16 May Delphi
"Know thyself and thou shalt know all the mysteries of the gods and of the universe." -- Inscription on the Greek temple at Delphi. You, I, the gods and the universe are one....
15 May The Pundits
They understand much and know little; long on intelligence, short on wisdom; have more answers than questions. High on an imaginary pecking order. Never in doubt, often wrong. The more they look the less they see for they cannot see what they cannot imagine. Following the advice of pundits is the penalty we pay for not thinking independently....
14 May Henry Demarest Lloyd
"Liberty produces wealth, and wealth destroys liberty." The consequences of too much of a good thing are not a good thing for the good thing. Liberty allows capitalism; capitalism creates wealth; wealth leads to power which soon concentrates among an elite and in turn disenfranchises all of their liberty. "Under socialism everyone (except the leaders) is equal. As in equally fucked" in terms of individual liberties. -- William Wisher....
12 May Terry Lenzner
"[T]he truth is what you can get enough people to believe."...
04 May William Wisher
"No one lies on their death bed and thinks: I wish I had more money." At some point in life we reach a crossover point when we realize we have more money than time. Certainly we reach the crossover point in our last moments of life. But as each of has thousands of lives encapsulated as a life each day, we are at the crossover point soon after we awaken from our sleep....
18 Apr God Plays Hide and Seek
Alan Watts in The Book On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are: "God also likes to play hide-and-seek, but because there is nothing outside God, he has no one but himself to play with. But he gets over this difficulty by pretending that he is not himself. This is his way of hiding from himself. He pretends that he is you and I and all the people in the world, all the animals, all the plants, all the rocks, and all the stars. In this way he has strange and wonderful adventures, some of which are terrible and frightening. But these are just like bad dreams, for when he wakes up they will disappear. Now when God plays hide and pretends that he is you and I, he does it so well that it takes him a long time to remember where and how he hid himself. But that's the whole fun of it—just what he wanted to do. He doesn't want to find himself too quickly, for that would spoil the game. That is why it is so difficult for you and me to find out that we are God in disguise, pretending not to be himself. But when the game has gone on long enough, all of us will wake up, stop pretending, and remember that we are all one single Self—the God who is all that there is and who lives for ever and ever. Of course, you must remember that God isn't shaped like a person. People have skins and there is always something outside our skins. If there weren't, we wouldn't know the difference between what is inside and outside our bodies. But God has no skin and no shape because there isn't any outside to him. The inside and the outside of God are the same. And though I have been talking about God as 'he' and not 'she,' God isn't a man or a woman. I didn't say 'it' because we usually say 'it' for things that aren't alive. "God is the Self of the world, but you can't see God for the same reason that, without a mirror, you can't see your own eyes, and you certainly can't bite your own teeth or look inside your head. Your self is that cleverly hidden because it is God hiding. You may ask why God sometimes hides in the form of horrible people, or pretends to be people who suffer great disease and pain. Remember, first, that he isn't really doing this to anyone but himself. Remember, too, that in almost all the stories you enjoy there have to be bad people as well as good people, for the thrill of the tale is to find out how the good people will get the better of the bad. It's the same as when we play cards. At the beginning of the game we shuffle them all into a mess, which is like the bad things in the world, but the point of the game is to put the mess into good order, and the one who does it best is the winner. Then we shuffle the cards once more and play again, and so it goes with the world." Everything is a manifestation of God. When we perceive God as something different than ourselves, we can never be one with God....
17 Apr William Shakespeare
"The play's the thing." Hamlet says "the play's the thing wherein I'll catch the conscience of the king." The king's guilty conscience will be revealed by the king's obvious embarrassment as he is watching the play. It's odd that an expression that's ambiguous to the point of meaningless is well-recognized. It must speak to certain truths. In the play of life, our intentions, actions and their consequences are revealed. So while the play is a fiction, it reveals the reality of who we are. The play's the thing; that is, something that cannot be described beyond "thing." It is what it is whatever it is. It can be anything we want it to be....
16 Apr Eckhart Tolle 1
“Don't Seek Happiness. If you seek it, you won't find it, because seeking is the antithesis of happiness.”...
31 Mar T. S. Eliot: The Waste Land
"I have heard the key Turn in the door once and turn once only We think of the key, each in his prison Thinking of the key, each confirms a prison" When we focus on our earliest memories, we imprison ourselves and can only wait for the prison door to open to allow us return to who we were before we were born. This keeps us from making the most of our present circumstances....