherent limitation or shortfall in our capacities to meet it. We can have the world we choose. We do have the world we have chosen, and we can choose more wisely.
The material on which the scientist works in his theoretical activities consists of reports of observations, scientific laws and theories, and predictions; that is formulations in language which describe certain aspects of experience. Therefore, an analysis of theoretical procedures in science must concern itself with language and its applications.
Buckminster Fuller's synergetic geometry demonstrates that every unity is inherently plural, and at a minimum six. That is, infinity is ineffable and the less we say about it the fewer idiocies we will utter; but as soon as we pull something out of infinity, something we can analyze and talk about, we find it has at least six elements or aspects.
Only after weeks had passed did I begin to think that I had, rather absent-mindedly, passed through what mystics call "the dark night of the soul," or "crossing the abyss." Whatever one calls it, I reached a depth of despair and deliberately decided to love the world instead of pitying myself; and afterwards, I was no longer afraid of anything.
By the middle of the twentieth century, two major mysteries of ancient times - the nature of physical matter and the nature of living matter - were well on their way to being unraveled. At the same time, however, a third mystery that had also fascinated the ancients - the enigma of the human mind - has yet to achieve comparable clarification.
Only love can achieve the next step of evolution. The separatists may impede the progress of those who love the world, but eventually they will change or else wither away through alienation, stress and discouragement. Love them, attract them, and leave them behind if they do not respond. Theirs is another day, another time, another cause.
A computer can be the most useful tool you've ever used. Realizing its potential, however, is not automatic. It depends on the kind of partnership you form with the computer. And more than anything else, it's the user-interface that determines this partnership. With the right user-interface, you can waltz. With the wrong one, you'll wrestle.
...any "discovery" we make about ourselves or the meaning of life is never, like a scientific discovery, a coming upon something entirely new and unsuspected: it is, rather, the coming to conscious recognition of something we really knew all the time, but, because we were unwilling or unable to formulate it correctly, we did not hitherto know we knew.
A blown egg floats well, and sails well on every puff of wind - light enough for such performances, since it has become nothing but shell, with neither embryo nor nourishment for its growth. "A good mixer." Without reserve or respect for privacy, anxious to please - speech without form, words without weight. Mere shells.
I understood U Thant's belief that the world would be a good place to live in only when its four billion people would understand that they were part of total Creation; that the goodness of humanity depended on their individual goodness and internal purity; that our lives were not closed at the beginning and the end, but were part of an endless stream of time.
He who knows nothing, loves nothing. He who can do nothing understands nothing. He who understands nothing is worthless. But he who understands also loves, notices, sees... The more knowledge is inherent in a thing, the greater the love... Anyone who imagines that all fruits ripen at the same time as the strawberries knows nothing about grapes.
What does date from the Renaissance is the appearance of men [and women] who made a considerable point about their individuality - who were even, one might say, rather theatrical about it. The men and women of the Renaissance found that it was exciting not only to be an individual but to talk about it, to preen one's self on it and to build a life around it.
The devil and a friend were walking down the street when, some distance away, they saw a man stoop down, pick something up, and put it in his pocket. The friend said to the devil, "What did he pick up?" "A piece of the truth", said the devil. "That's too bad for you then," said the friend. "Oh, not at all," the devil replied. "I'm going to help him organize it."
We can restore Earth by recognizing it as our large body and healing it by the same recognition with which we heal ourselves. We can transcend Earth by recognizing that the existing planetary body is not our limit any more than the existing physical body is. We can transcend by the use of our total power and authority in alignment with the designing intelligence.
The bells of the world have tolled long enough for death, let them now ring out for life... A dead youth is a blasphemy against the God of Life. No one desires war but a fool or a madman, and there is no longer room in the world for madmen or fools. We deny the infallibility of the atom bomb; we affirm the infallibility of the brotherhood of man the world over.
I am particularly drawn to people who can tell me I'm wrong. Most individuals, by the time they're 30, know almost as much as they're ever going to know, and the most important thing they can get from another person is a sense of awkwardness, confusion and contradiction. How do you live on the edge of the most sophisticated awareness that exists? Play the fool.
First, there are what are sometimes called "dark" secrets. These consist of facts about a team which it knows and conceals and which are incompatible with the image of self that the team attempts to maintain before the audience. Dark secrets are, of course, double secrets: one is the crucial fact that is hidden and another is the fact that crucial facts have not been openly admitted.
The Arcosanti project is "optimism in concrete". It works by believing that there is a tomorrow that can be prodigiously affirmative. We would be unholy fools if we did not acknowledge the savagery of what our politicians and our strategists are planning. We must also remember that we vote - that is, we transform reality first and foremost with our lives, minute by minute.
In the twentieth century war will be dead, the scaffold will be dead, royalty will be dead, and dogmas will be dead; but man will live. For all, there will be but one country - that country the whole Earth; for all, there will be but one hope - that hope the whole heaven. All hail, then, to that noble twentieth century, which shall own our children, and which our children shall inherit.
In paradigm change, we realize that our previous views were only part of the picture - and that what we know now is only part of what we'll know later. Change is no longer threatening. It absorbs, enlarges, enriches. The unknown is friendly, interesting territory. Each insight widens the road, making the next stage of travel, the next opening, easier, more fun, more exciting, etc.
A heart pulsating in harmony with the circulation of the sap and the flow of rivers? A body with the rhythms of Earth in its movements? No. Instead: a mind, shut off from the oxygen of alert senses, that has wasted itself on "treasons, stratagems, and spoils" - of importance only within four walls. A tame animal - in whom the strength of the species has outspent itself, to no purpose.
Each of us has a role in this time, this period of transformation. These roles are not equal nor can they be compared in terms of 'more' or 'less' value. No one, by virtue of experience, knowledge, or any other attainment is 'better' than another. Some of us are leaders. Some are teachers. Some are messengers. Some are prophets. Some are parasites. Each plays a part in the unfolding of the event.
To eschew a teleological explanation of evolution is not to deny God. The gospel says, "That which is born of the flesh is flesh, that which is born of spirit is spirit". Biologist deal with the flesh. They believe that, like all other aspect of our created universe, living organisms are designed rationally, and reason should be able to discern the logic of the pattern without resorting to mysticism.
...much education today is monumentally ineffective. All too often we are giving our young people cut flowers when we should be teaching them to grow their own plants. We are stuffing their heads with the products of earlier innovation rather than teaching them to innovate. We think of the mind as a storehouse to be filled when we should be thinking of it as an instrument to be used.
Most people are not even aware of their need to conform. They live under the illusion that they follow their own ideas and inclinations, that they are individualists, that they have arrived at their opinions as the result of their own thinking - and that it just happens that their ideas are the same as those of the majority. The consensus of all serves as a proof of the correctness of "their" ideas.
Mixed motives. In any crucial decision, every side of our character plays an important part, the base as well as the noble. Which side cheats the other when they stand united behind us in an action? When, later, Mephisto appears and smilingly declares himself the winner, he can still be defeated by the manner in which we accept the consequences of our action.
When you have reached the point where you no longer expect a response, you will at last be able to give in such a way that the other will be able to receive, and be grateful. When love has matured and, through the dissolution of the self into light, become a radiance, then shall the Lover be liberated from dependence upon the Beloved, and the Beloved also be made perfect by being liberated from the Lover.
Well, this is one of the characteristics by which we recognize the facts which yield great results. They are those which allow of these happy innovations of language. The crude fact then is often of no great interest; we may point it out many times without having rendered great services to science. It takes value only when a wiser thinker perceives the relation for which it stands, and symbolizes it by a word.
The Old Religion, as we call it, is closer in spirit to Native American traditions or to the shamanism of the Arctic. It is not based on dogma or a set of beliefs, nor on scriptures or a sacred book revealed by a great man. Paganism takes its teachings from nature, and reads inspiration in the movements of the sun, moon, and stars, the flight of birds, the slow growth of trees, and the cycles of the seasons.
In short, the teller's proper relation to his tale, his telling it as if this is the first time he has told it, is generated not by him, but by his having a first-time relation with his current listeners. The genuineness and spontaneity he can bring to his telling is generated by his current listeners' experiencing of genuine suspense; he borrows spontaneity from them. Effective performance requires first hearings, not first tellings.
Take a chair. Any goddamn chair. Right where you are sitting now. Get up and look at it. You don't see the chair alone. Millions of light signals are being integrated very bloody fast and they all pass through the verbal centers. An English-speaker DOESÊNOT see the same chair as the Hopi-speaker or a Chinese-speaker, as Benjamin Whorf demonstrated. You see what language and metaphor allow you to see.
...what the individual spends most of his spoken moments doing is providing evidence for the fairness or unfairness of his current situation and other grounds for sympathy, approval, exoneration, understanding, or amusement. And what his listeners are primarily obliged to do is to show some kind of audience appreciation. They are to be stirred not to take action but to exhibit signs that they have been stirred.
Originally, many children win the affection of one parent at the cost of affectionate claims on the other. A child's means of controlling the family situation by pitting one parent against the other is often developed on this basis, but gives him no more than a relative security. Children who have used this technique with particular success are especially handicapped in their ability to form unambivalent relationships later on.
...for the adolescents emerging from childhood and school there are new factors with which they must come to terms. Some arise from developing sexuality which represents one of the most difficult and lengthy adjustments that any human being has to make, and which is not made any easier by having to take place in a society which seems obsessed, it not with sexual activity, then certainly with sexual titillation.
How then, is the future of art to be envisaged if stylistic evolution has now reached the end of the line? Meyer is of the opinion that "the coming epoch (if, indeed we are not already in it) will be a period of stylistic stasis, a period characterized not by the linear, accumulative development of a single fundamental style, but by the coexistence of a multiplicity of quite different styles in a fluctuating and dynamic steady-state.
Light without a visible source, the pale gold of a new day. Low bushes, their soft silk-gray leaves silvered with dew. All over the hills, the cool red of the cat's-foot in flower. A blue horizon. Emerging from the ravine where a brook runs under a canopy of leaves, I walk out onto a wide open slope. Drops, sprinkled by swaying branches, glitter on my hands, cool my forehead, and evaporate in the gentle morning breezes.
...our memory isn't very good. I'm not saying that we've been saved by sloppy design. On the contrary, the mechanism that regulates our ability to make a long-lasting record is likely quite sophisticated. I suspect that it's not unlike a kidney, where first you throw everything away (except for cells and large molecules), then you take back what you really want to keep from what's being discarded before it reaches the bladder.
One of the (few) virtues of our formal schooling is that it requires the student to test himself in a great variety of activities that are not of his our choosing. But the adult can usually select the kinds of activity on which he allows himself to be tested, and takes full advantage of that freedom of choice. He tends increasingly to confine himself to the things he does well and to avoid the things in which he has failed or has never tried.
Were all humanity taken and crowded together in one place, it would occupy three hundred billion liters, or less than a third of a cubic kilometer. It sounds like a lot. Yet the world's oceans hold 1,285 million cubic kilometers of water, so if all humanity - the five billion bodies - were cast into the ocean, the water would rise less than a hundredth of a millimeter. A single splash, and Earth would be forever unpopulated.
The prospect is, after all, that we are going to enter an age when any duffer sitting at a computer terminal in his laboratory or office or public library or home can delve through unimaginable increased mountains of information in mass-assembly data banks with mechanical powers of concentration and calculation that will be greater by a factor of tens of thousands than was ever available to the human brain of even an Einstein.
Clad in this "self", the creation of irresponsible and ignorant persons, meaningless honors and catalogued acts - strapped into the straight jacket of the immediate. To step out of all this, and stand naked on the precipice of dawn - acceptable, invulnerable, free: in the Light, with the Light, of the Light. Whole, real in the Whole. Out of myself as a stumbling block, into myself as fulfillment.
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Where does the frontier lie? Where do we travel to in those dreams of beauty satisfied, laden with significance but without comprehensible meaning, etched far deeper on the mind than any witness of the eyes? Where all is well - without fear, without desire. Our memories of physical reality, where do they vanish to? While the images of this dream world never grow older. They live - like the memory of a memory.
Indeed, the organism of a thousand minds exists today in thousands of examples: the towns and cities of the world, none too successful, most of them without a future. It is an organism so flaccid and so tenuous that even the elementary demands of sustaining its spare physical energies, of cleansing its receptacles and arteries (of giving each cell its due), of procuring for itself a coherent reference to natural elements are hardly met.
The meaning of international integration now becomes clear. The process of transferring one's loyalty from national symbols and institutions to global symbols and institutions has become not merely desirable but necessary for the survival of mankind. The ethical standard has rarely been so obvious. We must all give up our petty nationalism and ethnocentrism to become Earthlings and learn to be more concerned with the preservation of Earth.
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One should love God mindlessly. By this I mean that your soul ought to be without mind or mental activities or images or representations. Bare your soul of all mind and stay there without mind. Moreover, I advise you to let your own "being you" sink away and melt into God's "being God". In this way your "you" and God's "his" will become completely one "my". And you will come to know his changeless existence and his nameless nothingness.
...The best documented case, perhaps, is the slow development of the easy right of medical people to approach the naked human body with a natural instead of a social perspective. Thus, it was only at the end of the eighteenth century in Britain that childbirth could benefit from an obstetric examination, an undarkened operating room, and delivery - if a male physician was to do it - unencumbered by its having to be performed under covers.
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The normal human being, totally uncritical as to language, sees himself not only as a separate body but also as a source of effect upon other persons. However persuasive and at times powerful this effect may be, it is nearly always uncertain. In contrast with this, he is able, with rare exceptions, to coordinate his earlier speech (intention) with later handling actions of his own. This contributes to the view of the "self" or "ego" as a more than bodily entity.
Take a fresh look, a searching look, at things which adult (Sape) society apparently wants young people to know so urgently - more urgently than anything else - not only in ordinary conversation at work, but even more by plastering them all over the advertisement billboards, the cinemas, the television screens and the pages of newspapers. Make a list of them and then reflect on all this as symbolizing the very peak and crown of Western civilization.
In a reality made of interdependent parts, the pretense of self-sufficiency is a measure of arrogance and ignorance. Only one system is self-sufficient ("God" permitting): the cosmos in its totality. The idea of developing anything that can do without other things is extravagant and devoid of sense. A degree of autonomy and self-reliance are more sane propositions, as they tend to discount arrogance on the one side and irresponsibility-parasitism on the other.
Young people do not assimilate the values of their group by learning the words (truth, justice, etc.) and their definitions. They learn attitudes, habits and ways of judging. They learn these in intensely personal transactions with their immediate family and associates. They learn them in the routine and crises of living, but they also learn them through songs, stories, drama and games. They do not learn ethical principles; they emulate ethical (or unethical) people.
For our Titanic purposes of faith and revolution, what we need is not the cold acceptance of the world as a compromise, but some way in which we can heartily hate and heartily love it. We do not want joy and anger to neutralize each other and produce a surly contentment; we want a fiercer delight and a fiercer discontent. We have to feel the universe at once as an ogre's castle, to be stormed, and yet as our own cottage, to which we can return at evening.
How should messages issued from an interactive program refer to the program, to the computer, and to the programmer? Stated differently, whom should the user perceive as the narrator - the computer, the computer program, or the author of the program? For books, an analogous question would be whether or not the reader should perceive the book as the narrator, but it never arises because books aren't interactive. It's a new question in literature.
...a certain Cambridge University undergraduate was examined for persistent headaches; X-ray studies revealed that a hydrocephalic condition in his infancy had produced a compression of the cerebral tissue, leaving him with only about one-tenth of the normal volume of gray matter. Yet he was a brilliant student, and nobody had ever suspected the extent of his cortical deficiency because his intellectual functions were very satisfactory.
The characteristic of all fundamentalism is that it has found absolute certainty - the certainty of class warfare, the certainty of science, or the literal certainty of the Bible - a certainty of the person who has finally found a solid rock to stand upon which, unlike others, is "solid all the way down". Fundamentalism, however, is a terminal form of human consciousness in which development is stopped, eliminating the uncertainty and risk that real growth entails.
Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children... This is not a way of life at all in the true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.
Wake and listen, you that are lonely! From the future come winds with secret wing-beats; and good tidings are proclaimed to delicate ears. You that are lonely today, you that are withdrawing, you shall one day be the people: out of you, who have chosen yourselves, there shall grow a chosen people - and out of them, the overman. Verily, Earth shall yet become a site of recovery. And even now a new fragrance surrounds it, bringing salvation - and a new hope.
I, for one, am going to know what to say when the ducks show up. I've made a list of phrases, and although I don't know which one I'll use yet, they are all good enough in case they showed up tomorrow. Many people won't know what to say when the ducks show up, but I will. Maybe I'll say, "Oh ducks, oh ducks!" or just, "ducks wonderful ducks!" I practice these sayings every day, and even though the ducks haven't come yet, when they do, I'll know what to say.
The energy which is expended in mere thinking, talking or writing is like the steam which escapes through the whistle of the railway engine. The whistle makes a noise, and is even interesting, but it cannot drive the engine forward. No amount of whistling can move the engine forward. The steam has to be harnessed and used intelligently in order that it may actually take the engine to its destination. That is why the sages have always insisted on practice rather than theory.
Awareness of the tension between human needs and existing social facts is political consciousness. When Gandhi arrived in South Africa and was thrown out of the first-class compartment on the train, he was politically conscious of the tension between his need for self-esteem and the social fact of unjust discrimination. Acting out of such consciousness is politics, and whether or not one chooses to make politics out of political consciousness depends on one's personality.
At such times, theories about totally imaginary conspiracies also escalate, because (a) times of transition make people nervous and uncertain, (b) nervous and uncertain people tend to become at least a little bit paranoid, (c) most people most of the time follow their own prejudices and anxieties much more than any technique for ascertaining objective facts, and (d) most people have no knowledge of the techniques or self-disciplines necessary to the search for objective facts.
Some intellectual prophets have declared the end of the age of knowledge and the beginning of the age of information. Information tends to drive out knowledge. Information is just signs and numbers, while knowledge has semantic value. What we want is knowledge, but what we often get is information. It is a sign of the times that many people cannot tell the difference between information and knowledge, not to mention wisdom, which even knowledge tends sometimes to drive out.
Let men, if they must, explain in their minds, according to whatever philosophy they hold, the nature of God and the nature of Jesus... and the meaning of his life and words. This is a perfectly natural process and need not be resisted. The evil and sacrilege come from confusing this interpretation with the original revelation itself, and treating them both as equally sacred, and... setting up my interpretation as the only true and orthodox one, imposing it, by the rack if necessary, on others.
However, because it is the most powerful social fact of international life, the nation-state cannot be ignored. The development of the nation-state is the key to understanding the rules of the game according to which politics is played in the world today, for the world is made up of a system of nation-states. It must only be remembered that individuals create nation-states and maintain their interests. Nation-states are not inevitable machines that operate without human origin or control.
"Lack of character..." All too easily we confuse a fear of standing up for our beliefs, a tendency to be more influenced by the convictions of others than by our own, or simply a lack of conviction - with the need that the strong and mature feel to give full weight to the arguments of the other side. A game of hide-and-seek: when the Devil wishes to play on our lack of character, he calls it tolerance, and when he wants to stifle our first attempts to learn tolerance, he calls it lack of character.
Our normal waking consciousness, rational consciousness as we call it, is but one special type of consciousness, while all about it, parted from it by the filmiest of screens, there lie potential forms of consciousness entirely different. We may go through life without suspecting their existence, but apply the requisite stimulus, and at a touch they are there in all their completeness. No account of the universe in its totality can be final which leaves these other forms of consciousness quite disregarded.
These are the times that try our souls. In this moment of profound evolutionary transformation Homo sapiens is faced with the choice between little "self" (the known) and big "SELF" (EARTH the unknown). The dabblers and the untested summer mystics shrink before the immensity of it all. But the ones who have a vision and take a stand on that vision now shall earn the love and admiration of a new humanity and shall for ever stand in the light of the most high.
Foolproof contraception and, more socially important, the eradication of the fear of accidental pregnancy are just the overtures to the oncoming biological revolution - an upheaval that Dr. W. H. Thorpe of Cambridge University has predicted will create social consequences "at least as great as those arising from atomic energy and the H-bomb... They rank in importance as high as, if not higher than, the discovery of fire, of agriculture, the development of printing, and the discovery of the wheel.
Our lives are ceaselessly intertwined with narrative, with the stories that we tell and hear told, those we dream or imagine or would like to tell, all of which are reworked in that story of our own lives that we narrate to ourselves in an episodic, mostly semiconscious, but virtually uninterrupted monologue. We live immersed in narrative, recounting and reassessing the meaning of our past actions, anticipating the outcome of our future projects, situating ourselves at the intersection of several stories not yet completed.
A human being is part of the whole, called by us "Universe"; a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest, a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.
We are all, in our compartmentalized responses, like the man who is a tyrant in his office and a weakling among his family, or like the musician who is assertive in his art and self-effacing in his personal relationships. Such dissociation becomes a difficulty when we attempt to unite these compartments (as, were the man who is a tyrant in his office and a weakling at home suddenly to employ his wife or children, he would find his dissociative devices inadequate, and might become bewildered and tormented).
The renewal of societies and organizations can go forward only if someone cares. Apathy and lowered motivation are the most widely noted characteristics of a civilization on the downward path. Apathetic people accomplish nothing. People who believe in nothing change nothing for the better. They renew nothing and heal no one, least of all themselves. Anyone who understands our situation at all knows that we are in little danger of failing through lack of material strength. If we falter, it will be a failure of heart and spirit.
The sane man knows that he has a touch of the beast, a touch of the devil, a touch of the saint, a touch of the citizen. Nay, the really sane man knows that he has a touch of the madman. But the materialist's world is quite simple and solid, just as the madman is quite sure he is sane. The materialist is sure that history has been simply and solely a chain of causation, just as the interesting person before mentioned is quite sure that he is simply and solely a chicken. Materialists and madmen never have doubts.
The dialogue within the self proceeds on many levels. Sometimes it is a dialogue between the self as engaged in its various responsibilities and affections and the self which observes these engagements. Sometimes the dialogue is between the self in the grip of its immediate necessities and biological urges, and the self as an organization of long-range purposes and ends. Sometimes the dialogue is between the self in the context of one set of loyalties and the self in the grip of contrasting claims and responsibilities.
One must act always as if the other party is a free, rational mind and never get dragged into their own childish and hysterical milieu. If they state that your position is pissy, shitty, and piggy, ignore that. Do not fall into replying in kind by stating that their position is pissy, shitty, and piggy. Explain the position logically and clearly, as if dealing with rational adults. This will, in the long run, perform the one moral form of segregation: drawing all judicious observers onto one side of the issue and all the fools onto the other.
From the standpoint of daily life there is one thing we do know: that man is here for the sake of other men - above all, for the sake of those upon whose smile and well-being our own happiness depends, and also for the countless unknown souls with whose fate we are connected by a bond of sympathy. Many times a day I realize how much my own outer and inner life is built upon the labors of my fellow men, both living and dead, and how earnestly I must exert myself in order to return as much as I have received.
It makes one's heart ache when one sees that a person has staked his soul upon some end, the hopeless imperfection and futility of which is immediately obvious to everyone but himself. But isn't this, after all, merely a matter of degree? Isn't the pathetic grandeur of human existence in some way bound up with the eternal disproportion in this world, where self delusion is necessary to life, between the honesty of the striving and the nullity of the result? That we all - every one of us - take ourselves seriously is not merely ridiculous.
Single cells, when united, create eyes to see both the single cells and the whole body. It is the whole which forms the organs to see the parts, not the parts which see the whole. It is the whole which sees itself.
Single individuals, when united into an intercommunicating planetary body, will have eyes to see each person as part of the whole that is greater than the sum of the parts. Single individuals, bonded for an instant by sharing awareness of the intention of Creation, will know the whole and its parts.
Language may be thought of as a map of some "territory". But it would be unwarranted to assume that there were not others functions for language to perform. Language may also serve as a blueprint (design tool) for that which does not yet exist.
Every life is a profession of faith, and exercises an inevitable and silent propaganda. As far as lies in its power, it tends to transform the universe and humanity into it's own image. Every person's conduct is an unspoken sermon that is forever preaching to others.
Another crucially important example is the phrase "end of the world." Thousands of persons throughout history have believed that Jesus predicted (in Matthew 24:3) that the end of the world would come in their lifetime, and they have disposed of all their material possessions and waited on housetops for the end to come. (A bumper sticker seen around the San Francisco area a few years ago read: "Do Not Repent! the end of the world has been called off.") The Greek word translated as world was aeon, which usually means age.
The feeling of shame over the previous day when consciousness again emerges from the ocean of the night. How dreadful must the contrast have been between the daily life and the living waters to make the verdict one of high treason. It is not the repeated mistakes, the long succession of petty betrayals - though, God knows, they would give cause enough for anxiety and self-contempt - but the huge elementary mistake, the betrayal of that within me which is greater than I - in a complacent adjustment to alien demands.
I can sympathize and identify with the intent of the natural philosophers of centuries, even millennia, ago as they struggled to comprehend the universe into which we are all born, seeking an invariant order beyond the welter of experience and feeling. That intent to comprehend the universe has been a persistent theme since the earliest time, a continuous motive to read the message of the Demiurge and to discover the repertoire of reality. As Edwin Hubble remarked, "The urge is older than history. It is not satisfied and it will not be suppressed."
We cannot return to a simpler world. Much of contemporary social criticism is made irrelevant by its refusal to face that fact. It is true that the pressure and tumult of our society compares unfavorably with say, the tranquillity of a village in Brittany. But the comparison does not deal with a choice that is open to us. We must live in the modern world. We cannot stem the pressure for more intricate organization of the economy, our production, our social, political and cultural life. We must master the new forms of organization or they will master us.
The fundamental discoveries of modern science in cosmology, astronomy, medicine, neurology, geology, genetics, are significant as disclosures of the basic order of the cosmos. Scientific order, like the order disclosed by theology, has its imperatives. Being in "regular relations" with the truths of science, doing things the "scientific way", having a "scientific attitude" are as much responses to the imperatives of the order disclosed by scientific research as pious godfearingness is a response to the imperatives of the theologically disclosed religious order.
Every person has at his disposal a certain zone of influence, which he owes as much to his defects as to his qualities. But whichever is the case, this zone is there and can be immediately used... And when you have done what you can in your own zone, in your own field, then you can call a halt and despair as much as you like. Understand this: we can despair of the meaning of life in general, but not of the particular forms it takes; we can despair over existence, for we have no power over it, but not of history, where the individual can do everything.
At every moment you choose yourself. But do you choose your self? Body and soul contain a thousand possibilities out of which you can build many I's. But in only one of them is there a congruence of the elector and the elected. Only one - which you will never find until you have excluded all those superficial and fleeting possibilities of being and doing with which you toy, out of curiosity or wonder or greed, and which hinder you from casting anchor in the experience of the mystery of life, and the consciousness of the talent entrusted to you which is your I.
So rests the sky against Earth. The dark still lake in the lap of the forest. As a husband embraces his wife's body in faithful tenderness, so the bare ground and trees are embraced by the still, high, light of the morning.
I feel an ache of longing to share in this embrace, to be united and absorbed. A longing like carnal desire, but directed towards Earth, water, sky and returned by the whispers of the trees, the fragrance of the soil, the caresses of the wind, the embrace of water and light. Content? No, no, no - but refreshed, rested - while waiting.
Hypnosis demonstrates the vast resources we have beyond our consciousness. A person is brought into a strange room for a few minutes and then taken out of it. Asked to list every item seen, he or she will reproduce 20 or 30 items. Under hypnosis, however, that same person will go on to reproduce about 200 more items.
Our minds have a remarkable capacity to store data, but relatively little ability to retrieve that information at any particular moment, under normal conditions. We have much more information stored than we realize, if only we can shake it loose.
Frankly, I'd find life a bore if I weren't playing for very high stakes in a very high-risk situation. We do have the chance, now, for Utopia and even for immortality. If we who see this opportunity aren't smart enough, adroit enough, and fast enough to seize the chance, then we don't deserve to initiate the next stage of evolution. In that case, the age of the mammalian predators isn't ending, and we are deluded visionaries seeing a future that can't happen yet. The order of nature is nothing to be angry about. Meanwhile, until they shovel me under, I still think our side is winning.
To allow simultaneous recordings from several cells, Pine and his colleagues are building "neurochips", which will house on a silicon wafer at least 16 nerve cells in wells with electrodes at their bases. They plan to inject immature nerve cells into the wells and let the cells extend their long fibers - axons and dendrites - to form connections with each other. Then the scientists plan to record communication among the selected nerve cells, and perhaps even put the neurochip into an animal's nervous system so that the "wired" cells establish connections with the intact brain.
We are living in a period of tremendous flux. What we tend to think of as eternal verities are, in reality, time- and place-bound. We (psychotherapists), our patients, their complaints, our very concepts of treatment and cure are all manifestations of the particular epoch in which we live, and ultimately of each other. We are as imbedded in our time and place as bugs in amber. The therapist who expects his theoretical and clinical perspectives to remain long relevant will find himself in the position of the little boy who is astounded to find that the train, not the platform, just moved out.
It is interesting to speculate on what sort of technology we might have developed, given, say, the bloodhound's olfactory apparatus. Instead of a tape measure, we might carry a small box of musk. To measure the length of a table, we would open the box at one end of the table, walk to the other end, and sniff. "Six feet, three inches," we would say, or whatever units might be appropriate for olfactoring distances. Painting a room would be for the proper smell, rather than color. "I'm having the kitchen done in bacon, the living room in lilac, and the library in musty leather.
Only tell others what is of importance to them. Only ask them what you need to know. In both cases, that is, limit the conversation to what the speaker really possesses. Argue only in order to reach a conclusion. Think aloud only with those to whom this means something. Don't let small talk fill up the time and the silence except as a medium for bearing unexpressed messages between two people who are attuned to each other. A dietary for those who have learned by experience the truth of the saying, "For every idle word..." But hardly popular in social life.
There is nothing contradictory in itself in the idea of human ecstasy sundered from material things. Indeed, as we shall see, this fits in very well with the final demands of a world of evolutionary structure. But with one proviso: that the world in question shall have reached a stage of development so advanced that its 'soul' can be detached without losing any of its completeness, as something wholly formed. But have we any reason to suppose that human consciousness today has achieved so high a degree of richness and perfection that it can derive nothing more from the sap of Earth.
A man who had studied much in the schools of wisdom finally died in the fullness of time and found himself at the Gates of Eternity. An angel of light approached him and said, "Go no further, O mortal, until you have proven to me your worthiness to enter into Paradise!" But the man answered, "Just a minute, now. First of all, can you prove to me this is a real Heaven and not just a wishful fantasy of my disordered mind undergoing death.
Before the angel could reply, a voice from inside the gates shouted: "Let him in - he's one of us!"
A stroke victim known as "M.D.", say University of Maryland and Johns Hopkins scientists, has the most specific language deficit yet recorded: He forgets the names of fruits and vegetables. Such specificity suggests that the brain indexes language by category. But M.D. can correctly point out fruits and vegetables when they are named, note the researchers, whose findings appeared in Nature. In the same issue, a British psychologist remarked of M.D.'s case, "It is as if the name is the key," suggesting that the store of linguistic data is intact but mysteriously locked away in the brain.
Perhaps you put too much energy into resentment, anger, denunciation, and similar negative energy states, and don't have enough energy surplus to achieve your goals. Perhaps you are too impatient and expect "freedom to drop into your lap as a fairy's gift," as Nietzsche said. Perhaps you are looking on too small a time scale to see the grand evolutionary pattern of higher consciousness and higher intelligence ever emerging. Perhaps you are too attached to the superficial and temporary, and regard each setback as a total defeat, without seeing that intelligence always wins in the long run.
Resisting death, over-breeding, hoarding and gorging are expressions of biological drives that are, under natural conditions, one-sided because the control is provided by the environment. Regenerative mechanism within the organism may normally be controlled at the environmental level. These are cases in which the paradox of "What you want is not what you want" is resolved by pointing out that there are two different levels to the word "you": What you1 want - as a system consisting of a single organism - is not what you2 want - a system consisting of organism in environment.
After laying 4,476 kilometers of cable, AT&T workers returned to shore for more, allowing scientists to get 19 days of data with the unpowered cable grounded to the ocean floor. Using some fancy statistical footwork, the researchers separated