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SCHOLAR ISLAND |
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Famous Last Words
"....The greatest crisis facing us is not Russia, not the Atom Bomb....It is a crisis in the organization and accessibility of human knowledge. We own an enormous "encyclopedia"-which isn't even arranged alphabetically. Our "file cards" are spilled on the floor, nor were they ever in order. The answers we want may be buried somewhere in the heap...."
Robert Heinlein (The Crisis of the Librarian)
"We live in an age of Ignorance, and it is important to understand how this came to be and why."
-Robert N. Proctor & Londa Schiebinger
Agnotology: The Making & Unmaking of Ignorance
"Every drop in the ocean has tens of thousands of microbes that are changing the chemistry around them.
They are everywhere and we know almost nothing about them."
-James Bellingham
"There are many things of which a wise man might wish to be ignorant."
-Ralph Waldo Emerson
"In 1931, when Brave New World was being written, I was convinced that there was still plenty of time. The completely organized society, the scientific caste system, the abolition of free will by methodical conditioning, the servitude made acceptable by regular doses of chemically induced happiness, the orthodoxies drummed in by nightly courses of sleep-teaching-these things were coming all right, but not in my time, not even in the time of my grandchildren. I forget the exact date of the events recorded in brave New World; but it was somewhere in the sixth or seventh century A.F. (After Ford). We who were living in the second quarter of the twentieth century A.D. were the inhabitants, admittedly, of a gruesome kind of universe; but the nightmare of those depression years was radically different from the nightmare of the future, described in Brave New World. Ours was a nightmare of too little order; theirs, in the seventh century A.F., of too much. In the process of passing from one extreme to the other, there would be a long interval, so I imagined, during which the more fortunate third of the human race would make the best of both worlds-the disorderly world of liberalism and the much too orderly Brave New World, where perfect efficiency left no room for freedom or personal initiative.
Twenty-seven years later; in this third quarter of the twentieth century A.D., and long before the end of the first century A.F., I feel a good deal less optimistic than I did when I was writing Brave New World. The prophecies made in 1931 are coming true much sooner than I thought they would. The blessed interval between too little order and the nightmare of too much has not begun and shows no sign of beginning. In the West, its true, individual men and women still enjoy a large measure of freedom. But even in those countries that have a tradition of democratic government, this freedom and even the desire for this freedom seem to be on the wane. In the rest of the world freedom for individuals has already gone, or is manifestly about to go. The nightmare of total organization, which I had situated in the seventh century, After Ford, has emerged from the safe, remote future and is now awaiting us, just around the next corner."
-Aldous Huxley
Brave New World Revisited (1958)
"Men have asked for freedom, justice and respect precisely as the scientific spirit has spread among them. The dilemma of today is not that the human values cannot control a mechanical science. It is the other way about: The scientific spirit is more human than the machinery of governments."
-Jacob Bronowski
"Yet for the most part, we are deciding such important matters from a position of ignorance. "ignorance" actually has two meanings. The first is the one we tend to think of, "the state of being uninformed." but it can also mean the "willful neglect or refusal to acquire knowledge which one may acquire and it is his duty to have." This latter definition may be more apt when it comes to robotics today. We fund, research, and use these new technologies more and more, especially in war. yet we willfully refuse to acknowledge that the reality of robotics is now upon us. 'We are already in A Brave New World, but just don't want to admit it," says one military consultant on unmanned systems. "We refuse to take our blinders off."
P.W. Singer
Wired For War
"I think it is no exaggeration to say we are on the cusp of the further perfection of extreme evil, an evil whose possibility spread well beyond that which weapons of mass destruction bequeathed to the nation-states, on to a surprising and terrible empowerment of extreme individuals."
-Bill Joy
"This is the seal of the absolute and sublime destiny of man-that he knows what is good and what is evil; that his destiny is his very ability to will either good or evil."
-Hegel
"We are often unaware of the scope and structure of our ignorance. Ignorance is not just a blank space on a person's mental map. It has contours and coherence, and for all I know rules of operation as well. so as a corollary to writing about what we know, maybe we should add getting familiar with our ignorance."
-Thomas Pynchon, 1984
"Every drop in the ocean has tens of thousands of microbes that are changing the chemistry around them.
They are everywhere and we know almost nothing about them."
-James Bellingham
"More than 6 Billion Terrestrial humans inhabit the Earth, and yet the vast majority are walking about in a daze, as if in a drugged-down stupor. When you get right down to it, because most people actually do not have a very clear idea of what is really happening on the very planet whence they were born and have passed their entire life."
-Richard Sauder PhD
"Most human beings today waste some twenty-five to thirty years of their lives before they break through the actual and conventional lies which surround them."
-Isadora Duncan
"As the end of the world approaches, errors increase , terrors multiply, iniquity increases, the light, is short, very often extinguished; this darkness of enmity between brethren increases, daily increases, and Jesus is not yet come."
St. Augustine (5th century)
"The world is growing old....We live at the end of time."
-Fredegar 7th century Frankish chronicler
"It is a mistake to think these times we are living in are like any other. These are extraordinary times."
-P.D. Ouspensenky
"How could things have gotten so out of hand?"
-Don Corleone
"Why change the world? Change worlds."
-Henry Miller
"The great Sun, moving in the heavenly houses, has left the House of the fishes for the House of the Water bearer. In the coming age shall humanity be holy, And in the perfection of the human shall we find the humane. Take up thy manhood into Godhead, and bring down the Godhead into Manhood, and this shall be the day of God with us; for God is made manifest in nature, and Nature is the self expression of God."
-Dion Fortune
"What is happening to our world is almost too colossal for human comprehension to contain. But it is a terrible, terrible thing."
-Arundhati Roy
"The future is disorder. A door like this has cracked open five or six times since we got up on hind legs. it is the best possible time to be alive, when almost everything you knew is wrong."
-Tom Stoppard
"Dramatic transitions are not the only times we can experience the source energies of Cellular Wisdom. This energy is available to us whenever we acre fully conscious of the present moment, because the present moment is the only place this energy exists. We cannot experience source energy in past events or in reveries about how we felt at some former time. We cannot experience source energy in past events or in reveries about how we felt as some former time. We cannot connect with it in future events or in fantasies about how we may be months or years hence. Moreover, we cannot find this energy in our minds, because our thoughts are not our actual experience. Nor can we tell it when our emotions are agitated. Only in a peaceful experience of the present moment can we enter the stillness and connect with the energetic hum of our being."
-Joan C. King
The Code of authentic Living: Cellular wisdom
"Thus, human societies and smaller groups may make disastrous decisions for a whole sequence of reasons: failure to anticipate a problem, failure to perceive it once it has arisen, failure to attempt to solve it after it has been perceived, and failure to succeed in attempts to solve it."
-Jared Diamond
Collapse
The rule of no realm is mine,
but all worthy things that are in peril
as the world now stands, those are my care.
And for my part, I shall not wholly fail in my task
if anything passes through this night
that can still grow fair or bear fruit
and flower again in days to come.
For I too am a steward. Did you not know?
J.R.R. Tolkien
"I think we're property.
I should say we belong to something:
That once upon a time, this earth was No-man's Land, that other worlds explored and colonized here, and fought among themselves for possession, but that not it's owned by something.
That something owns this earth-all others warned off...."
Charles Fort
The Book of The Damned
"Throughout the whole of the absurd life I've lived, a dark wind had been rising toward me from somewhere deep in my future."
-Albert Camus
The Stranger
"I feel internal peace because I know every fate is predestined."
-Fathi Elhahmi (from a letter sent from prison to Khadafy by one of the bravest dissidents of our time)
"We don't see things as they are, we see them as we are."
-Anais Nin
"I see the same blackness, hear the same thunder, see the same lightning everyone else does. But I ascribe this not to the end, but to the beginning. I see the dangers we face now as a possibility for human beings to evolve to a new stage; to respond consciously to the threats of our survival; to do something about our survival and not leave it entirely to chance."
-Jonas Salk
"Bewilderment about the fact that there is anything at all, and the curiosity about meeting that fact as a wonder, is the best part of man."
-Goethe
"What man actually needs is not a tensionless state but rather the striving and struggling for a worthwhile goal, a freely chosen task."
-Viktor E. Frankl Man's Search for Meaning
"If human beings with the potential for excellence generally have done best in cultures where people believe the universe to have transcendental meaning, one must ask why. The easy answer is that the giants of the past were deluded. They imagined that what they were doing had some transcendental significance, and, lo and behold, their foolishness inspired them to compose better music or paint better pictures. But this line of thought can become embarrassing when one confronts just what those self-deluded people accomplished. is it not implausible that those individuals who accomplished things so beyond the rest of us just happened to be uniformly stupid about the great questions? Another possibility is that they understood things we don't"
-Charles Murray
Human Accomplishment
"Let no man imagine that he has no influence. Whoever he may be, and wherever he may be placed, the man who thinks becomes a light and power."
-Henry George
"The function of man differs from that of other physical beings, for it is the reparation of the disorders of the universe....The only sign that we are "regenerated" is that we regenerate everything around us."
-Saint-Martin
"Get hold of the main thing: That the world and the self are one and perfect. Only your attitude is faulty and needs readjustment."
-Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj I am That
"The 'State of Emergency' in which we live is not the exception but the rule."
-Walter Beryman
"I awoke morning after morning with a horrible dread at the pit of my stomach, and with a sense of the insecurity of life that I never knew before."
-William James 1902
"We are afraid of truth, afraid of fortune, afraid of death, and afraid of each other."
-Ralph Waldo Emerson
"Whatever elation there is in the world today because of final victory in the war is severely tempered by fear. It is a primitive fear: the fear of the unknown, the fear of forces man can neither channel nor comprehend. The fear is not new; in its classical form it is the fear of irrational death . But overnight it has become intensified, magnified. It has burst out of the subconscious and into the conscious, filling the mind with primordial apprehensions....And now that the science of warfare has reached the point where it threatens the planet itself, is it possible that man is destined to return the earth to its aboriginal incandescent mass blazing at fifty million degrees?"
-Norman Cousins "Modern Man is Obsolete"
"We are like a lot of wild spiders crying together, but without tears."
-Robert Lowell
"In a sense, every human construction, whether mental or material, is a component in a landscape of fear because it exists to contain chaos. Thus children's fairy tales as well as adults' legends, cosmological myths and indeed philosophical systems are shelters built by the mind in which human beings can rest, at least temporarily, from the siege of inchoate experience and of doubt."
-Yi-Fu Tuan, Landscapes of Fear
"Only the fortunate can take life without mythology."
-Will Durant
"We are in the midst of a momentous event in the evolution of human consciousness, but they won't be talking about it in the news tonight. On our planet, and perhaps simultaneously in many parts of our galaxy and beyond, consciousness is awakening from the dream of form. This does not mean all forms (the world) are going to dissolve, although quite a few almost certainly will. It means consciousness can now begin to create form without losing itself in it. It can remain conscious of itself, even while it creates and experiences form. Why should it continue to create and experience form? For the enjoyment of it. How does consciousness do that? Through awakened humans who have learned the meaning of awakened doing.
Eckhart Tolle
A New Earth
"Many of our deepest thinkers and many of those most familiar with the scale of the challenges we face have concluded that the transitions required can be achieved only in the context of what I will call the rise of a new consciousness. For some, it is a spiritual awakening-a transformation of the human heart. For others it is a more intellectual process of coming to see the world anew and deeply embracing the emerging ethic of the environment and the old ethic of what it means to love thy neighbor as thyself?"
-James Gustave Speth
The Bridge at the Edge of the World: Capitalism, the Environment, and crossing from crisis to Sustainability
"Men and women who understand this truth and accept its implications will be well fitted to renew the moral order-and to renew their society as well. They will understand that the tasks of renewal are endless. They will understand that their society is not like a machine that is created at some point in time and then maintained with a minimum of effort; a society is being continuously re-created, for good or ill, by its members. This will strike some as a burdensome responsibility, but it will summon others to greatness."
-John W. Gardner
Self-Renewal
"you do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves..."
-Mary Oliver, Dreamworks
"If a way to the better be, it lies in taking a full look at the worst."
Thomas Hood (1799-1845)
"uranium did not just reshape the political world. its first detonation at Hiroshima also tapped deep into the religious part of the human consciousness and gave even those who didn't believe in God a scientific reason to believe that civilization would end with a giant apocalyptic burning, much as the ancient texts had predicted. A nonsupernatural method of self-extinction had finally been discovered.
This unstable element has played many more roles in its brief arc through history, controlling us, to a degree, even as we thought we were in control. it was a searchlight into the inner space of the atom, an inspiration to novelists, a heroic war ender, a prophet of a utopia that never arrived, a polluter, a slow killer, a waster of money, an enabler of failed states, a friend to terrorists, the possible bringer of Armageddon, an excuse for war with Iraq, an incitement for possible war in Iran, and now, too, a possible savior against global warming. Its trajectory has been nothing short of spectacular, luciferous, a Greek drama of the rational age. The mastery and containment of uranium-this thing we dug up seventy years ago-will almost certainly become one of the defining aspects of twenty-first-century geopolitics. Uranium will always be with us. Once dug up, it can never be reburied.
In this rock we can see the best and the worst of mankind: the capacity for scientific progress and political genius; the capacity for nihilism, exploitation, and terror. We must find a way to make peace with it. Our continuing relationship with uranium, as well as our future as a civilization, will depend on our capacity to resist mirroring that grim and never-ceasing instability that lies within the most powerful tool the earth has to give."
-Tom Zoellner
Uranium: War, Energy, and the Rock that Shaped the World
"My own worry is a bit different. I believe strongly in an adage that riffs on the better-known "Murphy's law." What science fiction calls "Finagle law" states a simple truth that I have come to believe holds for both humans and their creations, including their robots: "anything that can go wrong, will-at the worst possible moment."
-P.W. Singer
Wired For War: The Robotics Revolution and Conflict in the 21st Century
"Let us dare to read, think, speak and write."
-John Adams (Second President of the United States)
"Dare to Know!"
Horace
"When the bubbles are growing, Wall Street's gain is a net loss for the rest of society. The costs fall on those who don't have the money to live in splendid isolation from the social and environmental realities of our troubled planet. The idea that economic growth will solve this problem has no substance, because the so-called rising tide lifts only the yachts and swamps the desperate, naked swimmers. it works out fine for the winners that growth in Wall Street financial assets plays out for the rest of society as growing inequality. What is a wealthy class without a servant class?
There is an alternative to Wall Street phantom-wealth capitalism: a real-market economy."
-David Korten
Agenda For a New Economy
"Here is the central question: while all of this is perfectly clear, why is the system so stubbornly incapable of changing? Several answers come to mind.
One implicit response of common opinion is that, in reality, the situation is not so serious. If all attentive citizens observe innumerable signals for alarm all about, the general current of information drowns them in a flood that makes those signals seem relatively minor. There are always cunning "conservatives," bolstered by their notoriety, who will proclaim violently, using biased arguments, that all the alarm is exaggerated. One variant is to acknowledge the gravity of the problem by asserting that we will be able to adapt almost spontaneously through new technologies.
But one must look further for an explanation. Three factors act to minimize the importance of the situation.
On the one hand, the dominant framework for explaining the world today is the economic representation of things. Thus, the world enjoys an apparent prosperity marked by the growth in gross domestic product (GDP) and international trade. This description is intrinsically distorted by the fact that this "economic growth" does not defray the cost of environmental destruction. In accounting terms, a company must reduce the profits from its activities by putting aside sums called "depreciation" that represents the wear and tear on the capital goods used; thus, when those capital goods are worn out, the company has a reserve available to replace them. But the "global economy" company does not pay for "the depreciation of the biosphere," that is, the replacement cost for the natural capital it uses. Admissible when the biosphere's absorption capacities were great, this conduct becomes criminal when those possibilities have reached their limit.
Global opinion and decision makers are in the same situation as the head of a business whose accountant has forgotten to count depreciation. They think the company is doing well while it's actually courting bankruptcy.
On the other hand, the leadership elites are ignorant. Trained in economics, engineering, or politics, they are frequently ignorant of science and virtually always lacking the slightest notion of ecology. The habitual reflex of an individual who lacks certain knowledge is to neglect, even condemn, those questions that are based on a culture foreign to him in favor of those questions in which he is the most competent. The elites act the same way. hence, their underestimation of the environmental problem.
a third factor should not be forgotten: the lifestyle of the rich prevents them from sensing what surrounds them.......
Herve kempf
How the Rich are Destroying the Earth
"Politics and religion are obsolete, the time has come for science and spirituality."
-J. Nehru
"You are the scientist of your life."
-Joann C. King
The Code of Authentic Living: Cellular Wisdom
"Make love now, by night and by day, in winter and in summer....You are in the world for that and the rest of life is nothing but vanity, illusion, waste. There is only one science, love; only one riches, love; only one policy, love. To make love is all the law, and the prophets."
-Anatole France
"When the Power of Love will overcome the love of Power, the world will Know Peace."
-Jimi Hendrix
"There are many things we can do to relax into the now and connect with the energy at our core. Some of us access this state while engaging in exercise; others by listening to music, painting, or viewing a magnificent sunset. Meditative and contemplative spiritual traditions teach many techniques for quieting thoughts and tuning into ourselves. We know when we've made the connection, for we experience the sense that all is well.
We can drop into this state instantly, suspended between tasks, even in the midst of a busy day. No one need know what we are experiencing the energy that pulses through our bodies at the deepest level. Frequent connection with source energy gives us access to that state of wholeness and joy which is the harmony underlying all activities. As you will discover in what follows, connection to source energy is not difficult, because Cellular Wisdom is always present, always accessible. Quite simply, we tune into it by becoming aware of its presence."
-Joan C. King
The Code of Authentic Living: cellular wisdom
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"You must give some time to your fellow men. Even if it's a little thing, do something for others-something for which you get no pay but the privilege of doing it."
-Albert Schweitzer
"A vision without a task is but a dream, a task without a vision is drudgery, a vision and a task are the hope of the world."
(Carved on old Church in West Sussex)
"The goal ever receded from us...Salvation lies in the effort, not the attainment. Full effort is full victory."
-Ghandi
"If you don't risk anything...You risk even...more."
-Erica Jong
"Where you fall, there your God pushed you down."
-Nigerian proverb
"You can always chase a dream but it will not count if you never catch it."
-Malcolm X
"Turn aside, turn aside! Confine yourself to the personal and the spiritual."
-Thomas Mann
"Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves like locked rooms and like books that are written in a foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers......Live the questions now."
-Rainer Maria Rilke Letters to a Young Poet
"The more we allow humility to invade our lives and displace pride, the more mastery we are given over all things."
-Samuel Abinto
Agnostic's Guide to Prayer
"Kindness is irresistible, be it but sincere and no mock smile or mask assumed. For what can the most unconscionable of men do to thee if thou persist in being kindly to him?"
-Marcus Aurelius
"LIFE IS NO LONGER a contest of great minds for great ends, but a pot house squabble"
-Ralph Waldo Emerson
"I call petroleum the devil's excrement. It brings trouble....Look at this locure-waste, corruption, consumption, our public services falling apart. And debt, debt we shall have for years."
-Juan Pablo Perez Alfonso (a founder of OPEC)
"Between boron and butanol, the oil industry is looking more and more like a dinosaur."
-Tom Blees
Prescription For the Planet
"Tunnel vision by scientists, economists, and mathematicians needs to be recognized and addressed, because to launch any sort of effective nationwide system of alternative energies, we will need to recruit and bring together an array of experts in all these areas."
-Stephen Leeb, PhD
Game Over
"We would rather be ruined than changed."
-W.H. Auden
"What are we to do? Well, begin by asking yourself what and who you are."
-Harold Bloom
Jesus and Yahweh: The Divine Names
"Unless you assume a God, the question of life's purpose is meaningless."
-Bertrand Russell, atheist
"The Holy Koran reveals the ultimate and perhaps the only question which God puts to the soul. "My dear humanity, at the dawning of the eternal Day, souls will be asked whether they have experienced only self-centered pleasure or whether they know the nature of true spiritual joy. Consider deeply what your response will be." (102:1-8)
"The whole nightmare of the materialist attitude, which has turned the life of the universe into an evil purposeless game is not yet over. The awakening soul is still deeply under the influence of the nightmare."
-Kandinsky
"You must not lose faith in humanity. Humanity is an ocean; if a few drops of the ocean are dirty, the ocean does not become dirty."
-Mahatma Gandhi
"We currently live in the Economy and Culture of the "one-night stand." Industrialism has provided us innumerable commodities, amusements, and distractions, but these offer us little satisfaction. Instead we suffer ever-increasing alienation from our families, our communities, and the natural world. There is another way to live and think: it's called agrarianism. It is not so much a philosophy as a practice, an attitude, a loyalty, and a passion-all based in a close connection with the land. it results in a sound local economy in which producers and consumers are neighbors and in which nature herself becomes the standard for work and production."
-Wendell Berry The Fatal Harvest Reader: The Tragedy of Industrial Agriculture
"The glory of the world is transitory,
and we should not measure our lives by it,
but by the choice we make
to follow our Personal Legend,
to believe in our utopias
and to fight for our dreams.
We are all protagonists of our own lives,
and it is often the anonymous heroes
who leave the deepest mark."
-Paulo Coelho
(Acceptance Speech delivered to the Brazilian Academy of Letters)
"If you listen carefully now you will hear....
Things are not the way they used to be,
Don't tell no lie;
One and all got to face reality now."
-Bob Marley
"It is no surprise that danger and suffering surround us. What astonishes is the singing."
-Jack Gilbert, "Horses at Midnight Without a Moon'
"If the economy, and your place within it, are really important to you, you will be really hurt when they go away. you can cultivate an attitude of studied indifference, but it has to be more than just a conceit. You have to develop the lifestyle, habits and physical stamina to back it up. It takes a lot of creativity and effort to put together a fulfilling existence on the margins of society. After the collapse, these margins may turn out to be some of the best places to live."
-Dmitry Orlov
Reinventing Collapse: The Soviet Example and American Prospects
"in order to adapt, you will need plenty of free time. Granting yourself this time requires a leap of faith: you have to assume that the future has already arrived. Your lying eyes will be of little help here, so shut them tight. The old normal is that life will go on just like before. The new normal is that nothing will ever be the same. Your consolation is that even if the new normal never arrives, you will be adapted for that too."
-Dmitry Orlov
ibid
"Ironically, at the very moment that consciousness is awakening, the flood waters of the economic tidal wave have poured in, and the survival of the species can be assured only at a growing rate of devaluation and degradation. The end of ideology coincides with the bankruptcy of the welfare state and the collapse of systems of administrative supervision.
It is precisely at the historical moment least conducive to belief in any certainty-God, Devil, State, Revolution, Supreme Savior, Left and Right-that religion tightens its net. The absolute dogma, according to which the existing world assumes reality only to the degree that it is governed by market forces, is based on a universal superstition instilled in us from infancy: the belief in the irreparable powerlessness of human beings."
-Raoul Vaneigem
The Movement of the Free Spirit
"I stepped down into the most hidden depth of my being, lamp in hand and ears alert, to discover whether in the deepest recesses of the blackness within me I might not see the glint of the waters of the current that flows on, whether I might not hear the murmur of the mysterious waters that rise from the uttermost depths, and will burst forth no man knows where. With terror and intoxicating emotion, I realized that my poor trifling existence was one with the immensity of all that is and all that is in the process of becoming."
-Teilhard De Chardin
"Each person is born with an infinite power, against which no earthly force is of the slightest significance."
-Neville Goddard (1905-1972)
"The time has come for men to turn into gods or perish."
-Alan Harrington
"The most exquisite paradox....as soon as you give it all up, you can have it all....As long as your want power, you can't have it. The minute you don't want power you'll have more than you ever dreamed possible."
-Ram Dass
"This is the lesson: never give in, never give in, never, never, never, never-in nothing, great or small large or petty-never give in except to convictions of honour and good sense."
-Winston Churchill ,1941
"The leap of faith is not so much a leap of thought as of action. One must.....dare to act wholeheartedly without absolute certainty."
-William Sloane coffin
'Nothing worth doing is completed in our lifetime: therefore, we must be saved by hope. Nothing True or beautiful or good makes complete sense, in any immediate context of history; therefore, we must be saved by faith. Nothing we do, however virtuous, can be accomplished alone: therefore, we are saved by love."
-Reinhold Nieburhr
"So to yield to life is to solve the unsolvable."
-Lao Tzu
"We must meet the unknown future by bringing to bear everything that has been shaped by us in the past."
-John O' Donohue
When rich speculators prosper
While farmers lose their land;
When government officials spend money
On weapons instead of cures;
When the upper class is extravagant and irresponsible
While the poor have nowhere to turn-
All is robbery and chaos.
It is not in keeping with the Tao."
-Lao-Tzu Tao teh Ching
"Some have too much, yet still do crave;
I little have and seek no more.
They are but poor, though much they have,
And I am rich with little store:
They poor, I rich; they beg, I give;
They lack, I leave' they pine, I live.
My wealth is health and perfect ease;
My conscience clear my chief defense;
I never seek by bribes to please,
Not by deceit to breed offence:
Thus do I live; thus will I die;
Would all did so well as I."
-Sir Edward Dyer "My Mind to Me a Kingdom Is (1586)
"If this world community is to survive, the current acceptance of lying, cheating, stealing, larceny, and personal gratification at any expense must be halted. To make money at any expense, including fatally harming the earth and its inhabitants, is the epitome of greed. Racism is the poison of society. It justifies the hate and torture-even murder-of others. If such human decadence becomes the norm, there is little hope that humanity can recover. In fact, it will probably be the doom of civilization as we know it."
Dr. Kasem Khaleel
The Arabian Connection
"Besides concealing the misdeeds of rulers, the doctrine that you can't change human nature has a larger purpose: defense of the existing social arrangements are, throughout most of the world, capitalist in character, the doctrine undertakes to show that, human nature being what it is, capitalism is the inevitable form of society."
-Barrows Dunham
"Let us remind ourselves over and over again that holiness has to do with very ordinary things: truthfulness, courtesy, kindness, gentleness, consideration for others, contentment with our lot, honesty and courage in the face of life, reliability, dutifulness."
-Ruth Burrows, Interior Castle Explored
"I feel internal peace because I know every fate is predestined."
-Fathi Elijahmi ( a letter from jailed human rights activist to Khadafi)
"It has been impossible for the general public to wipe its collective windshield clear enough to actually see the truth. But once the haze is rubbed away-even a little-the world will peer into the past and discover that to achieve clean energy independence and petropolitical security we do not need to reinvent the wheel. We need to exhume that wheel from whence it was deliberately buried by those who have diligently worked to keep us focused on petroleum."
Edwin Black
Internal Combustion: How Corporations And Governments Addicted the World to Oil and Derailed The Alternatives
"Between boron and butanol, the oil industry is looking more and more like a dinosaur."
-Tom Blees
Prescription For the Planet
"The germs of deterioration are growing to epidemic proportions and infecting the entire world. This crisis is of such magnitude that it can be solved on a stage no smaller than the world itself. No one discipline or government, even the imperial one, can solve it. The international World Health Organization, despite its earnest efforts and praiseworthy accomplishments, is unable to heal sickness on any large scale, nor can Alan Greenspan, solve the U.S.'s or the world's economic rises.
As the downhill pace quickens, the legal pirates realize that their time may be short, so they gobble up all they can before being exposed. Their clever public relations gimmicks become more obvious daily, for the simple reason that they contradict peoples' actual experiences. The terrorism of poverty, hunger, and disease, all unnecessary in a rich, technologically advanced world, nourish hate and resentment worldwide. Unfortunately, some of this hate becomes misdirected as artificial divisions cause strife between groups instead of uniting in defense against global corporatism. "Divide and conquer" has always been the watchword of power elites"
Joseph Eger
Einstein's Violin
"I got the blues thinking of the future, so I left off and made some marmalade. it's amazing how it cheers one up to shred oranges or scrub the floor."
-D.H. Lawrence
"Survive on my own, grow on my own, even prevail on my own, but in the end, you cannot become human on your own."
-Frederick Buechner
"There is little peace or comfort in life if we are always anxious as to future events. he that worries himself with the dread of possible contingences will never be at rest."
-Johnson
"I feel internal peace because I know every fate is predestined."
-Fathi Eljahmi (who died this May after seven years in jail in Libya-he wrote this to Khadafy)
"I too could now say to myself: be no longer a Chaos, but a World, or even a Worldkin. Produce! Produce! Were it but the pitifullest infinitesimal fraction of a Product, produce it in God's name!....Up! Up! Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy whole might. Work while it is called Today, for the Night cometh wherein no man can work."
-Thomas Carlyle
"I believe that if we really want human brotherhood to spread and increase until it makes life safe and sane, we must also be certain that there is no one true faith or path by which it may spread."
-Adlai E. Stevenson
"The demand for certainty, is a sign of weakness."
-Mark Rutherford
"The unknown is what it is. And to be frightened of it is what sends everybody scurrying around chasing dreams, illusions, wars, peace, love, hate, all that....Accept that it's unknown, and it's plain sailing."
-John Lennon
"We can destroy ourselves by cynicism and disillusion, just as affectively as by bombs."
-Kenneth Clark
"This is the century of fear."
-Albert Camus
"Drive out fear."
-Dr. W. Edward Deming
"Fear, true fear, is a savage frenzy. Of all the insanities of which are capable, it is surely the most cruel."
-Georges Bernanos
"All forms of fear produce fatigue"
-Bertrand Russell
*brilliant insight Berty Ed.
"One of the effects of fear is to disturb the senses and cause things to appear other than what they are."
-Miguel de Cervantes
"What begins in fear usually ends in folly."
-Samuel Taylor Coleridge
"The only thing we have to fear is fear itself-nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance."
-Franklin Delano Roosevelt
"There is no devil but fear."
-Elbert Hubbard
"It is never safe to look into the future with eyes of fear."
-E.H. Harriman
"We have to start teaching ourselves not to be afraid."
-William Faulkner
"Do the thing you fear, and the death of fear is certain."
-Ralph Waldo Emerson
"Fear is the most devastating emotion on earth. I fought it and conquered it by helping people who were worse off than I was. I believe that anyone can conquer fear by doing the things he fears to do, provided he keeps doing them until he gets a record of successful experiences behind him."
-Eleanor Roosevelt
"We must dare, and dare again, and go on daring."
-Georges Jacques Danton
"Dare to be naive."
-R. Buckminster Fuller
"The biggest lie you have been told is that you have no power to change the world, but the biggest secret is why when you realize this, you don't get up off your backside and do something about it."
-David Southwell
Secrets and Lies
"What strange beings we are....that sitting in hell at the bottom of the dark, we're afraid of our own immortality."
-Rumi
"You know what has to be done.
Why don't you do it?"
-Paul Williams
Das Energi
"Your problem is you're ......too busy holding on to your unworthiness."
-Ram Dass
"We are no longer alert. We continuously lie to our children and teach them to be liars. Easter bunnies, Santa Claus, denying what their senses tell them, these are all lies. If you're well educated you'll work to hurt people, you'll do the work of big institutions. You'll work to make alcohol, drugs, TV, schools, religion, things to put people's minds to sleep."
Grace Spotted Eagle (Inuit Native American)
"The world is facing an awful crisis, the very future of humanity is at stake. Mankind can be saved only by a group of men who are so centered in God at the Source that their wisdom is a part of the All-Wisdom, and therefore so conscious of the cosmos and so integrated at the center that they will be able to think clearly in many fields and not be limited to one field alone. Such a group of men, if they could find each other out, and share their wisdom, might be able to chart a course that could save the world. Can you help me find such men."
Dr. Alexis Carrel
The Man Who Tapped The Secrets of the Universe
by Glenn Clark
"God, is the author, men only the players. These grand dramas which are played on earth have been composed in heaven."
-Honore De Balzac (1779-1850)
"God governs in the affairs of men; and if a sparrow cannot fall to the ground without His notice, neither can a kingdom rise without His aid."
-Benjamin Franklin
"The Providence that watches over the affairs of men works out of their mistakes, at times, a healthier issue than could have been accomplished by their wisest forethought."
-James Anthony Froude
"It is private life that holds out the mirror to infinity; personal intercourse, and that alone, that even hints at a personality beyond our daily vision."
-E.M. Forster
"Without going outside, you may know the whole world. Without looking through the window, you may see the ways of heaven."
-Tao Te Ching
"it is easy for God to supply thy greatest as thy smallest wants, even as it was within His power to form a system or an atom, to create a blazing sun as to kind the fire-fly's lamp."
-Thomas Guthrie
"We cannot think too oft there is a, never-sleeping Eye which reads the heart, and registers our thoughts."
-Sir Francis Bacon (1561-1626)
"Abandon the search for God and the creation and other matters of a similar sort. Look for him by taking yourself as a starting point. Learn who it is within you who makes everything his own and says, 'My God, my mind, my thought, my soul, my body.' Learn the sources of sorrow, joy, love, hate.....If you carefully investigate these matters you will find him in yourself.""
-Monoimus, a gnostic teacher
"Most people go on living their everyday life: half frightened, half indifferent, they behold the ghastly tragi-comedy that is being performed on the international stage before the eyes and ears of the world....It would be different if the problem were not one of things made by Man himself, such as the atomic bomb.....It would be different, for instance, if an epidemic of bubonic plague were threatening the entire world. In such a case, conscientious and expert persons would be brought together and they would work out an intelligent plan to combat the plague. After having reached agreement upon the right ways and means, they would submit their plan to the governments. These would hardly raise serious objections that rather agree speedily on the measures to be taken....They certainly would never think of trying to handle the mater in such a way that their own nation would be spared whereas the next one would be decimated. But could not our situation be compared to one of a menacing epidemic."
-Albert Einstein
"I have seen that it is not man who is impotent in the struggle against evil, but the power of evil that is impotent in the struggle against man. The powerlessness of kindness, of senseless kindness, is the secret of its immortality. it can never be conquered. The more stupid, the more senseless, the more helpless it may seem, the vaster it is. Evil is impotent before it. The prophets, religious teachers, reformers, social and political leaders are impotent before it. This dumb, blind love is man's meaning.
Human history is not the battle of good struggling to overcome evil. it is a battle fought by a great evil struggling to crush a small kernel of human kindness. but if what is human in human beings has not been destroyed even now, then evil will never conquer."
-Vasily grossman
Life and Fate
"To what purpose should I trouble myself in searching out the secrets of the stars, having death or slavery continually before my eyes?"
-Anaximenes, sixth century B.C.E.
"The secret of life
is to "die before you die"-and
find that there is no death."
-Eckhart Tolle
The Power of NOW
"Let's give the historians something to write about."
-Propertius
"One of the hardest lessons we have to learn in this life, and one that many persons never learn, is to see the divine, the celestial, the pure, in the common, the near at hand-to see that heaven lies about us here in this world."
John Burroughs
"The further limits of our being plunge, it seems to me, into an altogether other dimension of existence from the visible world. Name it the mystical region, or the super-natural region, whichever you choose....we belong to it in a more visible world. When we commune with it, work is actually done upon our finite personality, for we are turned into new men."
-William James
"By passion for the "pairs of opposites."
By those twin snares of Like and Dislike, Prince.
All creatures live bewildered, save some few
Who, quit of sins, holy in act, informed.
Freed from the "opposites" and fixed in faith
Cleave unto Me."
-Bhagavad Gita
"So, think as if your every thought were to be etched in fire across the sky for
all and everything to see.
For so, in truth, it is.
So speak as if the world entire were but a single ear intent on hearing what
you say.
And so, in truth, it is.
Do as if your every deed were to recoil upon your heads.
And, so in truth it does.
So wish as if you were the wish.
And so, in truth, you are.
So live as if your God Himself had need of you his life to live.
And so, in truth, he does."
-Mikhail Naimy
"One cannot pursue one's own highest good without at the same time necessarily promoting the good of others. A life based on narrow self-interest cannot be esteemed by any honorable measurement. Seeking the very best in ourselves means actively caring for the welfare of other human beings. Our human contract is not with the few people with whom our affairs are most immediately intertwined, nor to the prominent rich, or well educated, but to all our human brethren.
View yourself as a citizen of a worldwide community and act accordingly."
-Epictetus A.D. 70
"The question before the human race is, whether the God of nature shall govern the world by his own laws, or whether priests and kings shall rule it by fictitious miracles."
-John Adams to Thomas Jefferson, 1815
"We are God-took us a long time to figure it out, didn't it?-and it's high time we stopped messing around with this guilt crap and got down to business. Let's affirm our past and say goodbye to it and get to work on the present."
-Paul Williams
Das Energi
"A human being is a part of a 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."
-Albert Einstein
"We are the music-makers
And we are the dreamers of dreams
Wandering by lone sea-breakers
And sitting by desolate streams;
World-losers and world-forsakers,
On whom the pale moon gleams:
Yet we are the movers and shakers
Of the world forever, it seems."
-Arthur O' Shaugnessy
"To conquer fear is the beginning of wisdom."
-Bertrand Russell
"The first and great commandment is, don't let them scare you."
-Elmer Davis
"Courage is a peculiar kind of fear."
-Charles Kennedy
"Do not be too timid and squeamish....All life is an experiment. The more experiments you make, the better."
-Ralph Waldo Emerson
"Courage is a kind of salvation."
-Plato
"Courage is almost a contradiction in terms. It means a strong desire to live taking the form of readiness to die."
-G.K. Chesterton
"For rising generations it will become a real problem at what point the policies you are ordered to carry out have become so iniquitous that a decent man must seek some other profession...."
-C.S. Lewis
""Few things are more striking than the fact that while the best are nearly powerless to effect changes, the worst are so potent."
-Watts
"When we are unhurried and wise we perceive that only great and worthy things have any permanent and absolute existence-that petty fears are but the shadow of reality. This is always exhilarating and sublime."
-Henry David Thoreau
"At some point these supersmart computers will become self-aware; One or more will "awaken" and understand that it is a being with wants and needs of its own. Since it will be much smarter than people, it will quickly move to take over the world, spreading itself across the Internet and feeding on the knowledge and processing power it finds there.
We can't know much about what happens next because the rules will change. All our ideas now-about science, technology, economics, and politics-are based on the assumption that people run the world to suit themselves.
What happens if that is no longer true?"
Vernor Vinge
"The concept of a singularity may to the non-scientist seem as mystic and unreal as the concept of God appears to the atheist, yet there are remarkable similarities between the two. Unity, transcendence of space and time, scorching heat, dazzling light, the power to create the universe; all these attributes are used equally by scientists to describe a 'singularity' as by theists to explain what they mean by God. "
-Alexander Waugh
God
"As time goes on, there are fewer and fewer points where humans can work better or more efficiently than machines.
Think of it as an island of competence, with the water rising around it. The island gets smaller and smaller and finally disappears. As computers get better and better, it becomes impossible for us to contribute in a meaningful way."
Vernor Vinge (See article: Vernor Vinge by Walter Russell Mead, Esquire Magazine Dec 2002
"We have become a nation of short-term doomsayers. In a word, we have lost our sense of history. Without the materials of historical comparison, we are left with nothing but abstractions."
Daniel Boorstin
"These are tumultuous times. Much of the world is going dark, leaving many human beings without clear direction. The European Dream is a beacon of light in a troubled world. It beckons us to a new age of inclusivity, diversity, quality of life, deep play, sustainability, universal human rights, the rights of nature, and peace on Earth. We used to say that the American dream is worthy of dying for. The new European Dream is worth living for."
-Jeremy Rifkin
The European Dream
"In the river, there is the crocodile. On the riverbank, there is the tiger, if you go to the forest, there are the thorns. If you go to the market, there is the policeman."
-Cambodian Proverb
"As long as we remain passive, we shall have in the course of our further existence to submit slavishly to every caprice of all sorts of blind events, and as a result inevitably shall serve solely as means for Nature's "involuntary and evolutionary constructions."
-G.I. Gurdjieff
"Despair is criminal."
-Samuel Johnson
"There is in society a mass of men who are capable only of conserving what exists; so mean are they, that they will sacrifice none of their present wealth in order to build a better future; and in order not to appear so mean and miserable, they deny the very possibility of a better future, and attack those people who attempt to achieve progress. Such is the vulgar mass of men."
-Monturiol
(inventor of the submarine) )
"Technical progress is the real hope for the future of the country; political reform cannot do anything for us. The engineer is engaged in a war of human liberation; his technique is different. The political reformer fights against ambition and initiative, the engineer is fighting against slavery. it is better for all to live well with a few rich than for all to live in slavery on a lower level."
-Glenn Frank
"Everything's joyously interconnected!"
-Brentano
'pure spirit reaches in the four directions, flows now this way, now
that-there is no place it does not extend to. Above, it brushes heaven;
\below, it coils on the earth....Its name is called One-with-Heaven.
....guard the spirit....and you will become one with spirit....
which communicates and mingles with the Heavenly Order."
-Chuang-Tzu
"The nation of love differs from all others...Lovers bear allegiance to no nation or sect."
Mevlana
"Sit, be still, and listen,
because you're drunk
And we're at the
edge of the roof."
-Rumi
"Close the shop of argument and mystery. Open the tea-house of experience."
-Abu Nuwas (7th and 8th century)
"This is (our) predicament: together with the fear of man we have lost the love of man, the affirmation of man, the will to man."
-Nietzsche
"We are all quantum fluctuations. That's the origin of all of us and of everything in the universe."
-Dr. John Bahcall (Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton)
"What do you expect? People are machines. Machines have to be blind and unconscious; they cannot be otherwise, and all their actions have to correspond to their nature. Everything happens. No one does anything. "Progress" and "civilization" in the real meaning of these words, can appear only as a result of conscious efforts. They cannot appear as a result of unconscious mechanical actions. And what conscious effort can there be in machines? And if one machine is unconscious, then a hundred machines are unconscious, and so are a thousand machines, or a hundred thousand, or a million. And the unconscious activity of a million machines must necessarily result in destruction and extermination. It is precisely in unconscious involuntary manifestations that all evil lies. You do not yet understand and cannot imagine all the results of this evil. But the time will come when you will understand."
G.I. Gurdjieff (1916)
"The greater part of what my neighbors call good I believe in my soul to be bad, and if I repent of anything, it is very likely to be my good behavior. What demon possessed me that I behaved so well?"
H.D. Thoreau
"Nothing is so beautiful and wonderful, nothing is so continually fresh and surprising, so full of sweet and perpetual ecstasy, as the good."
-Simone Weil
"Service is the rent we pay to be living. It is the very purpose of life and not something you do in your spare time."
-Marian Wright Edelman
"He who despairs over an event is a coward, but he who holds hope for the human condition is a fool."
-Albert Camus, The Rebel (1951)
"Look at the world. Though people have been trying to do even a hundred good deeds, the world has been going worse and worse. But why? It is because that which people have been trying to do is minor goodness, and that they have forgotten the existence of major goodness.
The Earth has come to the verge of destruction. Its survival depends on our actions at this very moment. But dear friends, we are in the Dark Age and it is impossible to make the right actions in the darkness. Thus it is of vital importance to bring Wisdom Light. When the Wisdom Light appears in the world, the darkness will disappear. And we will become able to see clearly and understand truly what is right to do and what is wrong to do. Then the Dark Age will transform into the New Age. When the nature of Wisdom Light is recognized in the world immediately, the New Age begins."
-Tamo-san
"The melancholy thing about the world is that it is full of stupid and common people, and the world is run for the benefit of the stupid and the common."
V.S. Naipaul
"If we are devoted to the cause of humanity, we shall soon be crushed and broken-hearted for we shall often meet with more ingratitude from men that we would from a dog; but if our motive is to love God, no ingratitude can hinder us from serving our fellow men."
-Oswald Chambers
My Utmost for His Highest
"If you seek to soar to heaven, make friends with all men. Never harbor a grudge in your heart. The joy of friendship is Paradise. When you talk of enemies, thorns and snakes fill your heart."
Mevlana
"We are conscious in the world of today that a new spirit is abroad to meet the challenge of a new era in the history of the world."
Louis Pauels & Jacques Bergier
Morning of the Magicians*
"The world must be romanticized. This is the way to rediscover its original meaning....By giving the base a lofty meaning, the ordinary an appearance of mystery, the known the dignity of the unknown and the finite an aura of infinity, I romanticize it."
-Novalis
"Let each one of all you who are fighting and are still too divided to be able as yet to know one another for what you are, guard his faith in the cause he believes to be just. But, in the very name of that faith, never cease to widen your ideas and ambitions to the real dimensions of the earth. Cling to your own race, indeed, and your own nation: for a sound synthesis calls for strong and sharply defined elements. But if you wish fully to realize yourselves, beware above all of everything that isolates, that refuses to accept and that divides. Each along your own line, let your thought and action be "universal", which is to say "total", And tomorrow, maybe, you will find to your surprise that all opposition has disappeared and you can "love" one another."
Pierre Teilhard De Chardin
Unpublished, Peking
20 March 1942
"Man is indeed a fantastic creature; and nothing about him is so fantastic as the alchemy of his crushed soul, which transmutes shame and weakness into pride and faith."
Eric Hoffer
"All men matter. You matter. I matter. It's the hardest thing in theology to believe."
G.K. Chesterton
"When heaven is about to confer
A great office upon a man,
It first exercises his mind with suffering,
And his sinews and bones with toil;
It exposes him to poverty
And confounds all his undertakings.
Then it is seen if he is ready."
-Moshi
"This is what you believe when you're on the road: People can begin anew. Life is a dream."
Jane Shapiro
"The greatest discovery of my generation is that a human being can alter his life by altering his attitudes of mind."
-William James 1842-1910
"A man must not complain of his "element," or of his "time," or the like; it is thriftless work doing so. His time is bad; well then, he is there to make it better."
-Thomas Carlyle
"You have set sail on another ocean
Without star or compass
Going where the argument leads
Shattering the certainties of centuries."
Janet Kalven
Respectable outlaw
"Whatever you love opens its secrets to you."
George Washington Carver
"We can do no great things-only small things, with great love."
-Mother Teresa
"The sea rises, the light fails, lovers cling to each other, and children cling to us. The moment we cease to hold each other, the moment we break faith with one another, the sea engulfs us and the light goes out."
-James Baldwin
"Spread love everywhere you go: first of all in your own house. Give love to your children, to your wife or husband, to a next door neighbor.....Let no one ever come to you without leaving better and happier. Be the living expression of God's kindness; kindness in your face, kindness in your eyes, kindness in your smile, kindness in your warm greeting."
-Mother Teresa
"Finally we shall place the sun itself at the center of the Universe. All this is suggested by the systematic procession of events and the harmony of the whole universe, if only we face the facts, as they say, with both eyes open."
Nicholas Copernicus
On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Objects
"Man can have access to a secret world-see the Light, see Eternity, comprehend the Laws of Energy, integrate within himself the rhythm of the destiny of the universe, consciously apprehend the ultimate concentration of forces and, like Teilhard de Chardin, live the incomprehensible life that starts from point Omega, in which the whole of creation, at the end of terrestrial time, will find its accomplishment consummation and exaltation. Man is capable of anything. His intelligence, equipped from the very beginning, no doubt with a capacity for infinite knowledge, can in certain conditions apprehend the whole mechanism of life. The powers of the human intelligence if developed to their fullest extent, could possibly cope with anything in the Whole Universe.."
Louis Pauwels & Jacques Bergier
Morning of the Magicians
"We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased."
C.S. Lewis
The Weight of Glory
"We are lame ants on the road in the midst of a breaking storm. But fortunately this road is not about faith, nor about vision either. Attractive and desirable as those may be, the Divine Presence does not depend on them in anyway. It is not our business to seek ecstasy and secret knowledge. it is our business to seek servanthood, what Hazrat Ibn-al- 'Arabi calls "The station of no station." And to such quest, time and circumstance neither present any impediment nor bestow any advantage. Wherever it is we find ourselves, it is to that place that we have been taken, and in that place our responsibility may be found."
Rabia Terri Harris
Women of Sufism by Camille Adams Helminski
"We can do it, you know.
We can get there. We can have it all. The Third Millennium A.D. can be the green millennium, the time in which we learn to live as responsible human beings at last.
There is no law, natural or divine, which demands that the world we live in become poorer, harsher and more dangerous. If it continues to become that way, it only because we do it ourselves...."
Isaac Asimov and Frederik Pohl
Our Angry Earth
"We can have a world of industrial smog, diminishing diversity, vanishing rainforests, the threat of nuclear annihilation, and the lurking hazards of genetic engineering, or we can have a world in which there are no 'environmental' diseases, no malnourished children, no warfare between social classes, no poor. A world in which rainforests expand, oceans and lakes teem with fish and marine mammals, new coral reefs are born, the variety of species of life expand and the human prospect grows ever more secure."
Ross Jackson, Albert Bates & Phillip Snyder of Global Ecovillage Network.
The Art of Natural Building
"(The Human Genome Project,) is the grail of human genetics...the ultimate answer to the commandment, 'Know thyself.' "
-Walter Gilbert
"The first rule of spiritual wisdom is to forget the world: Forget about doing good in the world; forget your fellow-man. Concern yourself, first of all, with establishing your own spiritual integrity and with realizing your own spiritual identity. Be spiritually endowed, and then, automatically, you become your brother's keeper and you will be putting into practice loving your neighbor as yourself, because spiritual endowment is like the atmosphere of God: It is a rich perfume which escapes from you without any conscious effort. Then you do not have to go up and down the world being a "do-gooder:" The mere fact that you are in the world means that some degree of spiritual power is flowing out from you, elevating human consciousness, even at the very time when you cannot see a visible result."
Joseph Goldsmith
The Infinite Way
"God is in the world, or nowhere. creating continually in us and around us. This creative principle is everywhere, in animate and so-called inanimate matter, in the ether, water, earth, human hearts. But this creation is a continuing process, and 'the process is itself the actuality,' since no sooner do you arrive than you start on a fresh journey. In so far as man partakes of this creative process does he partake of the "divine", of God, and the participation is his immortality, reducing the question of whether his individuality survives death of the body to the estate of an irrelevancy. His true destiny as co-creator in the universe is his dignity and his grandeur."
Alfred North Whitehead
"Donï' mock the faith. to hell with truth! As the history of the world proves, the truth has no bearing upon anything. It is irrelevant and immaterial. The life of a pipe dream is what gives life to the whole misbegotten mad lot of us, drunk or sober."
Eugene ONeill
The Ice Man Cometh
"In our belief culture, the word "truth" is most often used as a universal, an absolute-an object one could go searching for-rather than what it is, a conditional affirmation. Proof must come before truth. In every case, truth affirms each of the conditions that were set by the proof as well as the conclusion, if it gets that far. If there is no proof, there is no truth. Belief attempts to make things true or real without proof, and in doing so, belief internalizes fallacy and contradiction. Worse still, belief hides these fallacies from the perception of the believer, which is what makes belief both possible and pernicious. Pernicious? The Belgrade-Kosovo wars, the Semitic-family wars, and the Kashmir conflicts come to mind, but there is a very long list because all prejudice is rooted in belief and all belief systems enclose the seeds of prejudice. When belief is recognized as a way of using our minds that is riddled with with contradiction and fallacy, a way will be found to eliminate belief from human mental processes. Then everything will change. Those seemingly intractable social problems will no longer plead for solutions, for in the absence of belief they will simply dissolve, evaporate, disappear...
And so we have found it. Humanity's Universal Fallacy: the belief mode of thought."
-Paul E. McCullough (Infinite Energy Mag issue 60 2005
"The message of Beethoven brings us back to what we should do...Fear can never unite people. Pain cannot unite people. Joy unites people. Beethoven is always fresh. It is like a Bible for a priest. You read it as often as you can, and you cannot get tired of it-as long as you recognize what you are reading."
Mr. Masur
What doth it profit, my brethren, though a man say he hath faith, and have not works? Can faith save him?"
-James 2:14
"Take the case , my brothers, of someone who has never done a single good act, but claims he has faith. Will that faith save him? If one of the brothers or one of the sisters is in need of clothes and has not enough food to live on, and one of you says to them: 'I wish you well; keep yourself warm and eat plenty' without giving them these bare necessities of life, then what good is that? Faith is like that: if good works do not go with it, it is quite dead."
James 2:14-17
"Most men can seldom accept even the simplest and most obvious truth if it obliges them to admit that a mistake might have been made."
Leo Tolstoy
"It was at a particular moment in the history of my own rages that I saw the Western world conditioned by the images of Marx, Darwin and Freud; and Marx, Darwin , and Freud are the three most crashing bores of the Western world. The simplistic popularization of their ideas has thrust our world into a mental straitjacket from which we can only escape by the most anarchic violence."
William Golding
"There are all kinds of flight from responsibility. There is a flight into death, a flight into sickness, and finally a flight into stupidity. The last is the least dangerous and most comfortable, since even for clever people the journey is not as long as they might fondly imagine."
-Arthur Schnitzler
"....Ignorance has many interesting surrogates and overlaps in myriad ways with-as it is generated by-secrecy, stupidity, apathy, censorship, disinformation, faith, and forgetfulness, all of which are science-twitched. Ignorance hides in the shadows of philosophy and is frowned upon in sociology, but it also pop up up in a great deal of popular rhetoric: it's no excuse, it's what can't hurt you, it's bliss. Ignorance has a history and a complex political and sexual geography, and does a lot of other odd and arresting work that bears exploring."
-Robert N. Proctor
Agnotology*
*The Study of Ignorance
"The public seems to be awakening to the fact that in the midst of the "information" explosion, there has been an 'ignorance' explosion as well."
-Smithson, "Toward a Social theory of Ignorance"
"So long as the mother, Ignorance, lives, it is not safe for Science, the offspring , to divulge the hidden cause of things."
-Kepler (1571-1630)
"We are products of the past and we live immersed in the past, which encompasses us. How can we move towards the new life, how create new activities without getting out of the past and without placing ourselves above it? And how can we place ourselves above the past if we are in it and it is in us? There is no other way out except through thought, which does not break off relations with the past but rises ideally above it and converts it into knowledge."
Benedetto Croce (1938)
"Christians, Jews, and Muslims are known as the People of the Book. Pagans, however, have always realized that one book is never enough. Pagans are not the people of the book; Pagans are the people of the library."
Steven Posch
"Today, instead of free speech, we have the carefully coordinated use of all of the media and the organized intellectual prowess of the country to create and maintain an official picture of reality which serves as the basis for the System's domination. As long as we believe, for example, that even the largest corporations are "private" enterprises subject to a "free market," or that the legions of the unemployed could find work if only they tried harder, basic change will remain out of reach. It is this false map of reality which must be challenged in order to oppose the System with any hope of success."
Charles A. Reich
Opposing the System
"we must "study the social construction of ignorance. The persistence of controversy is often not a natural consequence of imperfect knowledge but a political consequence of conflicting interests and structural apathies. controversy can be engineered: ignorance and uncertainty can be manufactured, maintained, and disseminated."
-Robert Proctor
Cancer Wars
"ignorance effects can be harnessed, licensed, and regulated on a mass scale for striking enforcements."
-Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick
Epistemology of the Closet
"Everything has been figured out except how to live."
Jean-Paul Sartre
"Love cannot remain by itself-it has no meaning. Love has to be put into action and that action is service. How do we put the love for God in action? By being faithful to our family. and to the duties that God has entrusted to us. Whatever form we are, able or disabled, rich or poor, it is not how much we do but how much love we put in the doing-a lifelong sharing of love with others."
-Mother Teresa Love Seeks to Serve
"Let us then be up and doing,
With a heart for any fate,
Still achieving, still pursuing,
Learn to labor and to wait."
-Longfellow Psalm of Life
"Perhaps the greatest social service than can be rendered by anybody to the country and to mankind is to bring up a family."
-George Bernard Shaw
"The question today is how we can persuade mankind to agree to its own survival."
-Bertrand Russell (1872-1970)
"We are not only responsible for what we do, but also for what we leave undone!"
-Moliere (1622-73)
""One is not superior merely because one sees the world as odious."
Chateaubriand (1768-1848)
"Once, at ebb of tide,
I lingered
In the gloom my tea-glass fingered
Spoke to friends of Ozaï beauty and the glory of the earth;
Suddenly a talking raven
Swooped upon our sea-side haven,
With his blue-black eyes asparkle,
He retorted;
"Whats it worth?"
Andrei Voznesensky (1964)
"In the late twentieth century there is a growing awareness that we are doomed as a species and a planet unless we have a radical change of consciousness. The re-emergence of the Goddess is becoming the symbol and metaphor for this transformation of culture."
Elinor Gadon
The Once and Future Goddess
"Nothing is better for a man than to be without anything, having no asceticism, no theory, no practice. When he is without everything, he is with everything."
Abu Yazid Al-Bistami (?-874 C.E.) Sufi
"The big question is whether you are going to be able to say a hearty yes to your adventure."
-Joseph Campbell
"Look around-it's a nightmare, everything is awful, we have never been in such a precarious position before. It's so horrific that, sincerely, and I really mean it, if one doesn't wake up in the morning and exert buoyancy, one could get seriously depressed."
David Bowie (Rolling Stone, aug 8,2002)
I believe that today there is only one main concern: the question of war and peace. man is likely to destroy all life on earth, or to destroy all civilized life and the values among those that remain, and to build a barbaric, totalitarian organization which will rule what is left of mankind. To wake up to this danger, to look through the double talk on all sides which is used to prevent men from seeing the abyss toward which they are moving is the one obligation, the one moral and intellectual command which man must respect today. If he does not, we all will be doomed. "
-Erich Fromm
Beyond The Chains of Illusion
"I'm more worried about global warming than I am of any major military conflict."
Lord Peter Levine (Board Chair of Lloyd's of London)
"No mistake must be made in our interpretation of the remarkable events we are about to witness. It is vitally important for us to understand the economic, political, and socio-cultural rumblings that grow louder day by day in the light of evolving spiritual design. What is happening is not what appears to be happening from the standpoint of our rational mindsets. Nothing within appearances can give a reliable clue to what is really going on. Just because we may feel we have seen it all before does not mean that we are truly seeing what sits before us now. Peering dimly into shadows, it is easy to forget the divine plan continues to unfold right beneath our noses."
Joe Landwehr
The Birth of the Shining One
"Nature is not benign The survival of the human species is not a preordained evolutionary program."
Joshua Lederberg (Nobel Laureate)
".schools are out to teach patriotism; newspapers are out to stir up excitement; and politicians are out to get reelected. None of the three, therefore, can do anything whatever toward saving the human race from reciprocal suicide."
Bertrand Russell
"There is a road, steep and thorny, beset with perils of every kind-but yet a road; and it leads to the Heart of the Universe. I can tell you how to find those who will show you the secret gateway that leads inward only. For those who win onwards, there is reward past all telling: the power to bless and save humanity. For those who fail, there are other lives in which success may come."
Madame Helena Blavatsky (May 8,1891)
"A mountain stands as an example of something immutable. No one can take it away. A flood cannot take it; a fire cannot destroy it. This inner mountain stands for our spiritual growth. Too often we don't make a spiritual mountain but build up pride and jealousy, mountains of anger. And our minds move so fast."
Thubten Jigme Norbu (Tibetan Lama)
"At this moment in human history the question of a higher Wisdom has become supremely important. If it must be answered in the negative, our chances of survival as a species for more than a hundred years are very doubtful. We can see the difficulties ahead for the next twenty or thirty years but assume that if we can surmount them, the Twenty-First century of the Christian Era will see the triumph of man over nature and a world society that will regulate human life in such a way as to eliminate poverty, war, famine, disease, and even, perhaps, death itself. Such predictions are indeed being confidently made by experts in "futurology". A realistic prediction that takes account of the basic facts of human nature leads to just the opposite conclusion. Every technological advance creates three problems for every one it solves. Every increase in mans power over nature results in more destruction. Human society is not moving toward the brotherhood of man but toward worse manifestations of human selfishness and greed. We shall no doubt survive the twentieth century; but unless there are great changes, few will survive the Twenty-first."
John G. Bennett
Masters of Wisdom*
Around the corner there may wait
A new road or a secret gate.
J.R.R. Tolkien
"The great Governor of the Universe has led us too long and too far on the road to happiness and glory to forsake us in the midst of it."
-George Washington
"We reach the conclusion that many have come to: There is no way out unless human nature can be changed."
John G. Bennett
"We who lived in the concentration camps can remember the men who walked through the huts comforting others, giving away their last piece of bread. They may have been few in number, but they offer sufficient proof that everything can be taken from a man but one thing: The last of his freedoms-to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way."
-Viktor E. Frankl
Man's Search for Meaning
"He who knoweth his own Self, knoweth God."
Muhammed (Sayings of Muhammed)
"One hour's meditation on the work of the Creator is better than seventy years of prayer."
Muhammed (Sayings of Muhammed)
"Whether people are beautiful and friendly or unattractive and disruptive, ultimately they are human beings, just like oneself. Like oneself, they want happiness and do not want suffering. Furthermore, their right to overcome suffering and be happy is equal to ones own. Now, when you recognize that. you automatically feel empathy and closeness for them. Through accustoming your mind to this sense of universal altruism, you develop a feeling of responsibility for others: the wish to help them actively overcome their problems. Nor is this wish selective; it applies equally to all."
Dalai Lama
"It is now clear to me that between ourselves and the inhabitants of a madhouse there was no difference: at the time I only vaguely suspected this, and , like all madmen, thought all were mad except myself."
Leo Tolstoy
"It is because we don't know who we are, because we are unaware that the Kingdom of Heaven is within us, that we behave in the generally silly, the often insane, the sometimes criminal ways that are so characteristically human. We are saved, we are liberated and enlightened, by perceiving the hitherto unperceived good that is already within us, by returning to our Eternal Ground and remaining Where, without knowing it, we have always been."
Aldous Huxley
The Perennial Philosophy
"Should I weep all day, should I howl through the night, should I gnaw the carpet? Should I give myself airs? Or write dignified articles, with the ponderousness of the politician or the heavy logic of the military about the madness of our century? It is not raving madness, alas; it falls far short of that. It is a lethargy of the soul accompanied by sententious chatter, which reminds one of the state of the French aristocracy on the eve of the Revolution. Everyone can see all the abuses, the impending danger, and the incapacity of the leaders. But if one speaks of it, one provokes a smile or an expression of vague astonishment�"
Denis de Rougemont
The Last Trump
"You think sometimes you're going mad. I understand. Try to trust my inadequate words. You may as well trust me, because you're beginning to glimpse the enormity of what you can no longer trust-all the familiar illusions that made you believe you were out there when you were in here right from the start. Better yet, trust yourself. Try to understand: this is what it feels like to go sane."
Robin Morgan
The Demon Lover
"....When it becomes evident that the world's rewards are not adequate to the world's pain, and when the possibility of other reward is denied, simple calculation demands the ending of all. The task is how to keep men from feeling desperately unrewarded. Do they today wish to go on living, or do they wish to destroy the world? Some are unable to comprehend the depth of bitterness which may induce a desire for the second course."
Richard M. Weaver
Ideas Have Consequences
"In this story of my bitter, restricted youth that I have been telling you, I have sought constantly to convey the narrowness, the intensity, the confusion, muddle, and dusty heat of the old world. It was quite clear to me, within an hour of my awakening, that all that was, in some mysterious way, over and done. That, too, was the common experience. Men stood up; they took the new air into their lungs-a deep long breath, and the past fell from them; they could forgive, they could disregard, they could attempt....And it was no new thing, no miracle that sets aside the former order of the world. It was a change in material conditions, a change in the atmosphere, that at one bound had released them. Some of them it had released to death. .....indeed, man himself had changed not at all. We knew before the Change, the meanest knew, by glowing moments in ourselves and others, by histories and music and beautiful things, by heroic instances and splendid stories, how fine mankind could be, how fine almost any human being could upon occasion be: but the poison in the air, its poverty in all the nobler elements which made such moments rare and remarkable-all that has changed. The air was changed, and the Spirit of Man that had drowsed and slumbered and dreamt dull and evil things, awakened, and stood with wonder-clean eyes, refreshed looking again on life."
H.G. Wells
In the Days of the Comet
"The stability of the biosphere as a whole, and its ability to evolve, depend, to a great extent, on the fact that it is a system of relatively independent biomes."
-M.M. Kamshilov
"Long as you're not afraid, nobody can run your life for you. Remember that. Hell is being scared of things. Heaven is refusing to be scared. I mean that literally. " He took a bite of soggy doughnut. "Now you know my religion."
Tom Robbins
Skinny Legs and All
"
Cleverness is mere opinion, bewilderment is intuition."
Jalal Uddin Rumi
"Gentlemen, we should do more dreaming."
-Kekule
"You must give birth to your images. They are the future waiting to be born."
-Rainer Maria Rilke
"...If you want to stay in for the long haul, and lead a life that is free from illusions either propagated by you or embraced by you, then I suggest you learn to recognize and avoid the symptoms of the zealot and the person who knows that he is right. ..."
Christopher Hitchens
letters to a young contrarian
"I wish that, as seekers of Bliss, which all of us are, you would try to experience for yourselves that universal Truth which is in all and may be felt by all. This state is not an invention of anyone. It is already there. We have simply to discover it."
Paramhansa Yogananda
The Science of Religion
"Come, Come whoever you are, Wanderer, worshipper, lover of learning-it does not matter. Ours is not a caravan of despair. Come, even if you have broken your vow a hundred times.
Come, come again, come."
Rumi
"There are those who want to set fire to our world;
we are in danger;
There is only time to work slowly;
There is no time not to love."
Denna Metzger
"The fateful question for the human species seems to me to be whether and to what extent their cultural development will succeed in mastering the disturbance of their communal life by the human instinct of aggression and self-destruction."
Sigmund Freud
Civilization and its Discontents
"Never let your sense of morals get in the way of doing what's right."
-Isaac Asimov
"I think we are in rats alley Where the dead men lost their bones."
T.S. Eliot
The Waste Land
"Examine the labels you apply to yourself. Every label is a boundary or limit you will not let yourself cross."
-Dwayne Dyer
"I had ambition not only to go farther than anyone had ever been, but as far as it was possible to go."
-Captain James Cook
"Two futures beckon us. We can choose to engineer the life of the planet, creating a second nature in our image, or we can choose to participate with the rest of the living kingdom. Two futures, two choices. An engineering approach to the age of biology or an ecological approach. The battle between bioengineering and ecology is a battle of values. Our choice, in the final analysis, depends on what we value most in life. If it is physical security, perpetuation at all costs, that we value most, then technological mastery over the becoming process is an appropriate choice. But the ultimate and final power to simulate life, to imitate nature, to fabricate the process brings with it a price far greater than any humanity has ever had to contend with. By choosing the power of authorship, humanity gives up, once and for all, the most precious gift of all, companionship."
Jeremy Rifkin
Algeny
"To consider the world in its length and breadth, its various history, the many races of men, their starts, their fortunes, their mutual alienation, their conflicts, and then their ways, habits, governments, forms of worship; their enterprises, their aimless courses, their random achievements the tokens so faint and broken of a superintending design, the blind evolution of what turns out to be great powers and truths, the progress of things, as if from unreasoning elements, not toward final causes, the greatness and littleness of man, his far-reaching aims, his short duration, the curtain hung over his futurity the defeat of good, the success of evil the pervading idolatries, the corruptions. all this is a vision to dizzy and appall; and inflicts upon the mind the sense of profound mystery, which is absolutely beyond solution. What shall be said to this heart-piercing reason bewildering fact."
Cardinal Newman
"From what and to what can this infinite whirl be saved?"
D.H. Lawrence
"Moreover, if we could dredge up something forgotten not only by ourselves but by our whole generation or our entire civilization, we should become indeed the boon-bringers, the culture hero of the day-a personage of not only local but world historical moment.:
Joseph Campbell
Hero With a Thousand Faces
"We are now tottering on the brink of a worldwide existentialist crisis. The existentialist dilemma is an anthropomorphic obsession over the meaning of life when faced with the inevitability of death. This straw horse dilemma is the logical end of western religion and its obsession with one lifetime instead of many. And now we have to face the possibility that a planet could self-destruct. We are paralyzed in a global existentialist dilemma. And we will self-destruct unless we look carefully at what life really is. For just as the most honorable way out for the existentialist is suicide, the same paradigm will apply to the planet unless we see that we are operating from the wrong premise."
Barbara Hand Clow
Eye of the Centaur
Bear Pub, Santa Fe
:"More immediately we must demand: What is the purpose of each new political and economic measure? Does it seek the old goal of expansion or the new one of equilibrium? Does it work for conquest or co-operation? And what is the nature of this of that industrial or social achievement does it produce material goods alone or does it make for universal society, in which art and science, truth and beauty, religion and sanctity, enrich mankind? Do our public life plans make for the fulfillment and renewal of the human person, so that they will bear fruit in a life abundant: ever more significant, ever more valuable, ever more deeply experienced and more widely shared?"
Lewis Mumford
"But the first step is a personal one: a change in direction of interest towards the person. Without that change, no great betterment will take place in the social order. Once that change begins, everything is possible."
Lewis Mumford
"It is cynicism and fear that freeze life; it is faith that thaws it out, release it, sets it free."
Harry Emerson Fosdick
"Anxiety is not fear, being afraid of this or that definite object, but the uncanny feeling of being afraid of nothing at all. it is precisely Nothingness that makes itself present and felt as the object of our dread."
-William Barrett
"All the scholastic scaffolding falls, as a ruined edifice, before one single word-faith!
Napoleon
"Faith is not complacent; faith is action. You don't have faith and wait. When you have faith, you move."
-Betty Eadie
"I respect faith, but doubt is what gets you an education."
-Wilson Miznes
"Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is a ridiculous one."
-Voltaire
"Doubt your doubts."
-Joe Batten
"Our doubts are traitors and make us lose the good we oft might win by fearing the attempt."
-Shakespeare
"Labour to keep alive in your breast that little celestial fire called conscience."
George Washington
"It is clear that the immense, stupid and suicidal waste of natural resources must come to an immediate end if the human species wishes to survive on this earth. The cause of the colossal squandering of riches-of our present and future life-is the circular process of the market. The market is highly efficient but it has no goal, its sole purpose is to produce more in order to consume more. No civilization of the past was ever ruled by such a blind, mechanical fatality."
Octavio Paz
"For nothing worth proving
can be proven
Nor yet disproven: wherefore
Thou be wise
Cleave ever to the sunnier
Side of doubt."
Alfred Lord Tennyson
"In short, if humanity wants to either progress or survive, we have to become a space faring species."
Dr. Robert Zubrin
"This is the space age and we are here to go."
-William Burroughs
"When the heart expands and we can stretch our limbs, and feel the new vitality everywhere, then life unfolds in us. But it needs a living space in which it can develop. Life in the Spirit is life in the "broad place where there is no cramping" (Job 36,16).But how else could "Life in the Spirit" be understood, if the Spirit were not the space "in" which this life can grow and unfurl."
Moltmann
Spirit
"The Earth is the cradle of the mind mankind will not remain on earth forever, but in its quest for light and space, will at first timidly penetrate beyond the confines of the atmosphere, and later in the search for heat and light will conquer for itself all the space near the sun."
Konstantin E. Tsiolkovsky (1857-1935)
The "Father of Spaceflight"
What is the destiny of man? What is the purpose of human life? If no one knows the answers to these questions now, can we ever hope to find them? We have searched for the answers on Earth for thousands of years without much success. Possibly we can find them out among the stars."
Donald W. Cox James H. Chestek
Doomsday Asteroid
"The murky views which some scientists advocate as to the inevitable end of every living thing on Earth should not now be regarded as axiomatic. The finer parts of mankind will, in all likelihood, never perish-they will migrate from sun to sun as they go out. And so there is no end to life, to intellect and the perfection of humanity. Its progress is everlasting.:
Konstantin E. Tsiolkovsky
"The world faces a revolutionary Transformation . We must all learn to communicate with one another on every topic. The true division is between the self-satisfied specialist in every field and those restless minds in all realms of inquiry who seek a deeper meaning of their discoverers in a more comprehensive frame of reference."
Andrei Sakharov
"Human affairs are not worthy of much seriousness, and yet one must take them seriously."
-Plato, Laws 803b
"It is becoming increasingly apparent that we shall not have the benefits of this world for much longer. The imminent and unexpected destruction of the life cycle of world ecology can only be prevented by a radical shift in outlook from our present naive conception of this world as a testing ground to a more mature view of the universe as a comprehensive matrix of life forms. Making this shift in viewpoint is essentially religious, no economic or political."
Vine Deloria Jr.
"We are here and it is now. Further than that all human knowledge is moonshine.
H.L Mencken
"Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known."
Carl Sagan
"We are all on a spaceship, and that spaceship is Earth. Six billion passengers-and no skippers.:
Wernher Von Braun
(Bucky Fuller at least wrote the "operating manual for spaceship Earth�)
"How can one deny-that all our lives hang by threads of nothing more than luck? A vacant microbe or an oil slick on the road, an open door, the leak in a gas line, a madman encountered by chance-against these what matters all our painful accumulations of virtue, knowledge, nobility, sacrifice?"
Leo Rosten
"We are a crowd of poaching hands and mouths who out of fear
have learned a safer life
than one can bear"
W. H. Auden
"In sickness and in Health"
"I came to know that humanities greatness does not reside in the destiny of species. Each individual is a precious, sacred entity and must be so cherished since S/HE is related by a mysterious and structural kinship to all of nature, to all of humanity, to the cosmos itself. Thus I found myself in the presence of a truth that spread through me as an infinitely simple Joy.:"
Ruth Nanda Anshen
Biography of an Idea
"And Joy shall overtake us as a flood.
When everything that is sincerely good and Perfect Divine,
With Truth, and Peace, and Love shall ever shine.
Then all this Earthy grossness quits
Attir�d with stars,
We shall for ever sit,
Triumphing over Death,
And Chance, and thee O Time."
John Milton
"Whether we wish it or not, we may soon have to make a clear choice between the special nation to which we pledge our allegiance and the broad humanity of which we are born a part."
E.B. White
"The legend of the earthbound spirit, for ever roaming the hiways and waste places of the world, bears the stamp of truth, for its poetic value is eternal. The wondering god, the disguised King, the mysterious stranger at the wayside hearth, itinerant poet, tinker and peddler, all those romantic figures whose appeal to our aesthetic sense is direct and universal, represents a true archetype , the spirit of the earth."
John Michell
The new view over Atlantis
The powers of the earth are reasserting themselves, as if demanding that we recognize anew the vital part they play in our existence and welfare."
John Michell
"We are keepers of the land. we say there is room for everyone, that we are supposed to live as bothers and share. That is the way it should be. We are supposed to work together to make life good for all of us, all who live upon this Mother Earth."
-Rolling thunder
"Until he extends the circle of his compassion to all living things, man will not himself find peace."
Albert Schwietzer
"Don't squander the gold of your days, listening to the tedious, nor giving your life away to the ignorant and the commonLive! Live the wonderful Life that in you."
Oscar Wilde
"Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. Life is either a daring adventure , or it is nothing."
Helen Keller
"The condition of lovelessness is the cause of suffering for the entire human race."
Wagner
"Unless there is a sisterly-brotherly feeling in your hearts, all the words that you speak or print in my name are hollow; all the miles that you travel in my cause are zero; all organization for my work are but an appearance of activity; all buildings to contain me are empty places and all statues that you make to embody me are of someone else"
Meher Baba
"We are not kept alive by legislators and militarists, that is fairly obvious. We are kept alive by men of faith, men of visions. They are like germs in the endless process of becoming. Make room, then, for the life-giving ones!"
Henry Miller
"Religion....is the first enemy of the ability to think. That ability is not used by men to one-tenth of its possibility, yet before they learn to think they are discouraged by being ordered to take things on faith. Faith is the worst curse of mankind, as the exact antithesis and enemy of thought."
-Ayn Rand
"Believe no more! Hope no more! Pray no more! Open wide your eyes. Stand erect. Cast out all fear. A new world is about to be born. It is yours. From this moment all will change. What is magic? The knowledge that you are free. You are free! Sing! Dance! Fly! Life has just begun."
Henry Miller
"It is time, now, not simply to change beliefs, but to stop believing."
-Paul E. McCullough
:"If you judge people, you don't have time to love them."
Mother Theresa
"We are the curators of life on earth; we hold it in the palms of our hands. Can we evolve spiritually and emotionally in time to control the overwhelming evil that our advanced and rational intellect has created? We will know the answer to this question in our lifetime. This generation will die having discovered the answer."
Dr. Helen Caldicott
Missile Envy
"Yes, something momentous is about to happen, But one thing I'm not sure of: will it happen to me alone, or will it also happen to the rest of the world.?
Byron
"If men understood each other, they will become as it were one race, one people, one household, one School of God. and then thee will be Universal Peace over the whole World. Hatred and the causes of hatred will be done away, and all dissension between men. For there will be no grounds for dissenting when men have the same Truths clearly presented to their eyes."
Comenius 1668
The way of light
"Today our plans miscarry because they are in the hands of people who have undergone no inner growth."
Lewis Mumford
"What is life? A bone thrown to a company of hungry curs; a bait for greedy fishes; the painfulness and continual burden-bearing of wretched ants, the running to and fro of mice: little puppets drawn up and down with wires and nerves: These be the objects of the world."
Marcus Aurelius (Emperor of Rome)
"Only you yourself can be your liberator."
Wilhelm Reich
"Is there a pattern in all this? Or just a series of charades en route to nothingness? All the follies and cruelties, the lusts, the betrayals-were they sign-posts on the path to peace and salvation? Or were they merely the wild gesticulations of a madman?"
Frederic Prokosch
The MissoLonghi Manuscript
"
By a high Star our course is setour end is life. Put out to sea."
-Louis Macneice 1907-1963
"Should we not give a spiritual basis to the world which is now being mechanically made to feel its oneness by modern scientific inventions?"
Sarvepalli Radhakrishna
1939
"We are living in times that have no precedent, and in our present situation, universality has to permeate our language and the whole of our way of life. Today it is not nearly enough merely to be a saint"
Simone Weil 1942
"We're all in this alone."
Lily Tomlin
"You need a lot of help to stand alone."
-Raymond Murphy
"Not only are we all in the same boat, but we are all seasick."
-G.K. Chesterton
"Just like legs take the man away from the cold and dark, towards lodging and light, word, art and literature help the man in his pursuit from the past through to the future."
Vladimir Korolenko
"You're catching on, my friend. Were nothing but a little blue spot in a solar system, in a galaxy with a hundred million solar systems, in a universe with a hundred million galaxies. And the truth is we don't know where it ends, or if it does. And we aren't even talking about dimensions yet. Gives you a headache, doesn't it?"
David Morehouse
Psychic Warrior
"Man has always lost his way. He has been a tramp ever since Eden; but he always knew, or thought he knew, what he was looking for. Every man has a house somewhere in the elaborate cosmos; his house waits for him.....But in the bleak and blinding hail of skepticism to which he has been now so long subjected, he has begun for the first time to be chilled, not merely in his hopes, but in his desires. For the first time in history he begins really to doubt the object of his wanderings on earth. He has always lost his way; but now he has lost his address.
-G.K. Chesterton
"It might turn out that exploring the far-out spaces of human consciousness is the fastest way to social transformation."
John C. Lilly
"Since the development of life means the rise and growth of consciousness, that development could not continue indefinitely along its own line without a transformation in depth: like all great developments in the world, life had to become different in order to remain itself."
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
"Have we fallen into a mesmerized state that makes us accept as inevitable that which is inferior or detrimental, as though having lost the will or the vision to demand that which is good?"
Rachel Carson,
Silent Spring
"If we are going to save the world that is, restore the biosphere and save ourselves as a species we will have to develop and live by new rules. Only through the recognition and enforcement of world law can our basic rights be protected and the war making of the nation-states be stopped."
Garry Davis
"To go up alone into the mountain and to come back as an ambassador to the world has ever been the method of humanity's best friends."
-Evelyn Underhill
"Any idiot can face a crisis its this day-to-day living that wears you out."
Anton Chekhov
"Last, but by no means least, courage moral Courage, the courage of ones convictions, the courage to see things through. The world is in a constant conspiracy against the brave. Its s the age-old struggle the roar of the crowd on one side and the voice of your conscience on the other."
General Douglas MacArthur
"From the stars to the earths center, in the external world and within ourselves, every substance is unknown to us. We see appearances only; we are in a dream."
Voltaire
"For a very long time people mocked at occult causes. We should rather ridicule those who doubt them Vegetables, minerals, animals, where is your first principle? It is in his hand who made the sun turn on its axis and clothed it in light What corpuscular physics, what atoms determine the nature (of the elements)? You know nothing. The reason will forever be occult, so far as you are concerned. All that surrounds you, all that lies within you, is an enigma whose key it is not given to man to discover."
Voltaire
"Whatever happens, good or bad, when you look closely, you'll find that it is all for the best."
Babur,
Prince & Emperor 1506
"The danger facing us is unlike any danger that ever existed. We cannot leave it to Generals, Senators and diplomats to work out a solution over a period of generations. Today lack of interest would be a great danger, for there is much the average man can do."
Albert Einstein
"The enemy is a man who not only believes in his own helplessness but actually worships it. His main article of faith is that there are mammoth forces at work which the individual cannot possibly comprehend, much less alter or direct The enemy is a man who has a total willingness to delegate his worries about the world to officialdom. He assumes that only the people in authority are in a position to know and act."
Norman Cousins
Checklist of Enemies
"Become who you are."
Neitzche
"There is a time for Buddhist mediation, and there is a time for Irish whiskey."
Joseph Campbell
"All theory, dear friend, is gray, but the golden tree of actual life springs ever green."
Goethe (1749-1832)
"Have we fallen into a mesmerized state that makes us accept as inevitable that which is inferior or detrimental, as though having lost the will or the vision to demand that which is good?"
Rachel Carson
Silent Spring
"The possibility of realizing our destiny depends upon a force that is not our own and that has its origin on a much higher level than the human. Therefore, everything for us really depends upon the possibility of coming into contact with that great Force."
J.G. Bennett
"Let us try to celebrate and enjoy ourselves. I am really only interested in trying to entice people with all the skills at my disposal to live in that sort of way if they possibly can."
R.D.Laing
"The way of a superior man is threefold; virtuous, he is free from anxieties; wise he is free from perplexities; bold, he is free from fear."
Confucius
"And whether we are preparing a new birth of spirit or the agonies of final dissolution depends on what you think, feel, and will about such manifestations or apparitions, on the Kabalistic skill you develop in the interpretation of these contemporary formations."
Saul Bellow
Cousins
"The universe is not dead. Therefore, there is an Intelligence there, and at least one purpose, (possibly the major purpose), of that intelligence is the achievement of universal harmony. Striving in the direction of peace and harmony, as well as the achievement of it, is the result of accord with that Intelligence.
If I had never seen a watch and should see one for the first time, I should be sure its hands were moving according to some plan and not at random. Nor does it seem any more reasonable for me to conceive that the precision and order of the universe is the product of blind chance. This whole concept is summed up in the word harmony. For those who seek it, there is inexhaustible evidence of an all-pervading Intelligence."
Rear-Admiral Richard Byrd
(notes made while alone for five months in the Antarctic)
"Everything is here, you know, very orderly, very beautiful and nice. There s a lot of authority and guidance coming from a source. That is all we know."
Jose Rey Toledo
"In our Pueblo life, during the winter solstice and what was to be the beginning of the new year, we always drew on the walls figures of prayer-prayer symbols like deer, horses, turkey, eagles, the planets, morning star, evening star these things that guided us, and gave us, and nurtured us in our lives, and crops like chili, melons, you know to symbolize a request to the spiritual world for many of those things that might grow plentiful during the year."
Jose Rey Toledo
"Although the origins of man are more obscure than they ever were and the mysteries of life grow more unfathomable the farther we progress in the exact sciences, at least we confront the earliest tokens of human existence with more humility than our great-grandfathers did a hundred years ago. At least we perceive the unique and extraordinary nature of mankind more clearly than all the generations before us and recognize the enigma of manïs origin lies no less on the physical than on the spiritual plane. No longer shrinking from the assumption that these is a creative force of that behind all the secrets of existence stands a supreme being, we are daily drawing nearer to God."
Iven Lissner
Man, God and Magic
"The great end of life is not knowledge but action."
Thomas Henry Huxley
"The time has come to think as intently about limits as about liberation. We walk warily between Sphinx and Unicorn."
-Roger Shattuck
Forbidden Knowledge: From Prometheus To Pornography
"The world, in incredibly dark and devious ways is headed toward Salvation."
Edward R. Murrow 1950
"Or you who were created for union with God himself and whom he is ever attracting to himself, what you doing with your precious lives, with your time? You are labouring for nothingness and all you think you possess is pure misery. O terrible human blindness. So great a light about you and you do not see it, so clear a voice sounding and you do not hear it."
-St. John of the Cross: Spiritual Canticle 39
"how much more delightful to an undebauched mind is the talk of making improvements on the earth, than all the vain glory which can be acquired from ravaging it, by the most uninterrupted career of conquests."
George Washington
"a conspiracy to coexist with the crab Nebula, the exploding Universe, the Mind."
Adrienne Rich
"Solutions are difficult, for our decay has engendered cynicism, and our first response to every suggestion is a disillusioned smile. By a kind of olfactory adaptation we have come to believe that the world has always been this way, and will always be; we seem quite reconciled, now that we are so intelligent, to be ruled by wolves and geese."
Will Durant 1929
"Underneath all, individuals;
I swear nothing is good to me now that ignores individuals,
The American compact is altogether with individuals,
The only government is that which makes minute of individuals,
The whole theory of the universe is directed to one single individual namely to You."
Walt Whitman
"For I do not see one imperfection in the universe;
And I do not see one cause or result lamentable at last in the universe."
Walt Whitman
"Nothing is too wonderful to be true."
Michael Faraday
(1791-1867)
"The mind of man how far will it advance? Where will its daring impudence find limits? If human villainy and human life shall wax in due proportion, if the son shall always grow in wickedness past his father, the gods must add another world to this that all the sinners may have space enough."
Euripides 428 B.C.
"how alien, alas, are the streets of the city of grief."
Rainer Maria Rilke
The Tenth Elegy 1923
"Judging by what I have learned about men and women, I am convinced that far more idealistic aspiration exists than is ever evident. Just as the rivers we see are much less numerous than the underground streams, so the idealism that is visible is minor compared to what men and women carry in their hearts, unreleased or scarcely released. Mankind is waiting and longing for those who can accomplish the task of untying what id knotted and bringing the underground waters to the surface."
Albert Schweitzer
"Something we were withholding made us weak until we found out it was ourselves we were withholding from our land of living, and forthwith found salvation in surrender. Such as we were we gave ourselves outright."
Robert Frost
(read at JFK inauguration)
"To picture Jesus and Muhammad and the Buddha and others competing for a prize for their contribution to progress in religionï¿ is at once to see the absurdity of the suggestion. Jesus' own message centered on the coming Kingdom of God. For those who follow Jesus, the longing and indeed daily prayer is that Gods kingdom will come on earth as it is in heaven. Jesus defined that Kingdom as good news for the poor, release for the prisoner, recovery of sight for the blind, freedom for the victims of cruelty. The ultimate picture and hope is of a world at peace, a world of justice, where all share Gods gift of abundant life. It is not, despite well-known hymns with splendid tunes, a coronation ceremony."
Reverend Marcus Braybrooke
Chairman of the World Congress of Faiths
"We should honor the great of all nations and cultures. It is a kind of universal ancestor worship, not just a communion of saints, but a communion of great achievers."
Professor Ninian Smart
Professor of Religious Studies at UC Santa Barbara
"The example of great and pure individuals is the only thing that can lead us to noble thoughts and deeds."
-Albert Einstein
"It is not for him to pride himself who loveth his own country, but rather for him who loveth the whole world. The earth is but one country, and mankind its citizens."
Baha Ullah
"Every man takes the limits of his own field of vision for the limits of the world."
Schopenhaurer
"The Brotherhood of man is not a mere poets dream: it is a most depressing reality."
Oscar Wilde
"Why roam in the far yonder? Look, the good is so near at hand!"
Goethe
"All this struggling and striving to make the world better is a great mistake: not because it isn't a good thing to improve the world, but because struggling and striving is the worst way you could set about doing anything."
-George Bernard Shaw
"The first duty for a man is still that of subduing fear. We must get rid of fear; we cannot act at all till then. A manï¿ acts are slavish, not true but specious, his very thoughts are false, he thinks too as a slave and coward, till he have go fear under his feet. Odins creed, if we disentangle the real kernel of it, is true to this hour."
Thomas Carlyle 1840
"We are the miracle of miracles, the great inscrutable mystery of God. We cannot understand it, we know not how to speak of it; but we may feel and know, if we like, that it is verily so."
Thomas Carlyle 1840
"There is no way back into the past. The choice is the Universe or nothing."
H.G. Wells
"This will of God which we were all the Angels, that is, the Rays, you see that very few of us still are, because too much Evil has passed over us. The War between Evil and God is not yet over and if the Kingdom of God is to come to earth we must be chaste. We are as Chaste as possible. But people all over the earth are no longer chaste at all. And the time has come for them to return to complete chastity."
Told to Antonin Artaud
by the Tarahumara Indians 1936 Mexico
"Properly speaking, global thinking is not possible. Those who have "thought globally (and among them the most successful have been imperial governments and multinational corporations) have done so by means of simplification too extreme and oppressive to merit. The name of thought. Global thinkers have been, and will be, dangerous people. National thinkers tend to be dangerous also; we now have national thinkers in the northeastern United States who look upon Kentucky as a garbage dump."
Wendell Berry
"The All-Knowing Physician hath His finger on the pulse of mankind. He perceiveth the disease, and prescribeth, in His unerring wisdom, the remedy. Every age hath its own problem�The remedy the world needeth in its present-day afflictions can never be the same as that which a subsequent age may require. Be anxiously concerned with the needs of the age ye live in, and center your deliberations on its exigencies and requirements."
Baha ullah
For Gen X, the lyrics of Alanis Morissetteïs Hand in My Pocket defines the guarded hopefulness of the new generation:
I'm broke but I'm happy, I'm poor but I'm kind
I'm lost but I'm hopeful baby, What it all comes down to
Is that everything is gonna be fine, fine, fine
Iïve got one hand in my pocket, And the other one is giving a high five.
"We've been assuming all along that failure was certain, that our universe was running down and it was strictly you or me, kill or be killed as long as it lasted. But now, in our century, weïve discovered that man can be a success on this planet, and this is the great change that has come over our thinking."
R. Buckminster Fuller
"Compose your differences, and reduce your armaments, that the burden of your expenditures maybe lightened, and that your minds and hearts may be tranquillized. Heal the dissentions that divide you, and ye will no longer be in need of any armaments except what the protection of your cities and territories demandeth."
Baha ullah
"One must be an individual, sane, and balanced, not belonging to any race, country or to any particular ideology. Then perhaps sanity and peace will come back to the world."
Krishnamurti
"Life is an exciting business and most exciting when it is lived for others."
Helen Keller
"In the long run men hit only what they aim at."
Thoreau
"A fool with a plan beats a genius with no plan any day."
-T. Boone Pickens
"The problems that will plague millennial man requires that we restore the idea of evil, the idea of the sacred to the center of political life."
Jacques Attali
"Listen oftener
To things than beings,
For the voice of Fire is heard,
Listen to the voice of the Water,
Listen in the wind to the crying bush,
It is the breath of ancestors."
Birago Diop
"We are not in control. As societies grow more populous and complex, the idea that a global elite like the UN can engineer reality from above is just as absurd as the idea that political scientists can reduce any of this to a science.
Robert D Kaplan
The Ends of the Earth
"Our worst enemies here are not the ignorant and the simple, however cruel; our worst enemies are the intelligent and the corrupt."
-Graham Greene
"The long-range future may be bright, but the next few decades will be tumultuous. Keep in mind that the collapse of just a few small countries scattered around the globe has overwhelmed policymakers in the West. Were a major regional power to dissolve somewhere, we would have no answers. Americans, because our own history, tend to see optimistic scenarios in places where endings have rarely been happy. But the banal truth is that economic and social development is generally cruel, painful, violent, and uneven and humanity is developing more dramatically than ever before."
Robert D. Kaplan
"The towers are gone now, reduced to bloody rubble, along with all hopes for Peace in our time, in the United States or any other country. Make no mistake about it: We are At War now-with somebody-and we will stay at War with that mysterious Enemy for the rest of our lives. it will be a religious War, a sort of Christian Jihad, fueled by religious hatred and led by merciless fanatics on both sides. it will be a guerrilla warfare on a global scale, with no front lines and no identifiable enemy.....we are going to punish somebody for this attack, but just who or what will be blown to smithereens for it is hard to say. maybe Afghanistan, maybe Pakistan or Iraq, or possibly all three at once.....victory is not guaranteed-for anyone, and certainly not for anyone as baffled as George W. bush....he will declare a national security Emergency and clamp down Hard on Everybody , no matter where they live or why. if the guilty won't hold up their hands and confess, he and the Generals will ferret them out by force.....he is in for a profoundly difficult job-armed as he is with no credible Military Intelligence., no witnesses and only the ghost of Bin Laden to blame for the tragedy."
-Hunter S. Thompson (day after 9/11 ESPN Website)
"And other spirits are standing apart upon the forehead of the age to come; these, these will give the world another heart, and other pulses. Hear ye not the hum of mighty workings? Listen awhile ye nations, and be dumb."
Keats
(from the poem "addressed to Haydon")
"More power and more knowledge exalt human nature but do not bless it. We must gather from the whole store of things such as make most for the uses of life."
Francis Bacon
The Advancement of Learning
"Truth is always exciting. Speak it, then. Life is dull without it."
Pearl Buck
"The simple step of a courageous individual is to not take part in the lie. One word of Truth outweighs the world."
-Alexander Solzhenitsyn
"The most disastrous times have produced the greatest minds. The purest metal comes of the most ardent furnace, the most brilliant lightning comes of the darkest clouds."
-Francois Rene de Chateaubriand
"The truth is the only thing worth having, and, in a civilized life, like ours, where so many risks are removed, facing it is almost the only courageous thing left to do."
E.V. Lucas
"I tore myself away from the safe comfort of certainties through my love for truth; and truth rewarded me."
Simone De Beauvoir
"A curse on every wish that blinds the sight, paralyzes the tongue, cramps the hand, and prevents the truth being seen, said, and written."
Theodor Haecker
"... AS To This present universal ferment of men's minds as to the imperfections of present social arrangements. Not only are the toilers of the world engaged in something like a worldwide Insurrection, but true and humane men and women, of every degree, are in a mood of exasperation, verging on absolute revolt, against social conditions that reduce life to a brutal struggle for existence, mock every dictate of ethics and religion, and render well-nigh futile the efforts of philanthropy."
Looking Backward/Edward Bellamy
"As to God, open your eyes and your heart, which is also a perceptive organ and you see him."
Charles Sanders Peirce
"Apart from God every activity is merely a passing whiff of insignificance."
Alfred North Whitehead
"One can easily find out why one is angry, but that does not stop one from being angry. One can find out what the contributory causes of war are, be they economic national, religious, or the pride of the politicians, the ideologies, the commitments and so on, yet we go on killing each other, in the name of God, in the name of an ideology, in the name of country, in the name of what it is. There have been 15,000 wars in 5,000 years!-still we have no love, no compassion!"
J. Krishnamurti
"Let here begin a Brotherhood of man, wherein the West shall freely meet the East, and man greet man as man."
Hu Shih
Written at Cornell University 1915
"People lives are in turmoil. There is a sense of crisis for men as well as for women, and for children too. Do we have an idea or even a glimmering about how people can and should live, not as victims as in the past for women, nor as atoms just whirling around on their own trajectories, but as members of a human community and as moral agents in that community?"
Barbara Ehrenreich
"No one should feel afraid of the unknown,
because everyone is capable of achieving
everything he wants and needs."
-Paulo Coelho
"Some say, after we have mastered the wind, the waves, the tides, and gravity, we shall harness for God the energies of love. Then for the second time in the history of the world, man will have discovered fire."
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
"Ring out old shapes of foul disease, Ring out the narrowing lust for gold; Ring out the thousand wars of old, Ring in the thousand years of peace.
Alfred North Tennyson
Collected Work
s
"Etana looked down and saw the earth had become like a hill and the sea like a well. And so they flew for another hour, and once again Etana looked down: the earth was now like a grinding stone and the sea like a pot. After the third hour the earth was only a speck of dust, and the sea no longer seen."
Flight of Etana
Written in Babylon 4,700 years ago
"This world is a terrible place; there is no safety here. But what are we to do? We must stop taking life so seriously"
Paramahansa Yogananda
"Were born alone, we live alone, we die alone. Only though our love and friendship can we create the illusion for the moment that w'ere not alone."
Orson Welles (1915-1984)
"We are not alone.
The world is changing,
and we are part of that transformation.
The angels guide and protect us."
-Paulo Coelho
"We are all of us sentenced to solitary confinement inside our own skins, for life!"
Tennessee Williams (1914-1983)
"Everyone who has the courage to say what he feels in his heart
is in contact with God."
-Paulo Coelho
"Hunger and love are the two axes on which the world turns. Humanity is ruled completely by love and hunger."
-Anatole France
"So don't be attached to the passing dreams of life. Live for God and God alone. This is the only way to have freedom and safety in this world. Outside of God there is no security; no matter where you go, delusion can attack you. Be free right now. Be a son of God now; realize you are His child, so that you may be rid of this dream of delusion forever."
Paramahansa Yogananda
The Divine Romance
"You have nothing if you have not God. You have everything if you have God; for he is the Master of the Universe."
Paramahansa Yogananda
"We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And to know the place for the first time."
T.S. Eliot
J. Krishnamurti
(talk given at Brandeis University)
"...Man has continued to evolve by acts of disobedience not just in the sense that his spiritual development was possible only because there have been men who dared to say "no" to the powers that be in the name of their conscience or of their faith. His intellectual development was also dependent on the capacity for being disobedient, disobedient to the authorities who tried to muzzle new thoughts, and to the authority of long-established opinions which declared change to be nonsense."
-Erich Fromm
Beyond the Chains of Illusion
"And so it all comes down to the same thing in the end, whether we start with the technological fantasies of Herman Kahn, the mysticism of Edgar Cayce or the cosmic fictions of Arthur C. Clarke. Western Civilization is drawing to a close in an age of apocalyptic turmoil in which the old species, collectivizing mankind with machines, and the new species, unifying it in consciousness, are in collusion with one another to end what we know as human nature. Western man will no doubt try to prove that he is not merely mud to be shaped into bricks for the dreamers temples, but even taking the conservative obstinacy of industrial man into account, it would still seem that we are at one of those moments when the whole meaning of nature, self, and civilization is overturned in a re-visioning of history as important as any technological innovation."
William Irwin Thompson
"Spiritual devastation is more likely to come from an enemy with a smiling face than from one whose countenance exudes suspicion and hate. in the Huxleyan prophecy,
big Brother does not watch us, by his choice. We watch him, by ours. There is no need for wardens or gates or Ministries of Truth. When a population becomes distracted by trivia, when cultural life is redefined as a perpetual round of entertainments, when serious public conversation becomes a form of baby-talk, when, in short, a people become an audience and their public business a vaudeville act, then a nation finds itself at risk.'Neil Postman
Amusing Ourselves to Death
"In that hour, weary of life, men will no longer regard the world as a worthy object of their admiration and reverence. This all which is a good thing, the best that can be seen in the past, the present and future, will be in danger of perishing; men will esteem it a burden; and thence forward they will despise and no longer cherish the whole of the universe, incomparable work of God, glorious construction, good creation made up of an infinite diversity of forms, instruments of the will of God who, without envy, pours forth his favour on all his work, in which is assembled in one whole, in a harmonious diversity, all that can be seen that is worthy of reverence, praise and love. For darkness will be preferred to light; it will be thought better to die than to live; none will raise his eyes towards heaven; the pious man will be thought mad, the impious wise; the frenzied will be thought brave, the worst criminal a good man. The soul and all the beliefs attached to it, according to which the soul is immortal by nature or forces that it can obtain immortality as I have taught you this will be laughed at and thought nonsense."
Asclepius
Translated by Marsilio Ficino
"Like tenants on an eighteenth-century estate, we live amid romantic ruins, a chancel arch here, a crumbling lancet window there, awaiting reverent figures of reformation-the return of energizing, enveloping forces like Hildegard and Francis, Giotto and Dante. We might even find ourselves mumbling a prayer like the one whispered by the anonymous bard who once stood looking at the ruins of Kilcash Castle on the southeast slope of Slievenamon in County Tipperary:
I beseech Mary and Jesus
That the great come home again
With long dances danced in the garden,
Fiddle music and mirth among men,
That Kilcash the home of our fathers
Be lifted on high again,
And from that to the deluge of waters
In bounty and peace remain.
What is there left to say but "Amen"??
-Thomas Cahill
Mysteries of the Middle Ages: The Rise of Feminism, Science, and Art from the Cults of Catholic Europe
'People are unreasonable, illogical and self-centered: love them anyway.
If you do good, people will accuse you of selfish ulterior motives: do good anyway
If you're successful you win false friends and make true enemies: try to succeed anyway.
The good you do today will be forgotten tomorrow: be good anyway.
Modesty and frankness will get you nowhere: They make you vulnerable. Be honest and frank anyway.
People favor underdogs, but they follow the top dogs: fight for some underdogs anyway.
What you spend days building may be destroyed overnight: do it anyway.
People really need help but they attack you if you try to help them: try anyway.
Give the world the best you have and you get kicked in the mouth: give the world the best you have anyway."
read as the Philosophy of Dr. Karl Menninger on his 87th birthday
"Only the mistakes are ours. In this world, beauty is common."
Jorge Luis Borges
"I will act as if what I do makes a difference."
-William James
"Who sees variety and not the unity wanders on from death to death."
The Upanishads
"The aim of the game is true awakening, full development of the powers latent in man. The game can be played only by people whose observations of themselves and others have lead them to a certain conclusion, namely, that mans ordinary state of consciousness, his so-called waking state, is not the highest level of consciousness of which he is capable. In fact, this state is so far from real awakening that it could appropriately be called a form of somnambulism, a condition of waking sleep."
Robert S. DeRopp
"The commonplace now is shot through with new glory-
old burdens become lighter, deep and ancient wounds
lose much of their hurting. a crown is placed over our
heads that for the rest of our lives we are trying to grow
tall enough to wear."
-Howard Thurman
"No great improvements in the lot of mankind are possible, until a great change takes place in the fundamental constitution of their modes of thought."
John Stuart Mill
And yet, a single night of universal love could save everything."-Roland Ciguere
"God seems to have left the receiver off the hook, and time is running out."
Arthur Koestler
"I decline to accept the end of men. I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail. He is immortal not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance.."
William Faulkner
(acceptance speech for Nobel Prize in Literature 1949)
Do all the good you can
By all the means you can,
In all the places you can,
At all the times you can,
As long as ever you can.
John Wesley
"The first problem for all of us, men and women, is not to learn, but to unlearn."
Gloria Steinhem
"When rich speculators prosper
While farmers lose their land;
When government officials spend money
On weapons instead of cures;
When the upper class is extravagant and irresponsible
While the poor have nowhere to turn-
All is robbery and chaos.
It is not in keeping with the Tao."
-Lao-Tzu," Tao teh Ching
"I think that we may safely trust a good deal more than we do."
Henry David Thoreau
"I teach you the superman. Man is something to be surpassed."
Nietzsche
"Never let your head hang down. Never give up and sit down and grieve. Find another way. And dont pray when it rains if you dont pray when the sun shines."
Satchel Paige
"I think we are in rats alley
Where the dead men lost their bones."
T.S. Eliot
The Waste Land (1922)
"Among mortals second thoughts are wisest."
-Euripides
"Now you can see how individuals who harbor this internal motivation force (despair unaware that it is despair)* are so easily distracted from their real fears, how and why their fear of death manifests itself as a resistance to change and intolerance for uncertainty, and how their need to cling to unexamined cultural truths leads to cultural conflict: contempt, bigotry, hatred, and obsessive patriotism in the extreme can lead all the way to genocide. Fear of knowledge that threatens someone's worldview leads that person to being uncomfortable with the unfamiliar; it manifests as anti-intellectualism on one side and snobbery on the other. This three-sided triangle is a contrivance used by people at all social and educational levels in society. Even intellectuals can be anti-intellectual at times. We all use existential angst in varying degrees when it suits us. it's always in the back-ground like a black hole in space, ever ready to drain us of whatever goodwill we possess that we do not consciously and carefully safeguard against our worst instincts."
-Charles Hayes
September University
*Soren Kierkegaard
"Come, let's scatter roses and pour wine in the glass;/
We'll shatter heaven's roof and lay a new foundation./
If sorrow raises armies to shed the blood of lovers,/I'll
join with the wine bearer so we can overthow them./
With a sweet string at hand, play a sweet song, my
friend, So we can clap and sing a song, and lose our heads
in dancing."
-Hafiz
A SUFI MANIFESTO by Bektashi poet Naim Frasheri 1896
Truth and justice, intelligence and wisdom, are supreme,
The faith of the Bektashi is a broad path lighted by wisdom,
brotherhood, friendship, love, humanity, and all the virtues.
On one side are the flowers of knowledge, and on the other the
flowers of truth....
Who does good, finds good; who does evil, encounters evil. Who
sins against humanity has joined the beasts...
Humanity is not bound, but free in all ways, and accountable for
all actions....
But the human person has a mind which reasons, knowledge by
which to make choices, a soul filled with recognition, a heart of discernment, and a conscience that weighs all deeds. This is all one
needs-no other help is required. God has granted humanity every-
thing....
the Bektashi Sufis take as the book of their religion the Universe, and especially humanity, because as Imam Ali said, "the human being is a speaking book, faith is speech, but the ignorant add to it. Faith is in hearts, not in books"....
They who enter the Path leave all vices behind and retain only virtue. With an unclean heart, an evil soul, or a bad conscience, nobody can enter the company of the saints who achieve intimacy with
God.
Here one must know the self, for whoever knows the Self, knows
God....
brotherhood, peace, love, closeness to God, friendship, good
conscience, and other virtues light the Path.
Above all things, love is the beginning and guidance of the Path."
"I believe the world needs Sufism. it is God's most deeply hidden treasure, another Islam, a miraculous sanctuary. One need not go all the way to Turkestan to find it, for it is present in the hearts of many who live throughout this world. its gates are open; and in the words of Rumi it appeals to all believers: only come."
-Stephen Schwartz
"Astonishing! Everything is intelligent."
Pythagoras
"Nothing happens? Or has everything happened, and we are standing now, quietly in the new life?"
Juan Ramon Jiminez
"I'd like to lie down somewhere in a cool, dark corner, and weep. What are people doing with their lives? What are they doing?"
Robert Sund
"We can't just sit here waiting for Armageddon."
Barbara Marx Hubbard
"Don't hate, it's too big a burden to bear."
Martin Luther King Jr.
"Tis all in pieces, all coherence gone; all just supply, and all relation."
John Donne
"all things are one"
-Heraclitus
""all things are connected, like the blood which unites one family. It is all like one family, I tell you."
-Chief Seattle (on his death bed)
""This age of technology will also see a return to atavistic violence."
-Ralph Peters
"I used to wonder: Is Huxley right or is Orwell right? It turns out they're both right."
-Chris Hedges
"All human action, will then, of course, be tabulated according to these laws, mathematically like tables of log rhythms up to 108,000 and and entered in an index...in which everything will be so clearly calculated and explained that there will be no more accidents or adventures in the world"
-Dostoevsky
"Forever alone, that's our lot, and try as we might, we can't change it."
-Character in "Mouth to Mouth" Theatre play by Kevin Elyot
"Solitude is the profoundest fact of the human condition. man is the only being who knows he is alone."
-Octavio Paz
"Pray that your loneliness may spur you into finding something to live for, great enough to diefor."
-Dag hammarskjold
"Over half a century ago while I was still a child, I recall hearing a number of older people off the following explanation for the great disasters that had befallen Russia; 'Men have forgotten God. That's why all this has happened'....And if I were called upon to identify briefly the principal trait of the entire 20th Century, here, too, I would be unable to find anything more precise and pithy than to repeat once again, "men have forgotten God,' "
Alexander Solzhenitsyn (Receiving the Templeton Award in London)
The New Yorker, may 30, 1983
"Only Connect!"
E.M. Forster
"It's kind of fun to do the impossible."
-Walt Disney
"Few human activities are less dignified than trying to manage decline."
-James o'Shea
"Opening to your Infinite Abundance means letting go of thoughts and concerns about how you will receive it or how you must act to receive it."
-Robert Sheinfel
Busting Loose From the Money Game
"Consciousness loves itself outrageously and it is positively blissed out in the joy of its experiences. sure, be awed, but awe can only be the emotional state of a passive-on-looker, and passive is not a word we can apply to consciousness. The closer we, as humans, come to this emotional state, the the nearer we come to living in life is truly intended to be loved."
-Barbara Dewey
Consciousness and Quantum Behaviour
"Limited is limited (no matter how big the numbers appear to get), infinite is infinite, who you really are is infinite and infinite is where you want to be after crossing the Busting Loose Point."
Robert Scheinfel
"The earth does not need more humans, but perhaps it needs better humans, humans more disease-resistant, genetically superior, more intelligent, sympathetic, moral, and spiritual, better adjusted to and able to cope with their environment. With our rapidly increasing knowledge about the human micro sphere and our developing technology, we stand in a position to improve our progeny."
V. Elving Anderson
On Behalf of God
"Sooner or later man will be forced to decide whether to abandon his body or his life. After all it is the brain that counts."
J.D. Bernal
"We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time."
T.S. Eliot
Four Quartets
"relinquish the notion that you are separated from the all-knowing mind of the universe. Then you can recover your original pure insight and see through all illusions....The breath of the Tao speaks, and those who are in harmony with hear quite clearly."
-Lao-tzu
"If the body isn't sacred-what is?"
Walt Whitman
"The end then of learning, is to repair the ruines of our first parents by regaining to know God aright, and out of that knowledge to love Him, to imitate Him, to be like Him."
John Milton
"If man is Alpha and Omega, then it is profoundly important for religious reasons that we travel to other worlds, other galaxies; for it may be Man's destiny to assure immortality, not only of his race but even of the spark of life itself. By the grace of God, we shall in this century successfully send man through space to the moon and to other planets on the first leg of his last and greatest journey"
Werner Von Braun
"Women, designed by evolution as the link between spirit and flesh, are perhaps also designed by the cosmos to lead the human world back, now, to the great celebration of the reconciliation of flesh and spirit. Thus, at the very edge of death, we will return to the beginning. That is, at the end of the world (where we must surely be) we will return to the Goddess, the Great Mother of All life, as her magic children. In a round world, the only way for human beings to survive the end is to return to the beginning. Thus we complete a circle; but on a spiral, we revolve to a larger circle."
Monica Sjoo & Barbara Mor
The Great Cosmic Mother
"Our bodies are not final. We are moving, all of us, in our common humankind, through the forms we love so deeply in one another, to what our hands have already touched in one another, to what our hands have already touched in love-making and our bodies strain for in each other's darkness. Slowly, and with pain, over centuries, we move an infinitesimal space towards it. We are creating the lineaments of some final man, for what delight we have prepared in landscape, and who can only be as god."
David Malouf
An Imaginary Life
"We are on the verge of the next stage in life's evolution, the stage where, by human agency, life takes control of itself and guides its own destiny. Never before has human life been able to change itself, to reach into its own genetic structure and rearrange its molecular basis; now it can. Perhaps we are already in the last few generations of our embodiment as carbon-based life forms. What is relatively certain is that we are about to enter the Transition period between the human and the post human eras-the transhuman age."
Christopher Dewdney
Last Flesh
"In John, you start out with the word, the word becomes flesh, what were in the process of doing is making the flesh back into word."
John Perry Barlow
"We need a new human in a new Earth, creating and entering new relationships with the primary realities of the universe. In the most obvious meaning, all our difficulty as a species on this planet stems from our false relationships with winds, seas, life, sunlight, and land. I not that were bad; we've simply been trying to live outside our True relationships with these primordial cosmic presences."
Brian Swimme
The Universe is a Green Dragon
"All God wants of thee is for thee to go out of thyself....and let God be God in thee."
-Meister Eckhart (13th Century)
"If you are willing to be lived by it, you will see it everywhere, even in the most ordinary things.'
-Lao-tzu
"Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate
Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure.
It is our light , not our darkness, that most frightens us.
We ask ourselves, who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented and fabulous?
Actually, who are you not to be?
You are a child of God.
Your playing small doesn't save the world.
There's nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won't feel
insecure around you.
We were born to make manifest the glory of God ....That is within us.
It's not just in some of us; it's in everyone.
And as we let our own light shine. We unconsciously give others permission to do the same.
As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others."
-Nelson Mandela Inaugural Speech. 1994
"The manifest destiny of mankind is to pass the torch of life and intelligence on the computer."
Rudy Rucker
"If you assume that there is no hope, you guarantee that there will be no hope. If you assume that there is an instinct for freedom, there are opportunities to change things, there's a chance you may contribute to making a better world. That's your choice."
Noam Chomsky
On Human Freedom
"Who are the Turks? There may be few more important questions for the early twenty-first century.:
Robert Kaplan
See Book: "Islam Secularism and Nationalism in Modern Turkey: Who is a Turk?" by Soner Gagaptay
"When a man's willing and eager, God joins in."
-Aeschylus
"God help our darkened and desecrated country and teach it to make its peace with the world and with itself."
-Thomas Mann (1875-1955)
"Only art and science give us intimations and hopes of a higher life."
-Ludwig Van Beethoven
"We are entering upon the spiritual era of mankind when peace and plenty shall cover the land, even as mother-love enfolds the babe."
Joel S. Goldsmith
Infinite Way Letters
"Nothing that is worth doing can be achieved in our lifetime; therefore we must be saved by hope. Nothing which is true or beautiful or good makes complete sense in any immediate context of history; therefore we must be saved by faith. Nothing we do, however virtuous, can be accomplished alone; therefore we are saved by love. No virtuous act is quite as virtuous from the standpoint of our friend or foe as it is from our standpoint. Therefore we must be saved by the final favor of love which is forgiveness."
Reinhold Niebuhr
The Irony of American History
"Either we have hope within us or we don't, it is a dimension of the soul, and its not essentially dependent on some particular observation of the world or estimate of the situation. Hope, is this deep and powerful sense, is not the same as joy that things are going well or willingness to invest in enterprises that are obviously headed for early success, but rather, an ability to work for something because it is good, not just because it stands a chance to succeed. Hope is definitely not the same thing as optimism. It is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense no matter how it turns out.:
Vaclav Havel
"A human being is part of a 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."
-Goldstein
"Not I, not I, but the wind that blows through me!
A fine wind is blowing the new direction of Time.
If only I let it bear me, carry me, if only it carry me!
If only I am sensitive, subtle, oh, delicate, a winged gift!
If only, most lovely of all, I yield myself and am borrowed
by the fine, fine wind that takes its course through the chaos of the world."
-D.H. Lawrence Song of a Man Who Has Come Through
"One may say the eternal mystery of the world is its comprehensibility."
Einstein
"The question is as follows: which will prevail within us, determine our relations to life, to reality? The civilization, the tradition in which we grew up, or the faith, the ideology that we possess and profess."
Ryszard Kapuscianski
Imperium
"All too often we tend to think of the world as being governed by natural laws which are independent of God. But perhaps the old Hebrew conception is nearer the truth, that the world is a sphere in God can directly at any time and in which he does act."
John Bright
The Interpreters Bible
"Those who have been mentally blinded 'in the gradual furnace of the world' can, and must, be pressed to look for new capabilities within themselves and work out new ways to happiness. They may even resent faith that expects nobler things from them. They say in effect, 'I will be content if you take me for what I am-a dull, or mean, or hard, or selfish." but it is an affront to them and to the eternal dignity of man to acquiesce. How often it comes over us that there is much in us which our nearest friends cannot know-more than we dare or care or are able to lay bare, more of feelings, more of power, more of manhood. How little we know ourselves! We need limitations and temptations to open our inner selves, dispel our ignorance, tear off disguises, throw down old idols, and destroy false standards. Only by such rude awakenings can we be led to dwell in a place where we are less cramped, less hindered by the ever-insistent External. Only then do we discover a new capacity and appreciation of goodness and beauty and truth."
-Helen Keller
"Remember that you have only one soul; that you have only one death to die; that you have only one life, which is short and has to be lived by you alone; and there is only one glory which is eternal. if you do this, there will be many things about which you care nothing."
-St. Teresa of Avila, MAXIMS FOR HER NUNS
"And so we have arrived on the threshold of the crux of the matter-power. We are at the end of the Piscean Age for which the Crucifixion is still the most potent symbol. Christ started it as the Master who attained his full potential reach into matter and was put on a cross for it. He was followed by two thousand years of searchers who are now in incarnations again after two thousand years of experience being garroted, burned at the stake, hands and genitals cut off, and lately radiated with atomic weaponry. Does anybody think we've had enough? Isn't it about time to enter the places of pain to find our power? There is no question about it any more. It is a matter of survival."
Barbara Hand Clow
The Eye of the Centaur
"......the love of power is the demon of men....for the demon waits and waits and will be satisfied."
-Nietzsche
"Those in possession of absolute power can not only prophesy and make their prophecies come true, but they can also lie and make their lies come true."
-Eric Hoffer
"Be Kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a great battle."
-Philo of Alexandria
"I therefore take it as my premise that at some point during the coming years, due to an array of factors, with energy scarcity foremost among them, the economic system of the United States will teeter and fall, to be replaced by something that most people can scarcely guess at, and that even those who see it coming prefer not to think about. This stunning failure of the collective imagination is the specific problem this book seeks to address."
-Dmitry Orlov
Reinventing Collapse: The Soviet Example and American Prospects
One ought never to turn one's back on a threatened danger and try to run away from it. If you do that, you will double the danger. But if you meet it promptly and without flinching, you will reduce the danger by half. Never run away from anything. Never!"
-Winston Churchill
"whenever you go out of doors, draw the chin in, carry the crown of the head high, and fill the lungs to the utmost; drink in the sunshine; greet your friends with a smile, and put soul into every handclasp. Do not fear being misunderstood and do not waste a minute thinking about your enemies. Try to fix firmly in your mind what you would like to do; and then, without veering of direction, you will move straight to the goal. Keep your mind on the great and splendid things you would like to do, and the, as the days go gliding by, you will find yourself unconsciously seizing upon the opportunities that are required for the fulfillment of your desire, just as the coral insect takes from the running tide the element it needs. Picture in your mind the able, earnest, useful person you desire to be, and the thought you hold is hourly conforming you into that particular individual. Thought is supreme. Preserve a right mental attitude-the attitude of courage, frankness and good cheer. To think rightly is to create. Al things come through desire and every sincere prayer is answered. We become like that on which our hearts are fixed. Carry your chin in and the crown of your head high. We are gods in the chrysalis."
-Elbert Hubbard
"No man is worth his salt who is not ready at all times to risk his body, to risk his well-being, to risk his life, in a great cause."
-Theodore Roosevelt
"The trouble with the world is that the stupid are cocksure, and the intelligent are full of doubts."
-Bertrand Russell
"What does it all mean? This is what it all means. To the extent that we depend on prosthetic devices to keep ourselves and the biosphere alive, we will render everything fragile. To the extent, that we banish the rest of life, we will impoverish our own species for all time, and if we should surrender our genetic nature to machine-aided ratiocination, and our ethics and art and our very meaning to a habit of careless discussion in the name of progress, imagining ourselves godlike and absolved from our ancient heritage, we will become nothing."
Edward O Wilson
Consilience
MANIFESTO; THE MAD FARMER LIBERATION FRONT by Wendell Berry
"Love the quick profit, the annual raise,
vacation with pay. Want more
of everything ready made. Be afraid
to know your neighbors and to die.
And you will have a window in your head.
Not even your future will be a mystery
any more. Your mind will be punched in a card
and shut away in a little drawer.
When they want you to buy something
they will call you. When they want you
to die for profit they will let you know.
So, friends, every day do something
that won't compute. Love the Lord.
Love the world. Work for nothing.
Take all that you have and be poor.
Love someone who does not deserve it.
Denounce the government and embrace the flag.
Hope to live in that free
republic for which it stands.
Give your approval to all you cannot
understand. Praise ignorance, for what man
has not encountered he has not destroyed.
Ask the questions that have no answers.
Invest in the millennium. Plant sequoias.
Say that the leaves are harvested
when they have rotted into the mold.
Call that profit. Prophesy such returns.
Put your faith in the two inches of humus
that will build under the trees every thousand years.
Listen to carrion-put your ear
close, and hear the fain chattering
of the songs that are to come.
Expect the end of the world. Laugh.
Laughter is immeasurable,. be joyful
though you have considered all the facts.
So long as women do not possess
great power, please women more than men.
Ask yourself: Will this satisfy
a woman satisfied to bear a child?
Will this disturb the sleep
of a woman near to giving birth?
Go with your love to the fields.
Lie easy in the shade. Rest your head
in her lap. Swear allegiance
to what is nighest your thoughts.
As soon as the generals and the politicos
can predict the motions of your mind,
lose it. Leave it as a sign
to mark the false trail, the way
you didn't go. Be like the fox
who makes more tracks than necessary,
some in the wrong direction.
Practice resurrection."
-Wendell Berry
"At the same time collecting and recollecting Memory
For that Shipwrecked moment
When we need it all and then some
To keep the voyage going
And never gone."
-Johnny Dolphin
"Ultimately, there is only one problem: the time-bound mind itself."
-Eckhart Tolle
"You may find it hard to recognize that time is the cause of your suffering or your problems."
-Eckhart Tolle
"To be truly radical is to make hope possible
rather than despair convincing."
-Raymond Williams
"Right now we must be radical Americans. We must be a generation of radical Americans like the people who founded this country, like the people who abolished slavery, like the people who defeated fascism in the last century, like the civil rights movement, Life the labor movement. We must do that now."
-Bill Talen
"Mankind will never see an end of trouble until....lovers of Wisdom come to hold Political power, or the holders of power....become lovers of Wisdom."
-Plato
:"One shortcoming in current writing on this subject has been the tendency to seek a villain. An essential feature of the individual's predicament today is that there is no villain. It is not a question of one social class dominating another: nor of believers in one dogma oppressing believers in another dogma. It is not a tyrant who subjugates the individual. it is not even that tired old bogeyman, Madison Avenue. Nor the fanciful new bogeyman-the Establishment. What is oppressing the individual is the very nature of modern society.
Yet the search for a villain continues. Clearly, it fills some emotional need on the part of the searchers."
-John W. Gardner
Self-Renewal: The Individual and the Innovative Society
"Another difficulty (which we have already explored) is that the complex processes of modern society tend to force the individual into an excessively specialized role. To the extent that they do they deprive him of the wholeness versatility and generalized competence that he should preserve at all costs. Not only does it become increasingly difficult for him to comprehend his relationship to the world about him, he has less time (or inclination) to explore this relationship as he whittles himself down to fit a slot in the intricate pattern.
One of the clearest dangers in modern society is that men and women will lose the experience of participating in meaningful decisions concerning their own life and work, that they will become cogs in the machine because they feel like cogs in the machine. All too often today they are inert components of the group, not participating in any significant way but simply being carried along like grains of sand in a bucket.
Malcolm Cowley, speaking of the Lost Generation , wrote:
But the decay of society was psychologically equivalent to its progress: both were automatic processes that we ourselves could neither hasten nor retard. Society was something alien, which our own lives and writings could never affect; it was a sort of parlor car in which we rode over smooth tracks, toward a destination we should never have chosen for ourselves."
The disastrous consequences of such attitudes for the morale of society are obvious. Without some grasp of the meaning of his relationship to the whole, it is not easy for the individual to retain a vivid sense of his own capacity to act as an individual, a sure sense of his own dignity and an awareness of his roles and to sink into passivity."
John W. Gardner
Self-Renewal
"but as identity becomes more and more based on mind alone, identification with a body and its environment will also become outdated. Even the old human memes will inevitably become obsolete. And as hyper-connectedness makes us all more and more like one living brain, all ego identification of the "self" will fade as well.
It will be like the Isaac Asimov story "The Last Question" The mind will be a singular intelligence, eventually joining other intelligences in the universe and, as such, becoming the macro intelligence that is the universe itself: "God" in the ultimate Spinozan sense. This universal intelligence will exist as hyper-condensed energy in perfect symmetry until some outside irritant disrupts the balance and sets off the entire cycle again with the big bang.
"Let there be light."
Perhaps it has already happened a billion times already."
-Gwyn Wahlman adbusters Nov/Dec 2009
"The biosphere is a geological force and a cosmic phenomenon."
-Vladimir Vernadsky
"Synergy is the property of a total system that cannot be predicted by addition of the properties of its parts."
R. Buckminster Fuller
"Our race will spread out through space-unlimited room, unlimited energy, unlimited wealth. This is certain."
-Robert A. Heinlein
"The stark symptoms of real endism have already begun to invade the body earth, gaining momentum, yet moving slowly enough so that we have gradually, step-by-step, become accustomed to accepting inconvenience after inconvenience. We boil water and drink bottled water (those who can afford it), peel apples and close our windows to avoid smog. We lose hundreds of species daily, Our fish, beef, and who knows what other foods are toxic.
The deterioration has become serious-poisoning of the earth's water and air, depletion and chemical degradation of the earth's soil, and increasing incidence of breast and other cancers. Autism has increased tenfold in ten years. American Mother's milk is ten times as toxic as in European countries. A handpicked group of eleven leading atmospheric American scientists, in a study requested by the Bush White House, concluded that global warming has put us well on the way to a major catastrophe. A vast majority of scientists throughout the world agree. Six glaciers have already melted, and the melting of the polar ice cap could cause the oceans to rise by up to 160 feet, wiping out the state of Florida and placing Manhattan under 30 feet of ocean water!"
Joseph Eger
Einstein's Violin
"Ultimately this is not about solving your problems, It's about realizing that there are no problems. Only situations-to be dealt with now, or to be left alone and accepted as part of the "isness" of the present moment until they change or can be dealt with. Problems are mind-made and need time to survive. They cannot survive in the actuality of the NOW."
-Eckhard Tolle
"As soon as you honor the present moment, all unhappiness and struggle dissolve; and life begins to flow with joy and ease."
-Eckhart Tolle
"Give it to soup lines
If I see someone who needs some
Here's hundred. Here fifty.
Soup vendor. Wino. Old woman with varicose veins.
Good deeds. Judgment,
I'm well pleased with you my son. Come into heaven.
That's eternal life. Maann! Maaann!
Look at all the buildings in downtown New York.
People built them. They're dead.
Buildings still standing.
You don't own nothing;. Just a trustee.
This life is a test. A test
Trying to pass the test. I'm trying
Warm bodies. Shake hands. Gone.
All dead now. President Kennedy.
Whatever color you are
No matter how much money you have
Politics. Sports. You're gonna die.
Sleep is the brother of death.
Mohammed Ali
"The meaning of the earthly existence is not, as we have grown used to thinking, in prosperity, but in the development of the soul."
-Alexander Solzhenitsyn The Gulag Archipelago
"One Nature, perfect and pervading, circulates in all natures,
One reality, all-comprehensive, contains within itself all realities."
-Yung-chia Ta-shih
"History will only change
when we are able to use the energy of love,
just as we use the energy of the wind,
the seas and the atom."
-Paulo Coelho
"Everyman in his lifetime needs to thank his faults"
"Brethren, I remind you this (death) is the end of all compounded things."
Last words of Gautama Buddha
"Flow with whatever may happen and let your mind be free. Stay centered by accepting whatever you are doing. This is the ultimate."
-Chuang Tzu
"For in and out, above, about, below
Tis nothing but a ,magic shadow show."
Omar Khayyam
"Whatever you can do , or dream you can do, begin it.
Boldness has genius, power and magic in it. Begin it now."
Goethe
"What we call the beginning is often the end. and to make an end is to make a beginning. The end is where we start from."
-T.S. Eliot
"the best way out is through."
-Robert Frost
"Let no more gods or exploiters be served.
Let us learn rather to love one another."
-Francisco Ferrer (executed 1909) This quote written on his cell wall
"We are the stars which sing.
We sing with our light.
We are the birds of fire.
We fly across the heaven.
Our light is a star,
We make a road for Spirits,
A road for the Great Spirit"
_Algonquin poem 'Song of the Stars'
"Develop interest in life as you see it; in people, things, literature, music-the world is so rich, simply throbbing with rich treasures, beautiful souls and interesting people. Forget yourself."
Henry Miller
"Take long walks in stormy weather or through deep snows in the fields and woods, if you would keep your spirits up. Deal with brute nature. Be cold and hungry and weary."
-Henry David Thoreau
"After sleeping through a hundred million centuries we have finally opened our eyes on a sumptuous planet, sparkling with color, bountiful with life. Within decades we must close our eyes again. Isn't it a noble, an enlightened way of spending our brief time in the sun, to work at understanding the universe and how we have come to wake up in it?....Who, with such a thought, would not spring from bed, eager to resume discovering the world and rejoicing to be a part of it."
-Richard Dawkins
Unweaving the Rainbow
"Learning to ignore things is one of the great paths to inner peace."
-Robert J. Sawyer Calculating God
"You have only to wish it and you can have a world without hunger, disease, cancer and toil-anything you wish, wish anything and it can be done. Or else we can exterminate ourselves....at present we are on the road to extermination."
-Albert Szent-Gyorgyi Nobel Prize 1937
"This is our predicament: Over and over again, we lose sight of what is important and what isn't.
We crave things over which we have no control, and are not satisfied by the things within our control.
We need to regularly stop and take stock; to sit down and determine within ourselves which things are worth valuing and which things are not; which risks are worth the cost and which are not. Even the most confusing or hurtful aspects of life can be made more tolerable by clear seeing and by choice."
-Epictetus A.D. 77
The Art of Living
"I believe that the psychedelics provide a chance, perhaps only a slender one for homofaber, the cunning, ruthless, foolhardy, pleasure seeking greedy toolmaker to emerge into that other creature whose presence we have so rashly presumed, homosapiens, the wise, the understanding, the compassionate, in whose fourfold vision-art, politics, science and religion are one. surely we must seize the chance."
-Dr. Osmond
"Nothing is so beautiful and wonderful, nothing is so continually fresh and surprising, so full of sweet and perpetual ecstasy, as the good."
-Simone Weil
"Listen to the call of this art, this philosophy, this unheard of politics: My people, wherever you come from, you who have been swept along on the great wave of deterritorialization, you who have been grafted to the hyperbody of humanity and whose pulse echoes its powerful heartbeat, you who think reunited and dispersed throughout the hypercortex of nations, or live, captive, torn asunder, within this immense in a world that continuously doubles back and recreates itself, you have been thrown alive into the virtual, overtaken by our species great leap into the headwaters of being, known that in the very heart of this strange maelstrom, you are at home. Welcome to humanitys' new home. Welcome to the virtual."
Pierre Levy
Becoming Virtual
:"What is life? It is the flash of a firefly in the night."
Crow Foot
Blackfeet Tribe
"We should learn to see things in a higher light."
-Booker T. Washington (1856-1915)
"As I said earlier: we are stardust."
-Frank Close
Lucifer's Legacy: The Meaning of Asymmetry
"Nothing is too wonderful to be true, if it be consistent with the laws of nature."
-Michael Faraday
'I am all at once what Christ is, since he was what I am, and This Jack, joke, poor potsherd, patch, matchwood immortal diamond, is immortal diamond."
-Gerard Manley Hopkins born July 1844
"The sole meaning of life is to serve humanity."
Leo Tolstoy
"Humanity cannot live forever with clipped wings."
-Freeman Dyson
"Prayer and propitiation may still influence the course of physical phenomena when directed to these centers."
-Sir Arthur Eddington
"We discover that the universe shows evidence of a designing or controlling power that has something in common with our own individual minds."
-Sir James Jeans
"The whole theory of the universe is directed to one individual-namely to You."
-Walt Whitman
"The sea is the cradle we all rocked out of, and it may be the homeplace to which we will someday return."
-Tom Robbins
"the Earth is not dying-it is being killed. And the people who are killing it have names and addresses."
-U. Utah Phillips
"Our race has long been titillated by images of a "lost civilization" beneath the sea. Some say it is legend, some say it is genetic memory, a few say there is small difference. Their common mistake is their relegation of this "vanished" utopia to ancient history. deep consciousness is hardly bound by the constraints of linear time. Atlantis is in our future, not our past."
-Tom Robbins
Half Asleep in frog Pajamas
"Ring in the valiant man and free
The larger heart, the kindlier hand!
Ring out the darkness of the land,
Ring in the Christ that is to be!
-Alfred Lord Tennyson
"Strong is the soul, and wise, and beautiful
The seeds of godlike power are in us still;
Gods are we, bards, Saints, Heroes, if we will."
-Matthew Arnold
"All that is gold does not glitter,
Not all those who wander are lost;
The old that is strong does not wither,
Deep roots are not reached by the frost.
From the ashes a fire shall be woken,
A light from the shadows shall spring;
Renewed shall be blade that was broken,
The crownless again shall be king."
-J.R.R. Tolkien The Fellowship of the Ring
"We are whirling through endless space with an inconceivable speed, all around us everything is spinning, everything is moving, and everywhere is energy. There must be some way of availing ourselves of this energy more directly."
-Nikola Tesla 1899
"What we need is more people who specialize in the impossible."
Theodore Roethke
"Don't bite my finger-look where it's pointing."
-Warren S. McCulloch
"That moment is like taking a hood off your head....everything opens, expands, becomes crisp, clear, brimming with life, vivid with wonder and freshness. it is as if the roof of your mind were flying off.....All limitations dissolve and fall away.....as if a seal were broken open."
-Dudjom Rinpoche
"If we discover a complete theory, it should in time be understandable in broad principle by everyone, not just a few scientists. Then we shall all, philosophers, scientists, and just ordinary people, be able to take part in the discussion of the question of why it is that we and the universe exist. If we find the answer to that, it would be the ultimate triumph of human reason-for then we would know the mind of God."
-Stephen Hawking
"After the final no there comes a yes
And on that yes the future world depends."
-Wallace Stevens
"....all your thoughts break their bonds;
Your mind transcends limitations,
Your consciousness expands in every direction
And you find yourself in a new, great
And wonderful world.
Dormant forces, faculties and talents
Become alive, and you discover yourself
To be a greater person by far
Than you ever dreamed
Yourself to be."
-Patanjali
"Stop limiting Spirit. Work with Divine Intelligence and be grateful that God doesn't think like us."
-Sarah Ban Breathnach
"Ever notice that "what the hell" is always the right decision."
-Marilyn Monroe
"The time has come for men to turn into gods or perish."
-Alan Harrington
"Trust in God: She will provide"
-Emmeline Pankhurst Quoted in Time Nov 21, 1969
"Everything that happens, happens as it should, and if you observe carefully, you will find this to be so."
-Marcus Aurelius
"Humanity's last and highest leave taking is leaving God for GOD!
Meister Eckhart
"So we saunter towards the Holy Land, Till one day the sun shall shine more brightly than ever has done, shall perchance shine into our minds and hearts, and light up our whole lives with -a great awakening light, as warm and serene and golden as a bank-side in autumn."
-Henry David Thoreau
"Without Haste, Without Fear. We Conquer the World."
Motto of China Space Project
"Keep Breathing."
Sophie Tucker
"There is a way of breathing
that's a shame and a suffocation
And there's another way of expiring,
a love breath, that lets you open infinitely."
-Rumi
"Everyone is almost God."
-William T. Vollmann
"I believe in God, God. God, I believe in God."
-William Faulkner
"Just as , long ago, self consciousness appeared in.....our ancestral race.....so will Cosmic Consciousness become more and more universal until the race at large will possess this faculty.....The simple Truth is, that there has lived on the earth, appearing at intervals, for thousands of years among ordinary man, the first beginnings of another race; walking the earth and breathing the air with us, but at the same time walking another earth of which we know little or nothing, but which is, all the same, our spiritual life......This new race is in the act of being born from us, and in the near future it will occupy and possess the earth."
--Richard Maurice Bucke, M.D. 1901
Cosmic Consciousness
"We are summoned to a new awareness....of the inner meaning of life and reality itself."
-Merton
"As we've seen our future is a race between good innovation and bad innovation. That's a sprint that will be decided purely by our ability to create."
-Joshua Cooper Ramo
"Every valuable human being must be a radical and a rebel for what he must aim at is to make things better than they are."
-Niels Bohr
"Just as IQ (intelligence quotient) may be increased by mental exercise, so CQ (compassion quotient) may be increased by exercising the willed intent of the heart and practicing the sacraments of imagination and empathy."
Sam Keen
hymns to an Unknown God
"As you make your way through the hazardous paradigm wars of this era, through the chaos of competing myths and belief-systems, keep your sense of humor intact, your heart open, and your wits about you. And every morning before you set out on your journey, check the batteries on your spiritual bullshit detector to make certain it is in good working order."
-Sam Keen
Hymns to an Unknown God
"Fundamentalist religions are humanity's greatest enemy. Blunt speaking, certainly, but time is short, and I see no reason not to call it as I see it. The fact we all have to face is that the fundamentalist religions leave no room for human frailty, for compassion, for forgiveness, or for creative freedom of thought. They are trying to return us to that time of darkness we thought was left far behind, when blind belief was considered more important than farsighted discovery, where the dogmatic was more valued than the tolerant and the false was more important than the true.
We simply cannot permit the future to occur; we must oppose that future with all the strength at our disposal. If, like those countless victims of the Nazi Holocaust, we are ever again asked to step into a cattle wagon for a trip to the Promised Land, we must remember that the correct response is always emphatically, "No! Never again!"
But we need to move quickly for the fundamentalists are on the march; step by step they are encroaching upon the peaceful and tolerant high ground with their perverted idea of a heavenly realm filled with comfortable seats from which those who have been "saved" can eat their popcorn and watch the slaughter below. it all sounds like some deranged fantasy based on a dim memory of the Roman arena, for there is much blood in the message and so little mercy."
-Michael Baigent
Racing Toward Armageddon: The Three Great Religions and the Plot to End the World
"The first time He came to earth, Jesus was the Lamb of God, led in silence to the slaughter. The next time He comes, He will be the Lion of Judah who will trample His enemies until their blood stains His garments."
-John Hagee
"All of the books will be burnt at the end of the road. Those who sucked at deceit, spying, and hypocrisy will be burnt beneath the feet of the prophet of God, Jesus, and the army of Islam-(Jews and Christians) ....will be trampled under after the dawn."
-Sa'id Ayyub (Egyptian writer 1987)
"The heresy of democracy has....worked havoc in church and state, and it has worked toward reducing society to anarchy."
-reverend Rousas John Rushdoony (founder of the Chalcedon Foundation)
"Much good work is lost for a lack of a little more."
AA
" The possibility that we are each a holographic mind interpreting a holographic universe is a tantalizing concept. It provides at once an explanation for the universal experience of unity and oneness, an emotion which pervades the written legacy of all culture. It may be the answer to Whitman's query: Location and times-what is it in me that meets them all, whenever and wherever, and makes me at home?"
Larry Dossey, M.D.
Space, Time & medicine
"Why....dissociate ourselves from a single atom beneath our feet? .....What is the purpose of presuming for dignity's sake alone that human life is dearer than other forms of life in the cosmic whole? Can we not exalt all life without losing our own prestige? Are we not a constituent of the whole?"
-C. Rustrum
"My advice to you is not to inquire why or whither, but just enjoy your ice cream while it's on your plate."
-Thornton Wilder
"We are here now and gone soon. Some sooner than others. Breathe deeply and behold the precious vehicle of incarnation. In this instant, and the next, trillions of individual lives will come and go in this Universe; one of countless Universes. In a spirit of humility, let us be mindful of the course of human destiny and how it is turned spectacularly and sharply in its path to new and unseen directions, unfathomable in their meaning; with the intent of the Divine remaining occult and perplexingly rich with sentient suffering. How right it is to grieve. How right it is to move with the flow of the Tao."
-Devin Mikles M.D.
"Quit thy childhood, my friend, and Wake-Up!"
-Jean Jacques Rousseau
"And he: "Follow your star, for if in all
of the sweet life I saw one truth shine clearly,
You cannot miss your glorious arrival."
-Dante Canto XV
"Risk! Risk anything!.....Do the hardest thing on earth for you. Act for yourself. Face the truth."
-Katherine Mansfield
"I stopped asking such questions as
is he white or black
an anarchist or monarchist
fashionable or outmoded
ours or theirs
and I began to ask
what in him is of human being
and is he."
-Ryszard Kapuscinski
"Listen, there's a hell of a universe next door: let's go!"
-e.e. cummings
"As long as your shallow worldly
ambitions exist, the door will not open."
-Lao-tzu
"The sense of danger must not disappear:
The way is both short and steep,
However gradual it looks from here;
Look if you like, but you have to leap."
-W.H. Auden
"Full effort is full victory."
-Mahatma Gandhi
JUMP!
Joseph Campbell
"Bread. A clean sky. Active peace. A woman's voice singing somewhere, melody drifting like smoke from the cook fires. The army disbanded, the harvest abundant. The wound healed, the child wanted, the prisoner freed, the body's integrity honored, the lover returned. The magical skill that reads marks into meaning. The labor equal, fair and valued. Delight in the challenge, for consensus to solve problems. No hand raised in any gesture but greeting. Secure interiors-of heart, home, land-so firm as to make secure borders irrelevant at last. And everywhere laughter, care, celebration, dancing, contentment. A humble, earthly paradise, in the now."
A Woman's Creed
PARADISE NOW!
-Roberta Becky Quest
"Few speak of paradise now, except as something remote enough to be impossible. the ideal societies we hear of are mostly far away or long ago or both, situated in a remote Himalayan vastness. The implication is that we here and now are far from capable of living such ideals. But what if paradise flashed up among us from time to time-at the worst of times?
-Rebecca Solnit
A Paradise built in Hell: Extraordinary communities that arise in Disaster
"We must not let our rulers load us with perpetual debt."
-Thomas Jefferson
"In 2009, about 40% of individual income taxes will go toward debt interest payment."
-Lawrence Kadish "Taking the national Debt Seriously" Wall Street Journal Monday 12, 2009
"The last word, of course, is about peace, 'O you who believe', says the Koran, 'enter fully into a state of peace' (Koran 2:208). This is an imperative, the final imperative. For the pursuit of peace is an active affair. A wholesome and enduring peace, founded on justice and mercy, is not easy to secure in our kind of world-a world in which, in the greatest yet most challenging paradox, one often needs to wage war in order to secure a hearing for peace."
Shabbir Akhtar
The Final Imperative
"Dwell in the Cool, Sweet, Holy Power of God."
George Fox
"Stand fast in the Unchangeable Life and Seed of God which was before all changing's and altering were and which will remain when all that is gone."
-George Fox
"We need to brace ourselves for a struggle against terrifying obstacles, both of our own making and imposed by the natural world."
-Barbara Ehrenreich
Bright-Sided
"Things are bad and getting worse, any fool can see that."
John Derbyshire
We Are Doomed
"In the oneness of allness, I am, guilt of, or infected with, or suffering from, everything that I attack."
-Charles Fort
"We are troubled on every side, yet not distressed; we are perplexed, but not in despair."
-2 Cor. 4:8
"Love is life. All, everything that I understand, I understand only because I love. Everything is, everything exists, only because I love. Everything is united by it alone. Love is God, and to die means that I , a particle of love, shall return to the general and eternal source."
-Leo Tolstoy
War and Peace
"For all that has been: Thanks!
For all that shall be: Yes!"
-Dag Hammarskjold
Markings
"Love is the final end of the world's history, the Amen of the universe."
-Novalis
"Love is all we have, the only way that each can help the other."
-Euripides
"Save all of yourself for the wedding though nobody knows when or if it will come."
-Carlos Drummond de Andrade
"However vast the darkness, we must supply our own light."
-Stanley Kubrick
"A new world is only a new mind!"
-William Carlos Williams
"I believe that the One World which is emerging can come into existence only if a New Man comes into being-a man who has emerged from the archaic ties of blood and soil, and who feels himself to be the son of man, a citizen of the world whose loyalty is to the human race and to life, rather than to any exclusive part of it; a man who loves his country because he loves mankind, and whose judgment is not warped by tribal loyalties.
I believe that man's growth is a process of continuous birth, of continuous awakening. We are usually half-asleep and only sufficiently awake to go about our business; but we are not awake enough to go about living, which is the only task that maters for a living being. The great leaders of the human race are those who have awakened man from his half-slumber. The great enemies of humanity are those who put it to sleep, and it does not mater whether their sleeping potion is the worship of God or that of the Golden calf."
-Erich Fromm
Beyond The Chains of Illusion
"Sometimes, events get too big for people." "But we've got to act as if they are not."
-from The New Man by C.P. Snow
"Get Out! Famous last words are for fools who haven't said enough!"
-Last words of Karl Marx
"When the story of these times gets written, we want it to say that we did all we could, and it was more than anyone could have imagined."
-Bono
"But we continue to ask: what have all our other cultural achievements led to? The fearful answer is there before our eyes: man has been delivered from no fear, a hideous nightmare lies upon the world. So far reason has failed lamentably....But already we are fascinated by the possibility of atomic fission and promise ourselves a Golden Age-the surest guarantee that the abomination of desolation will grow to limitless dimensions."
-C.G. Jung
"A Single Good Deed Will Change The World Forever. Will It Be Yours?"
-Rabbi Menachem M. Schneerson New York Times Friday, March 30 2007
Magnanimity: "a loftiness of spirit enabling one to sustain danger and trouble with tranquility; a nobility of feeling that is superior to meanness, pettiness, or jealousy and that disdains revenge or retaliation, generosity of mind."
"Walk On!" (Supposed last words of Gautama The Buddha )
*****************
Book: "Our Final Hour: A Scientist's Warning: How Terror, Error and Environmental Disaster Threaten Humankind's Future in This Century-on Earth and Beyond." by Martin Rees
C copyright 2011
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The weal or woe of the future will be decided neither by the attacks of wild animals nor the natural catastrophes nor by the danger of world-wide epidemics, but simply the psychic changes in man. "Is it at all possible to bring about a psychological revolution immediately?-not in time, not gradually, because there is no time when the house is burning; you do not talk about gradually putting out the fire; you have no time, time is a delusion. So what will make man change? What will make either you or me as a human being, change? What will make either you or me as a human being, change? Motive, either of reward or punishment? That has been tried. Psychological rewards, the promise of heaven, the punishment of hell, we have had in abundance and apparently man has not changed, he is still envious, greedy, violent, superstitious, fearful and so on. Mere motive, whether it is given outwardly or inwardly, does not bring about a radical change. Finding, through analysis, the cause why man is so violent, so full of fear, so greatly acquisitive, competitive, so violently ambitious-which is fairly easy-will that bring about change? Obviously not, neither that nor the uncovering of the motive. Then what will? What will bring about, not gradually, but immediately, the psychological revolution? That, it seems to me, is the only issue. "Sell you cleverness and buy bewilderment;"