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The shadows on the wall of the cave
Snuggling by the fire
Fresh air, sunshine
Noble lies, simple truths
The shadow on the moon
The stars
Words
The spaces between words
The places words will not reach
The gift of tears
The gift of laughter
The way light sparkles in your eyes
The view at the top of the hill
Silence
The sound of the breeze in the trees
Silence
The rhythm that finds a circle of drums
Sunrise and sunset
The rhythm of your heartbeat
The view from the other side of the shadow
The thought that breaks the silence
The cacophony
The origin of our collective madness
The panthers that no longer exist in the Ozarks
The way my hair stands when an Ozarks panther screams
The fox who romps under the full moon
The red-tailed hawk that spirals higher
The stream that burbles in the valley
The perfect skipping stone
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When you call yourself an Indian or a Muslim or a Christian or a European, or anything else, you are being violent. Do you see why it is violent? Because you are separating yourself from the rest of mankind. When you separate yourself by belief, by nationality, by tradition, it breeds violence. So a man who is seeking to understand violence does not belong to any country, to any religion, to any political party or partial system; he is concerned with the total understanding of mankind.
J. Krishnamurti, Freedom from the Known, pp.51-52
(1895-1986)
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"There is then a supreme Reality eternal, absolute, and infinite. Because it is absolute and infinite, it is in essence indeterminable. It is indefinable and inconceivable by finite and defining Mind; it is ineffable, by a mind-created speech; it is describable neither by our negations, neti neti, for we cannot limit it by saying it is not this, it is not that, nor by our affirmations, for we cannot fix it by saying it is this, it is that, iti iti. And yet, though in this way unknowable to us, it is not altogether and in every way unknowable; it is self-evident to itself and, although inexpressible, self-evident to a knowledge by identity of which the spiritual being in us must be capable; for that spiritual being is in its essence and its original and intimate reality not other than this Supreme Existence."
From "The Divine Life"
Sri Aurobindo
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"The mind creates the abyss, and the heart crosses it."
Sri Nisargadatta
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Plato (Was he the chief sophist or a comedian?)
The Essenes, the three wise men
Jesus of Nazareth (not the Jesus of Rome)
Maharaji, the Blind Monk in the cave
The architects of the great pyramids
The inventor of the Mayan calendar
The people who lived here before the rampage
The people who lived where the sea conceals the evidence
Carl Jung, Eric Erikson, Karen Horney, Margret Mahler, Virginia Satir
Sir Wilhelm of Occam, Baruch Spinoza, Friedrich Nietzsche
Albert Camus, Karl Marx (before he met Engels), Edward Bernays
The man behind the curtain
Eve of Eden, Inanna of Sumer
People who know that the light in another person's eyes is truer than any idea. People who know that words are approximations of reality. People who know that most adult decisions are more interesting than either/or. People who know without argument that hate, separation, and violence are hopelessness. People who know that love, and sometimes fierce love, remains the solution. Playful people.
Get your own friendscroller
I made this MySpace MP3 Player at MyFlashFetish.com .
I like movies that challenge my assumptions, movies in which art is a higher priority than marketing and programming. I find that silly comedies, and especially laughter, are fun when shared, but I don't recall any titles. I find that old black and white movies are often entertaining and are also interesting as the programming is easily discernible (i.e. selling cigarettes and coca cola, justifying mass murder of certain categories of human beings).
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Television feeds the mass delusion. I check in on the delusion from time to time and am amazed at the hypnotic qualities. The flashes of light entrain my attention with little awareness.
I imagine myself in the woods, and a flash of light, my head would turn, my eyes would focus without a thought. If the contrast is high enough, I might even enter fight-flight-immobilization mode.
There is a reason they call it programming. There is a reason that the "tools" taught to students of marketing correspond to the reasoning errors taught to students of critical thinking and logic 101. Reasoning errors are simply those errors to which each of us, no matter how intelligent, are prone. Marketing preys upon these "flaws."
There is a reason these "flaws" exist. There is a reason the human mind is not a computer. The survival of life on this little ball rolling through the infinite has and will depend upon the human capacity to rise above mere reason.
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I remember the humiliation of being in the "slow" reading group in first grade. Thankfully, my mother gently encouraged reading. By fourth grade I was an avid reader. It has taken longer to overcome other insults of a government education modeled on the factory assembly line without respect for the humanity and dignity of children. Nowadays, my collection of books is in the hundreds. Here are few titles that come to mind:
E.T. 101 The Cosmic Instruction Manual for Planetary Evolution: An Emergency Remedial Edition - Zoev Jho (A silly, and yet strangely serious, little book that makes me laugh and feel happy every time.)
The Book of Laughter and Forgetting - Milan Kundera (Riveting post-modern fiction that left my soul naked.)
How to Be An Adult: Handbook of Psycho-Spiritual Integration - David Ricoh (Self-help book so extraordinarily balanced that it tends not to reinforce defenses.)
Journey to the Ancestral Self: The Native Lifeway Guide to Living in Harmony with Earth Mother - Tamarack Song (Reminds us who we were and are.)
The following two books explain how socially crippled people who have the audacity to rule Earth do what they do:
The Prince - Niccolo Machiavelli (1513)
The Society of the Spectacle - Guy Debord (1967)
The ideas and practices presented in the following two books could save Earth:
Permaculture: A Designers' Manual - Bill Mollison
Permaculture: Pathways and Principles Beyond Sustainability - David Holmgren
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Regarding heroes, I strive to be true to myself... to be my own hero...
"Every step on the path is sacred: the original crossing of the threshhold, the struggle, the return with higher consciousness. The hero is always complete because [s]he is acting in accord with here and now unfolding challenges. The struggle is thus equal in value to the prize because both honor what that moment can offer." - David Richo
I try to avoid ideological thinking, idolatry, and identification with categories that separate me from others.
I try to let go of the belief that I could aspire to be someone other than myself.
I admire qualities in others, and indeed, with enough patience, I find there are breath taking qualities in any human being. When I find myself in admiration or envy, I try to know that this is information about possibilities within me. The other human being is both as extraordinary and as fragile as am I.