iheartgoodbooks.com

by Tom Robbins. Second time reading it

The constant battle with the reproductive process, a war in which her only allies were pharmaceutical robots, alien agents whose artificial assistance seemed more treacherous than trustworthy, was gnawing with plastic teeth at her very concepts of love. Was it entirely paranoid to suspect that all those stoppers, thingamajigs, and substances devised to prevent conception were intended not to liberate womankind from the biological and social penalties imposed on her natural passions but, rather, at the insidious design of capitalistic puritans, were supposed to technologize sex, to dilute its dark juices, to contain its wilder fires, to censor its sweet nastiness, to scrub it clean (clean as a laboratory autoclave, clean as a hospital bed), to order it uniform, to render it safe; to eliminate the risk of uncontrollable feelings, illogical commitments, and deep involvements (substituting for those risks the less mysterious, tamer risks of infection, hemorrhage, cancer, and hormone imbalance); yes, to make sexual love so secure and same and sanitary, so slick and frolicsome, so casual that it is not a manifestation of love at all, but a near anonymous, near autonomous, hedonistic scratching of a bunny itch, an itch far removed from any direct relation to the feverish enigmas of Life and Death, and a scratching programmed so that it would in no way interfere with the real purpose of human beings in a capitalistic, puritanical society, which is to produce goods and consume them?

Who does have a love life anymore? These days people have sex lives, not love lives. Lots of them are even giving up sex. I don’t have a love life because I’ve never met a man who knew how to have a love life. Maybe I don’t know how either.

There is a particularly unattractive and discouragingly common affliction called tunnel vision, which, for all the misery it causes, ought to top the job list at the World Health Organization. Tunnel vision is a disease in which perception is restricted by ignorance and distorted by vested interest. Tunnel vision is caused by an optic fungus that multiplies when the brain is less energetic than the ego. It is complicated by exposure to politics. When a good idea is run through the filters and compressors of ordinary tunnel vision, it not only comes out reduced in scale and value but in its new dogmatic configuration produces effects the opposite of those for which it originally was intended.

That is how the loving ideas of Jesus Christ became the sinister cliches of Christianity. That is why virtually every revolution in history has failed: the oppressed, as soon as they seize power, turn into the oppressors, resorting to totalitarian tactics to “protect the revolution.” That is why minorities seeking the abolition of prejudice become intolerant, minorities seeking peace become militant, minorities seeking equality become self-righteous, and minorities seeking liberation become hostile (a tight asshole being the first symptom of self-repression).

By Eckhart Tolle

Continuing to read this book for the second time and still finding yummy tidbits. These are from the final chapter of the book.

Without the impairment of (egoic) dysfunction, our intelligence comes into full alignment with the outgoing cycle of universal intelligence and its impulse to create. We become conscious participants in the creation of form. We don’t identify with what we create and so don’t lose ourselves in what we do. We are learning that the act of creation may involve energy of the highest intensity, but that is not “hard work” or stressful. We need to understand the difference between stress and intensity, as we shall see. Struggle or stress is a sign of the ego, as are negative reactions when we experience obstacles.
The force behind the ego’s wanting creates “enemies,” that is to say, reaction in the form of an opposing force equal in intensity. The stronger the ego, the stronger the sense of separateness between people. The only actions that do not cause opposing reactions are those that are aimed at the good of all. They are inclusive not exclusive.

The three modalities of awakened doing…
There are three ways in which consciousness can flow into what you do and thus through you into this world, three modalities in which you can align your life with the creative power of the universe. Modality means the underlying energy-frequency that flows into what you do and connects your actions with the awakened consciousness that is emerging into this world. What you do will be dysfunctional and of the ego unless it arises out of one of these modalities.
The modalities are acceptance, enjoyment, and enthusiasm.
Whatever you cannot enjoy doing, you can at least accept that this is what you have to do. Acceptance means: For now, this is what this situation, this moment, requires me to do, and so I do it willingly. If you can neither enjoy or bring acceptance to what you do – stop. Otherwise, you ar enot taking responsibility for the only thing you can really take responsibility for, which also happens to be the one thing that really matters: your state of consciousness or mind.
Enjoyment
The peace that comes from surrendered action turns into a sense of aliveness when you actually enjoy what you are doing. On the new earth, enjoyment will actually replace wanting as the motivating power behind people’s actions. You don’t have to wait for something “meaningful” to come into your life so that you can finally enjoy what you do. There is more meaning in joy than you will ever need. The “waiting to start living” syndrome is one of the most common delusions of the unconscious state. When you say, I enjoy doing this or that, it is really a misperception. It makes it appear that the joy comes from what you do, but that is not the case. Joy does not come from what you do, it flows into what you do and thus into this world. The misperception that joy comes from what you do is normal, and it is also dangerous, because it creates the belief that joy is something that can be derived from something else, such as an activity or thing.
Then what is the relationship between something that you do and that state of joy? You will enjoy any activity in which you are fully present, any activity that is not just a means to an end.
Enthusiasm
Then there is another way of creative manifestation that may come to those who remain true to their inner purpose of awakening. Suddenly one day they know what their outer purpose is. They have a great vision, a goal, and from then on they work toward implementing that goal. Their goal or vision is usually connected in some way to something that on a smaller scale they are doing and enjoying already. Enthusiasm means there is a deep enjoyment in what you do plus the added element of a goal or a vision that you work toward.

Written by Eckart Tolle

Along the same lines as The Power of Now, this book is about the ego, and how much we let it run wild and take our lives into a negative space. I really can’t type all of my notes to this book, too much. You just have to read it if you’re interested.

The quicker you are in attaching verbal or mental labels to things, people, or situations, the more shallow and lifeless your reality becomes, and the more deadened you become to reality, the miracle of life that continuously unfolds within and around you. In this way, cleverness may be gained, but wisdom is lost, and so are joy, love, creativity, and aliveness. They are concealed in the still gap between the perception and the interpretation. Of course we have to use words and thoughts. They have their own beauty – but do we need to become imprisoned in them?
Words reduce reality to something the human mind can grasp, which isn’t very much. Language consists of five basic sounds produced by the vocal cords. They are the vowels a, e, i, o, u. The other sounds are consonants produced by air pressure. Do you believe some basic sounds could ever explain who you are, the ultimate purpose of the universe, or even what a tree or stone is in it’s depth?

I was still thinking about her (crazy lady rambling incessantly on train) when I was in the men’s room prior to entering the library. As I was washing my hands I thought: I hope I don’t end up like her. The man next to me looked briefly in my direction, and I was suddenly shocked when I realized that i hadn’t just thought those words, but I mumbled them aloud. “Oh my god, I’m already like her,” I thought. Wasn’t my mind as incessantly active as hers? There were only minor differences between us. The predominant underlying emotion behind her thinking seemed to be anger. In my case it was mostly anxiety. She thought out loud. I thought – mostly – in my head. If she was mad then everyone was mad, including myself. There were differences in degree only.

For a moment, I was able to stand back from my own mind and see it from a deeper perspective, as it were. There was a brief shift from thinking to awareness. I was still in the men’s room, but alone now, looking at my face in the mirror. At that moment of detachment from my mind, I laughed out loud. I may have sounded insane, but it was the laughter of sanity, the laughter of the big-bellied Buddha. “Life isn’t as serious as my mind makes it out to be.” That’s what the laughter was saying. But it was only a glimpse, very quickly to be forgotten. I would spend the next 3 years in anxiety and depression, completely identified with my mind. I had to get close to suicide before awareness returned, and then it was much more than a glimpse. I became free of compulsive thinking and ot he false, mind-made I.

The ego tends to equate having with Being. I have, therefore I am. And the more I have, the more I am. The ego lives through comparison. How you are seen my others turns into how you see yourself.

Those who are identified with their good looks, physical strength, or abilities experience suffering when those attributes fade and disappear, as of course they will, Their very identiy that was based on them is then threatened with collapse. In either case, ugly or beautiful, people derive their identity from the I-thought that they erroneously attach to the mental image or concept of their body, which after all is no more that a physical form that shares the destiny of all forms – impermanence and ultimately decay.

The conceptual “I” cannot survive without the conceptual “other.” The others are most other when I see them as my enemies. At one end of the scale of this unconscious egoic pattern lies the egoic compulsive habit of fault finding and complaining about others. Jesus referred to it when he said ” Why do you see the speck that is in your brother’s eye, but do not notic the log that is in your own eye?” At the other end of the scale there is physical violence between individuals and warfare between nations. In the bible Jesus’ question remains unanswered, but the answer is, of course: Because when I criticize or condemn another, it makes me feel bigger, superior.

Complaining is one of the ego’s favorite strategies for strengthening itself. Every complaint is a little story the world makes up so you completely believe in. Whether you complain aloud or only in thought makes no difference. Some egos that perhaps don’t have much else to identify with easily survive on complaining alone. When you are in the grip of such an ego, complaining especially about other people, is habitual and, of course, unconscious, which means you don’t know what you are doing. Applying negative mental labels to people, either ito their face or more commonly when you speak about them to others or even just think about them, is often part of this pattern. Name-calling is the crudest form of such labeling and of the ego’s need to be right and triumph over others: “jerk, bastard, bitch” – all definitive pronouncements that you can’t argue with. On the next level down on the scale of unconsciousness you have shouting and screaming, and not much below that physical violence.

Resentment is the emotion that goes with complaining and the mental labeling of people and addseven more energy to the ego. Resentment means to feel bitter, indignant, aggrieved, or offended. You regret other people’s greed, their dishonesty, their lack of integrity, what they are doing, what they did in the past, what they said, what they failed to do, what they should or shouldn’t have done. The ego loves it. Instead of overlooking unconsciousness in others, you make it into their identity. Who is doing that? The unconsciousness in you, the ego. Sometimes the “fault” that you perceive in another isn’t even there. It is a total misinterpretation, a projection by a mind conditioned to see enemies and to make itself feel superior. At other times the fault may be there, but by focusing on it, sometimes to the exclusion of everything else, you amplify it. And what you react to in another, you strengthen in yourself.

Non Reaction to the ego in others is one of the most effective ways not only of going beyond the ego in yourself but also of dissolving the collective human ego. But you can only be in a state of non reaction if you can recognize someone’s behavior as coming from the ego, as being an expression of the collective human dysfunction. When you realize it’s not personal, there is no longer a compulsion to react as if it were. By not reacting to the ego, you will often be able to bring out the sanity in others, which is the unconditioned consciousness as opposed to the conditioned. At times you may have to take practical steps to protect yourself from deeply unconscious people. This you can do without making them into enemies. Your greatest protection is being conscious. Somebody becomes an enemy if you personalize the unconsciousness that is the ego. Non reaction is not weakness but strength. Another word for non reaction is forgiveness. To forgive is to overlook, or rather to look through the ego to the sanity that is in every human being as his or her essence.
The ego loves to complain and feel resentful not only about other people but also about situations. What you can do to a person, you can also do to a situation: make it into an enemy. The implication is always: this should not be happening; I don’t want to be here, I don’t want to be doing this, I am being treated unfairly. And the ego’s biggest enemy of all, is of course, the present moment, which is to say, life itself.

Complaining is not to be confused with informing someone of a mistake or deficiency so it can be put right. And to refrain from complaining doesn’t necessarily mean putting up with bad quality or behavior. There is no ego in telling the waiter that your soup is cold and needs to be heated up – if you stick to the facts, which are always neutral. “How dare you serve me cold soup”, that’s complaining. There is a “me” here that loves to feel personally offended by the cold soup and is going to make the most of it, a “me that enjoys making someone wrong. The complaining is in service of the ego and not of change. Sometimes it becomes obvious the ego doesn’t really want change so that it can go on complaining.

See if you can catch, that is to say, notice, the voice in your head, perhaps the very moment it complains about something, and recognize it for what it is: the voice of the ego, no more than a conditioned mind pattern, a thought. Whenever you notice that voice, you will also realize that you are not the voice, but the one who is aware of it. In fact, you are the awareness that is aware of the voice. In the background there is awareness. In the foreground, there is the voice, the thinker. In this way you are becoming free of the ego, free of the unobserved mind. The moment you become aware of the ego in you, it is strictly speaking no longer the ego, but just an old conditioned mind pattern. Ego implies unawareness. Awareness and ego cannot coexist. The old mind-pattern or mental habit may still survive and reoccur for a while because it has the momentum of thousands of years of collective human unconsciousness behind it, but everytime it is recognized, it is weakened.

There is nothing that strengthens the ego more than being right. Being right is identification with a mental position – a perspective, an opinion, a judgment, a story. For you to be right, of course, you need someone else to be wrong, and so the ego loves to make wrong in order to be right. In other words: you need to make others wrong in order to get a stronger sense of who you are. Not only a person, but also a situation can be made wrong through complaining and reactivity, which always implies that “this should not be happening.” Being right places you in a position of imagined moral superiority in relation to the person or situation that is being judged and found wanting. It is that sense of superiority the ego craves and through which it enhances itself.

Ego takes everything personally. Emotion arises, defensiveness, perhaps even agression. Are you defending the truth? No, the truth in any case needs no defense.

All religions are equally false and equally true, depending on how you use them. You can use them in the service of the ego, or you can use them in the service of the Truth. If you believe only your religion is The Truth, you are using it in the service of the ego. Used in such a way, religion becomes ideology and creates and illusory sense of superiority as well as division and conflict between people. In the service of truth, religious teachings represent signposts or maps left behind by awakened humans to assist you spiritual awakening, that is to say, in becoming free of identification with form.

When Jesus said “I am the way and the truth and the life.” They are most direct and powerful pointers to the truth, if understood correctly. If misunderstood, however, they become a great obstacle. Jesus speaks of the innermost I Am. When you are in touch with that dimension within yourself – and being in touch with it is your natural state, not some miraculous achievement – all your actions and relationships will reflect the oneness whi all life that you sense deep within. This is love. Laws, commandments, rites, and regulations are necessary for those who are cut off from who they are, the Truth within. They prevent the worst excesses of the ego, and often they don’t even do that. “Love and do what you will,” said St. Augustine. Words cannot get much closer to the Truth thatn that.

Both sides of the conflict are equally identified with their own perspective, their own “story,”
that is to say, identified with thought. Both are equally incapable of seeing that another perspective, another story, may exist and also be valid.

Here it becomes obvious that the human ego in its collective aspect as “us” against “them” is even more insane that the “me,” the individual ego, although the mechanism is the same. By far the greater part of violence that humans have inflicted on each other is not the work of criminals or the mentally deranged, but of normal, respectable citizens in the service of the collective ego. One can go as far as to say that on this planet “normal” equals insane. What is it that lies at the root of this insanity? Complete identification with thought and emotion, that is to say ego.

omg. i still have 7 journal pages on this book. i am not transcribing it all. needless to say, i dig this kind of psycho-babble.

Written by Eckhart Tolle

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.

Written by Tom Robbins

This is one of my favorite books of all time. I heart Tom Robbins.

The gods have a great sense of humor don’t they? If you lack the iron and fizz to take control of your own life, if you insist on leaving your fate to the gods, then the gods will repay your weakness by having a grin or two at your expense. Should you fail to pilot your own ship, don’t be suprized at what inappropriate port you find yourself docked. The dull and prosaic will be granted adventures that will dice their central nervous systems like an onion, romantic dreamers will end up in the rope yard. You may protest that it is too much to ask of an uneducated 15 year old girl that she defy her family, her society, her weighty cultural and religious heritage tin order to pursue a dream she doesn’t even understand. Of course it is too much. The price of self destiny is never cheap and in certain situations it is unthinkable. But to achieve the marvelous, it is precisely the unthinkable that must be thought.

If desire causes suffering, it may be because we do not desire wisely, or that we are inexpert at obtaining what we desire. Instead of hiding our heads in a prayer cloth and building walls against temptation, why not get better at fulfilling desire? Salvation is for the feeble. I don’t want salvation, I want life, all of life, the miserable as well as the superb. If the gods would tax ecstasy then I shall pay; however, I shall protest their taxes at every opportunity. If they can’t respect that, then I’ll accept their wrath. At least I will have tested the banquet spread before me on this rich round planet, rather than recoiling from it like a toothless bunny. I cannot believe that the most delicious things were placed here merely to test us, to tempt us, to make it more difficult to capture the grand prize: the safety of the void. To fashion a life of such a petty game is unworthy of both men and gods.

The lamas declare that they have no fear of death, yet it is anything less than fear that causes them to die before they die? In order to tame death they refuse to completely enjoy life. In rejecting complete enjoyment, they are half-dead in advance – and that with no guarantee that their sacrifice will actually benefit them when all is done.

He hadn’t been asleep at Samye, he had been in a state of heightened awareness, but there is a sense in which awareness can be as stagnating as sloth. His stay had become a rut, a tranquil, nourishing, educational run that had done him little harm and much good, but a rut none the less. His wheel was stuck in a ditch of light, so to speak, and he felt an overpowering urge to steer in the direction of darkness. If the earth needs night as well as day, wouldn’t it follow that the soul requires endarkenment to balance enlightenment?

He excited her because he was as damned as she was, yet had no regrets. He actually made damnation seem attractive. Here was a believer who refused to grovel, a man who stood up to the gods, who stood right up to them and demanded an accounting for a system in which pleasure must be paid for with pain, a system in which the only triumph over suffering was hard-won oblivion, a system that offered it’s captive audience little choise in matters concerning duration of performance.

Dread, fear, anxiety, guilt, even a bit o’ neurosis, are perfectly natural responses to a life that promises such an unaccpetable end. The trick is not to take such responses to seriously, not to trivialize your all too short stay in your carton o’ flesh by cooperation with misery.
Seems to me that the so-called happy people are the ones who are trivial. Avoiding reality and never thinking about anything important.
Reality is subjective, and there’s an unenlightened tendency in this culture to regard something as ‘important’ only if it’s sober and sever. Sure and still you’re right about your cheerful dumb, only they’re not so much happy as lobotomized. But your Gloomy Smart are just as ridiculous. When you’re unhappy you get to pay a lot of attention to yourself. And you get to take yourself oh so seriously. Your truly happy people, which is to say, your people who truly like themselves, they don’t think about themselves very much. Your unhappy person resents it when you try to cheer him up, because it means he has to stop dwelling on himself and start paying attention to the universe.

Unhappiness is the ultimate form of self-indulgence.

Physical Pleasure.
Scientific Discovery.
Artistic Masterpieces.
Social Improvement.
Technological Innovations.
Loving Relationships.
Spiritual Ecstacy.

Do you think all those drugs barbecued your brain?
Oh no, none of that. Sure they destroyed some cells, no doubt about it, but ’twas for the good. If you want your tree to produce plenty of fruit, you’ve got to cut it back from time to time. Same thing with your neural cells. Some people call it brain damage, I call it prunin’.

Suppose death is necessary to evolution. What if we have to give up our bodies so that we can evolve off the earth plane? It might be foolish and regressive to cling to our physical bodies.

by Tom Robbins

There is love making that is bad for a person, just as there is eating that is bad. That boysenberry cream pie from the thrift-e-mart may appear inviting, may, in fact, cause all 900 taste buds to carol from the tongue, but in the end, the sugars, the additives, the empty calories clog arteries, disrupt cells, generate fat, and rot teeth. Even potentially nourishing foods can be in properly prepared. There are wrong combinations and improper proportions in sex as well, yes, one must prepare for a f@#$ – the way an enlightened priest prepares to celebrate mass, the way a great matador prepares for the ring: with intensification, with purification, with a conscious summoning of sacred power. And even that won’t work if the ingredients are poorly matched: oysters are delectible, so are strawberries, but mashed together…?!? Every nutritious sexual recipe calls for at least a pinch of love, and the fucks that rate four-star rankings from both gourmets and health food nuts use capfuls. Not that sex should be regarded as therapeutic or to be taken for medicinal purposes – only a dullard would hang such a millestone around the nibbled neck of a lay – but to approach sex carelessly, shallowly, with detachment and without warmth is to dine night after night in erotic greasy spoons. In time one’s palate will become insensitive, one will suffer (without knowing it) emotional malnutrition, the skin of the soul will fester with scurvy, the teeth of the heart will decay. Neither duration nor proclamation or commitment is necessarily the measure – there are ephemeral expolosions of passion between strangers that make more erotic sense than many lengthy marriages, there are one-night stands in Jersey City more glorious than 6-month affairs in Paris – but finally, there is a commitment, however brief; a purity, however threatened; a vulnerability, however concealed; a generosity of spirit, however marbled with need; an honest caring, however singed by lust, that must be present if couplings are to be salubrius and not slow poison.

Don’t let yourself be victimized by the age you live in. It’s not the times that bring us down any more than it’s society. When you put the blame on society, then you end up turning to society for the solution. Just like those poor neurotics at the care fest. There’s a tendency today to absolve individuals of moral responsibility and treat them as victims of social circumstance. You buy that, you pay with your soul. It’s not men who limit women, straights who limit gays, it’s not whites who limit blacks. What limits people is lack of character. What limits people is that they don’t have the fucking nerve or imagination to star in their own movie, let alone direct it. Yuk.

Love is the ultimate outlaw. It just won’t adhere to any rules. The most any of us can do is sign on as its accomplice. Instead of vowing to honor and obey, maybe we should swear to aid and abet. That would mean that security is out of the question. The words “make” and “stay” become inappropriate. My love for you has no strings attached. I love you for free.

He have her that uncomfortable half-amused, half-resentful look that people always give you when they’re remaining sober and you’re getting looped. Intimacy is the principle source of the sugars with which life is sweetened. It is absolutely vital to the essential insanities. Without the essential (intimate) insanities, humor becomes inoffensive and therefore pap, poetry becomes esoteric and therefore prose, eroticism becomes mechanical and therefore pornography, behavior becomes predictable and therefore easy to control.

When the mystery of the connection goes, love goes. It’s that simple. This suggests it isn’t love that’s so important to us but the mystery itself. The love connection may be merely a deice to put us in contact with the mystery and we long for love to last so that the ecstasy of being near the mystery will last. It is contrary to the nature of mystery to stand still. Yet, it’s always there, somewhere, a world on the other side of the mirror.

The romance of new love, the romance of solitude, the romance of objecthood, the romance of ancient pyramids and disctant stars are means of making contact with the mystery. When it comes to perpetuating it, however, I got no advice. But I can and will remind you of two of the most important facts that I know:

1. Everything is part of it
2. It’s never too late to have a happy childhood