haLLcyon G

"Condemnation without investigation is the height of ignorance."
~ Albert Einstein
UPDATED: April 27, 2008 1st-My age is not correctly listed due to TOM; New VIDEOS, QUOTES, Project Playlist JUKEBOX, more neuroscience..
As for me? Other than being a librarians librarian athletic bookworm? Am just being, living, seeing as there is no separation in communication whether it is on a phone, in person, or via the internet (myspace). Einstein pointed this out directly, "Our separation of each other is an optical illusion of consciousness" . The only division is the that which one creates and lives (prejudice). If that which is you desire communication, have the compacity to care and love so that you may with sincere, compassionate communications skills. Me? Sincere, unattached, nonjudgmental, open to dialogue. Otherwise go away, as far away as possible. Also if you are on my list and can't, do delete me. I despise cowards. Why? What does it mean to be dumb? Being ignorant of love so that you can't see past your selfness; Thus being unable to communicate and investigate with compassionate scientific inquiry.
This isn't psychobabble, to quote Vladek, "What do you know about friends?" Well? Cheers to free-form BOHMIAN-DIALOGUE...Shalom! Now may we without prejudice listen to words long written down..?
“Suppose we were able to share meanings freely without a compulsive urge to impose our view or conform to those of others and without distortion and self-deception. Would this not constitute a real revolution in culture.”
~ David Bohm
"Nothing is written."
~ Lawrence of Arabia
"We put our hands over our eyes and weep that it is dark."
~ Swami Vivekananda
"As long as our brain is a mystery, the universe, the reflection of the structure of the brain will also be a mystery."
~ Santiago Ramon y Cajal
"I think we need to understand how sensory information is translated into action. We need to understand how unconscious mental processes develop. Where do they occur? What are the processing steps? What is the nature of decision making? Of free will? Can we get a vantage point on consciousness?"
~ Eric Kandel
“I think that we’re not really aware of what is happening in this system which I’ve called ‘thought’. We don’t know how it works. We hardly know it is a system; it’s not part of our culture even to admit that it is a single system.”
~ David Bohm
"This is the threat to our lives. We all face it. We all operate in our society in relation to a system. Now is the system going to eat you up and relieve you of your humanity or are you going to be able to use the system to human purposes? [...] If the person doesn't listen to the demands of his own spiritual and heart life and insists on a certain program, you're going to have a schizophrenic crack-up. The person has put himself off center. He has aligned himself with a programmatic life and it's not the one the body's interested in at all. And the world's full of people who have stopped listening to themselves."
~ Joseph Campbell
"There is no “I” to get enlightened. That’s illusion. There’s only being here with what’s here without division. Eyes open. Eyes and ears open, to let everything reveal itself as it is. And maybe feel this Love. In loveness with life, as it is."
~ Toni Packer
"Truth has no path. Truth is living and, therefore, changing. Awareness is without choice, without demand, without anxiety; in that state of mind, there is perception. To know oneself is to study oneself in action with another person. Awareness has no frontier; it is giving of your whole being, without exclusion."
~ Bruce Lee
"Every man takes the limits of his own field of vision for the limits of the world."
~ Arthur Schopenhauer, "Studies in Pessimism," Psychological Observations, 1851
"Did you ever wonder if the person in the puddle is real, and you're just a reflection of him?"
~ Calvin and Hobbes
"Those who are enslaved to their sects are not merely devoid of all sound knowledge, but they will not even stop to learn!"
~ Claudius Galen (c.130-c.200) Greek physician, writer, philosopher. On The Natural Faculties.
"What is essential here is the presence of the spirit of dialogue, which is in short, the ability to hold many points of view in suspension, along with a primary interest in the creation of common meaning."
~ David Bohm
"To confront a person with his own shadow is to show him his own light."
~ Carl Jung
"The emergence and blossoming of understanding, love and intelligence has nothing to do with any tradition, no matter how ancient or impressive - it has nothing to do with time. It happens completely on its own when a human being questions, wonders, listens and looks without getting stuck in fear, pleasure and pain. When self concern is quiet, in abeyance, heaven and earth are open. The mystery, the essence of all life is not separate from the silent openness of simple listening."
~ Toni Packer
"The general plot of life is sometimes shaped by the different ways genuine intelligence combines with equally genuine ignorance."
~ Lucy Grealy from 'Autobiography of a face'
"I assumed that the memories I did have, especially those which were vivid, concrete, and circumstantial, were essentially valid and reliable. And it was a shock to me, but I found that some of them were not."
~ Oliver Sacks
"Even though it is common knowledge, it never ceases to amaze me that all the richness of our mental life - all our feelings, our emotions, our thoughts, our ambitions, our love lives, our religious sentiments and even what each of us regards as his or her own intimate private self - is simply the activity of these little specks of jelly in our heads, in our brains. There is nothing else."
~ V.S. Ramachandran, A Brief Tour of Human Consciousness: From Impostor Poodles to Purple Numbers
“The human understanding when it has once adopted an opinion ... draws all things else to support and agree with it. And though there be a greater number and weight of instances to be found on the other side, yet these it either neglects and despises ... in order that by this great and pernicious predetermination the authority of its former conclusions may remain inviolate.”
~ Francis Bacon, Novum Organum, 1620
"Any object of thought is both 'more than what we think, and different'."
~ Alfred Korzybski
"Brain: an apparatus with which we think that we think."
~ Ambrose Bierce
"The tension felt in the modern world between those who look at the confluence of neuroscientific data, historical data, and other information illuminating our past and those who simply accept received wisdom as their guide in life is real and profound. Yet it may not be as divisive as one would think. It appears that all of us share the same moral networks and systems, and we all respond in similar ways to similar issues. The only thing different, then, is not our behavior but our theories about why we respond the way we do. It seems to me that understanding that our theories are the source of all our conflicts would go a long way in helping people with different belief systems to get along."
~ Michael Gazzaniga
"Every sentence I utter must be understood not as an affirmation, but as a question."
~ Niels Henrik David Bohr (1885-1962) Danish physicist.
To all whom read this, do you have a question? Then ask me, be upfront so we can have a dialogue, presume nothing. Like Jim Mora once stated, "You think you know, but you don't know and you never will." I agree with that statement but not in the way Mora intended it. I challenge all on what they think they 'know.'
And now for something completely different...
"Nothing exists except atoms and empty space; everything else is opinion."
~ Democritus
Now too the central issue here is simply the complete, absolute, unconditional undivided freedom of each and every human being. As how can we communicate if we are divided from within? So is it the story is as always that 'good' guys win, 'bad' guys lose and ignorance prevails? Unless one opens ones minds eye to see the illusion you live in, one can't even understand this question. Not that I presume you the reader are aware and/or understand any of this. Prejudice is not needed to communicate, nor knowledge. Just good will, compassion and clarity of vision.
Please let me know that you were here. Also are you aware that this Hallcyon has nothing to with putting you to sleep or getting loaded as in the sleeping pill? Thank you..
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In regard to 'Hallcyon", philosopher-educator Krishnamurti first book as a child under the name "Alcyone" (this book is not authentic Krishnaji and is more the views of C.W. Leadbeater). Though that is not my first inspiration for the usage of the name. It just so happens the theosophists named a town in California "Halcyon" just before K. Not that I have any association with theosophy, theosophists or any other group. Here are some definitions:
"Means "kingfisher" from the Greek word alkyon or halkyon. Alcyone was a Greek demi-goddess, sometimes regarded as one of the Pleiades. More often she was thought of as the daughter of Aeolus and wife of Ceyx, she had a son called Eosphorus and the king of Thessaly. They were very happy together, but, when Ceyx perished in a shipwreck, Alcyone (whose name means "queen who wards off storms") threw herself into the sea. Out of compassion, the gods changed them into the halcyon birds. When Alcyone made her nest on the beach, waves threatened to destroy it. Aeolus restrained his winds and made the waves be calm during seven days in each year, so she could lay her eggs. These became known as the "halcyon days", when storms never occur. The halcyon has become a symbol of tranquility."
On a much more personal note that definition actually has special though personal meaning to me of a very private nature.
Halcyon is also the name of the brightest of the Pleiades, the seven stars in the constellation Taurus. The star is the location "from which the Almighty governs his universe" according to Studies in the Scriptures, Millennial Dawn, volume 3, page 327, by Charles Taze Russell, founder of the Jehovah's Witnesses. It is also alluded to in the same sect's book Reconciliation by Joseph F. Rutherford, which says on page 14 "that one of the stars of that group is the dwelling-place of Jehovah."
To digress for a moment, don't worry I don't have a God-complex, people like that are to be avoided. Though on that subject, Joseph Campbell states that God is a metaphor for that which transcends all levels of intellectual thought. It's as simple as that.
In the silent depth of space,
Immeasurably old, immeasurably far,
Glittering with a silver flame
Through eternity,
Rolls a great and burning star,
With a noble name,
Alcyone!
In the glorious chart of heaven
It is marked the first of seven;
'Tis a Pleiad:
And a hundred years of earth
With their long-forgotten deeds have come and
gone,
Since that tiny point of light,
Once a splendor fierce and bright,
Had its birth
In the star we gaze upon.
It has traveled all that time--
Thought has not a swifter flight--
Through a region where no faintest gust
Of life comes ever, but the power of night
Dwells stupendous and sublime,
Limitless and void and lonely,
A region mute with age, and peopled only
With the dead and ruined dust
Of worlds that lived eternities ago.
Man! when thou dost think of this,
And what our earth and its existence is,
The half-blind toils since life began,
The little aims, the little span,
With what passion and what pride,
And what hunger fierce and wide,
Thou dost break beyond it all,
Seeking for the spirit unconfined
In the clear abyss of mind
A shelter and a peace majestical.
For what is life to thee,
Turning toward the primal light,
With that stern and silent face,
If thou canst not be
Something radiant and august as night,
Something wide as space?
Therefore with a love and gratitude divine
Thou shalt cherish in thine heart for sign
A vision of the great and burning star,
Immeasurably old, immeasurably far,
Surging forth its silver flame
Through eternity;
And thine inner heart shall ring and cry
With the music strange and high,
The grandeur of its name
Alcyone!
--Archibald Lampman
So why, why Hallcyon? Well the golden years in many ways as this is my life, my existence... is not now, not this, not that, but the timeless unmeasured reality. Bah humbug to golden years of peaceful tranquility and the power of now. right action with love, which is not a mood, but truly an unconditional way of just being. Besides it is also the meaning of my first and last name so to speak. I'm still a formless Tasmanian wolf...
Here is a parting quote, though this page is full of them. This one in particular states so much:
"You have a concept of what you should be and how you should act, and all the time you are in fact acting quite differently; so you see that principles, beliefs and ideals must inevitably lead to hypocrisy and a dishonest life. It is the ideal that creates the opposite to what is, so if you know how to be with 'what is', then the opposite is not necessary." ~ Krishnamurti, Freedom from the Known
Finally for my personal selfish interests your viewing of this page is being monitored and tracked (no spyware).
And now a message from Iggy Pop:
"Today everything's a conflict of interest"
~ Sid Vicious
"Outrageousness is nothing more than a way to wake people up..."
~ the punky QB known as Jim McMahon, NFL Super Bowl Champion Quarterback
"I believe the game is designed to reward the ones who hit the hardest. If you can't take it, you shouldn't play."
~ Jack Lambert, Super Bowl Champion and NFL Hall of Fame Linebacker
"Just about everything we do stems from the "self" and if your asking me whether I see this? It is my life long challenge to see this. Thought(time) is our illusory trap. If one can stay with this, and observe this, than that is all one needs. The change will happen from this. However, the change is not the focus, it's the awareness and attention of the movement we call "me" that's important."
~ Kaia
"A house must be built on solid foundations if it is to last. The same principle applies to man, otherwise he too will sink back into the soft ground and becomes swallowed up by the world of illusion."
~ Sai Baba
"Can we learn to become more learning-oriented individually and collectively, rather than 'I know' oriented?"
~ David Bohm
"Forget about winning and losing; forget about pride and pain. Let your opponent graze your skin and you smash into his flesh; let him smash into your flesh and you fracture his bones; let him fracture your bones and you take his life. Do not be concerned with escaping safely - lay your life before him."
~ Bruce Lee
"Pain is physical, suffering is mental. Beyond the mind there is no suffering. Pain is essential for the survival of the body, but none compels you to suffer. Suffering is due entirely to clinging or resisting; it is a sign of our unwillingness to move on, to flow with life. As a sane life is free of pain, so is a saintly life free from suffering. A saint does not want things to be different from what they are; he knows that, considering all factors, they are unavoidable. He is friendly with the inevitable and, therefore, does not suffer. Pain he may know, but it does not shatter him. If he can, he does the needful to restore the lost balance, or he lets things take their course."
~ Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj
"It’s never what people do that make us angry, it’s what we tell ourselves about what they did.
~ Marshall Rosenberg
"Trying to capture the physicists' precise mathematical description of the quantum world with our crude words and mental images is like playing Chopin with a boxing glove on one hand and a catcher's mitt on the other."
~ George Johnson, "On Skinning Schrödinger's Cat," The New York Times, 2 June 1996.
"Man may purposely, consciously choose for himself even the harmful and the stupid, even the stupidest thing -- just so that he will have the right to wish the stupidest thing, and not be bound by the duty to have only intelligent wishes. For this most stupid thing, this whim of ours, gentlemen may really be more advantageous to us than anything on earth, especially in certain cases. In fact, it may be the most advantageous of all advantages even when it brings us obvious harm and contradicts the most sensible conclusions of our reason concerning our advantage. Because, at any rate, it preserves for us the most important and most precious thing -- our personality, our individuality."
~ Fyodor Dostoeyvsky
"I do not believe that there is any teaching; there is only learning, and this is very important to understand. When the individual who is listening regards the speaker as one who is teaching him something, such an attitude creates and maintains the division of the pupil and the master, of the one who knows and the one who does not know. But there is only learning, and I think it is very important from the very beginning to understand this and to establish the right relationship between us. The man who says he knows does not know; the man who says he has attained liberation has not realized. If you think you are going to learn something from me which I know and you do not know, then you become a follower and he who follows will never find out what is truth. That is why it is very important for you to understand this."
~ Krishnamurti
"You have to work hard but not bury yourself in the work. You have to have passion for something you want to do. And you have to work at it. If you don't have the passion for it, I don't know. But you can't neglect making a living. And have to realize as you get older, put that money aside a little bit. Don't let your passion lead you astray. Make sure it's a pragmatic thing. Don't go crazy with lack of success. As you grow up, there are many things in life besides what you do as a living, and you have to take care of yourself. And if you have a wife and children, that's important, very important. You can float away into nowhere into space. Some do that their whole life. Otherwise you just float to nowhere."
~ Hilly Krystal
"Once you go beyond your self-identification with your past, you are free to create a new world of harmony and beauty."
~ Nisargadatta
"Brothers and sisters, the time has come for each and every one of you to decide whether you are gonna be the problem, or whether you are gonna be the solution. You must choose, brothers, you must choose. It takes Five seconds, Five seconds of decision. Five seconds to realize your purpose here on the planet. Five seconds to realize that it's time to move. It's time to get down with it. Brothers, it's time to testify and I want to know, are you ready to testify? Are you ready?! I give you a testimonial, the MC5!"
~ Rob Tyner and the MC5
"To put the world right in order, we must first put the nation in order; to put the nation in order, we must first put the family in order; to put the family in order, we must first cultivate our personal life; we must first set our hearts right."
~ Confucius
"There is nothing to practice. To know yourself, be yourself. To be yourself, stop imagining yourself to be this or that. Just be. Let your true nature emerge. Don't disturb your mind with seeking."
~ Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj
"And that Aha! that you get when you see an artwork that really hits you is, 'I am that.' I am the very radiance of energy that is talking to me through this painting."
~ Joseph Campbell
"This unconditioning means: the academic side, behavior in detail as well as seeing the totality, all of that running together. This is what I am trying to convey to the student and in that I am learning how to live that way. That takes too long. So I say to myself, "A miracle must happen to change it instantly." May be both together are necessary - the miracle as well as the other. Can we produce both? I think we can. And that's why, as you said just now, if we are balanced, serious - which means not sentimental, not verbal, not ideational but factual - if we are dealing with it in that way, the miracle comes."
~ Krishnamurti
"When we quit thinking primarily about ourselves and our own self-preservation, we undergo a truly heroic transformation of consciousness."
~ Jospeh Campbell
"I have never experienced another human being. I have experienced my impressions of them."
~ Robert Anton Wilson
"Indeed, to some extent it has always been necessary and proper for man, in his thinking, to divide things up, if we tried to deal with the whole of reality at once, we would be swamped. However when this mode of thought is applied more broadly to man's notion of himself and the whole world in which he lives, (i.e. in his world-view) then man ceases to regard the resultant divisions as merely useful or convenient and begins to see and experience himself and this world as actually constituted of separately existing fragments. What is needed is a relativistic theory, to give up altogether the notion that the world is constituted of basic objects or building blocks. Rather one has to view the world in terms of universal flux of events and processes."
~ David Bohm
"Politicians today are not leaders, nor are they representatives of the people. They are brokers who distribute the taxpayer money among special interests. That is all they are. And either party would much rather see their opponents win, with whom they can cut a deal, than a maverick in their own party with whom they could not cut a deal. And if you don't understand that, you're still in kindergarten."
~ C. Wilson
"Only two kinds of people can attain self-knowledge: those who are not encumbered at all with learning, that is to say, whose minds are not over - crowded with thoughts borrowed from others; and those who, after studying all the scriptures and sciences, have come to realise that they know nothing."
~ Ramakrishna
"Please don't try to understand me intellectually. I am not an intellectual, in fact I am anti-intellectual. I am not a philosopher, I am very anti-philosophic. Try to comprehend me. Listen silently with no inner chattering, with no inner talk, without evaluating. I am not saying believe what I say, I am not saying accept what I say. I am saying there is no need to be in a hurry to accept or reject. First at least listen - why be in such a hurry? When you see a rose flower, do you accept or reject it? When you see a beautiful sunset, do you accept or reject it? You simply see it, and in that very seeing is a meeting. If what I am saying has anything of truth in it, it will be understood by your heart. But the mind has to give way. And then you will not need to change your life according to it, it will be changed of its own accord."
- Osho
"The time is always right to do what is right."
~ Martin Luther King Jr.
"An insincere and evil friend is more to be feared than a wild beast; a wild beast may wound your body, but an evil friend will wound your mind."
~ Siddharta Gautama
"The ignorant man is not the unlearned, but he who does not know himself, and the learned man is stupid when he relies on books, on knowledge and on authority to give him understanding. Understanding comes only through self-knowledge, which is awareness of one's total psychological process. Thus education, in the true sense, is the understanding of oneself, for it is within each one of us that the whole of existence is gathered."
~ Krishnamurti
"The remarkable thing is that we really love our neighbor as ourselves: we do unto others as we do unto ourselves. We hate others when we hate ourselves. We are tolerant toward others when we tolerate ourselves. We forgive others when we forgive ourselves. We are prone to sacrifice others when we are ready to sacrifice ourselves."
~ Eric Hoffer
"Because we are prisoners of our symbolic forms, we can do little more than reconstruct the operations that generate meaning, not only for ourselves, but for other cultures also; we are unable to transcend particular meanings in order to inquire about man himself, his destiny, etc. The most we can do is to recognize man as the one who produces symbolic forms, systems of signs, and who then confuses them with reality itself, forgetting that in order to make reality meaningful he interposes an always particular system of signs between reality and himself."
~ René Girard, Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World
"I think that parents only get so offended by television because they rely on it as a babysitter and the sole educator of their kids."
~ Trey Parker & Matt Stone
"Religion, politics, society are exploiting you, and you are being conditioned by them; you are being forced in a particular direction. You are not human beings; you are mere cogs in a machine. You suffer patiently, submitting to the cruelties of environment, when you, individually, have the possibilities of changing them."
~ Krishnamurti
"While our bodies move ever forward on the time-line, our minds continuously trace backward, seeking shape and meaning as deftly as an arrow seeking its mark."
~ Lucy Grealy from Autobiography of a face
"A man goes to the doctor. Says he's depressed. He says life seems harsh and cruel. Says he feels all alone in a threatening world where what lies ahead is vague and uncertain. The doctor says "The treatment is simple. The great clown Pagliacci is in town tonight. Go and see him, that should pick you up." The man bursts into tears. He says "But doctor... I am Pagliacci."
~ Alan Moore
"Go without a coat when it's cold; find out what cold is. Go hungry; keep your existence lean. Wear away the fat, get down to the lean tissue and see what it's all about. The only time you define your character is when you go without. In times of hardship, you find out what you're made of and what you're capable of. If you're never tested, you'll never define your character."
~ Henry Rollins
"To talk about communication theory without communicating its real mathematical content would be like endlessly telling a man about a wonderful composer, yet never letting him hear an example of the composer's music."
~ John Robinson Pierce (1910- ) U. S. electrical engineer. In: Symbols, Signals and Noise
"There's a sense in which final causes - purposes and goals - have this kind of attractive quality. They draw things toward them.... This is completely different from the model of things being pushed from behind in the mechanical universe."
~ Rupert Sheldrake
"...the only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn, like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue center light pop and everybody goes 'Awww!'"
~ Jack Kerouac
"All violence is the result of people tricking themselves into believing that their pain derives from other people and that consequently those people deserve to be punished."
~ Marshall Rosenberg
"Pseudospeciation, the ability of humans and some other primates to classify certain members of their own species as ‘other,’ can neutralize the threshold of inhibition so they can kill conspecifics."
~ from War Psychiatry
"If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?"
~ Alexander Solzhenitsyn
"Your vision will become clear only when you look into your heart... Who looks outside, dreams. Who looks inside, awakens."
~ Carl Jung
"Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma - which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of other's opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary."
~ Steve Jobs
"Honest disagreement is often a good sign of progress."
~ Mohandas K. Gandhi
"When I'm telling you my feelings, discussing memories, in this close relationship, I'm achieving better neurological integration; I'm repairing the connections in the brain."
~ Dr. Dan Siegal, Psychiatrist at the University of California, Los Angeles, discussing interpersonal neurobiology
"What we now want is closer contact and better understanding between individuals and communities all over the earth... and the elimination of egoism and pride which is always prone to plunge the world into primeval barbarism and strife."
~ Nikola Tesla
"Man should not be in the service of society, society should be in the service of man. When man is in the service of society, you have a monster state, and that's what is threatening the world at this minute."
~ Joseph Campbell
"To be prepared for war is one of the most effectual means of preserving peace. A free people ought not only to be armed, but disciplined, but they should have sufficient arms and ammunition to maintain a status of independence from any who might attempt to abuse them, which would include their own government."
~ United States President George Washington
"One person can make a difference and every person should try."
~ President John F. Kennedy
"A man is ethical only when life, as such, is sacred to him, that of plants and animals as that of his fellow men, and when he devotes himself helpfully to all life that is in need of help."
~ Albert Schweitzer
"Truth, like gold, is to be obtained not by its growth, but by washing away from it all that is not gold."
~ Leo Tolstoy
"I've always felt it was not up to anyone else to make me give my best."
~ Hakeem Olajuwon
"Great spirits have always found violent opposition from mediocre minds. The latter cannot understand it when a man does not thoughtlessly submit to hereditary prejudices but honestly and courageously uses his intelligence and fulfills the duty to express the results of his thoughts in clear form."
~ Albert Einstein
"Your most unhappy customers are your greatest source of learning."
~ Microsoft Founder Bill Gates
"Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself."
~ Leo Tolstoy
"Language is a process of free creation; its laws and principles are fixed, but the manner in which the principles of generation are used is free and infinitely varied. Even the interpretation and use of words involves a process of free creation."
~ Noam Chomsky
"The voice of the people has been said to be the voice of God; and, however generally this maxim has been quoted and believed, it is not true to fact. The people are turbulent and changing, they seldom judge or determine right."
~ Alexander Hamilton
"The argument for liberty is not an argument against organization, which is one of the most powerful tools human reason can employ, but an argument against all exclusive, privileged, monopolistic organization, against the use of coercion to prevent others from doing better."
~ Friedrich von Hayek
"The fact is there is nothing that you can trust; and that is a terrible fact, whether you like it or not. Psychologically there is nothing in the world, that you can put your faith, your trust, or your belief in. Neither your gods, nor your science can save you, can bring you psychological certainty; and you have to accept that you can trust in absolutely nothing. That is a scientific fact, as well as a psychological fact. Because, your leaders religious and political and your books sacred and profane have all failed, and you are still confused, in misery, in conflict. So, that is an absolute, undeniable fact."
~ Krishnamurti
"A great writer has spoken sadly of the shock it would be to a mother to know her boy as he really is, but I think she often knows him better than he is known to cynical friends. We should be slower to think that the man at his worst is the real man, and certain that the better we are ourselves the less likely is he to be at his worst in our company. Every time he talks away his own character before us he is signifying contempt for ours."
~ J.M. Barrie
"To overcome evil with good is good, to resist evil with evil is evil."
~ Mohammad
"When you see evil, especially when it wears a smiling and angelic face, you must call it out. And you must deal with the consequences of calling it out, which can be bad. Because the consequences of not calling it out could be infinitely worse."
~ John Kessel
"The great teachings unanimously emphasize that all the peace, wisdom, and joy in the universe are already within us; we don't have to gain, develop, or attain them. We're like a child standing in a beautiful park with his eyes shut tight. We don't need to imagine trees, flowers, deer, birds, and sky; we merely need to open our eyes and realize what is already here, who we really are -- as soon as we quit pretending we're small or unholy."~ Unknown
"You must understand the whole of life, not just one little part of it. That is why you must read, that is why you must look at the skies, that is why you must sing, and dance, and write poems, and suffer, and understand, for all that is life."
~ Krishnamurti
"Pain and suffering are always inevitable for a large intelligence and a deep heart. The really great men must, I think, have great sadness on Earth."
~ Fyodor Dostoevsky
"The struggle of "humanity" against all other cultures. This struggle defined what people defined as humanity. Think of it. What general ideas do you have about the emergence of man? when does human history start? In most of my education and in many books besides, I was often told that humanity truly emerged not with the introduction of homo sapiens but rather with the beginning of agriculture in Mesopotamia thousands of years ago. With this came the development of the first cities and also the birth of civilization(which comes from the Latin for city-civitas). Then came the belief that civilization can do no wrong. Think of it. We never question that civilizations basic foundation is wrong, in fact it will say it is right as it continues to destroy itself. Civilization has either convinced other cultures or forced other cultures that lived differently then them to become a part of them. They targeted people who didn't live the way they wanted them to. In Europe Gypsies, in the America's the Native Peoples, in Australia the Aborigines, etc. Now we are almost complete. The world is almost one culture. The problem arises when one tries to decide if this is necessarily a good thing or not. Is the destruction of thousands of other cultures worth it just to prove "We can't be wrong"?"
~ anonymous
"Humanity today is not safe in the presence of humanity. The old cannibalism has given way to anonymous action in which the killer and the killed do not know each other, and in which,indeed, the very fact of mass death has the effect of making mass killing less reprehensible than the death of a single individual. In short, we have evolved in every respect except our ability to protect ourselves against human intelligence. Our knowledge is vast but does not embrace the workings of peace. . . . We study history, philosophy, religions, languages, literature, art, architecture, political science . . . anthropology, biology, medicine, psychology, sanitation . . . chemistry, physics, engineering, mathematics. But we have yet to make peace basic to our education. The most important subject in the world is hardly taught at all."
~ Norman Cousins (In the spirit of this passage, the editor has taken the liberty of editing Mr. Cousins' language to make it more gender inclusive.)
"Let them call me a rebel and I welcome it; I feel no concern from it; but I should suffer the misery of demons should I make a whore of my soul."
~ Thomas Paine
"I go further, and affirm that bills of rights, in the sense and to the extent in which they are contended for, are not only unnecessary in the proposed Constitution, but would even be dangerous. They would contain various exceptions to powers not granted; and, on this very account, would afford a colorable pretext to claim more than were granted. For why declare that things shall not be done which there is no power to do? Why, for instance, should it be said that the liberty of the press shall not be restrained, when no power is given by which restrictions may be imposed? I will not contend that such a provision would confer a regulating power; but it is evident that it would furnish, to men disposed to usurp, a plausible pretense for claiming that power. They might urge with a semblance of reason, that the Constitution ought not to be charged with the absurdity of providing against the abuse of an authority which was not given, and that the provision against restraining the liberty of the press afforded a clear implication, that a power to prescribe proper regulations concerning it was intended to be vested in the national government. This may serve as a specimen of the numerous handles which would be given to the doctrine of constructive powers, by the indulgence of an injudicious zeal for bills of rights."
~ ALEXANDER HAMILTON, The Federalist Papers n. 84
"You can’t have reliable partners in a war on terrorism if they are torturing and killing their own people."
~ Samantha Power
"Imagine that you are creating a fabric of human destiny with the object of makingmen happy in the end... but that it was essential and inevitable to torture to death only one tiny creature... And to found that edifice on its unavenged tears: would you consent to be the architect on those conditions? Tell me, and tell me the truth!"
~ Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov
"Once enough of us decide we’ve had enough of all these so-called good things that the government is always promising—or more likely, when the country is broke and the government is unable to fulfill its promises to the people—we can start a serious discussion on the proper role for government in a free society. Unfortunately, it will be some time before Congress gets the message that the people are demanding true reform. This requires that those responsible for today’s problems are exposed and their philosophy of pervasive government intrusion is rejected. Let it not be said that no one cared, that no one objected once it’s realized that our liberties and wealth are in jeopardy. A few have, and others will continue to do so, but too many—both in and out of government—close their eyes to the issue of personal liberty and ignore the fact that endless borrowing to finance endless demands cannot be sustained. True prosperity can only come from a healthy economy and sound money. That can only be achieved in a free society."
~ 2008 Presidential Candidate Ron Paul
"Race is, quite literally, skin-deep, but to the extent that perceivers generalize from external to internal differences, nature has duped them into thinking that race is important. The X-ray vision of the molecular geneticist reveals the unity of our species. And so does the X-ray vision of the cognitive scientist. "Not speaking the same language" is a virtual synonym for incommensurability, but to a psycholinguist, it is a superficial difference. Knowing about the ubiquity of complex language across individuals and cultures and the single mental design underlying them all, no speech seems foreign to me, even when I cannot understand a word. The banter among New Guinean Highlanders in the film of their first contact with the rest of the world, the motions of a sign language interpreter, the prattle of little girls in a Tokyo playground - I imagine seeing through the rhythms to the structures underneath, and sense that we all have the same minds."
~ Steven Pinker
"Judge not, that ye be not judged. For with what judgment ye judge, ye shall be judged: and with what measure ye mete, it shall be measured to you again."
~ Matthew 7:1/7:2
"Life is not a problem to be solved but a mystery to be lived."
~ Joseph Campbell
"All men dream, but not equally. Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds wake in the day to find that it was vanity; but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act their dream with open eyes, to make it possible."
~ T. E. Lawrence
"In proportion to our body mass, our brain is three times as large as that of our nearest relatives. This huge organ is dangerous and painful to give birth to, expensive to build and, in a resting human, uses about 20 per cent of the body's energy even though it is just 2 per cent of the body's weight. There must be some reason for all this evolutionary expense."
~ Susan Blackmore
"Every ideology is contrary to human psychology."
~ Albert Camus
"Truth always rests with the minority, and the minority is always stronger than the majority, because the minority is generally formed by those who really have an opinion, while the strength of a majority is illusory, formed by the gangs who have no opinion—and who, therefore, in the next instant (when it is evident that the minority is the stronger) assume its opinion ... while Truth again reverts to a new minority."
~ Soren Kierkegaard
"You must have the capacity to doubt, so that you will discover through that doubt what is truth, what is the essential and the lasting. But to doubt everything requires strength of intelligence, of thought, because from morning to night you have to be ceaselessly questioning, demanding, urging. What is life but a mere existence – earning money, gathering and rejecting experience, with all its sorrows – what is its value unless you live like a tremendous volcano that is a danger to everything?"
~ Krishnamurti
“If it is too complicated for most of us to understand in 10 to 15 minutes, then we probably shouldn’t be doing it.”
~ Christopher Whalen of Institutional Risk Analytics
"The world is not the way they tell you it is."
~ Adam Smith
"The greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance, it is the illusion of knowledge."
~ Stephen Hawking
"Freedom is at hand when the fundamental qualities of nature, each of their transformations witnessed at the moment of its inception, are recognized as irrelevant to pure awareness; it stands alone, grounded in its very nature, the power of pure seeing. That is all."
~ the Yoga Sutra of Pantanjali, A New Translation, with Commentary by Chip Hartranet
"Life is only what you make it, you bring the meaning entirely to it as you are reality and reality is you.."
~ Hallcyon
One more thing: Man is born crying. When he has cried enough, he dies.