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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 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.

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

By Arundhati Roy

A pair of actors trapped in a recondite play with no hint of plot or narrative. Stumbling through their parts, nursing someone else’s sorrow. Grieving someone else’s grief. Unable somehow, to change plays. Or, purchase, for a fee, some cheap brand of exorcism from a couselor with a fancy degree, who would sit them down and say, in one of many ways: “You’re not the Sinners. Your the Sinned Against. You were only children. You had no control. You are the victims not perpetrators.”

If he held her, he couldn’t kiss her. If he kissed her, he couldn’t see her. If he saw her, he couldn’t feel her. If he touched her, he couldn’t talk to her, if he loved her, he couldn’t leave, if he spoke he couldn’t listen, if he fought, he couldn’t win.

The love laws lay down who should be loved. And how. And how much.

By Daniel Quinn. Concerning a great, telepathic ape who dispenses ecological wisdom about the possible doom of humankind. Gets you to think.

Around 10,000 years ago people gave up the foraging life and settled down to become farmers.

The lie in this is in the word people, Julie. It wasn’t people who did this, it was the people of your culture – one of tens of thousands cultures. The lie is that your actions are humanity’s actions. The lie is that you are humanity itself and that your history is human history. The truth is that 10,000 years ago on people gave up the foraging life and settled down to become farmers.

Erratic Retaliation: Give as good as you get, but don’t be too predictable. If another tribe isn’t bothering you, don’t bother them. but if they do, be sure to return the favor. Also, if another tribe isn’t bothering you, it will be no bad thing if you make a hostile move against them from time to time. They will retaliate, but this is the price to be paid for letting them know that you’re there and haven’t gotten soft. Then, once the score is even between you, you can get together for a reconciliation party to celebrate your undying friendship and do some matchmaking (because, of course, it doesn’t do to breed endlessly within a single tribe).

By Benjamin Hoff.

You can’t help respecting anybody who can spell Tuesday, even if he doesn’t spell it right; but spelling isn’t everything. There are days when spelling Tuesday simply doesn’t count. One sometimes gets the impression that those intimidating words are there to keep us from understanding. That way, the scholars can appear Superior, and will not likely be suspected of Not Knowing Something. After all, from the scholarly point of view, it’s practically a crime not to know everything. But sometimes the knowledge is the scholar. It’s a bit hard to understand because it doesn’t seem to match up with our own experience of things. In other words, Knowledge and Experience do not necessarily speak the same language. But isn’t the knowledge that comes from experience more valuable than knowledge that doesn’t? It seems fairly obvious to some of us that a lot of scholars need to go outside and sniff around – walk through the grass, talk to the animals, that sort of thing.

The Busy Backson is always going somewhere, somewhere he hasn’t been. Anywhere but where he is. For a reward, perhaps. Our Busy Backson religious, sciences, and business ethics have tried hard to convince us that their is a great reward waiting for us Somewhere, and that what we have to do is spend our lives working like lunatics to catch up with it. Whether it’s up in the sky, behind the next molecule, or in the executive suite, it’s somehow always farther along than we are…just down the road, on the other side of the world, past the moon, beyond the stars.

Now, one thing that seems rather odd to us is that the busy backson society, which practically worships youthful energy, appearance, and attitudes, has developed no effective methods of retaining them, a lack testified to by an ever increasing reliance on the unnatural. False Front approach cosmetics and plastic surgery. Instead it has created countless ways of breaking youthfulness down and destroying it. These damaging activities that are not part of the search for the Great Reward seem to accumulare under the heading of Saving Time.

Practically speaking, if time saving devices really saved time, there would be more time available to us now, than ever before in history. But, strangely enough, we seem to have less time than even a few years ago. It’s really great fun to go someplace where there are no time saving devices, because, when you do, you find you have lots of time. Elsewhere, you’re too busy working to pay for machines to save you time so you won’t have to work so hard.

In Ray Bradbury’s classic novel firemen don’t put out fires–they start them in order to burn books. Good, albeit scary, stuff.

On the way downtown he was so completely alone with his terrible error that he felt the necessity for the strange warmness and goodness that came from a familiar and gentle voice speaking in the night. Already, in a few short hours, it seemed that he had known Faber a lifetime. Now he knew that he was 2 people, that he was, above all, Montag who knew nothing, who did not even know himself a fool, but only suspected it. And he knew that he was also the old man who talked to him and talked to him as the train was sucked from one end of the night city to the other on one long sickening gasp of motion. In the days to follow, and in the nights when there was no moon and in the nights when there was a very bright moon shining on the earth, the old man would go on with this talking and this talking , drop by drop, stone by stone, flake by flake. His mind would well over at last and he would not be Montag anymore, this the old man told him, assured him, promised him. He would be Montag-plus-Faber, fire plus water, and then one day, after everything had mixed and simmered and worked away in silence there would be neither fire nor water, but wine. Out of two separate opposite things, a third. And one day he would look upon the fool and know the fool. Even now he could feel the long journey, the leave-taking, the going-away from the self he had been.

What a dreadful surprise. For everyone nowadays knows, absolutely is certain, that nothing will ever happen to me. Others die, I go on. There are no consequences and no responsibilities. Except that there are. But lets not talk about them, eh? By the time the consequences catch up with you, it’s too late, isn’t it Montag?

A movie by Richard Linklater

One second of dream consciousness is much longer than one second of actual consciousness.

What are the barriers that stop humans from living up to their full potential? Which is the most universal human characteristic, fear or laziness?

Dream travel. Controlling your dreams to experience things your waking consciousness couldn’t handle.

It seems like everybody’s sleep walking through their waking state or wake sleeping through their dreams.

Looking back, all that really mattered was connecting with the people.