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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).

From A New Earth by Eckhart Tolle. I am reading this book again with a web class being offered through oprah.com. Each week we read a new chapter, answer leading questions, and participate with other people from all over the world as we explore living more consciously. yum.

Chapter 5 – The Pain Body

Any negative emotion that is not fully faced and seen for what it is the moment it arises doesn’t completely dissolve and lives on in you later coming up as illness, addiction, drama.

In intimate relationships, pain-bodies are often clever enough to lie low until you start living together and preferable have signed a contract committing yourself to be with this person for the rest of your life.

You may wonder whether this is your partner’s real face that you had never seen before and whether you made a dreadful mistake in choosing this person. It is of course not the real face, just the pain-body that has taken possession. It would be hard to find a partner who does not carry a pain-body, but it would perhaps be wise to choose someone whose pain-body is not excessively dense.

Although the body is intelligent it cannot tell the difference between thoughts and reality. Every time you think of something negative or some problem your body will have a response to it.

You cannot expect someone to act beyond their level of consciousness. You must let go and forgive those who’ve hurt you. It’s never on purpose.

It’s all about experiencing negative emotions when they come up. Letting go of the repeated, painful stories we tell ourselves over and over again and make part of our identity.

Written by Tom Robbins

Logic only gives man what he needs.
Magic gives him what he wants.

She thought of Life, and said to herself, “It’s okay. I want more of it.”
She thought of Death, and said to herself, “If I fall out of this frigging treetop, I’ll soon enough learn it’s secrets.”

History is closer to animal husbandry than it is to mathematics in that it involves selective breeding. The principal difference between the husbandryman and the historian is that the former breeds sheep or cows or such and the latter breeds (assumed) facts. The husbandryman uses his skills to enrich the future, the historian uses his to enrich the past. Both are usually up to their ankles in bullshit.

Those folks who are concerned with freedom, real freedom – not the freedom to say shit in public or criticize their leaders or to worship God in the church of their choice, but the freedom to be free of languages and leaders and gods – well, they must use style to alter content. If our style is masterful, if it is fluid and at the same time complete, then we can recreate ourselves, or rather, we can re-create the Infinite Goof within us. We can live on top of content, float above the predictable responses, social programming and hereditary circuitry, letting the bits of color and electricity and light filter up to us, where we may incorporate them at will into our actions. That’s what the voices said. They said that content is what a man harbors but does not parade. And I love a parade.

As long as it’s done with honesty and grace, John Paul doesn’t mind if I go to bed with other men. Or with other girls, as is sometimes my fancy.
Then why the hell did you get married?
What the hell does marriage got to do with it? I married John Paul because I’m knocked out by his style. Because I love him and respect him and enjoy the transformations that take place as a result of our sharing the same dimensions. But, Marx, marriage is not a synonym for monogamy any more than monogamy is a synonym for ideal love. To live lightly on the earth, lovers and families must be more flexible and relaxed. The ritual of sex releases its magic inside or outside the marital bond. I approach that ritual with as much humility as possible and perform it whenever it seems appropriate. As for John Paul and me, a strange spurt of semen isn’t going to wash our love away.
Then why do you deny me?
Marx, you are as sensitive as you are stubborn. And, you’re well, shall we say – terribly impressionable. You also tend to be possessive. Those are basic characteristics of Cancerians. I know you have no use for astrology but you can’t deny those are your traits. And neither John Paul nor I feel that you could handle a simple, free relationship with me. No sooner would we begin than you’d be in love with me, which is beautiful except that you’d make it so complex. You’d demand more of me. You’d be possessive and play ego games. You’d be jealous of John Paul. Before long you would create tension…between all three of us. Then where would we be? Friction at the Captain Kendrick. No, I don’t think you’re ready.

You people, that fucking magician, I don’t know all it is you’ve got yourselves into. But you wouldn’t if somebody would have raised you with a little guts, if somebody had put the fear of God in you.
You’re talking about the fear of authority.
In order to be respected, authority has got to be respectable.
Oh? Our duly constituted authority isn’t respectable enough for you?
The only authority I respect is one that causes butterflies to fly south in fall and north in springtime.
You mean God?
Not necessarily.
You can’t possibly question authority, said the agent, ignoring the implications of her last remark. Who are you to question it. You don’t remember the war against fascist aggression back in the forties, when America defended herself against Hitler, you weren’t even born. Young lady, I risked my life in order that you could have freedom and education and all the good things of our society; the authorities of this nation saved it as a free and decent place for you to live in, but you don’t remember that do you? I risked my life…
You risked your life, but what else have you ever risked? Have you ever risked disapproval? Have you ever risked economic security? Have you ever risked a belief? I see nothing particularly courageous in risking one’s life. So you lose it, you go to your hero’s heaven and everything is milk and honey ’til the end of time. Right? You get your reward and suffer no earthly consequences. That’s no courage. Real courage is risking something that might force you to rethink your thoughts and suffer change and stretch consciousness. Real courage is risking one’s cliches.
The agent was thoughtful for a moment. Then he spewed, “What the hell do you know? Who are you, one infantile weirdo girl, to make these charges?

Written by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

I liked One Hundred Years of Solitude and decided to read this because I was in the mood for what I remembered his style to be: depth & reality of characters. Be aware, notice the word love in the title.

After a crazy description of Florentino Ariza making love with Ausencia Santander.
He would say to her: “You treat me as if I were just anybody.” She would roar with the laughter of a free female and say: “Not at all: as if you were nobody.” He was left with the impression that she took away everything with mean spirited greed, and his pride would rebel and he would leave the house determined never to return. But then he would wake for no reason in the middle of the night, and the memory of the self-absorbed love of Ausencia Santander was revealed to him for what it was: a pitfall of happiness that despised and desired at the same time, but from which it was impossible to escape.

The start of the affair of Dr Juneval Urbino & Barbara Lynch
So their love became impossible when the carriage at her door became too conspicuous, and after 3 months it became nothing less than ridiculous. Without time to say anything, Miss Lynch would go to the bedroom as soon as she saw her agitated lover walk in the door. She took the precaution of wearing a full skirt on the days she expected him, a charming skirt from Jamaica with red flowered ruffles, without underwear, nothing in the belief that this convenience was going to help him ward off his fear. But he squandered everything she did to make him happy. He was more concerned with leaving as soon as possible than with achieving pleasure. She was left dangling, barely at the entrance of her tunnel of solitude, while he was already buttoning up again, as exhausted as if he had made absolute love on the dividing line between life and death, when in reality he had accomplished no more than the physical act that is only a part of the feat of love. But he had finished in time: the exact time needed to give an injection during a routine visit. The he returned home ashamed of his weakness, longing for death, cursing himself for the lack of courage that kept him from asking Fermina Daza to pull down his trousers and burn his ass on the brazier.

By the time she had emptied the teapot and he the coffeepot, they had both attempted and then broken off several topics of conversation, not so much because they were really interested in them but in order to avoid others that neither dared to broach. They were both intimidated, they could not understand what they were doing so far from their youth on a terrace with checkerboard tiles in a house that belonged to no one that was still a redolent of cemetery flowers. It was the first time in half a century that they had been so close and had enough time to look at each other with some serenity, and they had seen each other for what they were: two old people, ambushed by death, who had nothing in common except the memory of an ephemeral past that was no longer theirs but belonged to two young people who had vanished and who could have been their grandchildren. She thought that he would at last be convinced of the unreality of his dream, and that this would redeem his insolence.

Captain had an almost maternal affection for the manatees, because they seemed to him like ladies damned by some extravagant love, and he believed the truth of the legend that they were the only females in the animal kingdom that had no mates.

They talked to pass the time. They spoke of themselves, of their divergent lives, of the incredible coincidence of their lying naked in a dark cabin on a stranded boat when reason told them they had time only for death.
…
Florentino Ariza, for his part, suddenly asked himself what he would never have dared to ask himself before: what kind of secret life had she led outside of her marriage? Nothing would have surprised him, because he knew that women are just like men in their secret adventures: the same stratagems, the same sudden inspirations, the same betrayals without remorse. But he was wise not to ask the question.

At last they mode wholesome love of experienced grandparents, as she would keep as her best memory of that lunatic voyage. Contrary to what the Captain and Zenaida supposed, they no longer felt like newlyweds, and even less like belated lovers. It was as if they had leapt over the arduous calvary of conjugal life and gone straight to the heart of love. They were together in silence like an old married couple wary of life, beyond the pitfalls of passion, beyond the brutal mockery of hope and phantoms of disillusion: beyond love. For they had lived together long enough to know that love was always love, anytime and anyplace, but it was more solid the closer it came to death.

By Tom Robbins

Meet me in Cognito, baby,
In Cognito we’ll have nothing to hide.
Let’s go in Cognito, honey,
And let the world believe we’ve died.

Why would they feel trees but leave men standing? Trees are a damn site more useful that people, and everything in the world knows it except people.
Trees do generate more oxygen.

Written by Robert Pirsig

The problem, the contradiction the scientists are stuck with, is that of the mind. Mind has no matter or energy but they can’t escape its predominance over everything they do. Logic exists in the mind, numbers exist only in the mind. I don’t get upset when scientists say that ghosts exist in the mind. It’s that only part that gets me. Science is only in your mind too. It’s just that doesn’t make it bad. Or ghosts either.

Written by Tom Robbins.

Life was masking the big fat drops out of Julian and Sissy. They had chipmunk festivals in their stomachs and the fillings in their teeth were picking up signals from sentimental radio. Life is forever pulling this number on men and women, and then acting surprised and innocent, as if it didn’t realize it was hurting anybody.

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