keep pan alive in your heart.
birth and death were easy. it was life that was hard.
christianity is merely a system for turning priestesses into handmaidens, queens into concubines, and godesses into muses.
there is a confort in conformity, a security in control, that is appealing. there is a thrill in domination, and we are all of us secretly attracted to violence.
tradition and continuity were the flours from which the social loaf was baked; feeding the culture, pleasing the gods.
should you fail to pilot your own ship, don't be suprised at what inappropriate port you find yourself docked.
here they teach that much of existence amounts only to misery; that misery is caused by desire; therefore, if desire is eliminated, then misery will be eliminated. now, that is true enough, as far as it goes. there is plenty of misery in the world, all right, but there is ample pleasure, as well. if a person forswears pleasure in order to avoid misery, what has he gained? a life with neither misery nor pleasure is an empty, neutral existence, and, indeed, it is the nothingness of the void that is the lamas' objective. to actively seek nothingness is worse than defeat; why, kudra, it is surrender; craven, chickenhearted, dishonorable surrender. poor little babies are so afraid of pain that they spurn the myriad sweet wonders of life so that they might protect themselves from hurt. how can you respect that sort of weakness, how can you admire a human who consciously embraces the bland, the mediocre, and the safe rather than risk the suffering that disappointments can bring?
i don't want salvation, i want life, all of life, the miserable and the superb.
the highest function of love is that it makes the loved one a unique and irreplacable being. the difference between love and logic is that in the eyes of a lover, a toad can be a prince, whereas in the analysis of a logistatician, the lover would have to prove that the toad was a prince, an enterprise destined to dull the shine of many a passion. logic limits love, which may be why descartes never married.
and he vowed that in the future he would strive to keep that sense of play more in mind, for he'd grown convinced that play- more than piety, more than charity or vigilance- was what allowed human beings to transcend evil.
reality is subjective, and there's an unenlightened tendency in this culture to regard something as 'important' only if 'tis sober and severe. sure and still you're right about your cheerful dumb, only there 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 very 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 that means he has to stop dwellin' on himself and start payin' attention to the universe. unhappiness is the ultimate form of self-indulgence.
sure they destroyed some cells. no doubt about it, but 'twas for the good. if you want your tree to produce plenty o' fruit, you've got to cut it back from time to time. same thing with your neural cells. some people might call it brain damage. i call it prunin'.
same thing in society. a conservative cycle, a liberal cycle, a conservative cycle again. action and reaction, back and forth, like the tides. as long as we're trapped in these cycles, we can't expect much in the way o' liberation, we can't even expect fundamental change except the awful slow variety where each step takes a million years or more.
people used to die from germs. now they died from bad habits. that was what dr. dannyboy said. heart disease was caused by bad personal habits, cancer was caused by bad industrial habits, war was caused by bad political habits.
nostalgia and hope stand equally in the way of authentic experience.
no, my friends, what bothers me today is the lack of, well, i guess you'd call it authentic experience. so much is a sham. so much is artificial, synthetic, watered-down, and standardized.
myth is neither fiction nor history. myths are acted out in our own psyches, and they are repetitive and ongoing.
we hold the pass. the fragile hold the pass precariously, hiding behind boulders of ego and dogma. the heroic hold the pass a bit more tenaciously, gracefully acknowledging their follies and absurdities, but insisting, nevertheless, on heroism. instead of shrinking, the hero moves ever toward life. life is largely material, and there is no small heroism in the full and open enjoyment of material things. the accumulation of material things is shallow and vain, but to have a genuine relationship with such things is to have a relationship with life, and by extension, a relationship with the divine.