(none)

The central long-term concern of religion must be to promote further evolutionary improvement and to realise new possibilities; and this means greater fulfillment by more human individuals and fuller achievement by more human societies.

An equally powerful short-term motive is to ensure the fullest possible development and flowering of individual personalities. In developing a full, deep and rich personality the individual ceases to be a mere cog or cipher, and makes his own particular contribution to evolutionary fulfillment.

-Julian Huxley

Only for Beginners

Art, I suppose, is only for beginners, or else for those resolute dead-enders, who have made up their minds to be content with the ersatz of Suchness, with symbols rather than with what they signify, with the elegantly composed recipe in lieu of actual dinner.

Aldous Huxley, The Doors of Perception

Islands

We live together, we act on, and react to, one another; but always and in all circumstances we are by ourselves. The martyrs go hand in hand into the arena; they are crucified alone. Embraced, the lovers desperately try to fuse their insulated ecstasies into a single self-transcendence; in vain. By its very nature every embodied spirit is doomed to suffer and enjoy in solitude. Sensations, feelings, insights, fancies—all these are private and, except through symbols and at second hand, incommunicable. We can pool information about experiences, but never the experiences themselves. From family to nation, every human group is a society of island universes.
Most island universes are sufficiently like one another to permit of inferential understanding or even of mutual empathy or "feeling into." Thus, remembering our own bereavements and humiliations, we can condole with others in analogous circumstances, can put ourselves (always, of course, in a slightly Pickwickian sense) in their places. But in certain cases communication between universes is incomplete or even nonexistent. The mind is its own place, and the places inhabited by the insane and the exceptionally gifted are so different from the places where ordinary men and women live, that there is little or no common ground of memory to serve as a basis for understanding or fellow feeling. Words are uttered, but fail to enlighten. The things and events to which the symbols refer belong to mutually exclusive realms of experience.

Aldous Huxley, The Doors of Perception

Masochism

That the ascetic ideal has meant so many things to man...is an expression of the basic fact of the human will, its horror vacui: it needs a goal - and it will rather will nothingness than not will.

There is no necessary antithesis between chastity and sensuality; every good marriage, every genuine love affair, transcends this antithesis.
But even in those cases in which this antithesis between chastity and sensuality really exists, there is fortunately no need for it to be a tragic antithesis. At least this holds good for all those well-constituted, joyful mortals who are far from regarding their unstable equilibrium between "animal and angel" as necessarily an argument against existence - the subtlest and brightest among them have even found in it, like Goethe and Hafiz, one more stimulus to life. It is precisely such "contradictions" that seduce one to existence,

Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals

Simorgh

Advaitism holds that when human beings think of Brahman, the Supreme Cosmic Spirit is projected upon the limited, finite human mind and appears as Ishvara. Therefore, the mind projects human attributes, such as personality, motherhood, and fatherhood on the Supreme Being. An interesting metaphor is that when the "reflection" of the Cosmic Spirit falls upon the mirror of Maya, it appears as the Supreme Lord.

Come you lost Atoms to your Centre draw,

And be the Eternal Mirror that you saw:

Rays that have wander'd into Darkness wide

Return and back into your Sun subside

Rosetta Stoned

E.T. revealed to me his singular purpose.
He said, "You are the Chosen One,
the One who will deliver the message.
A message of hope for those who choose to hear it
and a warning for those who do not."

Overwhelmed as one would be, placed in my position.
Such a heavy burden now to be the One
Born to bear and bring to all the details of our ending,
To write it down for all the world to see.

I can't remember what they said to me
Can't remember what they said to make me out to be the hero
Can't remember what they said
Bob help me!
Can't remember what they said

We don't know, and we won't know.

Tool, Rosetta Stoned

Born into Colour

If you want a comparison that will make you clearly grasp the difference between the perception, such as it is understood by that sect [the Sufis], and the perception as others understand it, imagine a person born blind, endowed however with a happy natural temperament, with a lively and firm intelligence, a sure memory, a straight sprite, who grew up from the time he was an infant in a city where he never stopped learning, by means of the senses he did dispose of, to know the inhabitants individually, the numerous species of beings, living as well as non-living, there, the streets and sidestreets, the houses, the steps, in such a manner as to be able to cross the city without a guide, and to recognize immediately those he met; the colours alone would not be known to him except by the names they bore, and by certain definitions that designated them. Suppose that he had arrived at this point and suddenly, his eyes were opened, he recovered his view, and he crosses the entire city, making a tour of it. He would find no object different from the idea he had made of it; he would encounter nothing he didn’t recognize, he would find the colors conformable to the descriptions of them that had been given to him; and in this there would only be two new important things for him, one the consequence of the other: a clarity, a greater brightness, and a great voluptuousness.

Ibn Tufail, Hayy ibn Yaqdhan

In this context, how significant is the enormous heightening, under mescalin, of the perception of color! For certain animals it is biologically very important to be able to distinguish certain hues. But beyond the limits of their utilitarian spectrum, most creatures are completely color blind. Bees, for example, spend most of their time "deflowering the fresh virgins of the spring"; but, as Von Frisch has shown, they can recognize only a very few colors. Man's highly developed color sense is a biological luxury—inestimably precious to him as an intellectual and spiritual being, but unnecessary to his survival as an animal. To judge by the adjectives which Homer puts into their mouths, the heroes of the Trojan War hardly excelled the bees in their capacity to distinguish colors. In this respect, at least, mankind's advance has been prodigious.
Mescalin raises all colors to a higher power and makes the percipient aware of innumerable fine shades of difference, to which, at ordinary times, he is completely blind. It would seem that, for Mind at Large, the so-called secondary characters of things are primary. Unlike Locke, it evidently feels that colors are more important, better worth attending to, than masses, positions and dimensions. Like mescalin takers, many mystics perceive supernaturally brilliant colors, not only with the inward eye, but even in the objective world around them. Similar reports are made by psychics and sensitives. There are certain mediums to whom the mescalin taker's brief revelation is a matter, during long periods, of daily and hourly experience.

Aldous Huxley, The Doors of Perception



Walk out like someone suddenly born into colour.

Rumi

God was a madman. ("Trials" revisited)

The voyager, as he tells, had a "particularly acute feeling" that the world he now was experiencing was established on three planes, with himself in the middle sphere, a plane of higher realizations above, and a sort of waiting-room plane beneath. Compare the cosmic image in the Bible, of God's heaven above, the earth beneath, and the waters beneath the earth. Or consider Dante's Divine Comedy, the temple towers of India and the Middle American Mayas, the ziggurats of old Sumer. Below are the hells of suffering; aloft, the Heaven of light; and between, the mountain of ascending souls in stages of spiritual progress. According to Jesse Watkins, most of us are on the lowest level, waiting (en attendant Godot, one might say), as in a general waiting room; not yet in the middle room of struggle and quest at which he himself had arrived. He had feelings of invisible gods above, about, and all around, who were in charge and running things; and in the high place, the highest job, was the highest god of all.
Moreover, what made it all so terrible was the knowledge that ultimately everybody would have to assume that job at the top. All those around him in the madhouse, who, like himself, had died and were in the middle, purgatorial stage, were - as he phrased it - "sort of awakening." (The meaning of the word buddha, let us recall, is "the awakened one.") Those all around him in the madhouse were on their ways - awakening - to assume in their own time that top position, and the one now up there was God. God was a madman. He was the one that was bearing it all: "this enormous load," as Watkins phrased it, "of having to be aware and governing and running things." "The journey is there and every single one of us," he reported, "has got to go through it, and you can't dodge it, and the purpose of everything and the whole of existence is to equip you to take another step, and another step, and another step, and so on..."

Joseph Campbell, Schizophrenia - the Inward Journey


[Man] is nothing else than the narrow and perilous bridge between nature and spirit.

Hermann Hesse, Steppenwolf

Centre and Circumference

What such an excluded one will be striving for in his inward lonely journey will be the finding or the fashioning of a center - not a family center, but a world center - of which he will be the pivotal being. Dr. Perry told me of the case of a schizophrenic patient who was so completely and profoundly cut off that no one could establish any communication with him at all. One day, this poor mute person, in the doctor's presence, drew a crude circle, and then just placed the point of his pencil in the middle of it. Dr. Perry stooped and said to him, "You are in the center, aren't you! Aren't you!" And that message got through, initiating the course of a return.

Joseph Campbell, Schizophrenia - the Inward Journey


The Way is round, a vast emptiness,
nothing lacking, nothing left over.
Only because you choose and reject
does it cease to be so.

Seng-Ts'an, The Hsin-Hsin-Ming

Obeying the Voice of Being

The logos of being, "Thought obeying the Voice of Being," is the first and the last resource of the sign, of the difference between signans and signatum. There has to be a transcendental signified for the difference between signifier and signified to be somewhere absolute and irreducible. It is not by chance that the thought of being, as the thought of this transcendental signified, is manifested above all in the voice: in a language of words [mots]. The voice is heard (understood) - that undoubtedly is what is called conscience - closest to the self as the absolute effacement of the signifier: pure auto-affection that necessarily has the form of time and which does not borrow from outside of itself, in the world or in "reality," any accessory signifier, any substance of expression foreign to its own spontaneity. It is the unique experience of the signified producing itself spontaneously, from within the self, and nevertheless, as signified concept, in the element of ideality or universality. The unworldly character of this substance of expression is constitutive of this ideality. This experience of the effacement of the signifier in the voice is not merely one illusion among many - since it is the condition of the very idea of truth - but I shall elsewhere show in what it does delude itself. This illusion is the history of truth and it cannot be dissipated so quickly. Within the closure of this experience, the word [mot] is lived as the elementary and undecomposable unity of the signified and the voice, of the concept and a transparent substance of expression. This experience is considered in its greatest purity - and at the same time in the condition of its possibility - as the experience of "being." The word "being," or at any rate the words designating the sense of being in different languages, is, with some others, an "originary word" ("Uwort"), the transcendental word assuring the possibility of being-word to all other words.

Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology

Only Breath

Not Christian or Jew or Muslim, not Hindu,
Buddhist, sufi, or zen. Not any religion

or cultural system. I am not from the East
or the West, not out of the ocean or up

from the ground, not natural or ethereal, not
composed of elements at all. I do not exist,

am not an entity in this world or the next,
did not descend from Adam and Eve or any

origin story. My place is placeless, a trace
of the traceless. Neither body or soul.

I belong to the beloved, have seen the two
worlds as one and that one call to and know,

first, last, outer, inner, only that
breath breathing human being.

Rumi


I am the wind that blows o'er the sea;
I am the wave of the deep;
I am the bull of seven battles;
I am the eagle on the rock;
I am a tear of the sun;
I am the fairest of plants;
I am a boar for courage;
I am a salmon in the water;
I am a lake in the plain;
I am the word of knowledge;
I am the head of the battle-dealing spear;
I am the god who fashions fire in the head.

Amairgen


The words, including nama-roopa (name and form) cannot have, by their very nature, any steadiness. Even ideas about yourselves are bound to change. Give me an idea of what you consider as yourself, you cannot, it changes. Mind does not speak to personality, it is its creation, mind speaks to mind, boy friend, girl friend and so on, all are movements in consciousness. At that point of consciousness where one’s mind realizes the ‘I Am’ (I amness), the word, breath and mind is one.

When I see I am nothing, that is wisdom. When I see I am everything, that is love. My life is a movement between these two.

Nisargadatta Maharaj

Two and One

This is the most important teaching: not two, and not one. Our body and mind are not two and not one. If you think your body and mind are two, that is wrong; if you think that they are one, that is also wrong. Our body and mind are both two and one. We usually think that if something is not one, it is more than one; if it is not singular, it is plural. But in actual experience, our life is not only plural, but also singular. Each one of us is both dependent and independent.

If your mind is related to something outside itself, that mind is a small mind, a limited mind. If your mind is not related to anything else, then there is no dualistic understanding in the activity of your mind. You understand activity as just waves of your mind. Big mind experiences everything within itself. Do you understand the difference between the two minds: the mind which includes everything, and the mind which is related to something? Actually they are the same thing, but the understanding is different, and your attitude towards your life will be different according to which understanding you have.

The reason everything looks beautiful is because it is out of balance, but its background is always in perfect harmony.

Takuan Soho

A Comfortable Room

You have a picture of life within you, a faith, a challenge, and you were ready for deeds and sufferings and sacrifices, and then you became aware by degrees that the world asked no deeds and no sacrifices of you whatever, and that life is no poem of heroism with heroic parts to play and so on, but a comfortable room where people are quite content with eating and drinking, coffee and knitting, cards and wireless. And whoever wants more and has got it in him - the heroic and the beautiful, and the reverence for the great poets or for the saints - is a fool and a Don Quixote.

Hermann Hesse, Steppenwolf


It's 4 a.m. Nasruddin leaves the tavern and walks the town aimlessly. A policeman stops him. "Why are you out wandering the streets in the middle of the night?" "Sir," replies Nasruddin, "if I knew the answer to that question, I would have been home hours ago!"

Wireless

There the industrious young man spent his evenings, fitting together the apparatus, a victim to the charms of wireless, and kneeling on pious knees before the god of applied science whose might had made it possible to discover after thousands of years a fact which every thinker has always known and put to better use than in this recent and very imperfect development. We spoke about this, for the aunt had a slight leaning to piety and religious topics were not unwelcome to her. I told her that the omnipresence of all forces and facts was well known to ancient India, and that science had merely brought a small fraction of this fact into general use by devising for it, that is, for sound waves, a receiver and transmitter which were still in their first stages and miserably defective. The principal fact known to that ancient knowledge was, I said, the unreality of time. This science had not yet observed. Finally, it would, of course, make this "discovery," also, and then the inventors would get busy over it. The discovery would be made - and perhaps very soon - that there were floating round us not only the pictures and events of the transient present in the same way that music from Paris or Berlin was now heard in Frankfurt or Zurich, but that all that had ever happened in the past could be registered and brought back likewise. We might well look for the day when, with wires or without, with or without the disturbance of other sounds, we should hear King Solomon speaking, or Walter von der Vogelweide. And all this, I said, just as today was the case with the beginnings of wireless, would be of no more service to man than as an escape from himself and his true aims, and a means of surrounding himself with an ever closer mesh of distractions and useless activities.

In eternity there is no posterity.

Hermann Hesse, Steppenwolf

Innocence

When people talk about going back to nature, do they really know what they are asking for?

Joseph Campbell, Schizophrenia - the Inward Journey


He who sentimentally sings of blessed childhood is thinking of the return to nature and innocence and the origin of things, and has quite forgotten that these blessed children are beset with conflict and complexities and capable of all suffering.

Every created thing, even the simplest, is already guilty, already multiple.

The way to innocence, to the uncreated and to God leads on, not back, not back to the wolf or to the child, but ever further into sin, ever deeper into human life.

Hermann Hesse, Steppenwolf


"But I'm not guilty," said K. "It's a mistake. How can any person in general be guilty? We're all human after all, each and every one of us." "That's right," said the priest, "but that's how guilty people always talk." "Are you prejudiced against me too?" asked K. "I'm not prejudiced against you," said the priest. "Thank you," said K. "But everyone else involved with the proceedings is prejudiced against me. And they instill it in those who aren't involved. My position is becoming increasingly difficult." "You misunderstand the facts of the matter," said the priest. "The judgment isn't simply delivered at some point; the proceedings gradually merge into the judgment."

Franz Kafka, The Trial


Oh memory, art thou living yet? Quickened indeed by the very impulse of the burning flame, memory revives and takes the back track of a man's life and goes back into those days of innocence and love, goes back and feels the kiss of mother once again, goes back and hears the sermon in the old church, goes back to the very day when the preacher talked about hell and the man believed it not; goes back to opportunity and sunshine and light again. Oh, memory, memory, memory! Oh, if a man could go to hell and leave his memory behind him it would not be hell. After all, hell is memory and memory is hell.

Rev. J.B. Cranfill, A Man in Hell



"O nobly born, let not thy mind be distracted." That was the problem—to remain undistracted. Undistracted by the memory of past sins, by imagined pleasure, by the bitter aftertaste of old wrongs and humiliations, by all the fears and hates and cravings that ordinarily eclipse the Light.

Aldous Huxley, The Doors of Perception

Layers

Man is an onion made up of a hundred integuments, a texture made up of many threads.

Hermann Hesse, Steppenwolf

Carapace

The judge who sits over the murderer and looks into his face, and at one moment recognizes all the emotions and potentialities and possibilities of the murderer in his own soul and hears the murderer's voice as his own, is at the next moment one and indivisible as the judge, and scuttles back into the shell of his cultivated self and does his duty and condemns the murderer to death.

...the bourgeois today burns as heretics and hangs as criminals those to whom he erects monuments tomorrow.

Man is not by any means of fixed and enduring form (this, in spite of suspicions to the contrary on the part of their wise men, was the ideal of the ancients). He is much more an experiment and a transition. He is nothing else than the narrow and perilous bridge between nature and spirit.

Hermann Hesse, Steppenwolf


Most people never have to face the fact that, at the right time and the right place, they're capable of anything.

Chinatown


Human nature, essentially changeable, unstable as the dust, can endure no restraint; if it binds itself it soon begins to tear madly at its bonds, until it rends everything asunder, the wall, the bonds, and its very self.

Franz Kafka, The Great Wall and the Tower of Babel



The primary nature of consciousness is not to remain constant. Objects keep on changing, when the mind stops, there is no-mind. The very nature of consciousness is to change, but you think one thing, then the very next second, something different, if consciousness becomes steady it will be awareness.

Nisargadatta Maharaj

Literary Mandala

All interpretation, all psychology, all attempts to make things comprehensible, require the medium of theories, mythologies and lies; and a self-respecting author should not omit, at the close of an exposition, to dissipate these lies so far as may be in his power. If I say "above" or "below," that is already a statement that requires explanation, since an above and a below exist only in thought, only as abstractions. The world itself knows nothing of above or below.

Hermann Hesse, Steppenwolf

Just long enough for a joke

[every artist] arrives at the ultimate pinnacle of his greatness only when he comes to see himself and his art beneath him - when he knows how to laugh at himself.

Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals


To live in the world as though it were not the world, to respect the law and yet to stand above it, to have possessions as though "one possessed nothing," to renounce as though it were no renunciation, all these favourite and often formulated propositions of an exalted worldly wisdom, it is in the power of humour alone to make efficacious.

Eternity is a mere moment, just long enough for a joke.

Hermann Hesse, Steppenwolf

Superstition

I know of a wild region whose librarians repudiate the vain superstitious custom of seeking any sense in books and compare it to looking for meaning in dreams or in the chaotic lines of one's hands...They admit that the inventors of writing imitated the twenty-five natural symbols, but they maintain that this application is accidental and that books in themselves mean nothing. This opinion - we shall see - is not altogether false.

Jorge Luis Borges, The Library of Babel


From books and words come fantasy, and sometimes, from fantasy comes union.

Rumi

Trials

Before the Law stands a doorkeeper. A man from the country comes to this doorkeeper and requests admittance to the Law. But the doorkeeper says that he can't grant him admittance now. The man thinks it over and then asks if he'll be allowed to enter later. 'It's possible,' says the doorkeeper, 'but not now.' Since the gate to the Law stands open as always, and the doorkeeper steps aside, the man bends down to look through the gate into the interior. When the doorkeeper sees this he laughs and says: 'If you're so drawn to it, go ahead and try to enter, even though I've forbidden it. But bear this in mind: I'm powerful. And I'm only the lowest doorkeeper. From hall to hall, however, stand doorkeepers each more powerful than the one before. The mere sight of the third is more than even I can bear.' The man from the country has not anticipated such difficulties; the Law should be accessible to anyone at any time, he thinks, but as he now examines the doorkeeper in his fur coat more closely, his large, sharply pointed nose, his long, thin, black tartar's beard, he decides he would prefer to wait until he receives permission to enter. The doorkeeper gives him a stool and lets him sit down at the side of the door. He sits there for days and years. He asks time and again to be admitted and wearies the doorkeeper with his entreaties. The doorkeeper often conducts brief interrogations, inquiring about his home and many other matters, but he asks such questions indifferently, as great men do, and in the end he always tells him he still can't admit him. The man, who has equipped himself well for his journey, uses everything he has, no matter how valuable, to bribe the doorkeeper. And the doorkeeper accepts everything, but as he does so he says: 'I'm taking this just so you won't think you've neglected something.' Over the many years, the man observes the doorkeeper almost incessantly. He forgets the other doorkeepers and this first one seems to him the only obstacle to his admittance to the Law. He curses his unhappy fate, loudly during the first years, later, as he grows older, merely grumbling to himself. He turns childish, and since he has come to know even the fleas in the doorkeeper's collar over his years of study, he asks the fleas too to help him change the doorkeeper's mind. Finally his eyes grow dim and he no longer knows whether it's really getting darker around him or if his eyes are merely deceiving him. And yet in the darkness he now sees a radiance that streams forth inextinguishably from the door of the Law. He doesn't have much longer to live now. Before he dies, everything he has experienced over the years coalesces in his mind into a single question he has never asked the doorkeeper. He motions to him, since he can no longer straighten his stiffening body. The doorkeeper has to bend down to him, for the difference in size between them has altered greatly to the man's disadvantage. 'What do you want to know now,' asks the doorkeeper, 'you're insatiable.' 'Everyone strives to reach the Law,' says the man, 'how does it happen, then, that in all these years no one but me has requested admittance.' The doorkeeper sees that the man is nearing his end, and in order to reach his failing hearing, he roars at him: 'No one else could gain admittance here, because this entrance was meant solely for you. I'm going to go and shut it now.'

Franz Kafka, The Trial


As for the way to true manhood, the way to the immortals, he has, it is true, an inkling of it and starts upon it now and then for a few hesitating steps and pays for them with much suffering and many pangs of loneliness. But as for striving with assurance, in response to that supreme demand, towards the genuine manhood of the spirit, and going the one narrow way to immortality, he is deeply afraid of it. He knows too well that it leads to still greater sufferings, to proscription, to the last renunciation, perhaps to the scaffold, and even though the enticement of immortality lies at the journey's end, he is still unwilling to suffer all these sufferings and to die all these deaths. Though the goal of manhood is better known to him than to the bourgeois, still he shuts his eyes. He is resolved to forget that the desperate clinging to the self and the desperate clinging to life are the surest way to eternal death, while the power to die, to strip one's self naked, and the eternal surrender of the self bring immortality with them.

Hermann Hesse, Steppenwolf



Upon your continual cowardice, your repeated lies, sentence will be passed on the day when some exhibition of your weakness, in itself, perhaps, quite trivial, deprives you of any further opportunities to make a choice - and justly.
Do you at least feel grateful that your trial is permitted to continue, that you have not yet been taken at your word?

Dag Hammarskjold

Phoenix

Let everything be consumed by the fire in the hope that something of value may be left which can be riddled out of the ashes.

Dag Hammarskjold


...suicides present themselves as those who are overtaken by the sense of guilt inherent in individuals, those souls that find the aim of life not in the perfecting and molding of the self, but in liberatring themselves by going back to the mother, back to God, back to the all. Many of these natures are wholly incapable of ever having recourse to real suicide, because they have a profound consciousness of the sin of doing so. For us they are suicides nonetheless; for they see death and not life as the releaser. They are ready to cast themselves away in surrender, to be extinguished and to go back to the beginning.

Hermann Hesse, Steppenwolf

Conversations

The overtones are lost, and what is left are conversations which, in their poverty, cannot hide the lack of real contact. We glide past each other. But why? Why-?
We reach out towards the other. In vain - because we have never dared to give ourselves.

Dag Hammarskjold

Beyond Boreas

Never on land or by sea will you find

the marvelous road to the feast of the Hyperborea.

Pindar

It is the kingdom on the other side of time and appearances. It is there we belong. There is our home. It is that which our heart strives for. And for that reason, Steppenwolf, we long for death.

Our only guide is our homesickness.

Hermann Hesse, Steppenwolf

I am being driven forward

Into an unknown land.

The pass grows steeper,

The air colder and sharper.

A wind from my unknown goal

Stirs the strings

Of expectation.

Still the question:

Shall I ever get there?

There where life resounds,

A clear pure note

In the silence.

Dag Hammarskjold

Forged by Others

To use language at all is to use an instrument which is forged by others. It is not that the purely personal cannot be uttered in [English]; it cannot be uttered in language at all. All languages are foreign languages - foreign to us, that is to say...It is never my language, for "I" have no language.

Gabriel Josipovici


Every individual is at once the beneficiary and the victim of the linguistic tradition into which he has been born—the beneficiary inasmuch as language gives access to the accumulated records of other people's experience, the victim in so far as it confirms him in the belief that reduced awareness is the only awareness and as it bedevils his sense of reality, so that he is all too apt to take his concepts for data, his words for actual things. That which, in the language of religion, is called "this world" is the universe of reduced awareness, expressed, and, as it were, petrified by language.

Aldous Huxley, The Doors of Perception

To speak is to fall into tautologies. This useless and wordy epistle itself already exists in one of the thirty volumes of the five shelves in one of the uncountable hexagons - and so does its refutation. (An n number of possible languages make use of the same vocabulary; in some of them, the symbol library admits of the correct definition ubiquitous and everlasting system of hexagonal galleries, but library is bread or pyramid or anything else, and the seven words which define it possess another value. You who read me, are you sure you understand my language?)
Methodical writing distracts me from the present condition of men. But the certainty that everything has been already written nullifies or makes phantoms of us all.

Jorge Luis Borges, The Library of Babel


Like the nest of a bird, a mythology is fashioned of materials drawn from the local environment, apparently altogether consciously, but according to an achitecture unconsciously dictated from within.

Joseph Campbell, Myths to Live By

Erasure

Only the hand that erases
can write the true thing

Meister Eckhart



It's better to destroy than to create what's unessential.

Federico Fellini, 8 1/2



In the dim light he searches every face, but sees only endless variations on his own meanness. So might Dante have imagined the punishment of those who had never taken the risk. -To reach perfection, we must all pass, one by one, through the death of self-effacement. And, on this side of it, he will never find the way to anyone who has passed through it.


Dag Hammarskjold

Named and Nameless

The Way that can be told of is not an unvarying way;

The names that can be named are not unvarying names.

It was from the Nameless that Heaven and Earth sprang;

The named is but the mother that rears the ten thousand creatures, each after its kind.

Tao Te Ching (chap. 1, tr. Waley)

Ineffable

–adjective

1.	incapable of being expressed or described in words; inexpressible: ineffable joy.

2.	not to be spoken because of its sacredness; unutterable: the ineffable name of the deity.

Freedom, Posession, Mortality

There is only one path out of the steamy dense jungle where the battle is fought over glory and power and advantage - one escape from the snares and obstacles you yourself have set up. And that is - to accept death.

The anguish of loneliness brings blasts from the storm center of death: only that can be really yours which is another's, for only what you have given, be it only in the gratitude of acceptance, is salvaged from the nothing which some day will have been your life.

She knew that nothing would get better, that it would never be any different. He had lost interest in his work, and no longer did anything. Because, he said, he was not given a free hand. And now she was sitting there praying for his freedom, praying because she so wanted to believe that he was being unfairly treated, that, if only he was given his freedom, he would become a man again. Wanted to believe it so that she might keep up her belief in him. She knew what the true answer was, but she had to force herself to listen to it: he was as free as anybody can be in the economic mazes of a modern society, and any external change would only bring him fresh disappointment. The situation would repeat itself, and he would discover that everything was just as it had been before.
Yes, yes - And she knew more: knew that there could never be a way out. Because behind all his talk of freedom lay hidden a child's wish to conquer death, a lack of interest in any piece of work the result of which would not be his, even long after he was dead. -And yet she sat there praying.

Dag Hammarskjold

Quietness

Inside this new love, die.
Your way begins on the other side.
Become the sky.
Take an axe to the prison wall.
Escape.
Walk out like someone suddenly born into colour.
Do it now.
You're covered with thick cloud.
Slide out the side. Die,
and be quiet. Quietness is the surest sign
that you've died.
Your old life was a frantic running
from silence.

The speechless full moon
comes out now.

Rumi


When all becomes silent around you, and you recoil in terror - see that your work has become a flight from suffering and responsibility, your unselfishness a thinly disguised masochism; hear, throbbing within you, the spiteful, cruel heart of the steppe wolf - do not then anesthetize yourself by once again calling up the shouts and horns of the hunt, but gaze steadfastly at the vision until you have plumbed its depths.

Only tell others what is of importance to them. Only ask them what you need to know. In both cases, that is, limit the conversation to what the speaker really possesses.-
Argue only in order to reach a conclusion. Think aloud only with those to whom this means something. Don't let small talk fill up the time and the silence except as a medium for bearing unexpressed messages between two people who are attuned to each other. A dietary for those who have learned by experience the truth of the saying, "For every idle word..." But hardly popular in social life.

Dag Hammarskjold


The mind must sing the ‘I am’ without words. Be liberated, if you think you have acquired knowledge and that is your achievement, then you are still far from Self-knowledge.

Nisargadatta Maharaj