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Bound Upon a Wheel of Fire

A Poeisis~

Come, come whoever you are


Wanderer, worshipper, lover of leaving
It doesn’t matter.
Ours is not a caravan of despair.
Come, even if you have broken your vow a thousand times.
Come, yet again.
Come, come.
~Jalal-udin Rumi~

When we truly love our children, the way will be clear.

Canto I
Preludes~~

The only sacrifice worth making is that of your own life.

Certain endeavors reach beyond logic and reason, morality and ethics, instinct and desire. They
touch the very core of Self. They provoke confrontation and promote revelation...if they are
undertaken. Seldom does such an experience leave the participants unmoved. It never leaves
them untouched. Such is the nature of the Way. You can think of it as a game: a game which
promises nothing, is nothing, save the chance to play. Understand: the instruments of this game
are not mere toys and trinkets, words and ideas, actions and deeds. The sole instrument of this
game is life itself...your life. Flowing on the blade of a sword.
~Throw your life and deserve to live, for joy of the game~
To live is to walk a path.
The worth of the path lies in who walks it.
All paths are chosen.
To each their own path.

There is no god but god.


All that is, is god.
The world is shadow.
God is light.
God is the world.
I am the jewel in the heart of god.
Sacred is the dreaming mystery of life.

Though the truth is unknowable, attain it.


Though the teaching is limitless, learn it.
Though life is boundless, embrace it.
Though you are hindered, hinder none.
Though you fail, press on.
~from The Teachings of the Buddha~

Birth nothing, except in awareness of the gifting.


Study nothing, except in the certainty that you already knew it.
Attempt nothing, except in celebration.
Worship nothing, except in adoration of your true self.
~from Clive Barker’s Imajica~
Renounce all claim upon creation.
Renounce the expectations of any.
Claim the sovereignty of your life.
Seek the good, the true, the beautiful.
Be generous in your heart.
Be clear in your vision.
Be noble in your thinking.
Be courteous in your manner.
Be candid in your speech.
Be just in your action.
Be resolute in your endeavor.
Be not ashamed.
Be not afraid.
Be not deceived.
If you believe it, you must live it.
If you do not live it, you do not believe it.
If you do not believe it, you cannot live it.

Canto II
First Lessons~

All students are created un-equal. The best discipline provides each with equal opportunity to
float at their own level.
~from Frank Herbert~

The free individual is the one who serves his own ends rather than the ends of another.
~Jiddu Krishnamurti~
Discipline in the Way is an acknowledgment, and then enrichment, of ever deeper and more
encompassing levels of one’s own self.
~from Ken Wilber~

To study the Way, there must be freedom from condemnation, justification, opinion, or
acceptance.
~from Jiddu Krishnamurti~

It is only those who know neither an inner call nor an outer doctrine whose plight is truly
desperate.
~Joseph Campbell~

Awakening begins when you realize you are going nowhere and do not know which way to go.
~from Frank Herbert~

This is all the Way asks of us, this is all true practice is meant to be: recognize god, and live up
to it.
~from Ken Wilber~

The Way requires a maximum of unscheduled wandering. For there is no other way of
discovering surprises and marvels, which is the only good reason for not staying at home.
~from Alan Watts~

The Way requires a very particular kind of philosophy. Not a philosophy of scientific proofs and
guarantees, but an aesthetic that addresses the question of how to live beyond proofs and
guarantees.
~from James Ogilvy~

Consciousness must dream. It must have a dreaming ground, and, dreaming, it must invoke ever
new dreams.
~Frank Herbert~
Any path which narrow future possibilities may become a lethal trap. Allow for surprises.
~from Frank Herbert~

The least thing that is known shall govern your acts.


~Frank Herbert~

Problems that remain persistently insoluble should always be suspected as questions asked in the
wrong way.
~Frank Herbert~

Answers are a perilous grip on the universe. They can appear sensible yet explain nothing.
~Frank Herbert~

The most strongly enforced of all taboos is the taboo against knowing who you are.
~Alan Watts~

Intelligence takes chances with limited data in an arena where mistakes are not only possible, but
necessary.
~Frank Herbert~

You must learn to distinguish between the fear that preserves and the fear that tames, between
discipline that liberates and discipline that enslaves.
~Frank Herbert~

Real boats rock.


~Frank Herbert~

Wandering between two worlds: one dead, one powerless to be born.


~Unknown~
You do not beg the sun for mercy.
~Frank Herbert~

Succeed or fail, you are what you dare.


~Greg Bear~

All people dwell in the same wilderness.


~Frank Herbert~

Canto III
Interludes

All life is a mystery.


To seek the mystery is to quest.
To Quest is to claim the life that is yours.
The path shapes the quest.
The questing shapes the questor.

All living is a joy.


To seek the joy is to play.
To play is to do for yourself.
The rules shape the play.
The playing shapes the player.

All living is a wonder.


To seek the wonder is to question.
To question is to know for yourself.
The answer shapes the question.
The questioning shapes the questioner.
All living is a sacrifice.
To seek the sacrifice is to judge.
To judge is to decide for yourself.
The circumstances shape the judgment.
The judging shapes the judge.

All living is a sacrament.


To seek the sacrament is to die.
To die is to transcend yourself.
The life shapes the death.
The dying shapes the living.

How is it possible that a being with such sensitive jewels as the eyes, such enhanced musical
instruments as the ears, and such a fabulous arabesque of nerves as the brain can experience
itself as anything less than a god. And, when you consider that this incalculably subtle organism
is inseparable from the still more marvelous patterns of its environment, how is it conceivable
that this incarnation of all eternity can be bored with being?
~Alan Watts~

A million young children dreamed of the stars.


Nine hundred thousand grew up and forgot.
One hundred thousand became childsoldiers.
Ninety nine thousand died.
Nine hundred came home.
They tilled the land, danced, and forgot.
Ninety grew rich and renowned.
Nine sought out and discovered new worlds.
One found the Truth. And lo...he gave the command: he yawned the stars from his lips for a
million young children to dream of.
~from Somtow Sucharitkul~
Canto IV
Sadhana

Thou Art That is the singular truth of the Way. This is the heart of the quest.

Quest describes a personal journey into experience and meaning. To quest is to awaken to, seek,
and claim the singular life unique to each of us.

The discipline of the quest is sadhana: the individual’s personal drive into life.

The sadhana endeavor infuses all aspects of a living.

As hatha practice, sadhana seeks to better interact with the physical Kosmos through
development and refinement of the bodily organism.

As bhakti practice, sadhana seeks to better enjoy the relational Kosmos through development and
refinement of the emotional organism.

As jnana practice, sadhana seeks to better understand the symbolic Kosmos through development
and refinement of the intellectual organism.

As karma practice, sadhana seeks to better serve the social Kosmos through development and
refinement of the cultural organism.

As raja practice, sadhana seeks to better realize the ultimate nature of Kosmos through the
development and refinement of the spiritual organism.

True practice in the sadhana endeavor requires perseverance, courage, humility, and honor.

Perseverance describes the audacity to struggle on through tedium.


Courage describes the audacity to struggle on through adversity. Humility describes the audacity
to face the truth as it can be known. Honor describes the audacity to live the truth as it is known.

Sadhana is the discipline of the Way.

The student of the Way seeks the more encompassing truth, the more acute observation, the more
penetrating judgment, the greater right, the deeper beauty. The student of the Way seeks god in
all things, at all times, in all ways.

Canto V
Lila

Sadhana is the discipline of the Way. Seishin is its living practice: Life...flowing on the blade of
a sword.

The practice that underlies all other practice is Lila.

Lila is the playing of life.

There are two types of games that may be played: finite and infinite.

Finite games are played to be won. Infinite games are played for the purpose of continuing the
playing.

Finite games end when someone has won. Someone has won a finite game when all the players
have agreed who among them is the winner. No other condition is absolutely required.

No one can play who is forced to play.


Whoever plays, plays freely.

Whoever must play, cannot play.

Finite games are played within specified and definitive temporal, spatial, and numerical
boundaries.

Boundaries must be agreed upon by all players.

Players are selected for finite play.

Any player may be removed or disallowed from play at any time in finite play.

Finite games are externally defined.

While only one may win a finite game, all may be ranked.

The only purpose of an infinite game is to prevent it from coming to an end and to keep everyone
in play.

There are no boundaries to an infinite game. They are internally defined.

Each play of an infinite game eliminates boundaries.

Each play opens to players a new horizon of time.

Finite games can be played within infinite games. The opposite is not the case.

Infinite players regard their wins and losses in whatever finite games they play as but moments
in continuing play.
Finite games must have internal limitations on what players can and cannot do to and with each
other.

These rules are different for each game.

The rules define the game.

Rules do not mandate behavior, they restrain freedom.

The rules allow players to agree as to who has won the game.

The rules must be known and agreed to prior to play.

The agreement of the players validates the rules.

There are no rules that require us to obey rules.

The rules of a finite game may not change during play.

The rules of an infinite game must change during play to prevent anyone from winning and to
bring as many people as possible into play.

Infinite players design rules to deal with specific threats to play, to deal with the impingement of
specific boundaries or limits.

Finite players play within boundaries.

Infinite players play with boundaries.

Whoever takes up a role in a game does so by choice.


All the limitations of finite play are self limitations.

Finite players intentionally forget the voluntary nature of their play.

Finite players freely step into roles, and then suspend their freedom with a proper
seriousness in order to act as the role requires.

Infinite players play finite games as finite games, not seriously, but playfully.

To be serious is to play for a specified conclusion.

To be playful is to allow for possibility, whatever the cost to oneself.

In infinite play everything that happens is of consequence.

Finite roles are scripted and played for an audience.

Finite games seek a conclusion.

Finite games are theatrical.

Infinite players avoid any outcome whatsoever, keeping the future open, making
all scripts useless

Infinite play is dramatic.

Finite players obey the rules in order to play.

The rules are not the script. The script is the record of actual exchanges between players.

Scripts are composed in the course of play.


A game is theatrical because there is an outcome.

The intention of all finite players is to eliminate the drama of the game by making a preferred
end inevitable.

Finite players seek to be Master Players, wherein surprise is no longer possible and every move
of the game is foreseen.

It is by surprising our opponent that we win a finite game.

It is the triumph of the past over the future.

Controlling the future prevents it from altering the past.

Infinite players expect to be surprised.

Surprise causes finite play to end, it is the reason for infinite play to continue.

All the moves of a finite player must be deceptive.

The infinite player expects to be transformed by surprise.

What one wins in a finite game is a title: the acknowledgment of others that one has been the
winner of a particular game.

The effectiveness of a title depends upon its visibility.

Society validates titles to assure their perpetual recognition.

A finite game must be won with a terminal move, a move which results in the death of the
opposing player as player.
Immortality is not a reward, but the condition necessary to the possession of rewards.

When life is viewed as the award to be won, then death is a token of defeat. It is not chosen, but
inflicted.

Death, for the finite player, is deserved.

If the losers are dead, the dead are losers.

If the prize for winning finite play is life, then the players are not properly alive.

Life is, then, not play, but the outcome of play.

All finite play is play against itself.

Immortality is a state of unrelieved theatricality. It is ultimately serious.

Immortality, for the finite player, is not of the soul, but of the persona.

Immortality is a life one cannot live.

Infinite players die, not as the result of play, but in the course of play. It is dramatic.

Infinite players do not play for their own life. They live for their own play.

To the degree that one is protected against the future, one has established a boundary, and no
longer plays with, but against, others.

The joyfulness of infinite play lies in learning to start something we cannot finish.

Infinite players have nothing but their name.


Names are given at birth, at the beginning of play.

When a person is known by title, the attention is on the completed past. When a person is known
only by name, the attention of others is on an open future.

Titles are theatrical.

The titled are powerful.

The exercise of power always presupposes resistance. It is never evident until two or more
elements are in opposition.

One wins to be powerful. It is of the past.

Power requires a title and is bestowed by an audience after the play is over.

Power is theatrical.

If we defer to titled winners, it is only because we consider ourselves as losers.

To do so is freely to take part in the theater of power.

Power is a feature only of finite games.

Infinite players do not oppose the actions of others, but initiate actions of their own in such a
way that others will respond by initiating their own.

Infinite players play with strength.

Strength carries the past into the future.


Strength refers to the freedom people have with limits.

Power is restricted.

Anyone can be strong.

I am strong because I can allow others to do what they wish in the course of my play with them.

Evil is the termination of infinite play.

Evil is the attempt to limit the play of another regardless of the rules.

Evil is not the acquisition of power, but the expression of power.

Evil is the forced recognition of a title.

The contradiction of evil is that it originates in the desire to eliminate evil.

Evil arises in the honored belief that history can be brought to a sensible conclusion.

Evil is the restriction of all play to one or another finite game

Only that which can change can continue.

~from Finite and Infinite Games by James P. Carse~


Canto VI
Lessons

~from The Future of the Body by Michael Murphy~


Cultural conditioning powerfully shapes metanormal capacities.

There exist extraordinary versions of most, if not all, human attributes.

Metanormal capacities point towards extraordinary types of embodiment.

Widespread realization of extraordinary capacities would constitute an evolutionary


transcendence.

All or most instances of human development are produced by a limited number of identifiable
activities.

These activities can be incorporated into transformative practice.

Extraordinary capacities may arise without benefit of formal discipline.

Metanormal capacities are mediated by superordinary agencies or processes.

Transformative practice can produce imbalanced development, inhibiting some


capacities while promoting others.

Balanced development is possible through integral practice.

Evidence supports some type of panentheism.

Development may be limited by focusing on partial but authentic experiences.


Transformative practices are interdependent.

Integral Transformative Practice should:


Be suited to each practitioner’s make up
Promote simultaneous development of our various faculties
Generally require several mentors
Require a strong and developing autonomy
Be facilitated by personal traits that promote creativity:
Tolerance of ambiguity
Openness to experience
Willingness to set aside reality testing
Nondefensiveness in relation to strong feelings or unusual ideas
Independence of judgment
Attraction to complexity and asymmetry
A capacity for creative regression
A capacity for nondominant hemispheric functioning
Flexibility of perception and ego boundaries
Ability to create order from chaos and to see similarities in the dissimilar
A capacity to perceive obscure figures or gestalts
A flair for rendering novel forms from complex stimuli
An unusual capacity for intuition
Psychological risk-taking
Emotional sensitivity
A strong desire to find pattern and meaning
A feeling of oneness with others
Encourage autonomy but require surrender at times to transformative agencies beyond
ordinary functioning
Require patience and a love of practice for its own sake
Utilize all-at-once responses
Utilize manifold changes catalyzed by images and altered states
Enlist more than one mediation to produce desired outcomes
Surpass limits by negotiation rather than force
Depend on improvisation
Utilize images of unity
Require and facilitate conscious transitions between different states of consciousness
Depend on developing awareness that transcends psychological and somatic functioning
Orient all our capacities and somatic processes toward the extra-ordinary life arising
within us.

~from Improvisation For The Theatre by Viola Spolin~


Freedom is first.

The learning environment should be free of authoritarianism.

The needs of the [practice] are the master.

Participation, not competition.

Practice is concerned with relationship, not merely information.

Before we can practice, we must be free to do so.

Looking to others to tell us where we are, who we are, and what is happening results in a serious
loss of selfhood.

Where approval-disapproval becomes the predominant regulator of effort and position, and often
the substitute for love, our personal freedoms are dissipated.

The expectancy of judgment prevents free relationships.


If we are to keep playing, natural competition must exist wherein each individual strives to solve
consecutively more complex problems.

This should be a world where every human predicament, riddle, or vision can be explored. A
world of magic where a rabbit can be pulled out of a hat when needed, and the devil himself can
be conjured up.

The goal evolves out of the activity, it must not be superimposed on it.

Avoid all preconceptions.

Seek to go beyond what we already know.

Do not confuse testing with teaching.

What we seek will evolve out of what we do to find it.

Problem-solving provides direct contact with the material and does away with the burden of
approval-disapproval.

Technical language should be reserved for clarification until the concept is understood.

Never give the student a question they cannot answer, nor a problem they cannot solve.

Evaluation, to be more than simple testing, must be free of personal judgment.

Evaluate what is done, not who does it.

Evaluation is not criticism.

Keep directions brief and concise.


Avoid labels.

Do not interpret for your students.

True learning re-makes the learner.

If your teaching tires you, your teaching is tiring.

Avoid giving examples. Let the students find their own solutions.

Discipline is freely given and evolves out of the environment.

Tension and release are implicit in learning.

If the environment permits it, anyone can learn whatever he chooses to learn. And if the
individual permits it, the environment will teach her everything it has to teach.

When people function beyond a constricted intellectual plane, they are truly open for learning.

Judging on your part, as teacher, limits your own experience as well as the students’. This limits
you to the use of rote-teaching, or formulas, or other standard concepts which prescribe student
behavior.

Methods alter to meet the needs of time and place.

The objective upon which the student must constantly focus and towards which every action
must be directed provokes spontaneity. In this spontaneity, personal freedom is released and the
total person is awakened. The student is freed to go out into the environment, to explore,
adventure, and face all dangers unafraid.
With no outside authority imposing itself on the players, telling them what to do, when to do it,
and how to do it, each player freely chooses self-discipline by accepting the rules of the game.

With no one to please or appease, the players can then focus full energy on the problem and learn
what they have come to learn.

In wishing to avoid approval, we must be careful not to detach ourselves in such a way that the
students feel lost or that they are learning nothing.

When the form of an art becomes static, isolated techniques presumed to make up the form are
taught and adhered to strictly.

Our constant concern is to keep a moving, living reality for our ourselves, not to labor
compulsively for an end-result.

Continuous work on, and the solving of problems opens everyone to their source and power.

While it is most essential that the teacher be aware of the part of the learning experience
explored in each activity and where it fits into the whole fabric, the student need not be so
informed.

Present problems quickly and simply.

All lessons are over the moment the problem is solved.

Try always to keep an environment where each can find their own nature.

Sometimes resistance is hidden to the student and shows itself in a great deal of argument and
questioning. Lack of discipline and resistance go hand in hand. For discipline can only grow out
of total involvement with the event.
The heart of learning is transformation.

Act, don’t react.

Every step is essential to growth.

The more blocked the student, or teacher, the longer the process.

Creativity is not re-arranging.

When students feel they did it themselves, the teacher has succeeded.

~from Multimind by Robert Ornstein~


We assume others are like us, and we judge people on our own set of criteria.

Our problem as individuals is that most often we act unconsciously and automatically.

Most sensory experiences are not absolute, but relative.

Our world appears to us the way it does because we are built the way we are.

Our biology gives our mental processes priorities.

Certain normal experiences cause innate abilities of the cortex to develop, but the exact
development depends on the particular world of the child.

We tend to attribute the actions of others to their general characteristics and our own actions to
the particular situation.
We are especially easy to influence because we are always comparing our behavior to that of
others.

The small mind, operating by comparison only, finds it difficult to resist such pressures to
conform even when the group is merely a random collection of strangers and there is no explicit
request to comply.

Comparing our behavior to that of others helps us define a situation.

We ignore more important or more valid evidence that is available to us and focus on what we
know.

We are organized by our specific emotions.

Emotion amplifies experience.

Any information, when it gets into consciousness, can affect all current or subsequent
experiences.

The idea of conscious development would allow the choice of multiple actions and multiple
ways of looking at a situation.

We remain unaware because we do not understand the complexity within ourselves.

Simple-minded first impressions are formed on the basis of snap judgments.

Intelligence is rather a limited judgment we make of others based on their array of talents. The
common element is that someone acts with excellence and originality in, what is considered by
those judging, the best way.
~from Journey to the Centers of the Mind by Susan Greenfield~
Consciousness is variable in depth, momentarily shrinking and expanding in accordance with our
interaction with the outside world.

Arousal is clearly a process, whereas mind is generally regarded as an entity. Consciousness


spans the bridge between both of these concepts and has elements of both.

Everything we experience is laced with associations from previous experiences.

Experience-related associations are not synonymous with consciousness. Rather, the neuro-
ecosphere built up slowly by a lifetime’s conglomeration of associations determines the quality
of our conscious experience.

Our consciousness grows as we do.

Objective, measurable responses have no obvious or immediate link with understanding


consciousness.

Consciousness is multi-modal.

We are either conscious or unconscious of things according to their importance, strength, or


intensity.

A fundamental property of consciousness is that it is continuously variable and can thus occur to
greater or lesser extents at different times.

Associations occur as our neurons form connections in certain ways as the result of exposure to
particular environments.

Connections among neurons are highly plastic and capable of great change.
There is no simple matching of the activity of certain neurons with certain conscious behaviors.

The degree of sensory intensity can influence consciousness.

Consciousness draws on associations as a poet does on images.

Consciousness is the product of an interaction of sensory and cognitive factors.

A moment of consciousness always entails a stimulus or focus.

Consciousness develops from epicenters.

Strength of stimulus elicits a greater degree of consciousness.

The more powerful or stronger the epicenter, whatever it may be in either physical properties or
psychological terms, the deeper the consciousness at that particular moment.

The concentric description of consciousness at the phenomenological level is based on a


triggering epicenter, albeit a sensory input or an internal cognitive factor or both, which sets in
motion non-linear, concentric associations. The more extensive or sustained they are, the more
consciousness will be experienced at that particular time. We need not actually be conscious of
these associations as separate components. Rather, they conspire together to give a single
experience at a specific moment in time.

Perception is global, not local. Objects or features are perceived in relation to one another,
giving a final holistic view that cannot be inferred from the individual components alone.

A neuronal gestalt is a highly variable aggregation of neurons which is temporarily recruited


around a triggering epicenter.

Attention=focused arousal.
We are constantly balancing a tendency for distraction with a need to pay attention.

Efficiency at a task is optimal in the middle range of arousal.

Consciousness is an emergent property of non-specialized and divergent groups of neurons


(gestalts) that is continuously variable with respect to, and always entailing, a stimulus epicenter.
The size of the gestalt, and hence the depth of the prevailing consciousness, is a product of the
interaction between the recruiting strength of the epicenter and the degree of arousal.

The target of focused arousal is the epicenter of a gestalt.

The more sophisticated a brain function, the more it is intimately linked to consciousness.

If new gestalts can be generated independently of the outside world through internal competition,
they no longer have to have an indirect correspondence and faithfulness to the outside world, to
reality.

The ripples from one gestalt trigger the epicenter of the next.

Small gestalts imply a poverty of associations with an object or idea, plus an inability to have
abstractions and free recall.

Smaller gestalts mean a world of more objects, but each with smaller significance.

A large gestalt would imply a sustained period of deep consciousness around a particular
epicenter that triggered many associations. Whereas a small gestalt would imply a shallow
consciousness of short duration centered around an epicenter where associations were sparse or
where there was insufficient time for many associations to be made.

Brain and environment are in constant dialogue.


Consciousness is the result of gestalt formation which is in turn influenced by arousal and
sensory inputs.

~from No Boundary by Ken Wilber~


As an individual draws up the boundaries of his soul, he establishes at the same time, the battles
of her soul.

To draw boundaries is to manufacture opposites.

The world of opposites is a world of conflict.

The firmer one’s boundaries, the more entrenched one’s battles.

Because our goals are not lofty but illusory, our problems are not difficult, but nonsensical.

All opposites arise simultaneously and mutually.

It is fine to map out the territory, it is fatal to confuse the two.

Every boundary carries with it political and technological power.

When the world is seen as void of boundaries, then all things and events are seen to be mutually
dependent and interpenetrating.

If reality is really a condition of no-boundary, then [the Way] is the natural state of awareness
and action which acknowledges this reality.

Of all the boundaries man constructs, the one between self and not-self is the most fundamental.

There is no more dangerous illusion than the fancies by which people try to avoid illusion.
Why are you unhappy? Because 99% of everything you think of and of everything you do, is for
yourself, and there isn’t one.

A language possesses utility only insofar as it can construct conventional boundaries.

Eternal life belongs to those who live in the present.

An impulse which arises in you and is naturally aimed at the environment, when projected,
appears as an impulse originating in the environment and aimed at you.

To fight a symptom is merely to fight the shadow contained in the symptom, and this is precisely
what caused the problem in the first place.

People and events don’t upset you, but are merely the occasions for you to upset yourself.

True spiritual practice springs from, but not toward enlightenment.

What on the surface we fervently desire, in the depths we necessarily prevent.

Original enlightenment is wonderful practice.

~from The Book by Alan Watts~


Wonder, and it’s expression in poetry and the arts, are among the most important things which
seem to distinguish men from animals, and intelligent and sensitive people from morons.

As the ocean ‘waves’, the universe ‘peoples’.

Irrevocable commitment to any religion is not only intellectual suicide, it is positive un-faith
because it closes the mind to any new vision of the world. Faith is, above all, openness, an act
of trust in the unknown.
Just as sight is something more than all things seen, the foundation of our existence and our
awareness cannot be understood in terms of things that are known.

God is underneath rather than above everything.

God plays the world from inside.

Genuine love comes not from a sense of duty or guilt.

You don’t die because you were never born, you have just forgotten who you are.

The material world means no more than the world as measured.

The more one interferes, the more one must analyze an ever growing volume of information
about the results of interference on a world whose infinite details are inextricably interwoven.

The more it sides with itself, the more the good soul reveals its inseparable shadow, and the more
it disowns its shadow, the more it becomes it.

It is the vivid image rather than the tenuous concept which has the greater influence on common
sense.

If the definition of a thing or event must include definition of it environment, we realize that any
given thing goes with a given environment so intimately and inseparably that it is more and more
difficult to draw a clear boundary between the thing and its surroundings.

Other people teach us who we are.

Society is our extended mind and body.

Life and love generate effort.


Faith is the attitude of allowing the spontaneous to be spontaneous, in its own way, and in its
own time.

The self imposed task of our society is a contradiction: to force things to happen which are
acceptable only when they happen without force.

For most of us the day is divided into work time and play time. The work consists largely of
tasks which others pay us to do because they are abysmally uninteresting.

The world is an ever elusive and ever disappointing mirage only from the standpoint of someone
standing aside from it and then trying to grasp it.

Fictions are useful so long as they are taken as fictions.

No figure is ever perceived except in relation to its background.

All features of the world hold their boundaries in common with the areas that surround them.

Thus the outline of the figure is also the inline of the background.

Just as no thing or organism exists on its own, it does not act on its own.

The organism is not other than its actions.

The organism, including it behavior, is a process which is to understood only in relation to the
larger and longer process of its environment.

Parts exist only for purposes of figuring and describing, and as we figure the world out, we
become confused if we do not remember that all the time.

Intelligent behavior implies an intelligent environment.


The relation between an organism and its environment is mutual.

In the act of putting everything at a distance so as to describe and control it, we have orphaned
ourselves from both the surrounding world and from our own bodies.

The universe implies the organism, and each single organism implies the universe.

No valid plans for the future can be made by those who have no capacity for living now.

You are nothing at all apart from everything else.

The universe is at root a magical illusion and a fabulous game.

So long as you manifest yourself in human form, you must eat at the expense of life and accept
the limitations of your particular organism.

To be viable, life must be lived as a game, and the ‘must’ here expresses a condition, not a
commandment.

No one can be compelled to behave freely or forced to act independently.

The goal of action is always contemplation. Knowing and being rather than seeking and doing.

Idolatry is not the use of images, but confusing them with what they represent.

The people we are tempted to call clods and boors are just those who seem to find nothing
fascinating in being human. Their humanity is incomplete, for it has never astonished them.

True humanity is knowledge of oneself.


~from Living Without A Goal by James Ogilvy~
A life enslaved to a single goal, no matter how noble, becomes a mechanism rather than an
organism, a business rather than a biography, a tool rather than a gift.

A life with a single goal robs you of your freedom, because a life devoted to a single goal
demands that every action serve that single end.

Many of us use goals to deny our own freedom.

When you try to identify the use of your entire life, you are asking to be used. When you try to
identify the function of your life, you are asking to be turned into a mere functionary.

Life, like art, serves no goal outside of itself.

The alternative to instrumental rationality is a more affective sensitivity less intent on


manipulating the world than on appreciating it.

The tyranny of impulse leads to myopia of the moment.

Pleasure can be courted but not calculated.

A goal should never compromise who it is who is achieving that goal.

School prepares you to live in a way that is not really living, but a perpetual preparation for life.

The self is no more found than a picture is found on a blank canvas.

A primary function of technology in industrial mass manufacturing was repetition, the repeated
production of more and more of the same thing by way of standardization. The function of
technology in an information economy is just the opposite...innovation...differentiations that
make a difference.
There are many communities of shared interests; a sign that we have evolved beyond total
dependence upon the uniformities of nature.

We are always implicated in systems that extend beyond the immediate moment. We are always
mediated.

In a symbolic economy, symbols are as real as it gets.

By nourishing the environment, one nourishes oneself.

There is no refuge in the absolute.

No matter how extraordinary any single experience may be, there’s always the morning after.

Sublimation is the process of mediation, placing intermediaries between desire and its object,
finding some romance in what would otherwise suffer the compulsiveness of instinct.

Sublimation works by adding layers of symbolic richness to what would otherwise be boring
literalism.

In the absence of absolutes, we may not know why certain acts are wrong, even if we know that
they are wrong.

Morality is less a matter of moralizing than of savoring.

The symbolic order is rife with ambiguity, riddled with arbitrariness, and rent with differences of
mere taste.

Without a master narrative shared by all nations and cultures, we lack a common ground for a
shared morality.
Living without a goal demands that we wrestle with the question of good and evil, but that we do
so in the context of the sublime. The customs of a community or a tradition may be sufficient for
dealing with most moral crises within that community. The relativization of values takes its toll
only when we attempt to span vast cultural distances.

Interpretation in the symbolic order is different from calculation in the physical order.

Customs are the work of cultures, and culture is the product of sublimation. And sublimation is
the product of minds that use symbols, memories, and associations to weave a complex fabric of
meaning.

Only the actions of symbol users enters the moral realm. And those actions are always subject to
the threat of evil because part of what turns a physical movement into an action is a conscious
intention. And the intention of an action, to the extent that it can be articulated in words, is
always open to interpretation.

It is the language as a whole that gives each word its meaning.

The meanings of our actions are defined by human culture.

By being aware of the multiple meanings of each moment, the lively mind lives in a richer
world.

The structure of humor and play predetermines the inevitability of the play going wrong sooner
or later.

The consequence of your failing to understand my true intention means that you will attribute to
me some intention that changes the meaning of my acts in your eyes.

There is danger that, confusing culture with nature, we will become imprisoned by a belief in the
rigidity of what we respect.
Freedom demands that we have a vivid sense of the plasticity of the human condition.

Transgression tests the rules and reminds us of both their power and their plasticity.

The task of the artist, like the task of living, has no end outside itself and no guarantee of
success.

Living without a goal calls for a balance of freedom and discipline. It occurs in real time. It
builds on what has gone before. It demands an ability to bend the momentum of tradition toward
the unprecedented. It requires creativity.

Aesthetics and ethics are about the judgment of the unique and the particular, while science and
mathematics are about the laws of the universal and repeatable, which human life never is.

If you approach each day as an artist approaches a blank canvas, then you confront the challenge
of living without a goal.

Neither beauty nor happiness can be guaranteed by following some set of precise rules.

Finding extreme pleasure will make you a better person, if you’re careful about what thrills you.

Humanity is most human in its freedom.

We do not find the good by avoiding all evil, but by finding our way through what could become
evil if we do not recognize it as such.

It is possible to experience the present as the sustained attainment of a goal rather than as the
instrumental means toward that end.

We would be so much less sad if we learned letting go.


~from Freedom From The Known by Jiddu Krishnamurti~
Faith invariably breeds violence.

A distorted mind, which has denied the outer world and been made dull through discipline and
conformity, such a mind, however long it seeks, will find only according to its own distortion.

A respectable human being cannot possibly come near to the infinite, immeasurable reality.

Immaturity lies only in total ignorance of self.

The whole history of man is written in ourselves.

We are totally responsible for the whole state of the world.

Truth has no path, and that is the beauty of truth...it is living.

All ideologies are utterly idiotic.

If you try to study yourself according to another, you will always remain a second hand citizen.

To be free of all authority, of your own and that of another, is to die to everything of yesterday,
so that your mind is always fresh, always young, always innocent, full of vigor and passion.

You have to question everything that man has accepted as valuable and necessary.

Learning about yourself is always in the present and knowledge is always in the past. And, as
most of us live in the past and are satisfied with the past, knowledge becomes extraordinarily
important to us.

Learning implies a great sensitivity.


To understand anything you must live with it.

Only when there is an emotional content do you become vital.

When you become aware of your conditioning, you will understand the whole of your
consciousness.

To find pleasure, and then nourish it and sustain it, is a basic demand of life and without it
existence becomes dull, stupid, and meaningless.

Anything that is the result of memory is old and therefore never free.

It is the struggle to repeat and perpetuate pleasure which turns it into pain.

Living in the present is the instant perception of beauty and the great delight in it without seeking
pleasure from it.

One of the major causes of fear is that we do not want to face ourselves as we are.

I am not my brother’s keeper.

Violence is not merely killing another. It is violence when we use a sharp word, when we make
a gesture to brush away a person, when we obey because there is fear.

When you separate yourself by belief, by nationality, by tradition, it breeds violence.

What is important is the fact that we are violent, not the reason for it.

In all our relationships each one of us builds an image about the other and these two images have
relationship, not the human beings themselves.
One cannot live in an abstraction.

All our relationships, whether they are with property, ideas, or people, are based essentially on
image-forming, and hence there is always conflict.

Man has accepted conflict as an innate part of daily existence because he has accepted
competition, jealousy, greed, acquisitiveness and aggression as a natural way of life.

You may think there is no waste of energy if you imitate, if you accept authority, but the
following and acceptance of an ideology is a fragmentary activity and therefore a cause of
conflict. And conflict will inevitably arise so long as there is a division between ‘what should
be’ and ‘what is’, and any conflict is a dissipation of energy.

If you do not compare yourself with another, you will be what you are.

It is only when you live with something intimately that you begin to understand it.

You cannot live without dying.

Most of us are frightened of dying because we don’t know what it means to live.

As long as we are frightened of life we shall be frightened of death.

Freedom from the known is death, and then you are living.

The demand to be safe in relationship inevitably breeds sorrow and fear.

To divide anything into what should be and what is, is the most deceptive way of dealing with
life.

Sorrow is self-created.
It is only when we see beyond any preconception, any image, that we are able to be in direct
contact with anything in life.

We have separated ideas from action because ideas are always of the past and action is always of
the present. We are afraid of living and therefore the past, as ideas, has become so important to
us.

Discipline must be without control, without suppression, without any form of fear.

To deny authority, one has to see why one normally obeys.

You recognize an experience according to your conditioning, and therefore the recognition of an
experience must inevitably be old.

~from the works of Frank Herbert~


The true seeker goes on a journey into a land where we walk without footprints.

The first lesson of all is the lesson that you can learn. Every experience carries its lesson.

What do you desire? By this are you truly known.

Speak directly to the senses with your own life.

Caution is the path to mediocrity.

Greatness is a transitory experience.

A true creation is independent of its creator.


It has not occurred to you that your ancestors were survivors and that the survival itself
sometimes involved savage decisions, a kind of wanton brutality which civilized humankind
works very hard to suppress. What price will you pay for that suppression? Will you accept your
own extinction?

Short-term expediency always fails in the long-term.

The person who takes the banal and ordinary and illuminates it in a new way can terrify.

We melt into one at the touch of infinity.

Poetry is what is lost in the translation.

Roots and wings: but let the wings grow roots, and let the roots fly.

I will this morning climb up in spirit to the high places, bearing with me the hopes and the
miseries of my mother. And there, upon all that in the world of human flesh is now about to be
born or to die beneath the rising sun, I will call down the fire.

These fleshly sensoria which we call ‘self’ are ephemera withering in the blaze of infinity,
fleetingly aware of temporary conditions which confine our activities and change as our
activities change.

It is wise to guide your actions in such a way that the interests of others coincide with your own.

Nostalgia represents an interesting illusion. Through nostalgia humans wish for things that never
were.

Truth suffers from too much analysis.

An infinite universe presents infinite examples of unreasoned acts.


When you think to take determination of your fate into your own hands, that is the moment you
can be crushed. Be cautious. Allow for surprises. When we create, there are always other
forces at work.

As long as you believe yourself helpless, you remain helpless.

Gods have plans too.

Religion begins when men seek to influence a god.

Intelligence is a poor cousin to understanding.

To survive a civilization’s time of madness, we are forced to go mad.

An object of worship can never be itself.

The ‘is’ is holy and the void is home.

When law and duty are one, united by religion or other dogma, you never become fully
conscious, fully aware of yourself. You are always a little less than an individual.

Respect for the truth comes close to being the basis for all morality. This is profound thinking if
you understand how unstable ‘the truth’ can be.

Religion encysts path mythologies, guesses, hidden assumptions of trust in the universe,
pronouncements made in search of personal power, all mingled with shreds of enlightenment.
And always an unspoken commandment: thou shalt not question.

The universe is just there. It neither threatens nor promises. This is the only way to view it and
still remain master of the senses.
The temptation to choose a clear, safe course warns: this path leads ever down into stagnation.

The forgotten language of our animal past conveys the necessity for challenges. Not to be
challenged is to atrophy. And the ultimate challenge is to overcome entropy, to break through
the barriers which enclose and isolate life.

The touch of the infant teaches birth, and our hands are witness to the lesson.

Death is not the answer to life.

Reveries, mad reveries, lead life.

The problem of leadership is, inevitably, who will play god?

The distresses of choice are our chance to be blessed.

At any given moment of history it is the function of associations of devoted individuals to


undertake tasks which clear-sighted people perceive to be necessary, but which nobody else is
willing to perform.

Today changes history.

All contemporaries do not inhabit the same time.

As a people you react against threats to innocence and the peril of the helpless young.
Unexplained sounds, visions, and smells raise the hackles you have forgotten you possess.
When alarmed, you cling to your native language because all other patterned sounds are strange.
You demand acceptable dress because a strange costume is threatening. This is systems
feedback at its most primitive. The cells remember.

The species can forget.


If it tastes bitter, spit it out.

Most discipline is hidden discipline, designed not to liberate, but to limit. Do not ask ‘Why?’,
be cautious with ‘How?’. ‘Why?’ leads inexorably into paradox. ‘How?’ traps you in a universe
of cause and effect. Both deny the infinite.

The concept of progress acts as a protective mechanism to shield us from the terrors of the
future.

Beyond a critical point within a finite space, freedom diminishes as numbers increase. The
human question is not how many can possibly survive within the system, but what kind of
existence is possible for those who do survive.

There are some forms of insanity which, driven to the ultimate expression, can become the new
models of sanity.

Given the proper leverage at the proper point, any sentient awareness can be exploded into
astonishing self-understanding.

The mind falls, the will drives on.

I play the song to which you must dance. To you is left the freedom of the improvisation. This
improvisation is what you call free will.

Humans spend their lives in mazes. If they escape and cannot find another maze, they create
one.

If you understand, you construct barriers.

A key function of logic limits argument, and therefore confines the thinking process.
The repressed share the psychoses and neurosis of the caged. As the caged run when released,
the repressed explode when confronted with their condition.

It is reverie which delineates the furthest limits of the mind.

To confront a person with his shadow, is to show him his own light.

The highest function of love is that it makes the loved one a unique and irreplaceable being.

Anyone who threatens the mind or its symbolizing endangers the matrix of humanity itself.

So many things fail to interest us simply because they do not find in us enough surfaces on which
to live. A nd what we have to do then is increase the number of planes in our mind, so that a
much larger number of themes can find a place in it at the same time.

Humans tend to think of everything in a sequential, word-oriented framework. This mental trap
produces very short-term concepts of effectiveness and consequences. A condition of constant,
unexplained response to crisis.

Ready comprehension is often a knee-jerk response and the most dangerous form of
understanding. It blinks an opaque screen over your ability to learn. Be warned: understand
nothing. All comprehension is temporary.

Education is no substitute for intelligence.

Humans are born with a susceptibility to that most persistent and debilitating disease of intellect:
self deception.

Making workable choices occurs in a crucible of informative mistakes. Thus intelligence accepts
fallibility. And when absolute (infallible) choices are not known, intelligence takes chances with
limited data in an arena where mistakes are not only possible, but necessary.
Some never participate. Life happens to them. They get by on little more than dumb persistence
and resist with anger or violence all things that might lift them out of resentment filled illusions
of security.

Confine yourself to observing and you always miss the point of your own life.

Life is a game whose rules you learn only if you leap into it and play it to the hilt.

No matter how exotic human civilization becomes, there are always interludes of lonely power
when the course of humankind depends on the simple actions of single individuals.

Boredom is good and sufficient reason for the invention of free will.

Never let self indulgence carry you away.

Perhaps the immobility of things around us is forced upon them by the immobility of our
perceptions of them.

Forceful rejection of the past is the coward’s way of removing inconvenient knowledge.

All ground is temporary. Law is made to be changed.

To think of a power means not only to use it, but to abuse it.

Feed people, then ask of them virtue.

Increase the number of variables, but the axioms themselves never change.

When I am weaker than you, I ask you for freedom because that is according to your principles.
When I am stronger than you, I take away your freedom because that is according to my
principles.
Paired opposites define your longings, and those longings will imprison you.

The convoluted wording of legalisms grew up around the necessity to hide from ourselves the
violence we intend toward each other. Between depriving a man of one hour from his life and
depriving him of his life there exists only a matter of degree. You have done violence to him,
consumed his energy. Elaborate euphemisms may conceal your intent to kill, but behind any use
of power over another the ultimate assumption remains: I feed on your energy.

Given any species which reproduces through genetic mingling such that every individual is a
unique specimen, all attempts to impose a decision matrix based on assumed uniform behavior
will prove lethal.

Rules build up fortifications behind which small minds create satrapies.

Peace is an internal matter.

Every leader requires outsiders to perpetuate his leadership.

All governments suffer a recurring problem: power attracts pathological personalities. It is not
that power corrupts, but that it is magnetic to the corruptible.

We tend to become like the worst in those we oppose.

Give me the judgment of balanced minds in preference to laws every time. Codes and manuals
create patterned behavior, and all patterned behavior tends to go unquestioned, gathering
destructive momentum.

Peace demands solutions, but we never reach living solutions, we only work towards them. A
fixed solution is, by definition, a dead solution.

The trouble with peace is that it tends to punish mistakes instead of rewarding brilliance.
Every civilization depends upon the quality of the individuals it produces.

If you over-organize humans, over-legalize them, suppress their urge to greatness, they cannot
work, and their civilization collapses.

Laws to suppress tend the strengthen what they would prohibit.

If you think of yourselves as helpless and ineffectual, it is certain that you will create a despotic
government to be you master.

The more control, the more that requires control.

The people who can destroy a thing, control a thing.

Any power must always meet a greater power.

Anyone who has the power to make you believe absurdities has the power to make you commit
injustices.

Choose containable violence when violence cannot be avoided.

No individual or group is to be trusted farther than they are bound by their own interests.

We accept too many things on the explanations of people who could have good reasons for lying.

If you believe certain words, you believe their hidden arguments. You believe the assumptions
in the words which express the arguments. Such assumptions are often full of holes, but remain
most precious to the convinced.

A leader tries to perpetuate the conditions which perpetuate his leadership.


The writing of history is largely a process of distraction and diversion.

Those who would repeat the past must control the teaching of history.

Any road followed precisely to its end leads precisely nowhere.

Square thoughts resist circles.

Too long a parasite and you cannot live without a host.

Too little law injures a society. It is the same with too much law.

Law must retain useful ways to break with traditional forms because nothing is more certain than
that the forms of law remain when all justice is gone.

Societies move to the goading of ancient, reactive impulses. They demand permanence. Any
attempt to display the universe of impermanence arouses rejection patterns, fear, anger, and
despair.

Every civilization must contend with an unconscious force which can block, betray, or
countermand almost any conscious intention of the collectivity.

All persons act from beliefs they are conditioned not to question. Therefore, whoever presumes
to judge must be asked, “How are you affronted?” You must begin there to question inwardly as
well as outwardly.

People always devise their own justifications. Fixed and immovable law merely provides a
convenient structure within which to hang your justifications and the prejudices behind them.

Law must expose prejudice and question justification. Thus, law must be flexible, must change
to fit new demands. Otherwise, it becomes merely the justification of the powerful.
Life is its own reason.

Life is not a option, it is a gift. Death is the option.

The things that people want and the things that are good for them are very different. Sooner or
later you will have to make your choice.

The tangible, existent universe is governed by two fundamental laws: all things are logical and
make sense; and, no things are ever what they seem.

Canto VII
Reflections~~

~sources unknown~
There are those who decide not to be satisfied with reality. Such people aim at altering the
course of things. They refuse to repeat gestures that custom, tradition, or instinct force them to
make. These people we call heroes...because to be a hero means to be one out of many...to be
oneself.

The child who refuses to travel in her parents harness, this is the symbol of humanity’s most
unique capability: ‘I do not have to be what my parents were. I do not have to obey their rules
or even believe everything they believed. It is my strength as a human that I can make my own
choices of what to believe and what not to believe, of what to be and what not to be’.

The Way implies but one ethic: in all ways, at all times, in all that you do, seek, to the utmost of
your understanding, the good, the true, and the beautiful.

The morality of the Way is self evident: do what you know to be right, always.
The desires of living are four: pleasure, success, service, liberation. Seek them, court them, each
and every one in its highest glory as your nature calls you. Indulge in none, for indulgence
merely strengthens desire and is, itself, the trap of the damned. Know that in the fullness of life
each shall prove hollow and cold. In that singular moment the truth shall break upon you like a
forgotten name remembered. Being beyond being. Awareness beyond awareness. Joy beyond
joy. All desire shall flee into the night of ignorance and your life shall cease to be your own and
shall be, always and ever, simply lived.

Create your own future, lest others create it for you.

Love and care for one another. For if you do not, who will?

Live as the Spirit moves you.

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