Welcome To My Personal Journal. Articles On This Page Attempt To Lean Towards Cultural Relativism, Instrumentalism, Mysticism, Perennial, Universal, Eastern, Existential, Phenomenal, Gnostic, Illuminati, Rosicrucian, Freemason, Democratic, Liberal Civil Libertarian, Socialism, Secular Humanism & Pragmatic Views. From the mind of Richard Schwartz Sign Guestbook View Guestbook The articles I have here are some I personally found most outstanding among many others. The Gaean Conspiracy is based on the following major premise: The Earth is a single living being, whose rocks, plants, animals, air, oceans and oozing mantle are all interdependent systems in a giant biological superorganism. "In a word, God is invisibly present to the ground of our being: our belief and love attain to him, but he remains hidden from the arrogant gaze of our investigating mind which seeks to capture him and secure permanent possession of him in an act of knowledge that gives power over him. It is in fact absurd and impossible to try to grasp God as an object which can be seized and comprehended by our minds." THOMAS MERTON "Imagination is an illusion of reality which can conceive us as an assembly of separate entities and selves. Meditation on interdependence helps penetrate reality in order to be "one" with it, not to become caught up in philosophical opinion and a system of concepts. THICH NHAT HANH "The Majority of men are suggestible, half-awake children, willing to surrender their will to anyone who speaks with a voice that is threatening or sweet enough to sway them, from the harsh threats of priests and kings to the soft voices of the hidden and not so hidden persuaders." ERICH FROMM "When God is regarded as exclusively immanent, legalism and external practices are abandoned and there is a concentration on the Inner Light. The dangers now are quietism and antinomianism, a partial modification of consciousness that is useless or even harmful, because it is not accompanied by the transformation of character which is the necessary prerequisite of a total, complete and spiritually fruitful transformation of consciousness." ALDOUS HUXLEY St. John of The Cross Dark Night of The Soul "The most terrifying thing is to accept oneself completely." CARL JUNG "All religions are therapies for the sorrow and disorders of the soul." "There is nothing either good or bad, but it is our thinking that's makes it so." SHAKESPEARE "Man's main task in life is to give birth to himself." ERICH FROMM "Every science must be filled with the consciousness of its limits and the longing for a living experience of truth which is not reachable with speculative thinking." THOMAS MERTON "The unconscious is always one step ahead of the conscious mind, & it is therefore impossible ever to know that you are doing the right thing (since knowing is a function of consciousness. However, if your will is steadfastly to the good, and if you are willing to suffer fully when the good is ambiguous, your unconscious will always be one step ahead of your conscious mind in the right direction. In other words, you will do the right thing even though you will not have the consolation of knowing at the time that it is the right thing. M. SCOTT PECK Religion is based mainly upon fear. Science can teach us, and I think our own hearts can teach, no longer to invent allies in the sky, but rather to look to our own efforts here below to make this world a fit place to live in. BERTRAND RUSSELL "Throughout the centuries men have sought to discover the highest good. What is the summum bonum of life? I think I have found that answer. I have discovered that the highest good is love. This is the principle at the center of the cosmos. It is the greatest unifying force of life. God is love. He who loves has discovered the clue to the meaning of ultimate reality." MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR. "There is a moment in which the self- affirmation of the average man becomes neurotic: when changes of the reality to which he is adjusted threaten the fragmentary courage with which he has mastered the accustomed objects of fear. If this happens - and it often happens in critical periods of history - the self-affirmation becomes pathological. The dangers connected with the change, the unknown character of the things to come, the darkness of the future make the average man a fanatical defender of the established order. He defends it as compulsively as the neurotic defends the castle of his imaginary world. He loses his comparative openness to reality, he experiences an unknown depth of anxiety. But if he is not able to take this anxiety into his self-affirmation his anxiety turns into neurosis." (1952), The Courage To Be, pp. 69-70. -PAUL TILLICH "There is something nearer to us than Scriptures, the Word in the heart from which all Scriptures come." WILLIAM PENN    PLOTINUS   "All things are not in the process of becoming, but in Being and see themselves in each other. Each being contains in itself the whole intelligible world. Therefore All is everywhere. Each is there All, and All is each. Man as he now is has ceased to be the All. But when he ceases to be an individual, he raises himself again and penetrates the whole world." PLOTINUS - 2nd Century "Each portion of matter may be conceived of as a garden full of plants, and as a pond full of fishes. But each branch of the plant, each member of the animal, each drop of its humors, is also such a garden or pond." LEIBNIZ "If a man wishes to be sure of the road he treads on, he must close his eyes and walk in the dark." ST. JOHN OF THE CROSS Jewish Roots of Eastern Christian Mysticism "One can believe that God is and live in his back, but he who trusts him lives in his face." (Two Types of Faith) "Trust is proving trust in the fullness of life in spite of the experienced course of the world." - MARTIN BUBER "To man the world is twofold, in accordance with his twofold attitude. He perceives what exists round about him - simply things, and beings as things; and what happens round about him - simply events, (I to I) . . Or on the other hand, man meets what exists and becomes as what is over against him, always simply a single being and each thing simply as being, (I to Thou) . . Only concerning it may you make yourself "understood" with others; it is ready, though attached to everyone in a different way, to be an object common to you all. But you cannot meet others in it. You cannot hold on to life without it, its reliability sustains you; but should you die in it, your grave would be in nothingness." "The essence of Christianity is not sterile doctrine, but the application of Biblical principles into a caring relationship with all those with whom we come in contact with on a daily basis." NORMAN VINCENT PEALE   "The essence of truth reveals itself as freedom.* "That which alone and first of all is decisive is not which ideas and which values are posited, but rather the fact that the real is interpreted according to 'ideas' at all, that the 'world' is weighed according to 'values' at all." MARTIN HEIDEGGER- "God Is A Concept, By Which We Measure Our Pain. . . The Dream Is Over" JOHN LENNON  "Religion is the intellectual resolution of the unknown" - R. BUCKMINSTER FULLER I love you, my brother, whoever you are. I love you as you pray in your mosque, as you practice your devotions in church, or worship in your temple.. For you and I are the children of one single religion: Faith." KAHLIL GIBRAN "Man tries to actualize all his potentialities; and his potentialities are inexhaustible. For he is the microcosm, in whom all cosmic forces are potentially present, and who participates in all spheres and strata of the universe. Through him the universe continues the creative process which first has produced him as the aim and the center of the creation. . . The bearer of this creative process is the individual who, as an individual, is a unique representative of the universe. Most important is the creative individual, the genius, in whom, as Kant later formulated it, the unconscious creativity of nature breaks into the consciousness of man. Men like Pico della Mirandola, Leonardo da Vinci, Giordano Bruno, Shaftesbury, Goethe, Schelling were inspired by the idea of a participation in the creative process of the universe. In these men enthusiasm and rationality were united. Their courage was both the courage to be as oneself and the courage to be as a part. The doctrine of the individual as the microcosmic participant in the creative process of the macrocosm presented them with the possibility of the synthesis." (1952), The Courage To Be, pp. 104-105. -PAUL TILLICH AL-ARABI Mystic & Islamic Sufi 1165-1240 C.E. "Do not attach yourself to any particular creed exclusively, so that you may disbelieve all the rest; otherwise you will lose much good, you will fail to recognize the real of the matter. God, the omnipresent and omnipotent, is not limited by any one creed, for he says, "Wherever you turn, there is the face of Allah" (Koran 2:109). Everyone praises what he believes; his god is his own creature, and in praising it he praises himself. Consequently he blames the beliefs others, which he would not do if he were just, but his dislike is based on ignorance." "Each being has as his god only his particular Lord; he cannot possibly have the whole." The whole reality of God is unknowable on the particular Word spoken in our own being in what Al-Arabi called "The Cloud of Blindness, " comparable with the 14th Century, unknown Christian Mystic who wrote, "The Cloud of Unknowing." ELIE WIESEL Holocaust Survivor & Noble Peace Prize Laureate "One day the Gestapo hanged a child. Even the SS were disturbed by the prospect of hanging a young boy in front of thousands of spectators. the child who, Wiesel recalled had the face of a 'sad-eyed angel," was silent, lividly pale and almost calm as he ascended the gallows. Behind Wiesel, one of the other prisoners asked: "Where is God? Where is He?" It took the child half an hour to die, while the prisoners were forced to look him in the face. The same man asked again: :"Where is God now?" And Wiesel heard a voice within him make this answer: "Where is He? Here He is - He is hanging here on the gallows." "People partition off their lands by means of boundaries, but no one can partition off the all-embracing sky overhead. The indivisible sky surrounds all and includes all. So people in ignorance say, 'My religion is the only one, my religion is the best.' But when a heart is illumined by true knowledge, it knows that above all these wars of sects and sectarians presides the one indivisible eternal, all-knowing bliss." RAMAKRISHNA ARTHUR SCHOPENHAUER "No truth is more certain, more independent of all others, and less in need of proof than this, namely that everything that exists for knowledge, and hence the whole of this world, is only object in relation to the subject, perception of the perceiver, in a word, representation. . . . This truth, is that a man can and must say: 'The world is my will.'" - , The World as Will and Representation, Vol I, pp. 3, 4   Welcome Human Conscious Implicate Order Aesop Fable Jurist Naturalist Enneagram - Types Principles over Codes Hyperspace/Conscious Creation/Mysticism Privatization Political Response The Mind and Rigpa Controlling Dreams Socrates & Immortality Elephant Truths Intuitive Awareness Thomasland On Darkness Allen Ginsberg The Great Encounter Mr. Religion/Theist Relative/Absolute Flesh of the Gods Stages of Faith Relativism & Fundamentalism Nietzsche Beyond Good & Evil Four Religious Factors Conceptions Towards The Higher Self Socrates To Nietzsche True Nature of Man Six Categories of Forbidden Knowledge Death & After Religion & God Discovering Magic Democracy & Greece Manzarek on The 60's Densmore to Morrison Leary-Mind and Head Vigyan Bhairav Tantra Christianity Head verses Heart Living by Principles Tacit Knowledge Courage To Be Goethe's NonNewtonian Heidegger's Nietzsche J.J. Van Der Leeuw Arthur Rimbaud Religious Experience Plato Notes Philosophical Irony Ignorance is Dangerous Historical Ignorance Four Directions Truth = Paradox Truth = Indirectly Prayer & Silence Hypothesis of God Purity of Heart Gems of Wisdom Who Is Christ For Us Universalist Christ Conscious Celestine Insights Sex,Violence & Bible Lou Holtz-Coach Freud - Religion SEARCH THIS SITE Gnostic Writings Manifest Destiny Contemplate Prayer Underlying Fact Non-Dual Mind Discover Magic Religious Formation Courage To Be Uncertainty Freedom Perennial Philosophy Study of Zen Apostle Paul Zen Notes Huston Smith-Zen Fear & Religion Mindfulness Dionysius Gaia Conspiracy One Faith - Blake God & Science Shambhala Mysticism Humanism Universalist Bonhoeffer Existentialism Krishnamurti Campbell - On God Dreaming Awake Humor Chart I Ching Greek - Hindu Epictetus Plotinus Chart of Opposing  Locke / Rosseau Peter Cooper History Old Watchtower Page "God's Word is the Word beyond the words of Scripture, beyond the formulations of tradition, beyond the human attempt to capture or to literalize. It is rather the Word, that by the grace of God, is perceived as Spirit beyond letter." JOHN SHELBY SPONG "I think the time has come for the Church to invite its people into a frightening journey into the mystery of God and to stop proclaim- ing that somehow the truth of God is still bound by either our literal scriptures or our literal creeds." JOHN SHELBY SPONG "We must ask where the inherent strength of religious doctrines lies and the circumstances that give rise to them, apart from all reason. Religious doctrines are not the residue of experience or the final result of reflection. They are illusions, fulfillments of the oldest, strongest and most insistent wishes of mankind. The secret of their strength is the strength of these wishes." -SIGMUND FREUD "By its very essence, the concept of Buddha-nature is not something that concerns Buddhists alone. We are concerned with an overall conception of what we could call the "double being" which each person has or is. One being is that part of our existence that we are all aware of. But that is not all. Each person also participates in an undivided absolute being, which is the basis of all that is." - HUGO ENOMIYA -LASSALLE "Every one-sided solution is doomed a priori to failure. It is not a solution but, even in the most favorable circumstances, only a post- ponement. For it is temporarily restricted and mental, regardless of whether it is focused on the merely measurable or the immeasur- able."- HUGO ENOMIYA -LASSALLE "Perfection consists not in knowledge but rather in the force with which we are seized." THOMAS AQUINAS "If you ould get rid of yourself just once, the secret of secrets would open to you. The face of the unknown, hidden beyond the universe would appear on the mirror of your perception." - JALAI-UDDEN RUMI "Self-discovery, self-knowledge, self-fulfillment is man's destiny. When we enter the world of ideals the differences among religions become negligible and the agreements striking. There is only one ideal for man, to make himself profoundly human, perfectly human. 'Be ye perfect.' The whole man, the complete man, is the ideal man, the divine man. 'You are complete in the godhead', said St. Paul. The seeking for our highest and inmost self is the seeking for God." - S. RADHAKRISHNAN "God is not someone who must be known according to analysis and reasoning. If we consider that the essence of reality is a personal thing, God is that which is most personal. Our knowing God is only possible through the intuition of love or faith. Therefore we who say we do not know God but only love Him and believe in Him are the ones who are most able to know God.". -NISHIDA KITARO "You will have to drop this idea of God that helps you to remain unafraid. You will have to pass through fear and accept it as a human reality. There is no need to escape from it. What is needed is to go deep into it, and the deeper you go into your fear the less you will find it is."  OSHO "When everything you carry around with you that you call a belief has become your own largely because of the experiences and testimonies of other people, it must be received with many question marks and doubts. As it comes to you from a source outside yourself, regardless of how persuasive the conditioning process might be, and of how many people just like you have worked to convince you of the truth of these beliefs, the fact that it is someone else's truth." - WAYNE W. DYER "There are thresholds which thought alone, left to itself, can never permit us to cross. An experience is required." -"The self creates its own obscurity by placing itself between the I and the other, who are in reality an intersubjective oneness." GABRIEL MARCEL "Security is so seductive, and insecurity is so frightening. But security is always false, and insecurity is always real. No religion can make anyone secure, though it, like the drugs on which our society is so dependent, can give the illusion of security. True religion enables one to grasp life with the radical insecurity and to live it with courage. It does not aid us in the pretense that our insecurities have been taken away." JOHN SHELBY SPONG, A New Christianity For a New World, p. 68 "The fairest thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion which stands at the cradle of true art and true science. A knowledge of the existence of something we cannot penetrate, of the manifestations of the profoundest reasons and the most radiant beauty, which are only accessible to our reason in their most elementary forms- It is this knowledge and this emotion that constitute the truly religious attitude; in this sense, and in this alone, I am a deeply religious man." ALBERT EINSTEIN (The World As I See It, trans. Alan Harris, New York, 1949, p.51)   "Man is not born to solve the problems of the Universe, but to find out what he has to do; and to restrain himself within the limits of his comprehension." JOHANN VON GOETHE "The true value of a human being can be found in the degree to which he has attained liberation from the self." ALBERT EINSTEIN "I never came upon any of my discoveries through the process of rational thinking." "One must have chaos in ones self in order to give birth to a dancing star." FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE  "We do not see things as THEY are, we see them as WE are." THE TALMUD   "What lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny matters, compared to what lies within us." RALPH WALDO EMERSON "In Choosing your God, you choose your way of looking at the universe. There are plenty of Gods. Choose yours. The god you worship is the god you deserve. . . . God is not an illusion, but a symbol pointing beyond itself to the realization of the mystery of at-one-ment." JOSEPH CAMPBELL   "Just as the boatman sits in his small boat, trusting his frail craft in a stormy sea that is boundless in every direction, rising and falling with the howling, mountain- ous waves, so in the midst of a world full of suffering and misery the individual man calmly sits, supported by and trusting the principium individ- uationis, or the way in which the individual knows things as phenomena." - ARTHUR SCHOPENHAUER, The World as Will and Representation, Volume I, §63, p. 353 "Discover the silence within . . . live in the present moment . . . be happy where you are . . . develop your compassion . . . set aside quiet time everyday . . . search for a grain of truth in other opinions . . . stop blaming others . . . choose being kind over being right . . . get comfortable not knowing." RICHARD CARLSON, PH.D. Don't Sweat the Small Stuff - (The essence of Buddhism) "Men are disturbed not by things that happen, but by their opinions of the things that happen." EPICTETUS 55-135 AD "Man is a distinct portion of the essence of God." The man who has learnt to regard things, not as literal with literal meanings, but as symbols, who sees not religion or religious organizations, but all persons, regardless of culture, race and religious beliefs, as temples of God and his actions those as divine, is a man who has learned constantly to remind himself who he is, where he stands in relation to the universe and its Ground of Being, how he should behave towards his fellow man and what he must do to come to his final end.   JACK KEROUAC   "I shambled after (others) as I 've been doing all my life after people who interest me, because the only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn, like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centerlight prop and everybody goes "Awww!" What did they call such young people in Goethe's Germany?," On the Road, pp. 5, 6 "My witness is the empty sky." "You can't have birth without existence and you can't have death without birth." "You'd be surprised how little I knew even up to yesterday." "All things are like visions beyond the reach of the human mind." FRANCESCO PETRARCH Humanist 1304-74 C.E. "Theology is actually poetry, poetry concerning God." Effective not because it proves anything but because it penetrates the heart." Anthology of Petrarch's Letters, David Thompson, p.90 Symbolism, mythology and poetry are non-literal expressions of essence beyond the rational mind. MULLA SADRA Islamic Persian Philosopher 1571-1640 C.E. "Everything to which man aspires, everything he desires is instantaneously present in him, or rather one should say: to picture his desire is itself to experience the real presence of its object. . . . There is no other source than the essential "I" of man himself, formed as it is by his intentions and projects, his innermost beliefs, his conduct. Spiritual Body and Celestial Earth, Nancy Pearson, p. 166 PIERRE TEILHARD DE CHARDIN "We are faced with a harmonized collectivity of consciousness equivalent to a sort of super- consciousness. The idea is that of the earth not only becoming covered in myriads of grains of thought, but becoming enclosed in a single thinking envelope so as to form, functionally, no more than a single vast grain of thought on the sidereal scale, the plurality of individual reflections grouping themselves together and reinforcing one another in the act of a single unanimous reflection." (The Phenomenon of Man, 1955, p. 252)" "To be fully ourselves it is in the opposite direction, in the direction of convergence with all the rest, that we must advance- towards the 'other.' The peak of ourselves, the acme of our originality, is not our individuality but our person; and according to the evolutionary structure of the world, we can only find our person by uniting together. There is no mind without synthesis. The same holds good from top to bottom. The true ego grows in inverse proportion to 'egoism.' Like the Omega which attracts it, the element only becomes personal when it universalizes itself." (The Phenomenon of Man, 1955. p. 263) “The politics of those whose goal is beyond time, beyond scripture, (beyond theism) are always those who reject the use of force; it is the idolaters of past and future, idolaters of words, concepts and scripture, of conservative memory and Utopian dream, who do the persecuting and make the wars.” - ALDOUS HUXLEY (Abridged) Escape From Fundamental Thinking "All the world is a stage, And all the men & women merely players, They have their exits and their entrances, And one man in his time plays many parts, His acts being seven ages." Shakespeare, As You Like It, Act 2, Scene 7 139-143 "A fool thinks he is wise, but the wise man knows himself to be a fool." Socrates "The first chapter of fools is to hold themselves wise." Shakespeare None of the roles we play are "absolute," but necessary for human survival. If only we can maintain our perspective of flexibility in each role we play. "The greater the ignorance, the greater the dogmatism." - Sir William Osler, M.D.   RAM DASS   "The most familiar models of who we are - father and daughter, doctor and patient, helper and helped - often turn out to be major obstacles to the expression of our caring instincts; they limit the full measure of what we have to offer one another . . they are delusions of separateness. Our task is to free our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole nature in its beauty . . " "How good it can feel to regain perspective. Our feeling of confinement as narrow, limited, isolated entities begins to dissolve as we take a few steps back and recognize that who we are is "this . . and also . . and also . . and also (multiple personas, roles, models). Moving in and out of these various identities, each is "real" only at the moment we are invested in it. A moment later it may not be relevant at all. We see, in other words, the relative reality of these various identities, "real" only in relation to the situation which calls them forth. But if all of our identities are only relatively real, coming and going as circumstance warrants, is there any par of us that remains steady and stable behind all our roles? If we observe our own minds at work, we see that behind all these identities is a state of awareness that incorporates them all and yet is still able to rest behind them. As we loosen the hold of each identity so that we don't get completely lost in it, we are able to remain light and loose - able to play among these various aspects of being without identifying exclusively with any. We don't have to be anybody in particular. We don't have to be "this" or "that." We are free simply to be. . . . We experience the versatility of our being and the independence of our awareness, opening up the windows of our little homes and letting in a little cross ventilation. . . Humor serves to support this awaking perspective." How Can I Help, pp 20, 31-32   THOMAS JEFFERSON   "A little rebellion, now and then, is a good thing, and as necessary in the political world as storms in the physical." - THOMAS JEFFERSON, letter to James Madison, January 30, 1787 Now put that in your PATRIOT ACT, Mr. G.W. Bush . . . in The Domestic "Security Enhancement Act of 2003," in the . . .   PAUL BRUNTON   "The awareness of the relativity of things relieves the philosopher of any compulsion to identify his self with any particular viewpoint. His liberation from dogma enables him to take the viewpoint which best suits the circumstances. This does not at all mean that chaos will enter into this affairs, insincerity into his attitudes, and anarchy into his morals. He is safeguarded from such perils by the link he has established with the Overself's wisdom and immeasurable goodness." (The Overself: where man meets the infinite within himself) - Paul Brunton, Essential Readings, p. 193 The greatest truths are the best lies. There are no absolutes, Only human created formulas. We create the meanings & paradigms. It's not about relativism in chaos, or absolutism in attacking evil more, but about transcending the good-and-evil polarity, in the pragmatic ability to compartmentalize the absolutes and work towards unity. This is the difference between the lower psyche and the higher, the former clings on to absolutes and attacks relativism with vengence in conspiracies and slander under a particular morality code, while the later has the ability to live both in existentialism and beyond in an interdependence of integral, holistic unity. While orthodoxy rests in formulas and certainty, heresy or apostasy courageously ventures in freedom of choice and the ability to face uncertainty and yet maintain values. Balance rests in the middle ground between the Platonic world of absolute ideas and the empirical nature of Aristotle's science. "The world is his who can see through its pretension. What deafness, what stone-blind custom, what overgrown error you behold is there only by sufferance - by your sufferance. See it to be a lie, and you have already dealt it its mortal blow."- Ralph Waldo Emerson, The American Scholar Truth is characterized by it's relative nature, humor, inclusivity, paradox & the ability to contain contradictions. Falsity can be detected by it's absolutism, seriousness without humor, one-sidedness and the failure to integrate the whole.   WALT WHITMAN         JOHN KEATS   In Walt Whitman's poem, Song Of Myself, he writes, "Do I contradict myself? Very well then, I contradict myself. I am large, I contain multitudes." ALLEN GINSBERG   WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE Allen Ginsberg in an 1988 interview, answers his one-sided interviewer's attack on Whitman with the following: Whitman is saying that our own minds are so vast that we can wind up contradicting ourselves without having to freak out about it. It's very similar to what the poet John Keats said about "negative capability." Keats said the quality of a very great poet like Shakespeare was his ability to contain opposite ideas in the mind "without an irritable reaching out after fact and reason." Meaning that that portion of the mind which judges and irritably insists on either black or white is only a small part of the mind. T3he larger mind observes the contradiction and contains those contradictions. The mind that notices that it contradicts itself is bigger than the smaller mind that is taking oneside or the other." - ALLEN GINSBERG, Spontaneous Minds, p. 485 The ability to contain contradictions does not have reside in blind relativism. It does not have to be the "doublethink" that George Orwell writes of in the authoritarian control in his novel, 1984, in which he describes as the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one's mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them both consciously and unconsiously. There can be the acceptance of contradictions while maintaining values, direction towards unity separating certain differences. There is a huge difference between the absolutes in pragmatism that compartmentalizes towards unity and that of mindless relativism.   CARL JUNG   Carl Jung, in his commentary on The Secret of the Golden Flower, A Chinese Book of Life, writes: "Intellect does in fact, harm the soul when it dares to possess itself of the heritage of the spirit. It is in no way fitted to do this, because spirit is something higher than intellect in that it includes not only the latter, but the feelings as well . . . It is the Chinese who have never failed to recognize the paradoxes and the polarity inherent in what is alive. The opposites always balance one another - a sign of high culture. One-sidedness, though it lends momentum, is a mark of barbarism. The reaction which is now beginning in the West against the intellect in favour of feeling, or in favour of intuition, seems to me a mark of cultural advance, a widening of consciousness beyond the to narrow limits of a tyrannical intellect . . . I have learned that greatest and most important problems of life are all in a certain sense insoluble. They must be so because they express the necessary polarity inherent in every self-regulating system. They can never be solved, but only outgrown, a psychic development . . . The union of opposites on a higher level of consciousness is not a rational thing, nor is it a matter of will: it is a psychic process of development which expresses itself in symbols. pp. 85, 91-92, 98-99 - CARL JUNG   M SCOTT PECK   "Truth in religion is characterized by inclusivity and paradox. Falsity in religion can be detected by its one-sidedness and failure to integrate the whole." - M. SCOTT PECK, A Different Drum The Greeks "Men are helpless so far as their fate is concerned but they can ally themselves with the good, and in suffering and dying, die and suffer nobly." The paradox of fatalism in accepting what the gods decide, yet with a fierce joy and autonomy to fully live this life towards excellence and the full human potential. Such excellence was the beauty of the self-artist in the desire to fully know oneself and restrain from excess. A passionate delight for life but not without the clear apprehension of its unalterable framework. The balance, that of a passionate tension, the tension between no romantic protest, and in contrast, no resigned acceptance, but with the courage to accept fate and yet craft life with zeal. Sometimes excellence resolves in suffering and death. Beauty, like glory, must be sought, through the price be tears and destruction, the choice of a short life in glory over a long life of mediocricy. - A few thoughts after reading Edith Hamilton's, The Greek Way and H.D.F. Kitto's, The Greeks. The Greek Polis & Democracy From H.D.F. Kitto's, The Greeks. "A man who takes no part in public business some call a quiet man: we Athenians call him useless. . . In fact, our polis is an education to all Greece." p. 123 "Everywhere the polis gave a certain fullness and meaning to life, where political democracy was carried to its logical extreme. There are of course those who deny that Athens was a democracy at all, since women, resident aliens and slaves had no voice in the conduct of affairs. If we define democracy as participation in the government by all the adult population of a country, then Athens was no democracy - not is any modern state: for because of its size every modern state must delegate government to representative and professional administrators, and this a form of oligarchy.If we define it as participation in the government by all citizens, then Athens was a democracy." p. 125 The Assembly met once a month, unless specially convened to settle something of importance. Any citizen could speak - if he could get the Assembly to listen; anybody could propose anything, within certain strict constitutional safeguards. p.125 "Public affairs in Athens were run, so far as possible, by amateurs. The professional was given as little scope as possible; indeed, the expert was usually a public slave. Every citizen was, in turn, a soldier, a legislator, a judge, an administrator." p.128 "To the Athenian at least, self-rule by discussion, self-discipline, personal responsibility, direct participation in the life of the polis at all points, these things were the breath of life." p. 128 "To attend to that business of the polis was not only a duty which a man owed to the polis: it was an absorbing interest too. It was part of the complete life. This is the reason why the Athenian never employed the professional administrator or judge if he could possibly help it. The polis was a kind of super-family, and family life means taking a direct part in family affairs and family counsels. The attitude to the polis explains, too, why the Greek never, as we say, "invented" representative government. Why should he "invent" something which most Greeks struggled to abolish, namely being governed by someone else." p. 129 From W.K.C. Guthrie, The Greek Philosophers. Protagoras the Pragmatist "Man is the measure of all things" - Protagoras (Fifth Century B.C.) "Protagoras taught that truth is purely relative, however, he allowed room for conventional views of truth and morals by adding that although no one opinion is truer than another, one opinion may be better than another. This is decided on the individual's actions or beliefs which act toward unifying or productivity for the majority, the whole. The test by truth or falsehood is abandoned, and replaced by the pragmatic test. p. 69 abridged Socratic Inquiry "True Socraticism represents first and foremost an attitude of mind, an intellectual humility easily mistaken for arrogance, since the true Socratic is convinced of the ignorance not only of himself but of all mankind. This rather than any body of positive doctrine is the contribution of Socrates." p. 75 The method of Socraticism consists of inductive argument, determined general definition and continual advancing increase in inquiry. Anotherwards, first one must eliminate all erroneous meanings to the particular word, and secondly, determine a general commonly believed definition, and third, no absolute answer, but advancing methods of inquiry. As in interior home renovation, first, the older mismatched furniture is removed, replaced with new furniture determined by collective agreement where continuous change will occur based on collective inquiry. The Value of Myth "The value of myth is that it provides a way into regions of truth in which the methods of dialectical reasoning can not follow, opening a way for us by poets and others of religious genius. We take account of myth not because we believe it to be literally true, but as a means of presenting a possible account of truths which we much admit to be beyond linguistic expression and too mysterious for exact demonstration." p. 98 abridged   WILLIAM JAMES   "Is it not obvious that even though there be such absolute directions in the shape of pre-human standards of truth that we ought to follow, the only guarantee that we shall in fact follow them must lie in our human equipment. . . All the sanctions of a law of truth lie in the very texture of experience. Absolute or no absolute, the concrete truth for us will always be that way of thinking in which our various experiences most profitably combine." William James, Humanism and Truth, pp. 241, 242 "The true is the opposite of whatever is instable, of whatever is practically disappointing, useless, lying and unreliable, unverifiable and unsupported, inconsistent and contradictory, artificial and eccentric, unreal in the sense of being of no practical account." "The truth itself was originally a copy of nothing; it was only a relation directly perceived to obtain between two artificial mental things." p. 247 "A true idea means not only one that prepares us for an actual perception. It means also one that might prepare us for a merely possible perception, or one that, if spoken, would suggest possible perceptions to others, or suggest actual perceptions which the speaker cannot share. The ensemble of perceptions thus thought of as either actual or possible from a system which it is obviously advantageous to us to get into a stable and consistent shape, and here it is that the common-sense notion of permanent beings finds triumphant use. Beings acting outside of the thinker explain, not only his actual perceptions, past and future, but his possible perceptions and those of every one else." p. 248 E Pluribus Unum Unity From Diversity On what grounds an architect, who has built a house in keeping with his own idea of a house, says that it is beautiful. Is it not that the idea of a house, aside from the stones, is inner idea stamped upon outer material, unity manifest in diversity? PLOTINUS, The Essential Plotinus, p. 36 "The religious threats to democratic practices abroad are much easier to talk about than those at home. Just as demagogic and antidemocratic fundamentalism's have gained too much prominence in both Israel and the Islamic world, so too has a fundamentalist strain of Christianity gained far too much power in our political system, and in the hearts and minds of citizens. This Christian fundamentalism is exercising an undue influence over our government policies, both in the Middle East crisis and in the domestic sphere, and is violating fundamental principles enshrined in the Constitution: it is also providing support and "cover" for the imperialist aims of empire. The three dogmas that are leading to the imperial devouring of democracy in America - free market fundamentalism, aggressive militarism, and escalating authoritarianism - are often justified by the religious rhetoric of this Christian fundamentalism. And perhaps most ironically - and sadly - this fundamentalism is subverting the most profound, seminal teachings of Christianity . ." - Cornel West, Democracy Matters, p. 146 "Is not a matter of whether the war is not real or if it is. Victory is not possible. The war is not meant to be won. It is meant to be continuous. A hierarchical society is only possible on the basis of poverty and ignorance. This new version is the past. And no different past can ever have existed. In principle, the war effort is always planned to keep society on the brink of starvation. The war is waged by the ruling group against its own subjects. And its object is not the victory over either Eurasia or Eastasia, but to keep the very structure of society in tact." George Orwell, 1984 "In a way, the world-view of the Party imposed itself most successfully on people incapable of understanding it. They could be made to accept the most flagrant violations of reality, because they never fully grasped the enormity of what was demanded of them, and were not sufficiently interested in public events to notice what was happening. By lack of understanding they remained sane. They simply swallowed everything, and what they swallowed did them no harm, because it left no residue behind, just as a grain of corn will pass undigested through the body of a bird." - George Orwell, 1984, p. 156 One thing I do get out of this book, whether it's the WTO, IMF, World Bank and all the Corporations, is that it's the LLM's manifesto on page 283, which states that "leaders who lead today are antique creatures of the Passing World. Today, markets lead. Industry CEOs lead. In the Emerging World, prime ministers and presidents merely 'listen.'" It's as though the new "Popes," with the power of the medieval Popes, are emerging as the new leaders, the corporate giants, who through the market and partisan monetary ventures that only benefit the elites, will rule the world in an unethical, authoritarian structure. Only this time around, with technology, both the environment and extreme totalitarianism are the stakes. - RS "ChoicePoint, the database company with its sixteen-billion-plus records on every living and dying being in the USA, Ground Zero would become a profit center lined with gold. contracts would gush forth from War on Terror fever not hurt by the fact that ChoicePoint did something for George W. Bush that the voters would not: select him as our president. These are the gentlemen who gave the list of over 90,000 "potential felons" to Florida's secretary of state, Kathleen Harris." Before ChoicePoint's miles of files on Americans could become a wartime weapon, the USA had to change radically. That change was announced by President Bush. On September 11, we Americans were the victims of the terrible attack. By September 12, we became the suspects. Not one single U.S. citizen hijacked a plane, yet President Bush and Attorney General John Ashcroft, through powers seized then codified in the USA PATRIOT Act, fingered 270 million of us for surveillance, for searches, for tracking, for watching." p. 350 "An insider at ChoicePoint says that chairman told him about a longer-term plan. Derek Smith said that it is his hope to build a database of DNA samples from every person in the United States, (it already has citizen files) from birth to death and beyond linked to all other data on a person. The plan, said the source, is for now kept under wraps because Smith expects resistance from the pubic. Thus, ChoicePoint Cares for the mothers of the country who are wrestling with threats, says Smith, moms who, presumably, will demand that the government, or better - this private contractor - store their DNA info." p. 351 Greg Palast, The Best Democracy Money Can Buiy, p. 351 I can't help but admire the Venezuela President, Hugo Chavez. Unlike George W. Bush, Chavez won office by a majority of the vote.   HUGO CHAVEZ       "Soviet power has collapsed but that does not mean that neoliberal capitalism (U.S., George W. Bush and WTO) has to be the model followed by the peoples of the West... This world cannot be run by a universal police force that seeks to control everything." -Venezuela President, Hugo Chávez   SOGYAL RINPOCHE   "Perhaps the deepest reason why we are afraid of death is because we do not know who we are. We believe in a personal, unique, and separate identity; but if we dare to examine it, we find that this identity depends entirely on an endless collection of things to prop it up: our name, our "biography," our partners, family, home, job friends, credit cards . . It is on their fragile and transient support that we rely for our security. So when they are all taken away, will we have any idea of who we really are?" "Without our familiar props, we are faced with just ourselves, a person we do not know, an unnerving stranger with whom we have been living all the time but we never really wanted to meet. Isn't that why we have tried to fill every moment of time with noise and activity, however boring or trivial, to ensure that we are never left in silence with this stranger on our own?" p. 16 Tibetan Buddhist, Sogyal Rinpoche speaks of the phowa practice, which consists of the transfer of consciousness at death to a higher realm of awareness using the techniques of visualizations, mantras and devotion of deep feelings of compassion towards all life, to personal trust in (a) deities, guru, or trust in subjective perceptions of higher consciousness that prepare a person for death. In this Sogyal Rinpoche writes: "If the time comes when you cannot practice phowa actively any more, the only really important things for you to do is to relax, as deeply as possible, in the confidence of the View or Rigpa and rest in the nature of mind. (This is the quiet space of mind that exists between thoughts - the Rigpa or ground luminosity). It does not matter whether your body or your brain are still functioning, the nature of your mind is always there, sky-like, radiant, blissful, limitless and unchanging . . . Know that beyond all doubt, and let that knowledge give you the strength to say with carefree abandon to all your pain, however great it is: "Go way now, and leave me alone!" If there is anything that irritates you or makes you feel uncomfortable in any way, don't waste your time trying to change it;' keep returning to the View." "Trust in the nature of your mind, trust it deeply and relax completely. There is nothing new you need to learn or acquire or understand, just allow what you have already been given to blossom in you and open at greater and greater depths." - SOGYAL RINPOCHE, The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying, p. 238 The Karmic Trace is that of every action - physical, verbal, or mental - undertaken by an individual, if performed with intention and even the slightest aversion or desire, leaves a trace in the mindstream of that individual. The accumulation of these karmic traces serves to condition every moment of experience of that individual, positively and negatively. Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche, The Tibetan Yogas of Dream and Sleep, p. 215 On The Gnostics Gospels   ELAINE PAGELS   "The gnostics were neither relativists nor skeptics. Like the orthodox, they sought the "one sole truth." But gnostics tended to regard all doctrines, speculations, and myths - their own as well as others' - only as approaches to truth. The orthodox, by contrast, were coming to identify their own doctrine as itself the truth - the sole legitimate form of Christian faith." - Elaine Pagels, The Gnostic Gospels, p. 114 The Gnostic Christians: "Seek and inquire about the ways you should go, since there is nothing else as good as this" - (not as offering a set of answers, but as encouragement to engage in a process of searching) The Orthodox Christians: "With our faith, we desire no further belief." "When the mind returns into itself from the confusion of the world of appearances, as it does when it reflects, it passes into another region (the consciousness), which is pure and everlasting, immortal and unchanging, and feels itself kindred thereto, and its welfare under its own control and at rest from its wanderings, being in communions with the unchanging (consciousness)." - PLATO, Phaedo   LAMA GOVINDA   “We are blind to reality, because we are so accustomed to our surroundings and to ourselves that we are no more aware of them. Once we break the fetters of habit by the power of a paradoxical situation or by a flash of intuition, everything becomes a revelation and everyday life turns into a wonder.” p.49 "Are the DhyaniBuddhas less real because they are not historical? My answer would be: They are more real, in so far as they can be experienced in meditation. A mind-created reality may even take outer form because "form is not different from emptiness (shunyata), the Plenum-void," as has been said in the Sutra of Transcendental Wisdom (Prajnaparamila-sutra). Here begins the great mystery of Reality which can only be solved in the experience of meditation and in the creative visions of immortal art." – LAMA GOVINDA, Insights of a Himalayan Pilgrim, 86   TIMOTHY LEARY   "Liberation is the nervous system devoid of mental conceptual redundancy. The mind in its conditioned state, limited to words and ego games, is continuously in thought-formation activity. The nervous system in a state of quiescence, alert, awake but not active, is comparable to what Buddhists call the highest state of dhyana or deep meditation. The conscious recognition of the Clear Light induces an ecstatic condition of consciousness such as saints and mystics of the West have called illumination." - TIMOTHY LEARY, Your Brain is God, pp. 66-67 "To use our heads, to push out beyond words, space-time categories, social identifications, models and concepts, it becomes necessary to go out of our generally rational minds. . . " - TIMOTHY LEARY, Change Your Brain, p. 8 "My philosophy of life has been tremendously influenced by my study of oriental philosophy and religion. Of course, what the American, regardless of his religious belief, doesn't understand is that the aim of oriental religious is to get high, to have an ecstasy, to tune in, to turn on, to contact incredible diversity, beauty, living, pulsating meaning of the sense organs, and the much more complicated and pleasurable and revelatory messages of cellular energy. To a Hindu, the spiritual quest is internal." - The Politics of Esctacy, p. 196 "Reality and the addiction to any one reality is a tissue-thin neurological fragility. At the height of a visionary experience it is crystal-clear that you can change completely. Be an entirely different person. Be any person you choose. It is a moment of rebirth . . . . It is habit, fear and laziness that keep people from changing after an LSD experience. It's so much easier to doubt your divinity, drift back to speaking English, wearing ties, playing the old game." - High Priest, p. 334 "There comes a point in every lifetime when the blinders are removed and the individual glimpses for a second the nature of the process. This revelation comes through a biochemical change in the body. A Twist of the protein key and you see where you are at in the total process." p. 336 "But what if man had eyes to see the true beauty - the divine beauty, I mean, pure and clear and unalloyed, not clogged with the pollutions of mortality and all the colours and vanities of human life - thither looking, and holding converse with the true beauty simple and divine? PLATO, Symposium   ARUNDHATI ROY   “In the twenty-first century the connection between religious fundamentalism, nuclear nationalism, and the pauperization of whole populations because of corporate globalization is becoming impossible to ignore.” P. 14 "This kind of democracy is the problem, not the solution. Our society’s greatest strength is being turned into her deadliest enemy. What’s the point of us all going on about “deepening democracy,” when it’s being beat and twisted into something unrecognizable?” pp. 33-34 "It's disturbing to see how neatly nationalism dovetails into fascism. While we must not allow the fascists to define what the nation is, or who it belongs to, it's worth keeping in mind that nationalism - in all its many avatars: communist, capitalist, and fascist - has been at the root of almost all the genocide of the twentieth century. On the issue of nationalism, it's wise to proceed with caution." - Arundhati Roy, War Talk, p. 36 "The whole idea really is that space-time, the four-dimensional system of Einstein, is just a subspace of this much higher dimensional space. And so the three-dimensional space that is the space of our ordinary experience is very much an illusion." - SAUL-PAUL SIRAG, Consciousness and Hyperspace, p. 106   MELVIN MORSE       "One cannot understand music by studying the various frequencies of sound that generate each note, nor does one need to have a deep understanding of acoustical physics to enjoy Mozart. The near-death experience remains a mystery." Melvin Morse, Closer to the Light: Learning from Children's Near-Death Experience, p. 193 What must be recognized is that while life takes on personas and still, unmoving snapshots of reality and interprets them as absolutes, it still can not hide what is behind such still frames of perception; the moving flow of multifaceted reality, the relative nature of perception. But this can only be so if people stop becoming so serious in their chess games, cease being critics, experts and trash their beliefs in absolutes - "Better learn to listen first! Learn what is to be taken seriously and laugh at the rest." p. 143 The music we hear may be distorted and may not conform to our perceptions, but it can never hide the eternal music of life that exists within it. While many of us have the courage to die for our errors and crimes, we don't have the courage to fully live, anotherwards, we don't know how to to laugh and apprehend the humor of life, to see the relative nature and meanings of the distorted music, and recognize that all of life's perceptions have serious limitations and must not be taken as absolute truths. - My thoughts relating to Steppenwolf, by Herman Hesse, p. 143 Quotes: Intuition is what gives us that richer information that you know in one second. And so you can get information from that logically; you can extrapolate. And of course, as I started to say about genius, the word genius comes from genesis, and genesis means creation and creativity, and what creation and creativity are, are out of nothing, something. The very power of "Out of nothing, something" is the main point, but the linear mind rejects that, it doesn't like it. It doesn't even like the word infinity: What do you mean? What's the end? What's the beginning? It wants to contain. And as soon as, I think, we get on good terms using both the linear mind happily, and using it as a tool -- knowing it's a tool for sorting reality but not equivalent to it -- then the intuitive, acausal mind will have more room to speak in metaphor that we won't have to take literally, but get the meaning of the parable or the insight of the greater whole of reality. Patrica Sun, from Thinking Allowed, in conversation with Jeffrey Mishlove Ph.D. Biologist RICHARD DAWKINS “We have seen that DNA molecules are the center of a spectacular information technology. They are capable of packing an immense amount of precise, digital information into a very small space, and they are capable of preserving this information – with astonishingly few errors, but still some errors – for a very long time, measured in millions of years. Where are these facts leading us? They are leading us in the direction of a central truth about life on earth . . . that living organisms exist for the benefit of DNA rather than the other way around . . The messages that DNA molecules contain are all but eternal when seen against the time scale of individual lifetimes. The lifetimes of DNA messages (give or take a few mutations) are measured in units ranging from millions of years to hundreds of millions of years, or, in other words, ranging from 10,000 individual lifetimes to a trillion individual lifetimes. Each individual organism should be seen as a temporary vehicle of which DNA messages spend a tiny fraction of their geological lifetimes.” P. 126 "In The Selfish Gene I speculated that we may now be on the threshold of a new kind of genetic takeover. DNA replicators built ‘survival machine’ for themselves – the bodies of living organisms including ourselves. As part of their equipment, bodies evolved onboard computers – brains. Brains evolved the capacity to communicate with other brains by means of language and cultural traditions. But the new milieu of cultural tradition opens up new possibilities for self-replicating entities. The new replicators are not DNA and they are not clay crystals. They are patterns of information that can thrive only in grains or the artificially manufactured products of brains – books, computers, and so on. . And if a new kind of replicator takeover is beginning, it is conceivable that it will take off so far as to leave its parent DNA far behind. If so, we may be sure that computers will be in the van." Richard Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker, p. 158 "There is permission now to talk about a lot of things that there didn't used to be. but underneath that, the most revolutionary thing of all is our new view of consciousness. Yes, the evolutionary picture looks OK; there was material evolution of stars and planets and life forms and human beings but consciousness/mind/spirit/universal mind was there all along. It didn't wait for neuronal cells to develop in the human brain; and furthermore, each of us in the depths of ourselves taps into that whole thing." Willis Harman, PH.D. from Thinking Allowed, in conversation with Jeffrey Mishlove Ph.D., p.104 "A CONCEPT is a kind of mental tool for organizing data and facts; it is like an aspect of a computer or a filing system. But it is part of a rather automatic part of the mind which the human being has, and which is very useful. An IDEA, on the other hand, is like an expression of a fundamental reality - a force, in a way. Sometimes it takes its expression in words, in an abstract formula; sometimes it is in images sometimes it is in geometric forms or in art forms. So the verbal expression of ideas is only one way of communicating something that we go beyond just the isolated intellects to understand. Ideas come from a deeper level of the human mind. Concepts are the ordinary mind functioning as it should to organize, cut, dry, put in file cabinets, and do all that. In other words, normally when we think of the work of the intellect we are thinking about concepts that it deals with. the intellect is also engaged wtih ideas, but ideas penetrate deeper, they have a greater transofrmative power. Ideas are meant to be accepted by the intellect, but they need to penetrate down into the heart and the guts, and concepts don't do that particularly An example of a great idea might be the one that was left to us by Socrates: "Man, know theyself." That is a great idea. The idea of God is an idea, and it points to something that may or may not exist. I think it does, that it is real, but it's an idea. It didn't just appear automatically like a rock or a stone. Somebody had a vision of the idea of God, or the idea of the universe - of oneness, many in one. Among the ancient Chinese, the idea of the yin and the yang, the constant interplay of two forces in the universe, is an idea. The head can figure out the conceptual way of dealing with it, but it can never really understand it, because to understand an idea you have to experience it. You have to be immersed in it with you whole being. There has been a tremendous confusion between ideas and concepts, and therefore the conceptual mind has tried to do all by itself what only the mind of the whole person is able to do. That has been a problem with out whole society, I think." Jacob Needleman from Thinking Allowed conversations with Jeffrey Mishlove, pp. 77-78 "Carl Jung came to a discovery that was quite amazing at the time – that it wasn’t the situation that was debatable, as in Freud and Adler debating over a patients neurosis, but that each person brought to it something of his own personality typology, and that no matter what the issue, the psychological makeup of the person would determine this perspective on it. This is a very important part of Jung’s work, as I see it, because if we believe that there is a right way tot look at something, and that something is as it appears to be, then there is really no negotiating, no arguing, no chance to harmonize when people of different types come together. If you can recognize that if people are of different types, they each bring something novel to the discussion that the other person doesn’t see, then you can welcome the opposite perspective. If Russia and the United States for example, could recognize that they come out of different typologies – to expand this to an international perspective, - we could learn much from each other." June Singer, Ph. D. from Thinking Allowed conversations with Jeffrey Mishlove, p. 127. Mass Organization Replaced By Technology Has Transformed US Electoral Dice In Favor of The Right From, The Captive Public, written in 1986 BENJAMIN GINSBERG Director of the Center for Governmental Studies at Johns Hopkins University "The enormous infantry armies that dominated World War I battlefields have given way in importance to powerful modern weapons systems operated from electronic command posts by small groups of technicians . . the displacement of organizational methods by new political technology is that of a change is a shift from labor - to capital -intensive competitive electoral practices and has far-reaching implications for the balance of power among contending political groups . . .Indeed, the new technology permits financial resources to be more effectively harnessed and exploited than was never before possible. As a result, the significance of the right's customary financial advantage has been substantially increased. Money and the new political technology, not some spontaneous "shift to the right" by mass public opinion, were the keys to the 1978 and 1980 and the Republicans surprisingly strong showing during what amounted to an economic depression in 1982." "No political party is guaranteed victory, "nevertheless, the new technology loads the electoral dice in favor of the right. The expanding role of the new electoral techniques means that over the coming decades, groups closer tot he political left will increasingly find them selves engaged in a type of political warfare that they are poorly equipped to win. The supersession of organization by the new technology may prove to be the functionally equivalent of a critical electoral realignment, substantially redistributing power and profoundly transforming political possibilities in the United States." Benjamin Ginsberg, from The Captive Public, pp. 150-151 Democracy, Polling & Public Opinion Polling acts to control in submission and subsequently change and mold public opinion according to the state's agenda. Polling includes those most outspoken with those apathetic, thus weakening the dissonant and strengthening the voiceless. This then works in two ways. One is in by limiting the questions posed to the state's agenda only limits the number of alternatives and subsequent answers, and secondly, this molds and shapes the current beliefs and desires of public opinion. "Because they (the public opinion polls) seldom pose questions about the foundations of the existing order, while constantly asking respondents to choose from among the alternatives defined by that order - candidates and consumer products, for example - the polls may may help to narrow the focus of public discussion and to reinforce the limits on what the public perceives to be realistic political and social possibilities." "But whatever the particular changes polling may help to produce in the focus of public discourse, the broader problem is that polling fundamentally alters the character of the public agenda of opinion. So long as groups and individuals typically present their opinions on topics of their own choosing, the agenda of opinion is likely to consist of citizens' own needs, hopes, and aspirations. Opinions elicited by polls, on the other hand, mainly concern matters of interest to government, business, or other poll sponsors." p. 82 On The Media, Protesting & Accurate Reporting “The chief problem with protest as a communication mechanism is that, in general, the media upon which the protesters depend have considerable discretion in reporting and interpreting the events they cover. Should, for example, a particular group of protesters be identified as “freedom fighters” or “terrorists”? If a demonstration leads to violence, was this the fault of the protesters or the authorities? The answers to these questions are typically determined by the media, not by the protesters. This means that the media interpretation of protest activities is more a reflection of the view of the groups and forces to which the media are responsive – usually segments of the upper-middle class – than it is a function of the wishes of the protesters themselves. . . ” “If protesters are aligned with or potentially useful to more powerful forces, then protest can be an effective mechanism for the communication of the ideas and interests of the lower classes. If, on the other hand, the social forces to which the media are most responsive are not sympathetic to the protesters or their views, then protest is likely to be defined by the print and broadcast medias as mindless and purposeless violence. . . ” “And, in general, success on the idea market for working-class protesters requires an alliance with at least some segment of the upper and upper-middle class.” Benjamin Ginsberg, from The Captive Public, pp. 134-135 Democracy and Alternative Thought ALLAN BLOOM "Freedom of the mind requires not only, or not even especially, the absence of legal constraints but the presence of alternative thoughts. The most successful tyranny is not the one that uses force to assure uniformity but the one that removes the awareness of other possibilities, that makes it seem inconceivable that other ways are viable, that removes the sense that there is an outside. It is not feelings or commitments that will render a man free, but thoughts, reasoned thoughts. Feelings are largely formed and informed by convention. Real differences come from difference in thought and fundamental principle. Much in democracy conduces to the assault on awareness of difference. The Closing of The American Mind, p. 249 "A serious life means being fully aware of the alternatives, thinking about them with all the intensity one brings to bear on life and death questions, in full recognition that every choice is a great risk with necessary consequences that are hard to bear." p. 227 "Human nature must not be altered in order to have a problem-free world. Man is not just a problem-solving being, as behaviorists would wish us to believe, but a problem-recognizing and accepting being." p. 229 - - Nietzschean Perspectives ALEX DE TOCQUEVILLE "Tocqueville found that Americans talked very much about individual rights but that there was a real monotony of thought and that vigorous independence of mind was rare. Even those who appear to be free-thinkers really look to a constituency and expect one day to be part of a majority. They are creatures of public opinion as much as are conformists - actors of nonconformism in the theater of the conformists who admire and applaud nonconformity of certain kinds, the kinds that radicalize the already dominant opinions." Alan Bloom on Tocqueville, Closing of The American Mind, p. 247 "There are images of philosophic magnificence - which, it must be stressed, are distortions of the original, and can be its bitterest enemies, but which preserve the order of the cosmos and the soul from which philosphy begins. Tocqueville describes this marvelously well in his moving account of Pascal whom he evidently regards as the most perfect of men. The possibility of such a human type, the theoretical type, is, according to Tocqueville,most threatened in democracy, and it must be vigorously defended if humanity is not to be grievously impoverished. Much of the theoretical reflection that flourishes in modern democracy could be interpreted as egalitarian resentment against the higher type represented by Pascal, denigrating it, deforming it and interpreting it out of existence. Marxism and Freudianism reduce his motives to those all men have. Historicism denies him access to eternity. Value theory makes his reasoning irrelevant. If he were to appear, our eyes would be blind to his superiority, and we would be spared the discomfort it would cause us . It is to prevent or cure this peculiar democratic blindness that the university may be said to exist in a democracy, not for the sake of establishing an aristocracy but for the sake of democracy and for the sake of preserving the freedom of the mind - certainly one of the most important freedoms - for some individuals within it. The successful university is the proof that a socety can be devoted to the well-being of all, without stunting human potential or imprisoning the mind to the goals of the regime. The deepest intellectual weakness of democracy is its lack of taste or gift for the theoretical life. All our Nobel prizes and the like do nothing to gainsay Tocqueville's appraisal in this regard. The issue is not whether we possess intelligence but whether we aere adept at reflection of the broadest and deepest kind. We need constant reminders of our deficiency, now more than in the past. pp. 251-252 "I know of no country in which there is so little independence of mind and real freedom of discussion as in America . . . it is as if the natural bond which unites the opinions of man to his tastes, and his actions to his principles is now broken." - Alex de Tocqueville, Democracy In America p. "However enlightened and however skillful a central power may be, it cannot of itself embrace all the details of the existence of a great nation." p. 100 Allan Bloom writes that people are becoming too relativistic; we should be attacking evil more. You seem to be saying -- and I would agree -- that no, it's just the opposite; we should be transcending this good-and-evil polarity. SPEETH: There is that feeling of wanting to be a whole person, a dappled person, a 3-D person -- is not a person split into black and white. That's part of moving toward liberation -- to be free of the sense of being split inside, into a part of me that I love, and a part of me that I despise. And another thing you were saying that seems to me very important, is that we need to be free of the necessity to take and defend one position. Why should I see everything from a narcissistic point of view? Why couldn't I be objective and see myself as the same as other people? That would be a big liberation -- if I didn't polarize myself and aggrandize this little one that I am. MISHLOVE: You know, I recall a modern writer (Allan Bloom) has a very popular book out right now -- The Closing of the American Mind. His point is that we aren't teaching people more about good and evil. We're forgetting what he calls traditional, basic values. People are becoming too relativistic; we should be attacking evil more. You seem to be saying -- and I would agree -- that no, it's just the opposite; we should be transcending this good-and-evil polarity. SPEETH: And of course that is goodness, that is freedom. The Sufis have a nice way of saying it. They say, "Let go of your preconceptions, and accept your destiny." What is the reason to be liberated? What are we being liberated from? We're being liberated, basically, from conditioning that we received in early childhood, and also from anti-life aspects of probably our biology. I suppose that's in the DNA, I don't know. For what reason? It seems to me, so that we can live out some kind of personal destiny. And how will we ever know about that if we're going through the motions in order to continue some family tradition, or some cultural tradition? Kathleen Speeth, Ph. D. from Thinking Allowed conversations with Jeffrey Mishlove, p. 318 "Language is a virus..." "We must find out what words are and how they function. They become images when written down, but images of words repeated in the mind and not of the image of the thing itself." - William S. Burroughs   PLOTINUS   LANGUAGE & THINKING And PERCEPTION & AWARENESS "Language, in developing it and making it pass from the state of thought to that of image, reflects the thought as in a mirror. And thus it is that thought which is perceived, is made determinate, and is recalled. Whenever the soul is moved continually towards thought, it perceives it only if it is in the condition indicated. For it is one thing to think; it is another thing to perceive one's thought. We are always thinking. But we do not always perceive our thought because the subject that receives the thoughts receives also, alternately, sensations." - PLOTINUS, The Essential Plotinus, p. 158 THOSE TOO WEAK FOR CONTEMPLATION SEEK ACTION. "It is men too weak for contemplation who seek that shadow of contemplation and reason which is action. Unable to give themselves to contemplation because weak of soul, they are unable to grasp the object of contemplation sufficiently and sate themselves. They want to see it. they seek to achieve by activity what they cannot obtain by thought. When they produce something, it is because they wish to see it, contemplate it, and perceive it, and they wish the same for other men." p. 166 OR ACTION IS BY THOSE WHO CONTEMPLATE AND WISH TO ACHEIVE THEIR INTENDED VISIONS Thus we find everywhere that doing and making are either a weak contemplation or the concomitaints of contemplation: a weak contemplation, if after the action there is no more image to be thought of; the concomitant of contemplation, if there is the ability to contemplate a better image that what we have made. Indeed, what man able to contemplate the true would prefer its image? There is proof of all this in the fact that mentally handicapped can only practice mechanical and manual crafts, since they lack such intellectual visions. (The designer vs. the builder or the creator in flexible action vs. the zero tolerant robotic law enforcer.) The "All that I have ever written, seems now like mere straw compared to revelation." - Thomas Aquinas "A wise man is flexible, has much to learn without a loss of dignity. See the trees in floodtime, how they bend along the torrent's course, and how their twigs and branches do not snap, but stubborn trees are torn up roots and all."-Antigone, The Oedipus Plays of Sophocles, translation by Paul Roche, p. 222 American Pragmatism America today has lost the compartmentalization of ideas with the RICHARD RORTY   WILLIAM JAMES pragmatic belief that our truths are relative tools, that we must put aside our absolutes and use our c JOHN DEWEY ommon views towards peace, growth, liberty, rights and happiness together in the American dream of Rorty, William James, Emerson, Walt Whitman and Dewey. But on the contrary, we now have the fundamentalism, religious intolerance and absolutism of the conservatives, who are taking power, causing wars and removing liberty as we know it. Due to a change from man power to technology and more powerful means of finances, right wing conservative - authoritarian government appears the direction we are moving towards. Hopefully after a century or less of authoritarianism, the balance of liberalism will be retored and we will return to a pragmatic democracy, perhaps this time, with a new equalitarianism that will not entail our current conditions of economic slavery. - Me - R.S. JOHN DEWEY "The moral is not unintelligent glorification of empirical, pluralistic, and pragmatic method. On the contrary, the lesson to be learned is the importance of ideas and of a plurality of ideas employed in experimental activity as working hypotheses. Thoughtless empiricism provides opportunity for secret manipulation behind the visible scene. When we assume that we are following common sense policies, in the most honorable sense of commons sense, we may in fact, unless we direct observation of conditions by means of general ideas, be in process of being led around by the nose by agencies purporting to be democratic, but whose activities are subversive of freedom: a generalized warning which, when translated into concrete words, should make us wary toward those who talk glibly about the "American way of life," after they have identified Americanism with a partisan policy in behalf of concealed economic aims." - John Dewey, Freedom and Culture, pp. 95-96 "Recognize this infinite variety of appearances as a dream. As nothing but the projections of your mind, illusory and unreal. Without grasping at anything, rest in the wisdom of your Rigpa, that transcends all concepts. This is the heart of the practice for the bardo of this life. You are bound to die soon, and nothing then will be of any real help. What you experience in death is only your own conceptual thinking. Without fabricating any thoughts, let them all die into the vast expanse of your Rigpa’s self-awareness: This is the heart of the practice for the bardo of dying. Whatever grasps at appearance or disappearance, as being good or bad, is your mind. And this mind itself is the self-radiance of the Dharmakaya, just whatever arises. Not to cling to the risings, make concepts out of them, accept or reject them: This is the heart of the practice for the bardo of dharmata. Samsara is your mind, and nirvana is also your mind. All pleasure and pain, and all delusions exist nowhere apart from your mind. To attain control over your own mind. This is the heart of the practice of the bardo of becoming." - TSELE NATSOK RANGDROL, Tibetan Master, quoted by Sogyal Rinpoche in, The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying, p. 347. The differences between the superficial level and the profound exist between the beliefs in absolutes as reality or in the relative nature of the position, but only with a pardigm in mind. "Everything is a social construction" - Michel Folcault "All awareness is a linguistic affair" - Wilfrid Sellars "When Seeking Knowledge, Much Is Aquired. When Seeking Tao, Much Is Discarded." (Tao 48)     Black Elk, Shaman of the Oglala Sioux, often fell to all fours to play with toddlers. "We have much in common," he said. "They have just come from the Great Mysterious and I am about to return to it."     "Think For Yourself & Question Authority" - TIMOTHY LEARY Every group tends to absolutize itself, blind to the rationalization of self-interest and the relativity of "truth." "If the philosopher cannot rule, philosophy must be disproportionate to the city. This means that its truths must remain fundamentally private, and that the philosopher, for his own good and that of the city, must hide himself. He must adapt his public teachings to his particular situation while keeping his thought free of the influence. The philosopher's public speech must be guided by prudence rather than love of the truth.; his philosophic activity seems essentially private." ALLAN BLOOM, Interpretive Essay on The Republic of Plato, p. 392 "In the area of spirituality, we need at the very least to distinguish between horizontal or translative spirituality (which seeks to give meaning and solace to the separate self and thus fortify the ego) and vertical or transformative spirituality (which seeks to transcend the separate self in a state of nondual unity consciousness that is beyond the ego. Let us simply call these "narrow religion" and "broad religion" (or shallow and deep, depending on your preffered metaphor). KEN WILBER, A Theory of Everything, p. 73 "In a Sociable God (CW3), I called this the difference between legitimate religion and authentic religion, the former offering effective translation (or change in surface structures), the latter offering effective transformation (or change in deep structures). The former is moving furniture around one floor, the latter is changing floors." A Theory of Everything, p 156 MIRCEA ElIADE From The Sacred & The Profane: "Religious man lives in open world and that, in addition, his existence is open to the world. This means that religious man is accessible to an infinite series of experiences that could be termed cosmic. Such experiences are always religious, for the world is sacred. . . we can say that every human experience is capable of being transfigured, lived on a different, a transhuman plane." p. 171 "Each year the religious recreated his world. At each New Year the cosmogony is reiterated, the world re-created, and to do this is also to create time, that is, to regenerate it by beginning it anew. . . The religious festival is the reactualization of a primordial event, of a sacred history in which the actors are the gods or semidivine beings." p. 105 "The perspective changes completely when the sense of the religiousness of the cosmos becomes lost. This is what occurs when, in certain more highly evolved societies, the intellectual elites progressively detach themselves from the patterns of the traditional religion. The periodical sanctification of cosmic time proves useless and without meaning. The gods are no longer accessible through the cosmic rhythms. The religious meaning of the repetition of paradigmatic gestures is forgotten. But repetition emptied of its religious content necessarily leads to a pessimistic vision of existence. When it is no longer a vehicle for reintegrating a primordial situation, and hence for recovering the mysterious presence of the gods, that is, when it is desacralized, cyclic time becomes terrifying; it is seen as a circle forever turning on itself, repeating itself to infinity." p. 107 "For religious man nature is not only natural but sacred. Experience of a radically desacralized nature is a recent discovery; especially to scientists. For others, nature still exhibits a charm, a mystery, a majesty in which it is possible to decipher traces of ancient religious values." p. 151 "Modern nonreligious man assumes a new existential situation; he regards himself solely as the subject and agent of history, and he refuses all appeal to transcendence. In other words, he accepts no model for humanity outside the human condition as it can be seen in the various historical situations. Man makes himself, and he only makes himself completely in proportion as he desacralized himself and the world The sacred is the prime obstacle to his freedom. he will become himself only when he is totally demysticized. He will not be truly free until has killed the last god. "It does not fall us to discuss this philosophical position. We will only observe that, in the last analysis, modern nonreligous man assumes a tragic existence and that his existential choice is not without its greatness. But this nonreligious man descends from homo religious and, whether he likes it or not, he is also the work of religious man; his formation begins with the situations assumed by his ancestors. In short, he is the result of a process of desacralization. Just as nature is the product of a progressive secularization of the cosmos as the work of God, profane man is the result of a desacrilization of human existence." p, 203 "For religion is the paradigmatic solution for every existential crisis. it is the paradigmatic solution not only because it can be indefinitely repeated, but also because it is believed to have a transcendental origin and hence is valorized as revelation received from on other, transhuman world. The religious solution not only resolves the crisis but t the same time makes existence "open" to values that are no longer contingent or particular, thus enabling man to transcend personal situations and, finally, gain access to the world of spirit. p. 210 "In the case of those moderns who proclaim that they are nonreligious, religion and mythology are "eclipsed" in the darkness of their unconscious - which means too that in such men the possibility of reintegrating a religious vision of life lies at a great depth. " p. 213 IAN G. BARBOUR IAN G. BARBOUR, from When Science Meets Religion: "Every discipline is selective and has its limitations. each abstracts from the totality of experience those features in which it is interested. The astronomer Arthur Eddington once told a delightful parable about a man studying deep-sea life using a net with a three-inch mesh. After bringing up repeated samples, the man concluded that there are no deep-see fish smaller than three inches in length. Our methods of fishing, Eddington suggests, determine what we can catch. If science (and religion) is selective, it cannot claim that its picture of reality complete." p. 14 "According to instrumentalism, scientific theories are not representations of reality but useful intellectual and practical tools. They are convenient human constructs, calculating devices for correlating observations and making predictions. Models in science are not pictures of the world but useful fictions that can be discarded after they have been used to construct theories that will predict observations." p. 21 "According to instrumentalism,, theories are convenient human constructs, calculating devices for correlating observations and making predictions. Theories are also practical tools for achieving technical control. They are to be judged by their usefulness in fulfilling these goals, not by their correspondence to reality (which is inaccessible to us). Models are imaginative fictions used temporarily to construct theories, after which they can be discarded; they are not literal representations of the world. We cannot say anything about the atom between our observations, through we can use the quantum equations to calculate the probability that a particular observation will occur in a particular experiment. Theories and models are useful intellectual and practical tools, but they do not tell us anything about the world in itself. this view is known as "the Copenhagen interpretation" because it has often been ascribed to the Dane, Niels Bohr( Niels Bohr, Atomic, Physics and Human Knowledge)." p. 74-75 "Neither science nor religion can say very much about reality in itself, apart from our involvement in it. Instrumentalists are supported by the linguistic analysts who insist that different types of language serve very different functions in human life; science and religion are said to be independent and unrelated enterprises. They serve useful but differing functions, even though neither one provides knowledge of reality in itself." p. 76 Reality Suggests There Are Countless Numbers of Conscious Levels That Exist Far Beyond The Human Consciousness and Completely Outside Man's Ability To Both Comprehend And Perceive. Only One Level of Consciousness Is The Human/Animal (Physical) Plane. In This, There Are Various Stages of Development. And It Is Here, In Blinded Ignorance, Where Such Animals Define, Describe, Explain and Even Smugly and Contemptuously Claim To Solve Reality, Spirituality and God. And Yet There Is the Nobility & Admiring Quality of Philosophy, Mysticism and Open Science, Always Available For Re-Interpretation, Re-Mystification, Re-Mythologizing It's Nature. And Then There Is The Narrow and One-Sided Fundamentalism, The Arrogant and Self-Righteous, Or Simply The Half-Baked, Half-Witted Simpletons, With No Ability To Walk Outside Their Limited, Fixed and Pithy Vacuums. Insight: The act or outcome of grasping the inward or hidden nature of things or of perceiving in an intuitive manner. (Non-Rational) PAUL TILLICH "The concept of a '"Personal God" interfering with natural events, or being "an independent cause of natural events," makes God a natural object besides others, an object among others, a being among beings, maybe the highest, but nevertheless a being. This indeed is not only the destruction of the physical system but even more the destruction of any meaningful idea of God . . . . The concept of a "Personal God" is a symbol, not an object, and it never should be interpreted as an object. And it is one symbol beside others indicating that our personal center is grasped by the manifestation of the inaccessible ground and abyss of being." Theology and Culture, (1964) pp. 129, 132 "There are no valid arguments for the existence of God, but there are acts of courage in which we affirm the power of being, whether we know it or not." The Courage To Be, p. NICHOLAS RESCHER "Some information is simply not safe for us - not because there is something wrong with its possession in the abstract, but because it is the sort of things we humans are not well suited to cope with. There are various things we simply ought not to know. If we did not have to live our lives amidst a fog of uncertainty about a whole range of matters that are actually of fundamental interest and importance to us, it would no longer be a human mode of existence that we would live. Instead we would become a being of another sort perhaps angelic, perhaps machine-like, but certainly not human." "There is a more deeply problematic issue, however. Are there also moral limits to the possession of information per se - are there things we ought not to know on moral grounds? .. .. . Here, inappropriateness lies only in the mode of inquisition or in the respect of misuses. With information, possession in and of itself - independently of the matter of its acquisition and utilization - cannot involve moral impropriety." Nicholas Rescher, Limits of Science "Every living thing needs a surrounding atmosphere, a shrouding vapor of mystery." FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE "The unexamined life may not be worth living, as Socrates taught. Yes, and the overexamined life may bring confusion and paralysis if one tries to pierce the veil of ignorance." ROBERT SHATTUCK, Forbidden Knowledge, p. 317 The Profound Loss of Democracy & Freedom Via The George Bush Administraton All Under the Guises of (Christian fundamentalism) Morality, Repression and Defense of Terrorism     As The Patriotic Flags Fly, The bourgeois sleep in nihilism and superficial identity, unaware of their foundational structures. The ideal condtions for tyranny.  "Please do not be offended if I tell you the truth. No man on earth who conscientiously opposes either you (the Greek democratic polis) or any other organized democracy, and flatly prevents a great many wrongs and illegalities from taking place in the state in which he belongs, can possibly escape with his life. The true champion of justice, if he intends to survive even for a short time, must necessarily confine himself to private life and leave politics alone." SOCRATES: PLATO, The Apology, The Last Days of Socrates, p. 56 "Once freedom was understood as meaning the absence of a powerful government. Today some observers at least appear to believe that freedom is some sort of gift from the governent. " H. B. Mayo JOHN DEWEY   "The serious threat to our democracy is not the existence of foreign totalitarian states. It is the existence within our own personal attitudes and within our own institutions of conditions which have given a victory to external authority, discipline, uniformity and dependence upon The Leader in foreign countries. The battlefield is also accordingly here - within ourselves and our institutions." JOHN DEWEY, Freedom and Culture, p.49, G.P. Putnam's Sons, New York, 1939 Bush signs the Patriot Act. The act towards oligarchy, American totalitarianism. "Beware the leader who bangs the drums of war in order to whip the citizenry into a patriotic fervor, for patriotism is indeed a double-edged sword. It both emboldens the blood, just as it narrows the mind.... And when the drums of war have reached a fever pitch and the blood boils with hate and the mind has closed, the leader will have no need in seizing the rights of the citizenry. Rather, the citizenry, infused with fear and blinded with patriotism, will offer up all of their rights unto the leader, and gladly so. How do I know? For this is what I have done. And I am Caesar." -- attributed to Gaius Julius Caesar -- The last dictator of the Roman Empire Nixon signs the War on Drugs. A Major Bill Against Free Democracy "Totalitarianism is never content to rule by external means, namely, through the state and a machinery of violence; thanks to its peculiar ideology and the role assigned to it in this apparatus of coercion, totalitarianism has discovered a means of dominating and terrorizing human beings from within" HANNAH ARENDT HANNAH ARENDT "The minority, the ruling class at present, has the schools and press, usually the Church as well, under its thumb. This enables it to organize and sway the emotions of the masses, and make its tool of them." ALBERT EINSTEIN "The great mass of people . . . will more easily fall victim to a big lie than to a small one. . . It also gives us a very special, secret pleasure to see how unaware the people around us are of what is really happening to them." ADOLPH HITLER, Mein Kampf "The accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judiciary, in the same hands . . . may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny." JAMES MADISON, Federalist Papers 47 "All endeavors to introduce any foreign innovation, the necessity of which is not rooted in the core of the nation itself, are therefore foolish; and all premeditated revolutions of the kind are unsuccessful, for they are without God, who keeps aloof from such bungling." PETER ECKERMANN, Conversations with JOHANN VON GOETHE, p. 37, January 4, 1824 "At what moment does it become necessary to limit the freedom of everyone in order to suppress the danger lurking in a disloyal handful? The moment for drastic repression has not arrived, and the task of liberals in America is difficult but clear. They must fight to preserve the democratic safeguards contained in the Bill of Rights, while applying to Nazis (terrorists) and their supporters the equally democratic methods of exposure, counter-propaganda, and justified legal attack. Otherwise the Nazi invasion of Norway is likely to end in a victory for Martin Dies* in America." Freda Kirchwey, The Nation, April, 1940 *Martin Dies: Congressman from Texas, member of the Democratic Party, Dies was first elected to the Senate in 1931. A passionate anti-communist, Dies was the first chairman of the Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) that was established in 1937. The main objective of the HUAC was the investigation of un-American and subversive activities. This included looking at the possibility that the American Communist Party had infiltrated the Federal Writers Project and other New Deal projects. Senator EDWARD KENNEDY Sen. Edward Kennedy, a Massachusetts Democrat, said he was concerned about reports that the FBI was monitoring anti-war protesters. "We have the stories going on this morning where they're using the FBI to look into demonstrations in order to find out who is demonstrating and getting into their background. That reminds me to the old Nixon times and the enemies list," he said on ABC's "This Week." White House officials in the administration of former President Richard Nixon kept a list of political enemies. Kennedy said the Bush administration had gone to "extraordinary lengths" to attack lawmakers who question the White House policy on Iraq and that was a "fundamental flaw" of the administration. "How could we be fighting abroad to defend our freedoms and diminishing those freedoms here at home?" Senator EDWARD KENNEDY, November 23, 2003 Feds Win Right to War Protesters' Records BY RYAN J. FOLEY, Associated Press Writer, February 7, 2003 DES MOINES, Iowa - In what may be the first subpoena of its kind in decades, a federal judge has ordered a university to turn over records about a gathering of anti-war activists. In addition to the subpoena of Drake University, subpoenas were served this past week on four of the activists who attended a Nov. 15 forum at the school, ordering them to appear before a grand jury Tuesday, the protesters said. Federal prosecutors refuse to comment on the subpoenas. "This is exactly what people feared would happen," said Brian Terrell of the peace ministry, one of those subpoenaed. "The civil liberties of everyone in this country are in danger. How we handle that here in Iowa is very important on how things are going to happen in this country from now on." John Stewart: "You know ... what has become rewarded in political discourse is the extremity of viewpoint," Stewart says on the show. "People like the conflict. Conflict baby! It sells. Crossfire! Hardball! Shut up! You shut up!" While many have questioned the veracity of the Fox News slogan "Fair and Balanced," Stewart thinks that frustration deserves to be leveled elsewhere as well. "Well, CNN says, `You can depend on CNN.' Guess what? I watch CNN. No, you can't!" KARL JASPERS "The independence of man is rejected by all totalitarianism, by the totalitarian religion which claims exclusive truth as well as by the totaltitarian state which, melting down all humanity into material for its edifice of power, leaves no room for individuality and even controls leisure activities in accordance with an idealogical line. Today independence seems to be silently disappearing beneath the inundation of all life by the typical, the habitual, the unquestioned commonplace." - 1954, KARL JASPERS, Way to Wisdom, An Introduction to Philosophy, p. 110 FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE "In some remote corner . . . of the universe there was once a star on which clever animals invented knowledge. It was the most arrogant and mendacious moment of universal history." On Truth and Falsity in their Extra-Moral Sense, 1873 "Who says it is better for human beings to seek for the truth? How do we know untruth is not better? And what is truth anyway?. . . Only that which has no history can be defined." Beyond Good & Evil, 1886 Nietzsche's insight: There is no "Truth" upon which to ground what we believe in. For all beliefs, philosophies and teachings are determined by the rules and definitions of history, with previous thinking systems, the interior motives, passions and desires of the unconscious, unaware to the philosopher, and that of language, which is either defined in rational and restrictive mathematical structure, having precise meaning, or that of poetic and metaphorical framework, with ambiguous meaning, open to undefinable and unlimited interpretation, yet in reality, all language, and subsequently all knowledge, is metaphorical and inadequate to contain objective "truth." We must have the courage to realize we either create our own ground of truth, or enslave our perceptions to others. Nevertheless, we accept this harsh insight, affirming ourselves with joy. "What then is truth? A mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, and anthropomorphism's: in short, a sum of human relations which have been poetically and rhetorically intensified, transferred, and embellished, and which, after long usage, seem to a people to be fixed, canonical, and binding. Truths are illusions which we have forgotten are illusions—they are metaphors that have become worn out and have been drained of sensuous force, coins which have lost their embossing and are now considered as metal and no longer as coins." On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR. "God has injected a principle in this universe. God has said that all men must respect the dignity and worth of all human personality." In Speaking of Nietzsche's Will to Power, Martin Luther King, Jr. comments: "It was this misinterpretation (interpretation of power and love as polar opposites and the association of power with violence.) that caused Nietzsche, who was a philosopher of the "Will To Power," to reject the Christian concept of love. It was this same misinterpretation which induced Christian theologians to reject Nietzschean philosophy of the "Will to Power" in the name of the Christian idea of love. Now, we've got to get this thing right. What is needed is a realization that power without love is reckless and abusive, and love without power is sentimental and anemic. Power at its best is love implementing the demands of justice." "Religious doctrines are not the residue of experience or the final result of reflection.  They are illusions, fulfillments of the oldest, strongest and most insistent wishes of mankind.  The secret of their strength is the strength of these wishes." - SIGMUND FREUD, The Future of an Illusion Freud sees religious doctrines as the solidifying of our wishes, illusions we have created. Yet he put science and analyticalism as supreme parting with all ideas of mysticism as the same in doctrines. Freud's reductionism misses the truly significant essential, the "religious experience," the idea of the holy, the numinous, the mysterium tremendum (Rudolph Otto), discounting such as a "oceanic feeling" from the mother's womb. Yet this mystical awakening, the doors of perception opened outside the phenomenal Being of human consciousness have been opened by mystics in all religious cultures from the beginning of recorded history, the irrational beauty beyond all discursive analytical clarity and linguistic pursuits. This experience being achieved through impairment of the brain's cerebral reducing valve obtained through various disciplines of meditation, yogic breathing exercises, fasting, self flagellation, singing, chanting & shouting and from the beginning with entheogenic drugs. Today's world consists of fundamental, illusionary, and intellectual religion devoid of the only true element, the religious "experience," the "wholly other," that spoken of in Rudolph Otto's Idea of the Holy : Religious Experience has been replaced by logic leaving this question brought forth by Paul Tillich: PAUL TILLICH "The question our century puts before us is: Is it possible to regain the lost dimension, the encounter with he Holy, the dimension that cuts through the world of subjectivity and objectivity and goes down to that which is not world but is for mystery of the Ground of Being?" HUSTON SMITH "Liberals: do not recognize the spiritual wholeness that can come from the sense of certainty." Embedded in that single sentence may be the primary reason the mainline liberal churches are losing ground to conservative churches. Liberals are at their worst in not recognizing how much an absolute can contribute to life, and in assuming that absolutes can be held only dogmatically, which is not the case. Absolutism and dogmatism lie on different axes. The first relates to belief, whereas the second is a character disorder. The opposite of absolutism is not open-mindedness but relativism, and the opposite of dogmatism is not relativism but open-mindedness. There can be, and are, dogmatic relativists and open-minded absolutists." The False Mirror Rene Magritte 1928rror "The light is there, and the colours surround us; but, if we had no light and no colours in our own eyes, we should not perceive the outward phenomena." PETER ECKERMANN, Conversations with GOETHE, p. 48, February 26, 1824 All human knowledge lives in limited perception and never absolute truth and naked reality, but only perceived of rational analysis that is hampered from fixed perceptive capabilities, filtering reality according to one's own mind, unique to each individual. The mind imposes form upon our perceptions as a means of making spatial and temporal experience itself possible and thus supplies "the false mirror." God is not an external being, but a divine process coming into being within the life of the world, an existence within all reality, not prior to it, but as growing by absorbing and transforming what is done in the temporal world. ALFRED NORTH WHITEHEAD Process and Reality BUDDHA "Do not accept what you hear by report, do not accept tradition, do not accept a statement because it is found in our books, nor because it is in accord with your belief, nor because it is the saying of your teacher. Be lamps unto yourselves. Those who, either now or after I am dead, shall rely upon themselves only and not look for assistance to anyone besides themselves, it is they who shall reach the topmost height." SIDDHARTHA GAUTAMA of the SAKYAS BARUCH SPINOZA Jewish Pantheist 1622-77 C.E. "The nature of religious faith has become a mere compound of credulity and prejudices." "Whatsoever exists expresses God's nature or essence in an even conditioned matter; That is, whatsoever exists, expresses in an even conditioned manner God's power." Spinoza, appears to have been closer to rational analysis, such as Descartes, and although a philosopher, not a poet or mystic, recognized the mystical awe. As an non-theist, believed there was nothing personal about God, which was inseparable from the rest of reality, as reality cannot be separated from anything else, as it is impossible to say that "he" exists in any ordinary sense. He believed that there was no God that corresponded to the meaning we usually attach to that word. Yet Mystics and Philosophers had been making the same point for centuries. Some has said that there was "nothing" apart from the world we know. If Spinoza were not to drop the idea of God (En Sof - as the Jewish Kabbalists called him) then his Pantheism would resemble Kabbalah and we could sense in affinity between radical mysticism and the newly emergent atheism of the Enlightenment. DENIS DIDEROT "Whether God exists of does not exist, He has come to rank among the most sublime and useless truths." In A Letter to the Blind, Diderot imagined an argument between a Newtonian, whom he called "Mr. Holmes," and Nicholas Saunderson, the late Cambridge mathematician who had lost his eyesight as a baby. "What is the world, Mr. Holmes (Mr. Holmes - a Newtonian that supports God's existence from supposed proof of the universe's design), but a complex, subject to cycles of change, all of which show a continual tendency to destruction: a rapid succession of beings that appear one by one, flourish and disappear; a merely transitory symmetry and a momentary appearance of order." The God of Newton, and indeed of many conventional Christians, who was supposed to be literally responsible for everything that happens, was not only an absurdity but a horrible idea. To introduce "God" to explain things that we cannot explain at present was a failure of humanity. "My good friend "Mr. Holmes," Diderot's Saunderson concludes, "admit your ignorance." The Principle of Generative Matter Taken From Karen Armstrong's History of God, p. 143. In Diderot's view there was no need of a Creator. Matter was not the passive, ignoble stuff that Newton and the Protestants imagined, but has its own dynamic which obeys its own laws. It is this law of matter - not a as Newton defined as a Divine Mechanick - which is responsible for the apparent design we think we see. Nothing but matter existed. Diderot had taken Spinoza one step further. Instead of saying that there was no God but nature, Diderot had claimed that there was only nature and no God at all. He was not alone in his belief: scientists such as Abraham Trembley  and John Turbeville Needham had discovered The Principle of Generative Matter, which was now surfacing as an hypothesis in biology, microscopy, zoology, natural history and geology. Few were prepared to make a final break with God, however. Even the philosophers who frequented the salon of Paul Heinrich, Baron of Holbach (1723-89), did not publicly espouse atheism, though they enjoyed open and frank discussion. From these debates came Holbach's book, The System of Nature: or Laws of the Moral and Physical World (1770), which became known as the bible of atheistic materialism. There was no supernatural alternative to nature, which, Holbach argued, was "but an immense chain of causes and effects which unceasingly flow from one another." To believe in a God was dishonest and a denial of our true experience. it was also an act of despair. Religion created gods because people could not find any other explanation to console them for the tragedy of life in this world. They turned to the imaginary comforts of religion and philosophy in an attempt to establish some illusory sense of control, trying to propitiate an "agency" they imagine lurking behind the scenes to ward off terror and disaster. Aristotle had been wrong, philosophy was not the result of a noble desire for knowledge but of the craven longing to avoid pain. The cradle of religion therefore, was ignorance and fear, and a mature, enlightened man must climb out of it. Three Rebuttals to the "Argument By Design," "Look at the structure of the universe, the atom and the orderly network of a hornet's nest." 1. The order of the Universe is under constant deterioration, it is not of exact order, but chaotic.. Life brings forth death, birth and growth bring degeneration and degradation, an outward push of expanding vibrancy, to an inward pull of contracting, retrogression in eventual disintegration of physical existence. Design is under constant decay and destruction, as as things are under continual renewal and atrophy, deterioration and death. Nothing declines in decomposition and ruin from reasons based on antiquated concepts such as "sin, " nor does any event of physical, natural, social, or economic disaster erupt from man's literal attempts to define such in theistic and objective terms. 2. Reality (the universe, the atom and the hornet's nest) is observed through the lens of human insight, through the filter of hum,an perception, all so, within the framework of phenomenal understanding, limited within the inside view, processed, filtered and interpreted within the compounds of constrained physical levels of consciousness, within narrow logic and inability to observe, to perceive, to absorb reality outside the structure of the mind's attempt to process, compute and define all spatial and temporal surroundings, transforming such to conform within the physical world as we know it. 3. How does humanity account for it's evil and manifest disorder? Antiquated mythological concepts do not answer this question, but rather hide such an answer that only survives in the fact that the design of the universe is destructively chaotic and against order. (David Hume's Argument) DAVID HUME There is no need to go beyond a scientific explanation of reality and no philosophical reason for believing anything that lay beyond our sense experience. In the Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, Hume disposed of the argument that purported to prove God's existence from the design of the universe, arguing that it rested on analogical arguments that were inconclusive. One might be able to argue that the order we discern in the natural world pointed to an intelligent Overseer, but how, then, to account for evil and the manifest disorder? There was no logical answer to this. Karen Armstrong on DAVID HUME Reason and Existenz The authentic idea of all Being disappears in every attempt to establish, isolate, and absolutize it. All objectification ceases to be absolute truth and no longer is true in transcendence, ceasing to cross boundaries. All demarcations are relative. Only within the grounded irrational center (the existenz), can reason find content, while only with reason can this chaotic center find clarification. The error lies in trying to secure as a content for knowledge what is true only as a limit for consciousness and demand of the self. FRITJOF CAPRA "When one looks at the ancient words for "soul" and "spirit" - the Sanskrit Amman, the Latin anima and spirtus, the Greek psyche and pneuma, the Hebrew ruach - we see that they all have a common meaning. They all mean "breath." The ancient intuition conceived of spirit as the breath of life. . . Physicists will find that Eastern mysticism provides a consistent and beautiful philosophical framework which can accommodate our most advanced theories of the physical world." The Tao of Physics, pp. 8, 12 "The utterance of thinking is a telling silence. Such utterance corresponds to the most profound essence of language, which has its origin in silence. As one in touch with telling silence, the thinker, in a way peculiar to him, rises to the rank of a poet, yet he remains eternally distinct from the poet, just as the poet in turn remains eternally distinct from the thinker." Martin Heidegger, Nietzsche, Vol II "What is novel about my position taken toward philosophy, is a conviction that no prior age shared; that we do not possess the truth. All earlier men "possessed the truth," even the skeptics." Nietzsche, The Dawn XI, 159   "The West has long been demythologized and lost its power to inspire and its view of the future. Therefore, it is evident that its myths are what animates a culture, and the makers of myths are the makers of cultures and of man. They are superior to philosophers, who only study and analyze what the poets make." Allan Bloom, The Closing of The American Mind, p. 204   Contemplation For Leaving The Rational Ego, Returning Towards The Intuitive Center. OSWALD SPENGLER "There is no justification for assigning to this intellectual Form-World the primacy over others. Every critical science, like every myth and every religious belief, rests upon an inner certitude. Various as the creatures of this certitude may be, both in structure and in sound, they are not different in basic principle. Any reproach, therefore, leveled by Natural science at Religion is a boomerang. We are presumptuous and no less in supposing that we can ever set up "The Truth" in the place of "anthropomorphic" conceptions, for no other conceptions but these exist at all. Every idea that is possible at all is a mirror of the being of its author. The statement that "man created God in his own image," is valid for every historical religion, and is not less valid for every physical theory, however firm its reputed basis of fact." Decline of The West Vol. I, p. 381 "The civilization is the inevitable destiny of the Culture, . . . and is the most external and artificial state of which a species of developed humanity is capable. Civilizations are the conclusions, the thing-become succeeding the thing-becoming, death following life, rigidity following expansion." OSWALD SPENGLER "The Greeks' originally did not preclude their overwhelming debt to earlier civilizations, and to the Oriental religion in particular; and it may well be true that Greek culture consisted, to a considerable extent, in the gradual refinement of the Dionysian religion, through Orphism  and Pythagoreanism, to Platonism; in other words, in Apollo's harnessing of Dionysus. Nietzsche, unlike Spengler, did not believe that we are doomed to ABRAHAM HESCHEL be epigoni (inferior imitator). The Greeks, too, found themselves at the end of a long line of magnificent civilizations and were yet able to develop a culture of their own by integrating what had gone before. We might appropriate their "conception of culture as another and improved physis without inside and outside . . . culture as a harmony of living, thinking, appearing, and willing". WALTER KAUFMANN, Nietzsche, Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist, p. 154. "As civilization advances, the sense of wonder declines." ABRAHAM HESCHEL, Between God and Man "Tbe image of God is found essentially and personally in all mankind. In this way we are all one, intimately united in our external image which is the image ofGod and the source in us of all our life." JOHN RUSBROECK SOREN KIERKEGAARD   "Truth is Subjectivity. . . Life has its own hidden forces which you can only discover by living." "That something which I am . . . is precisely a nothing . . . Existenz at that critical zero . . . between something and nothing, a mere perhaps." Soren Kierkegaard "The sclerosis of objectivity is the annihilation of existence." SHRIVASTAVA KARL JASPERS "There is no value in the type of knowledge which bases itself solely on objective criteria of thought and that order of civilization where technological development has swallowed up the natural artifice of man." "Without infinite reflection we should fall into the quiet of the settled and established which, as something permanent in the world, would become absolute, that is, we should become superstitious. An atmosphere of bondage arises with such a settlement. Infinite reflection, therefore, is, precisely through its endlessly active dialectic, the condition of freedom. It breaks out of every prison of the finite. Reason and Existenz, p. 32 "In order to see most clearly into what is true and real, into what is no longer fastened to any particular thing or colored by any particular atmosphere, we must push into the widest range of the possible. And then we experience the following: everything that is an object for us, even though it be the greatest, is still always within another, is not yet all. Wherever we arrive, the horizon which includes the attained itself goes further and forces us to give up any final rest. We can secure no standpoint from which a closed whole of Being would be surveyable, nor any sequence of standpoints through whose totality Being would be given even indirectly." p. 63 ALDOUS HUXLEY "That art Thou.' Behold but one in all things. God within and God without. There is a way to reality in and through the world, and there is a way to a reality in and through the soul. but the best way is that which leads to the Divine ground simultaneously in the perceiver and in that which is perceived." PIERRE TEILHARD DE CHARDIN "The day will come when, after harnessing space, the winds, the tides, and gravitation, we shall harness for God the energies of love. And on that day, for the second time in the history of the world, we shall have discovered fire." "We are faced with a harmonized collectivity of consciousness equivalent to a sort of super- consciousness. The idea is that of the earth not only becoming covered in myriads of grains of thought, but becoming enclosed in a single thinking envelope so as to form, functionally, no more than a single vast grain of thought on the sidereal scale, the plurality of individual reflections grouping themselves together and reinforcing one another in the act of a single unanimous reflection." - The Phenomenon of Man, 1955, p. 252 "To be fully ourselves it is in the opposite direction, in the direction of convergence with all the rest, that we must advance- towards the 'other.' The peak of ourselves, the acme of our originality, is not our individuality but our person; and according to the evolutionary structure of the world, we can only find our person by uniting together. There is no mind without synthesis. The same holds good from top to bottom. The true ego grows in inverse proportion to 'egoism.' Like the Omega which attracts it, the element only becomes personal when it universalizes itself." p. 263 WALLACE BLACK ELK "A lot is happening in Indian world . . . In a time of "who is the most powerful" and "who controls the most," the focus of earth-dwellers should be that of individuals living harmoniously on a small planet. " "Already too much emphasis is placed on human difference - the breach of peace, the conflict of existence. How much of this do we as individual earth-dwellers cause, and how much is caused by superpowers? " "Mother Earth continually goes through its life-affirming processes which allows us the latitude to complicate her design." "Indian "earth-dwelling" values and ethics are needed at a world level. A number of nations lesser than the superpowers' illusion face reality on a day-to-day basis." "These are our kin, for oftentimes there is no time for illusion. Just truth. The hard truth of deprivation, the usurping of inalienable rights and the destruction of traditional ways of living. The Indian Reader supports peace - but all who profess peace do not bring it." "It is a sad fact that this society has no respect for its elders or ancestors, for how is it possible to balance both your children and children's-children to respect and honor? If we believe that to study the past is to foretell the future, then the lesson will show that ":solutions" which led to massive abuses will again outweigh the sacrifices of men. Yet, lost souls may again find themselves as earth-dwellers." WALLACE BLACK ELK - The Indian Reader MICHEL FOUCAULT "To all those who still wish to talk about man, about his reign or his liberation, to all those who still ask themselves questions about what man is in his essence, to all those who wish to take him as their starting-point in their attempts to reach the truth . . . to all these warped and twisted forms of reflection we can only answer with a philosophical laugh - which means, to a certain extent, a silent one." Human beings do not possess a unique identity, which is "theirs." They are subjects, made by systems and networks of power which they are usually completely unaware. "Power produces knowledge . . . knowledge and power directly imply one another." Foucault's histories reveal that 'truth' and 'knowledge' will necessarily always be interpretations that involve reduction and repression. Knowledge always requires specifically qualified interpreters and representatives, which is how power elites evolve. Truth is a Pathless Journey, As There Is No One Path of Supreme Truth, Yet That In Itself Is The Path. There Is No Instruction Manual To Life With Logical Formulas & Moral Codes Of Certainty & Safety. Nor are there Exact Metaphysical Laws to follow For Objective ""Truth."" Yet There Exists Compassion, Kindness, Forgiveness, & Metaphysics Which Reside Outside All Moral Codes & Explanatory Definitions of Consciousness. Despite it's Uncharted Direction And Mapless Reality, There Is No Confusion In Unknowing, But An Illumination of Unspoken Equilibrium Of Both Order & Peace That Lives In Perfect Harmony - That Which Rests In The Deep Recesses Of The Soul In Silence & Solitude. It Is Here, In Ambiguity, In The Mystery of Life, In The Depths of One's Own Being, That Rests The Cloud of Unknowing, Where Truth & Understanding Exist & Where Courage and Compassion Reside. - Richard Schwartz, Website Owner Using Beauty to Inconspicuously Confine Many cults, new age movements, a lesser number of philosophical groups - as most are abstract, and of course, most religious organizations, are those who rely on fundamental thinking. In an attempt to appeal others to their cause and belief systems, they will use the beauty of mysticism, with the ambiguous and open vulnerability, to appear as just, impartial, honest, intellectual and reasonable in human development. Subsequently, they subtly, slyly and inconspicuously lure in idealism and formulations constrained of all intuitive awareness into linguistic rationalization, mapping out realities into incognizant vision of narrow logic, the ugliness of fundamentalism, embracing the safety zones of certainty and one-sided dogma, labeling all such as objective ""truth."" After such certainties and one-sided belief systems are built, a complete removal of all emptiness and subjective relativity are trashed into oblivion in the neurotic prison walls of intellective refuge, the internal walls of artificial barriers and false protection. To live in reality, freedom and truth All words, all direction, all conceptual ideas, teachings and guidance of men, all scriptures, formulas and creeds, even God himself as an object, must remain in relativity; in subjective perception for communication means only. The moment we leave ambiguity with trust and dependence in anything beyond personal experience, that is, in teachers and formulas, words of men, in anything absolute, which includes God as on object, is when we leave the ever flowing, moving and expanding mystery and fullness of life to that of stagnation - a life of certainty, and security, of interior, illusionary protection and degrees of fundamentalism. To cover over our fears is to hide, but to accept them "in spite of," living in uncertainty and insecurity, is to have the courage and joy to grow, fully live, fully love and use the power of being with the openness to see our true inner nature and that of all others. To transcend all prejudice, rise above all cultural, religious, racial barriers, sexual orientations and social structures, to unconditionally accept and find understanding in truth beyond subjective interpretation. HIPPOLYTUS "Abandon the search for God and the creation and other matters of a similar sort. Look for him by taking yourself as the starting point. Learn who it is within you that makes everything his own and says, My God, my mind, my thought, my soul, my body. Learn the sources of sorrow, joy, love, hate. Learn how it happens that one watches without willing, loves without willing. If you carefully investigate these matters, you will find him in yourself." - Heresies (170 - 235 e.v.) JULIAN OF NORWICH "I see no difference between God and our substance, but, as it were, all God . . . Yet God is God and our substance is a creature in God." "We are in God and God, whom we do not see, is in us." "We are more truly in heaven than on earth." (1342-1416 C.E.) WALKING BUFFALO "Oh yes, I went to the white man's schools. I learned to read from school books, newspapers, and the Bible. But in time I found that these were not enough. Civilized people depend too much on man-made printed pages. I turn to the Great Spirit's book which is the whole of creation. You can read a big part of that book if you study nature. You know, if you take all your books, lay them out under the sun, and let the snow and rain and insects work on them for a while, there will be nothing left. But the Great Spirit has provided you and me with an opportunity to study in nature's university - the forests, the rivers, the mountains and the animals which include us." - Tatanga Mani; Native American Stoney Indian JEWISH MISHNA "Man cannot conceive the meaning of thunder, hurricane, storm, the order of the universe, his very own nature, how then can he boast of being able to understand God and confine in the thoughts, concepts and words of men." Abridged - Psalm 25:6 - Commenting on Job 11:7 The whole idea of God was the sense of mystery and wonder of life, not to find neat solutions. This is the beauty & essence of Jewish Mysticism. AL-HALLAH Iranian Mystic, Islamic Sufi "I am He whom I love, and He whom I love is I: We are two spirits dwelling in one body. If you see me, you see Him. And if you see Him, then you see both." "I have seen my Lord with the eye of my heart, and I said: "Who are You?" He said: "You." "I find it strange that the divine whole can be born by my little human part, Yet due to my little part's burden, the earth cannot sustain me." - This Sufi died as a Martyr for seeing God in all men, not as an external Being. SRI AUROBINDO "The Bhagavad Gita uses language that is emphatic & seems very absolute. But we must take, here as elsewhere, the thought of the Gita as a whole and not force its affirmations in their solitary sense quite detached from each other, - as indeed every truth, however true in itself, yet, taken apart from others which at once limit and complete it, becomes a snare to bind the intellect as a misleading dogma; for in reality each is one thread of a complex weft and no thread must be taken apart from the weft . . . . There are, in fact, different planes of our conscious existence, and what is practical truth on one plane ceases to be true, because it assumes a quite different appearance, as soon as we rise to a higher level from which we can see things more in the whole." Essays on The Gita, pp. 212-213 HANS KUNG "What is to be said of the healing miracles in the Gospels? It must be the fact that they are not eyewitness reports, not scientifically tested documentation, not historical, medical or psychological records. They are simply unsophisticated popular narratives which are meant to call forth admiring belief. As such they are wholly JOHANN WOLFGANG GOETHE at the service of the proclamation of Christ. . . There is no need at all either to accept all miracle stories in an uncritical, fundamentalist spirit as historical facts, and, regardless of contradictions, to "believe" in them, or on the other hand, in a spirit of narrow-minded rationalism to refuse to take any miracle stories seriously." On Being A Christian, p. 229 "Miracles, "dearest child of faith" according to Goethe, in the age of natural science and technology has become the weakest child of faith." OSHO "My whole approach is that of love. I teach love and only love and nothing else. You can forget about God; that is just an empty word. You can forget about prayers because they are only rituals imposed by others on you. Love is the natural prayer, not imposed by anybody. You are born with it. Love is the true God - not the God of theologians, but the God of Buddha, Jesus, Mohammed, the God of the Sufis. Love is a device, a method to kill you as a separate individual and to help you become the infinite. Disappear as a dewdrop and become the ocean - but you will have to pass through the door of love." - Love, Freedom & Aloneness, p. 37 ...........This Site Originally Contains :   Articles Comprised of Anti-Watchtower and Fundamental Views Based on The Foundations of Both Biblical Literalism and Theism, FOUNDATIONS I NO LONGER SUPPORT. ARTICLES I MAY TRASH SOMETIME SOON, BUT FOR THE SAKE OF THE FUNDAMENTALIST VIEWPOINT THEY REMAIN. I WAS A FUNDAMENTAL THINKER TOO and find some of these older articles are an insult to my thinking. Did I really think this way? ...........Progressively Transforming Into :   Non-theism, Non-duality and Information of Psychology, Theology and Philosophy that Enter Beyond and Behind One Sided Perspectives, With Paradoxical Truths That Are Not Necessary Religious, But Spiritual Principles That Framework Man, Society and God - In User Friendly, Non-Philosophical Terms. "The day will come when the mystical generation of Jesus by the Supreme Being in the womb of a virgin, will be classed with the fable of the generation of Minerva in the brain of Jupiter." THOMAS JEFFERSON MARCUS BORG Professor of Religion and Culture at Oregon State University " I have learned that the Gospels are neither divine documents nor straightforward historical records. They are not divine products inspired directly from God. . . Nor are they eyewitness accounts . . Rather, the gospels represent the developing tradition of the early Christian movement . . . Written in the last third of the first century, they contain the accumulated traditions of early Christian communities and were put into their present forms by second (or even third) generation authors." Meeting Jesus for the First Time, p. 9 "God does not refer to a supernatural being "out there," but the world God refers to the sacred at the center of existence, the holy mystery that is all around us and within us. God is the nonmaterial ground and source and presence in which, to cite words attributed to Paul by the author of Acts, "we live and move and have our being." p. 19 MEISTER ECKHART "All creatures are the Words of God" "It is when people are not aware of God's presence everywhere, that they must seek God by special methods, by special knowledge and special practices. Such people have not attained God. To all outward appearances persons who continue properly in their pious practices are holy. Inwardly, however, they are asses. For they know about God, but do not know God." - - 14th Century - Sermons translated Online "When the Soul wishes to experience something she throws an image of the experience out before her and enters into her own image." This Catholic Mystic was condemned by the Official Hierarchy of the Church, as he saw God internally in all living matter, not as an external Being. JOHN SHELBY SPONG Retired Bishop of Newark Archdiocese. "The God of theism is so visibly dying that only by playing a game of denial and illusion - a game that many play - can we continue to maintain that this God is still real. That is the nature of the religious dilemma of our generation." "Yes God is real, intensely real, for me, but God is not an external being, supernatural, or theistic - to whom I seek access. God is rather a presence discovered in the very depths of my life, in the capacity to live, in the ability to love, and in the courage to be." "The thought of destabilizing the literal claims of scripture is a scary place for a person of faith to walk . . . but not nearly so scary as the attempt to continue through inconsistent gospel stories as literal history . . . we have nothing to lose by looking at new possibilities unless we yearn to hide inside the hysterical prison of self-deception . . . a fortress-like barrier of significant emotional defenses." Liberating the Gospels, p. 299 There is no creditable external deity existing today on whose perceived will, spelled out in an ancient text, we can base our ethical decision making. No heavenly parent figure sits down and enforces the rules by which life is governed. No divine and eternal law has ever been written, either in the sky or on tablets of stone. The God who once was perceived as undergirding these primitive assumptions has been taken from us and destroyed by both the march of time and the explosion of knowledge." Why Christianity Must Change or Die, p. 159 "God is present in every life, calling that life to the fullness of its own unique being. It is ultimately and objectively right, I believe, to expand and enhance life. It is ultimately wrong, I believe, to act in such a way as to distort life or to shrink a human being's potential. p. 164 RUDOLPH OTTO Elephanta "Nowhere have I seen the mystery of the transcendent expressed with more grandeur or fullness than in these three heads. ... From the spirit of the religion that lived here [at Elephanta] one can learn more in an hour of viewing than from all the books ever written." - "So far from keeping the non-rational element in religion alive in the heart of the religious experience, orthodox Christianity manifestly failed to recognize its value, and by this failure gave to the idea of God a one-sidedly intellectualistic and rationalistic interpretation." The Idea of The Holy, pp. 17-18 DAISETSU SUZUKI "Technical knowledge is not enough. One must transcend techniques so that the art becomes an artless art, growing out of the unconscious." Zen Buddhist "The contradiction so puzzling to the ordinary way of thinking comes from the fact that we have to use language to communicate our inner experience which in its very nature transcends linguistics." "Truth is a pathless land. Man cannot come to it through any organization, through any creed, through any dogma, priest or ritual, not through any philosophic knowledge or psychological technique." - JUDDI KRISHNAMURTI "He on whom the sky, the earth, and the atmosphere are woven, and the wind, together with which all life breaths. To Him Alone is known as the One Soul." Words on Brahman, One Collective Consciousness, all life the manifestation of the One. WILLIAM BLAKE "If the doors of perception were cleansed everything would appear to man as it is, infinite." "I must create my own belief system or be enslaved by another man's." "The world of imagination is the world of eternity. It is the divine bosom into which we shall go after the death of the vegetated body. This world of imagination is infinite and eternal, whereas the world of generation of vegetation, is finite and temporal. In this eternal world of imagination, there exists the permanent realities of everything which we see reflected in this vegetable glass of nature." "The merit of a man lies in his understanding and in his deeds, not at all in the color of his skin or in what he believes." - KAHLIL GIBRAN, Sufi Mystic OSHO "Freedom creates fear. People talk about freedom, but they are afraid. If I can give you a formula, a set formula, that there is a God and there is a Holy Ghost and there is an only begotten son, Jesus; there is hell and heaven, and these are the good acts and these are the bad acts; do the sin and you will be in hell; do what I call, the virtuous acts and you will be in heaven - finished! - then you are certain. That's why so many people have chose to be Christians, to be Hindus, to be Mohammedans, to be Jainas - they don't want freedom, they want fixed formulas." "Only by accepting and even willing the death of God in our experience can we be liberated from the transcendent beyond, and alien beyond which has been emptied and darkened by God's self-alienation in Christ." THOMAS ALTIZER, Radical Theology and The Death of God MARCEL PROUST "A work of art that contains theories is like an object on which the price tag has been left. " Scripture is symbolic, religious art. The moment a literal rendering is placed, with rational theories, and theological analysis, is the very moment true wisdom is lost. True wisdom lives in the experience of art, poetry, myth and beauty, far apart from rational theories, literal exactitude and discursive thinking. Art, ultimately, conveys interpretive meaning with multiple perceptions, each discovering his or her journey in personal silence and unique passion of self creativity. "We don't receive wisdom; we must discover it for ourselves after a journey that no one can take us or spare us." FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE "Whatever is profound loves the mask; the profoundest things have a hatred even of images and representations. Might not the opposite be the proper disguise for the shame of a god to go about in?" Beyond Good & Evil, p. 29 "With this basic idea is connected the fact that both, the most open and candid of thinkers, had a misleading aptitude for concealment and masks. for them masks necessarily belong to the truth. Indirect communication becomes for them the sole way of communicating genuine truth; indirect communication, as expression, is appropriate to the ambiguity of genuine truth in temporal existence, in which process it must be grasped through sources in every Existenz." KARL JASPERS, Reason and Existenz, p. 27 KARL JASPERS "Existenz is like the counter part to spirit. Spirit is the will be become whole; potential Existenz is the will to be authentic. Spirit is the intelligible throughout, coming to itself in the whole; but Existenz is the unintelligible, standing by and against other Existenzen, breaking up every whole and never reaching any real totality.For spirit, a final transparency would be the origin of Being;Existenz on the other hand remains in all clarity of spirit as the irremediably dark origin. Spirit lets everything disappear and vanish into universality and totality. The individual as spirit is not himself but, so to speak, the unity of contingent individuals and of the necessary universal. Existenz however is irreducibly in another; it is the absolutely firm, the irreplaceable, and therefore, as against all mere empirical existence, consciousness as such, and spirit, it is authentic being before Transcendence to which alone it surrenders itself without reservation." "Existenz however is irreducibly in another; it is the absolutely firm, the irreplaceable,and therefore, as against all mere empirical existence, consciousness as such, and spirit, it is authentic,being before Transcendence to which alone it surrenders itself without reservation. Spirit wants to grasp the individual either as an example of a universal or as a part of a whole. On the other hand, Existenz, as the possibility of decision derivable from no universal validity, is an origin in time, is the individual as historicity. It is the apprehension of timelessness through temporality, not through universal concepts. . . . Existenz, the dark ground of selfhood, the concealment out of which I come to encounter myself and for which transcendence first becomes real." p. 62, KARL JASPERS "Reason of itself is no source; but, as it is an encompassing bond, it is like a source in which all sources first come to light. It is the unrest which permits acquiescence in nothing; it forces a break with the immediacy of the unconscious in every mode of the Encompassing (three modes: empirical existence, consciousness and spirit) which we are. It pushes on continually. But it is also that which can effect the great peace, not the peace of a self-confident rational whole, but that of Being itself opened up to us through reason." p. 65 "Such a concealed (artistically creative & profound) man (masks himself) instinctively, needing speech for silence and/or burial in silence, inexhaustible in his evasion of communication, wanting and seeing to it that a mask of (indirect, metaphorical conveyance) roams in his place through the hearts and heads of his (non-profound) friends. And supposing he did not want it, he would still realize some day that in spite of that a mask of (indirect, symbolism) is there- and that this is well. Every profound spirit needs a mask: even more, around every profound spirit a mask is growing continually, owing to the constantly false, namely shallow, interpretation of every word, every step, every sign of life he gives." Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good & Evil, p. 29 SHUNRYU  SUZUKI "Usually when someone believes in a particular religion, his attitude becomes more and more a sharp angle pointing away from himself. In Zen, the point of angle is always towards ourselves. As long as you have a particular goal, directed towards some object, the practice of Zen will not help you completely. If you limit your activity to the present moment, then you can express fully your true nature, the universal Buddha nature."  DIETRICH BONHOEFFER "Those that say, we must 'Like it or lump it' - to the doctrines of the virgin birth, the Trinity, or anything else - that we must swallow all these teachings as part of the whole of Christianity, or accept nothing at all, is simply not biblical, as there are degrees of knowledge and significance." - Letters & Papers From Prison, p. 386 DALAI LAMA "My religion is very simple. My religion is kindness. We can live without religion, but we cannot survive without human affection. Whether one believes in a religion or not, and whether one believes in rebirth or not, there isn't anyone who doesn't know the supreme value of kindness and compassion." - Tibetan Buddhist MOHANDAS K. GANDHI "God has no religion." "I subscribe to the belief or the philosophy that all life in its essence is one, and that humans are working consciously or unconsciously towards the realization of that identity. . . God is that indefinable something which we all feel but which we do not know. To me God is Truth and Love. God is ethics and morality. God is fearlessness. God is the source of light and life and yet He is above and beyond all these. God is conscience. He is even the atheism of the atheist. He transcends speech and reason." RABBI YISRAEL BAAL SHEM TOV "Every person in his own right is a complete spiritual Torah. If he goes in God's path, that Torah is absorbed into his being, according to his level . . . . When you look and see with your mind's eye, you will see the inner, life-force aspect of everything, not just its outer, superficial layer. You will see nothing but the divine power inside all things that is giving them life, being and existence at every moment. When you listen carefully to the inner voice within any physical sound that you hear, you will hear only the voice of God as, at that moment, it is literally giving life and existence to the sound that you are hearing." - Jewish Mystic "Every man is a redeemer of a world that is all his own. He beholds only what he, and only he, ought to behold and feels only what he is personally singled out to feel." HILLEL ZEITLIN " My 'me' is God, nor do I recognize any other 'me' except God, himself" - CATHERINE OF GENOA "I went from God to God, until they cried from 'me' in 'me' - Oh thou I." - BAYAZID ome people do not have the law. But they do what the law says because their own hearts tell them to. They have a law of their own, even though they do not know the law. They show that the law is written in their hearts. They know what is right to do and what is wrong to do. Their own thoughts tell them they have done what is wrong or what is not wrong. This will be on the day when God judges the things men have kept secret. Jesus Christ will be the judge. That is part of the good news I tell people. " ST. PAUL- Romans 2:14-16 - Worldwide English Version "To be biblical may well mean to move beyond the Bible itself to the larger principles that can be derived from the Christian faith (the living Spirit) of which the Bible is a part, but for which the Bible cannot possibly be a substitute." - PETER J. GOMES "If you are able to relax - relax to a cloud by looking at it, relax to a drop of rain and experience its genuineness - you can see the unconditionality of reality and are experiencing the state of being of the cosmic mirror, the wisdom of the cosmic mirror." CHOGYAM TRUNGPA Belief, in the end, creates formulas and fixed patterns for living. It provides us with ready responses to whatever situation may arise. Thus we are never free to act in the fullness of any moment. Life is infinite and its unfolding; it cannot be met with formulas and scripts. Belief is a tether that keeps us forever in the tiny circle of our vanities. JOHN MCAFEE, The Fabric of Self, p. 74 KAREN ARMSTRONG Former Catholic Nun and Scholar "Religion is like a raft, once you get across the river, moor the raft and go on. Don't lug it with you if you don't need it anymore. It's part of all the great religions that we become most fully ourselves when we give ourselves away. But not many of us really want to do that. However much the self makes us miserable, it is the self we know, and we're not quite so ready to go out of it. Unlike the East, intolerance is more a failing of monotheists. There's an endless temptation to use religion to back our own prejudices, especially with a personalized God. The Crusaders who went into battle crying, "God wills it!" when they killed Jews and Muslims were simply projecting their own loathing and fear onto an imaginary being, giving their horrible notions a sacred endorsement. To distinguish good religions from the bad, compassion is the key. That's the test, always. All of them say that. Think of Hillel and the Golden Rule, Jesus and his version of the Golden Rule." KAREN ARMSTRONG, Belief In Absolutes: Both Rational Thinker and Mystic Belief In Absolutes: Rational Method of Thinking Devoid of Mystical Experience The 'pre-Socrates' thinking of Greek thought, as in the early 6th century BC, thinkers like Thales, Heraclitus and Empedocles, are considered by existentialists, men such as Nietzsche, to have been noble, free, creative and passionate, while the later Athenians, such as Socrates, Plato and Aristotle were inferior because they believed in absolute, definite things such as: an absolute morality, the immortality of the soul, transcendent realities, and the power of human reason. Athenian philosphy also helped soften up Western civilization for the eventual arrival of Christianity - an even bigger disaster. - Nietzsche & Postmodernism, by Dave Robinson, p. 8 It was with the Greek thought of Socrates, Plato and Aristotle that prepared the way for Christian defining God in absolute terms, in Greek terms: as static, remote and as an unmoved mover who did not intervene in human affairs, in later Christian terms: as the absolute person who intervenes in human affairs, both views, Greek and Christian, reflecting fundamental views of so called absolute, basic truths. Divinity was found in the human mind, in the power of reason, in divine wisdom, such as in Plato and that of St. Augustine, which was said to emit in two parts. The first part was that of logic and rational thinking, which conceptualized, analyzed and scientifically measured objective reality. The second part being beyond the reach of discursive reason to an intuitive apprehension and awareness of essence, experienced in Being that is indescribable in human language, beyond all conceptual thought. To convey such meanings, mythology, rituals & liturgical worship were used as symbols, not to be taken as literal, but as symbolic, archetypical descriptions of what can only be experienced through contemplation, the catching glimpses of essence of indescribable unknown. This unseen essence could be experienced and understood mystically in what Plato called theoria - contemplation and expressed symbolically within the hidden, secret traditions of religious teachings. Basil, Bishop of Caesarea and also the Cappadocians, used this idea in their definition of Christianity in the terms kerygma - the explicative logic of clear reasoning and dogma, the unexplainable only perceived of intuitive thought and articulated through symbolism. The history of monotheism found in Judaism, Islam and Christianity, as conveyed in The History of God, by Karen Armstrong, relates the seemingly forever saga of the battle between rationalism of philosophy and the mysticism of personal religious experience, finding both in unbalanced extremes and incongruent combinations, while others transcending into a universal equilibrium of harmony and planetary inclusiveness. The extreme rationalists found no religious experience with cold philosophical and Aristotelian metaphysical formulations using clear cut logic with explanation, while the extreme mysticism formed eccentric disciplines of inertia, with quietism and neurotic escapism from reality. Other sects and teachers would use faulty rationalism as foundations using mysticism as the claim of "mystery," to support faith in such. Then there were those that balanced between the two, using rational thinking along with the recognition of personal religious experience of internal essence beyond explanative definition, without rational foundational belief systems, relating in non-literal symbolism, mythology and liturgical activities, recognizing the entire realm of humanity to be included in such a divinity of God, metaphysics and rational thinking. Plotinus With the Neoplatoism of Plotinus, who described all Being as the "One," the later the writings of an unknown author under the name of Dionysius The Areopagite, took this a step further as God being not entirely static and remote, but rather a moving conscious that somewhere meets the human in mystical experience of theoria. Such mystical understanding has been understood by the Eastern Greek Orthodox Church in Christianity, along with various schools of thought in Jewish Mysticism, Sufism, Hinduism and Buddhism. That is, the awareness of the both the paradoxical and the unknown essence beyond human thought, language and conception - dogma. In the case of the Judeo-Christian Scriptures, the dogma of mythology articulated in Jewish midrashic stories, symbolic for liturgical purposes. While the West, the descendants from the Latin frame of mind, more so the fundamentalists of all religious cultures, have failed to conceive the unseen dogma, literalizing words and mythological accounts into literal renderings as "the inerrant Word of God," - as literal, factual history, using logic and rational reasoning - kerygma, which legalizes, literalizes and misinterprets symbolic expressions of the unexplainable in the straight jacket of one-sided fundamental theological terminology. "It was Socrates, and then Aristotle, who encouraged the notion that some objects have mysterious "essences" without which they could not exist, but which are not discoverable by any normal means of scientific investigation. By offering a prescriptive and persuasive definition of the "essence" of "human nature" (as "rational" or possessing "original sin"), it has also been possible to justify certain kinds of authoritarian social and political institutions. Essentialism also tends to encourage a belief in the possibility of objective, eternal and absolute truths, and an overconfidence in the ability of language to discover and "freeze" these truths, sometimes known as "Iogocentricity." Something Nietzsche would be no part of." Nietzsche & Postmodernism, by Dave Robinson, p. 68 "It (God) cannot be grasped by the understanding since It is not knowledge or truth; nor is It kingship or wisdom; nor is It one, nor is It unity, nor is It Godhead or Goodness; nor is It a Spirit, as we understand the term, since It is not Son-ship or Fatherhood; nor is It any other thing such as eye or any other being can have knowledge of; nor does It belongs to the category of non-existence or to that of existence." DIONYSIUS THE AREOPAGITE - 5th Century, The Mystical Theology "As we plunge into that darkness which is beyond intellect, we shall find ourselves not simply running short of words but actually speechless and unknowing." "Even the word "God" itself is faulty, since God is "above God," a mystery beyond being." Four Stages of Spiritual Growth   Who is Christ For Us?   Contemplative Prayer   Underlying Fact of A Non-Theist God M. Scott Peck, M.D.   John Shelby Spong   Thomas Merton   George Fowler       Discovering Magic   Truth in religion is characterized by inclusivity and paradox. Falsity in religion can be detected by its one-sidedness and failure to integrate the whole.   Religious Development Chogyam Trungpa     Religion, God & Humanity           Hafiz, Al-Arabi, Ramana, Nisargadatta, Rinpoche, Hallaj, Attar, Papaji, Bistami, Kabir, Emre, Balsekar, Al-Jilani, Wu Wei, Daikaku, Vasishtha, Ramakrishna, T’san, Kristof,   God Is An Experience, Not An Explanation Both God and objective truth are beyond explanatory words in human terminology. No linguistic straight jacket of human language conveyed from the fallibility of men, can possibly explain the "experience" of God. Yet seeing behind, around and beyond the words, the letters, of men, is to get glimpses of Spirit, the "experience" that the author's attempted to convey but compromised in human fallibility the moment they articulated their words in human terms. This is the difference between the Fundamentalist and the Mystic all religious cultures. Those who need to explain God, life and being, seeking stagnation, needing security and clear-cut answers, taking the letters and words of men literally, becoming one sided and exclusive. While others who know beyond the letter, the moving and expanding experience to enter into ambiguity and mystery, recognizing both inclusivity and paradox in truth and the ability to transcend all differences in the oneness of both God and humanity. Email Comments To: Lightbearer@yahoo.com How A Person Treats His Fellow Man Far Outweighs Both The Deepest Of Knowledge And The Obedience Of Legal Requirements Fundamentalism Relativism Fundamental Logic Intellectual Explanation Rational Thinking Mathematical Language Science, Absolute Facts Realism, Pragmatism Civilization, Tradition Mystical Insight Revelatory Experience Non-Rational, Intuitive Metaphorical Language Mythology, Art, Poetry Idealism, Romanticism Culture, Creativity Reality Externally Created Collectively Created Perception Internally Created Individually Created Individual Consciousness Collective Consciousness Purity, Holiness, Laws, Regulations, Sacrifice, Rituals, Exclusiveness Compassion, Mercy Flexibility, Empathy Inclusiveness Literalism Metaphorical, Mythological Illusionary Mystical Doctrines - (Trinity, Incarnation, Resurrection) Mystical Experience Over Rational Explanation Deism (Reason Alone) All Forms of Mysticism       Only Reason Both Reason & Revelatory Experience Anti-Reason Deism (Reason Alone) Mysticism Illusionary Mystical Doctrines Left Center Right

LEX HIXON "What Apostle Paul terms faith, is the human mood of openness to the revelation of the Christ Nature, not faith in some particular set of doctrines, but simply faith, free from all efforts at grasping. And as we can see from Paul's own experience of Enlightenment, the mood of faith is itself a gift of Divine Grace, not that of pious human efforts. On the road to Damascus, Paul was not struggling to believe the Christian revelation. Illumination dawned spontaneously as Paul let go his conception of orthodoxy, his particular effort to believe. We enter this mood of faith when our efforts to grasp or define Divine Nature are suspended. We experience the awareness of what Paul calls life in Christ as a gift, which simply means that it is not correlated with any finite efforts or beliefs." "Paul's realization of the Christ Nature can continue to serve the process of universalization. As Paul perceived in the radiance of Spirit no more distinctions between Jew and Greek, slave and free, male and female, neither can we perceive any fundamental distinction between Jew and Christian, Hindu and Buddhist, theist and nontheist, believer and nonbeliever. There is only one inclusive spiritual family, the Mystical Body, the secret of Divine Life lived fully through the planetary life of conscious beings. Awakening to this secret, instantly we enter the New Aeon (Age)."- Coming Home, The Experience of Enlightenment In Sacred Traditions, pp. 133, 142-143 ALBERT CAMUS "A man without hope, and conscious of this condition, no longer belongs to the future." The Myth of Sisyphus QUESTION TO CAMUS: Since you do not believe that men can escape into religion, are you not afraid that young people today will be led into a dangerous neglect of action? "If it were not possible nowadays to live or act without reference to God, then perhaps a very great number of people in the West would be condemned to sterility. Young people know this very well. And if I feel so great a solidarity with so many students, for example, it is because we are all confronted with the same problem, and because I am confident that, like me, they want to solve it by trying to act more effectively and to serve man. Lyrical and Critical Essays, p. 347

IMMANUEL KANT Kant's Critique of Pure Reason makes credible the claim that in its operations the mind imposes form upon our perceptions as a means of making spatial and temporal experience itself possible. And SIGMUND FREUD psychology suggests discernible patterns in thought processes, patterns over which we have no control, at least in the Freudian traditions, and which are based on external influences, environment, perhaps even sensations far below our level of conscious awareness. TAGORE: Once I asked an English musician to analyze for me some classical music, and explain to me what elements make for the beauty of the piece. EINSTEIN: The difficulty is that the really good music, whether of the East or of the West, cannot be analyzed. TAGORE: Yes, and what deeply affects the hearer is beyond himself. EINSTEIN: The same uncertainty will always be there about everything fundamental in our experience, in our reaction to art, whether in Europe or in Asia. Even the red flower I see before me on your table may not be the same to you and me. TAGORE: And yet there is always going on the process of reconciliation between them, the individual taste conforming to the universal standard. If the reality of music and a simple flower cannot be adequately explained beyond human perceptive conscious limitations, surely God, existence, life and spirituality can never be defined from a book, better yet the language of man. One can understand why the Jewish mystics refused the idea of God being a person and having a name, therefore objecting to such a misuse of objectification.

The Two Step Fallacies of Illusionary Thought Pertaining to the Judeo-Christian Belief System 1   The erroneous and illusionary belief in both prophecy and supernatural teachings that evade objective reality, defy laws of physics and elevate the Bible and words of men as both magically "inspired," as objective truth and the "Word of God," who acts as a person leaving logical instructions, as though life could be contained in a magisterial manual of all-embracing truth in linguistic form. 2   Now that God and truth are removed from its naked, colorless state to an interpretive filter through the subjectivity of human perception, all detachment is reduced to being objective and absolute, the foundation for determining, debating and demanding the juridical correctness of doctrines and perfect orthodoxy of dogmas and creeds.     The living truth of the Judeo-Christian culture exists apart in undefinable essence, distinct from visible manifestations and activities, completely removed from the literalization of scripture, to the symbolism conveyed in the Jewish midrashic writing, representing mythological interpretations of real experiences beyond human language.

BAWA HAIYADDEEN "I do not accept retaliation to be prescribed by the Qu'ran. If one understands the Qur'an that exists within one's self, then he will never retaliate." "The Qur'an is just a religion, and if that is right for you, then use it. But if the Truth is right, then please think about it and listen. Analyze what is within yourself. There might be a Bible within you, there might be a Qur'an within you, there might be a Jesus within you, there might be a book and a story within you. . . We cannot say that they are wrong and we cannot say that they are right. . . Therefore understand and correct yourself." "We must have compassion, patience, tolerance, and the love of other lives as one loves one's own life. We need to have peacefulness, justice, and conscience. We need to know the sorrows of others as our own, the hurts of others as our own, the difficulties of others as our own, and we need that light explanation of wisdom. Having compassion on all lives, having that love and understanding and acting accordingly is to have the qualities of Allah." BAWA HAIYADDEEN, God, His Prophets & His Children, pp. 138, 140, 157

Mystics & Non-Theists

(& Somewhere In Between)

Christian, Jewish, Buddhist, Sufi, Hindu

Links To The Universal, Spiritual Principles Far Beyond Religion

Joseph Campbell	Juddi Krishnamurti	Lex Hixon
	Rudolph Steiner

Two Spiritual Masters Catholic Monk and Mystic, Thomas Merton and His Holiness the XIVth Dalai Lama, Tibetan Buddhist. (India, 1968)

TIMOTHY LEARY "The political and ethical controversies over psychedelic plants are caused by our basic ignorance about what these substances do. They alter consciousness. As we learn more about the biochemistry and physiology of consciousness, then we will understand the specific effects and uses of conscious altering plants." from Politics of Ecstacy 1965

"Are you a God?" they asked the Buddha. "No," he replied. "Are you an angel, then?" "No." "A saint?" "No." "Then what are you?" The Buddha replied, "I AM AWAKE." - HUSTON SMITH, from The World's Religions, p. 82

The Courage  To Be		Uncertainty Is Freedom		The Hypothesis  of God		The Perennial Philosophy
Paul Tillich		Osho		Osho		Aldous Huxley
The Study of Zen		Happiness  (Intro 1952)		Introduction To Zen		Readiness, Mindfulness
Thomas Merton		Allan W. Watts		D.T. Suzuki		Shunryu Suzuki
Non-Duality of The Mind		God Cannot Be Perceived		Three Pillars of Zen (Forward)		Notes on Zen
Thich Nhat Hanh		Dionysius The Areopagite		Huston Smith
Fear, The Foundation of Religion		Spong's Thesis on Apostle Paul		Existentialism under construction		Rugged Individualism under construction
Bertrand Russell		John Shelby Spong		Thomas Merton		M. Scott Peck
4 Types of Consciousness under construction				Axial Period under construction		Meditation under construction
Hugo Enomiya Lassalle		Eastern Influence In Judeo/Christian		Thoughts on Karl Jaspers		Thoughts on John Tauler
The Concept of Timelessness under construction		The Omega Point under construction		A Short Thought		No Natural Religion/Only One Religion
Hugo Enomiya Lassalle		Pierre Teilhard De Chardin		Jewish In Germany During WWII		William Blake
Eastern Mind of BEING (Hindu) Western Mind of KNOWING (Greek)		Truth Is A Pathless Land		Could God Exist If Nobody Did?		Dreaming While Awake
Osho		Krishnamurti		Joseph Campbell		Bawa Muhaiyaddeen

TIMOTHY LEARY "There's something very ominous about this tendency to call anybody that you don't agree with insane," he said. "A few hundred years ago, they said that you were possessed by the Devil, or you were a heretic. Twenty years ago, they'd say you were a Communist. Now the really sophisticated totalitarian method is to say that someone who is a dissenter, who is against the society, is insane. In Russia, they're very smooth; they take their philosophers and their dissenting poets and they don't put them in Siberia anymore-they put them in an insane asylum. Now, maybe it's insane to be against what's happening in the United States. Maybe it's insane to have hope that something could be done about it. If that's insane, count me in. But otherwise make up your own mind." - TIMOTHY LEARY, from Folsom Prison, the New Yorker, December 3, 1973

ALDOUS HUXLEY "The Mescaline Experience is without any question the most extraordinary and significant experience available to human beings this side of the 'Beatific Vision.'" I am not so foolish to equate what happens under the influence of mescaline or of any other drug . . with the realization of the end and ultimate purpose of human life; Enlightenment, the Beatific Vision. All I am suggesting is that the mescaline experience is what Catholic theologians call "a gratuitous grace," not necessary to salvation but potentially helpful and to be accepted thankfully." "To be shaken out of the ruts of ordinary experience, to be shown for a few timeless hours the outer and inner world, not as they appear to an animal obsessed with words and notion, but as they are apprehended, directly and unconditionally, by Mind at Large - this is an experience of inestimable value to everyone ." "The man who comes back through the Door in the Wall will never be quite the same as the man who went out. He will be wiser, but less cocksure, happier, but less self-satisfied, humbler in acknowledging his ignorance, yet better equipped to understand the relationship of words to things, of systematic reasoning to the unfathomable Mystery which it tries, forever vainly to comprehend." - Aldous Huxley, The Doors of Perception

HUSTON SMITH Historically, religion has given people another world to live in, a world more adaptive to the human spirit. As a student of world religions, I see religion as the winnower of the wisdom of the human race. Of course, not everything about these religions is wise. Their social patterns, for example -- master -slave, caste, and gender relations -- have been adopted from the mores of their time. But in their view of the nature of reality, there is nothing in either modernity or postmodernity that rivals them."

If you would be a man of true worth and not a phantom, you must be able to walk upright by yourself dependent on nothing. When you harbor philosophical concepts or religious beliefs or ideas or theories of one kind or another, you too are a phantom, for inevitably you become bound to them. Only when your mind is empty of such abstractions are you truly free and independent. YASUTANI-ROSHI

THOMAS MERTON Catholic Monk and Mystic "Christianity begins with revelation. It would be misleading to classify this revelation simply as a "doctrine" and "explanation" for it is far more than that - the revelation of God Himself is in the mystery of Christ. It is nevertheless communicated in words, in statements, creating the problem of everything depending on the believer's accepting the truth of these statements, profoundly concerned with the accuracy of their transmission from the original sources and precise understanding of their exact meaning with condemnation of false interpretations to almost the point of a obsession and fanatical insistence on hairsplitting distinctions. This obsession with doctrinal formulas, juridical order and ritual exactitude has removed the heart of Christianity, the living experience of which far transcends all conceptual formulations."-

"The religious life does not depend on the dogmas of the soul, the saints and the fundamentals of religion but profits from passion to the supreme wisdom and Nirvana (self-realization)." -  MAJJHIMA NIKAYA p.63

ANNE FRANK Holocaust Victim "I don't think of all the misery, but of the beauty that still remains. This is one of the things that Mummy and I are so entirely different about. Her counsel when one feels melancholy is: 'Think of all the misery in the world and be thankful you are not sharing in it!' My advise is: 'Go outside, to the fields, enjoy nature and the sunshine, go out and try to recapture happiness in yourself and in God. Think of all the beauty that's still left in and around you and be happy!' I don't see how Mummy's idea can be right, because then how are you supposed to behave if you go through the misery yourself? Then you are lost. On the contrary, I've found that there is always some beauty in life - in nature, sunshine, freedom, in yourself: these can all help you. Look at these things, then you find yourself again, and God, and then you regain your balance." - ANNE FRANK - The Diary of a Young Girl, p. 153

Security Uncertainty FUNDAMENTALISM: the root word being "Fundament" - the Old English word for Buttocks & Anus. Neurotic safety is to sit on your fundament, in biblical literalism and definitive theology- mapping out certainty in objective terms, with finalities, grasping conceptual schematics: ignorant of naked reality & the risk of pain of unknowing change needed to transcend absolutism into the wisdom of higher consciousness and intuitive awareness. Reason is diluted with perverted rationalism that restricts the infinite to communicable exactitude and objectivism that fails to know the authentic and eternal that lies forever beyond in existential Being. Fundamentalism & Relativism & The Ability To Have Both Values & Myth RELATIVISM: Relativism thrives in democratic society of equalitarianism which equates all values as interpretive opinions, none truly superior to one another. Relativism in rationalistic society is the product of the "Enlightenment" from the 17th & 18th centuries, devoid of Eros, as a passionless, arid, de-enchanted & dry society, where all longings for illimitable and immortal desires in romantic myth and eternal love, with passionate yearning in learning, poetry, and visionary enchantment are viewed as impractical, naive and even gullible, as all such fervent and majestic magnanimity is considered null and void in logical and pragmatic non-creative, unexpressive thinking. All mysterious, enthusiastic and mystifying longings for imaginative idealism in poetic, erotic utopian and phantasmagorical beauty and madness are lost in a society based on the practical reasoning of science and logic. Within such a devalued relativistic society, crops up fundamentalism. This is the basis for the "decline of western civilization."

What is Fundamentalism? Fundamentalists of all religious cultures need a logical, rational "instruction manual," that will neatly package and map out reality into formulated safety. Such certainty requires objection to the notion that all religions are one, and one must believe that their version, interpretation and unique road to God is the only religion in truth that has no equal, leaning upon the words and letters of fallible men in substitution of the living and dynamic Spirit, the unexplainable essence of Being and living Word. In fear of ambiguity and entering into the "unknown," they search for clear-cut answers, architectural explanations within the grasp of human logic, possessing formulas and conceptual frameworks in place of uncertainty. The empirical self is considered the base of objectivity as opposed to the infinite realm of interior nothingness or emptiness, that is Being itself. In turn, they rise up against what they consider to be "liberalism," in an attempt to remove all thought beyond structured formulations, from the minds of all, for unconsciously fearing they may lose their grasp and possession of their "truth." In most cases, God is an object, a person, who is sought after externally, in the heavens or "out there" somewhere, seeking favors and mercy. In short, fundamentalism needs security and certainty to survive. It is what Freud considered to be the result of trauma to ward of hysteria from the self conscious mind. Our future, as evolving humans, is to transcend beyond such ego survival instincts, limitations and tribal prejudices into new beings apart from fundamentalism and duality. Fundamentalism is the attempt to capture the infinite essence of objective "truth" into the subjective "straight jacket" of human language, to capture the universe in a bottle, to define experience that is far beyond explanation within the confinement of individual ego and empirical self, using linguistic terminology and one-sided thought. While words of men, that of creeds, dogmas and scriptures point to truth, under the subjectivity of language and human perception,  fundamentalism attaches objective truth to them, as captured within their framework, literalizing as laws, rules and codes. This is the consciousness that rejects the metaphysical intuition of Being, reducing "being" to an abstract concept, an object, a purely logical entity, surely nothing to be experienced. What is experienced as primary is not "being" or "isness" but individual consciousness, the reflexive ego-awareness.

What is Mysticism, Universalism? Mysticism favors revelatory experience over logical explanation, and at the same time, rejects literalizing mystical doctrines (the trinity, resurrection, atonement, etc.) into superstitious and/or literal (illusionary) meanings, but rather seeing such doctrines as symbolic, mythological accounts, metaphorical words that do not capture truth, but merely point in that direction. Mystics of all religious cultures, reach the higher consciousness of entry into the "unknowing" of knowing, the ambiguous waters and sea of relativity of indistinct and unclear outlines into living life in both uncertainty and insecurity, yet with compassion and gratitude. This is the ability to see God, the universal one existence, in the darkness of faith as the life force of unconditional love, without conditions, living in all life, and every person, regardless of culture, transcending all creeds, dogmas, sexual orientation and societal structure with complete inclusiveness. Mysticism is beyond intellectual reason, knowing God rests in the intuitive life force of each individual, being un-penetrable with reasoning. Not an external God outside from ourselves to ask for favors or receive punishment, but the very ground of our being deep within ourselves in non-duality. Aligning ourselves with our higher consciousness, aligns us with this life force, God. To know God is to have an individual experience that is undefined from human words, which act as a straight jacket on experience that no words can articulate in intellectual terms, as they are, inadequate in explanation. Mysticism is not magic, astrology and numerology, but rather, mysticism is finding the original face of self, the no-self, that existed before one was born and is only perceived in the prelanguage of perception that usually is found in meditation and contemplation. There will always be some degree of teachers, instructional words and conceptual ideas, however, to live in reality, they must remain relative and communicative only. For the moment we leave ambiguity with trust and dependence in teachers and formulas to anything absolute in answer of fears, is when we leave the mystery and fullness of life to that of interior protection and degrees of fundamentalism. Our fears must not be covered over but accepted "in spite of." It is only then that we can have the courage and joy of living. This is the consciousness that looses the self as a separate entity into the metaphysical intuition of Being as the center in terms not of intellectual conception or theology but that of experience.

What is Non-Duality?

What is Humanism? Humanism is considered by many to be atheism, as it rejects all supernatural and puts all faith in the human spirit. However rejection of theism alone is not the rejection of God. Yet humanism goes further to regard all forms of God, theistic and all others, to that being made in man's image, that is, God is what we humans, put into our belief, elevate with the value we give, thus making our faith our God. As Isaiah wrote of those who made idols out of carved images making them their Gods, giving them their value, the same can be said for humans who give the same idolatrous worship and value to the words, concepts and teachings written by other humans, as their God, labeling such as the "Word of God." Humanism is to simply relate God as nothing more but of both the human mind and creative human spirit.

What is Pantheism?  Pantheism - that of Spinoza- allows both rational logic as Decartes and Newton, along with revelatory experience, that of the mystics, as Eckhart, Keats and Otto. For Spinoza, like Plato and Aristotle, God is simply the principle of law, the sum of all the eternal laws in existence, yet unlike Aquinas, Decartes and Voltaire, there is an awe inspiring wonder of mystical experience, nothing personal of a theistic God, but a nothingness in God - a type of God that exists apart from theism, a theme told by many mystics and philosophers long told prior to Spinoza. Pantheism is a metaphysical and religious position. Broadly defined it is the view that (1) "God is everything and everything is God ... the world is either identical with God or in some way a self-expression of his nature" (Owen 1971: 74). Similarly, it is the view that (2) everything that exists constitutes a "unity" and this all-inclusive unity is in some sense divine (MacIntyre 1967: 34). A slightly more specific definition is given by Owen (1971: 65) who says (3) "‘Pantheism’ ... signifies the belief that every existing entity is, only one Being; and that all other forms of reality are either modes (or appearances) of it or identical with it." Even with these definitions there is dispute as to just how pantheism is to be understood and who is and is not a pantheist. Aside from Spinoza, other possible pantheists include some of the Presocratics; Plato; Lao Tzu; Plotinus; Schelling; Hegel; Bruno, Eriugena and Tillich. Possible pantheists among literary figures include Emerson; Walt Whitman, D.H. Lawrence, and Robinson Jeffers. Beethoven (Crabbe 1982) and Martha Graham (Kisselgoff 1987) have also been thought to be pantheistic in some of their work-if not pantheists.

What is Your Brain on Drugs?

"The Christian conception of God - God as god of the sick, God as a spider, God as spirit - is one of the most corrupt conceptions of the divine ever attained on earth. It may even represent the low water-mark in the descending development of divine types. God degenerated into the contradiction of life, instead of being its transfiguration and eternal Yes! God as the declaration of war against life, against nature, against the will to live! God - the formula for every slander against "this world," for every lie about the "beyond!" God - the deification of nothingness, the will to nothingness pronounced holy!" FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE God is not an object for us as subjects and we at same time objects for him as a subject, otherwise God is nothing more than an object. The existential revolt against theism protested what makes God into an object. For as an object, God can be equated with the tyrants of history who attempted to transform all into subjects of control. This is the God that Nietzsche said had to be killed. It is an atheism which is rightly justified as the reaction against theological theism and its disturbing objectification, control and lack of acceptance of uncertainty and ambiguity that constitute the essence of life. Nietzsche's radical individualism, his "will to power," was against all that limited the doubt and meaninglessness of the individual, but he directed his attack to the semicollective control of the church. He was an unparalleled master at dissecting what was wrong with European Christianity, as in its objectification and limited view in Nominalism, denying the ambiguous essence of humanity. In turn, ignorant followers of Nietzsche, simply mouthed his slogans without believing in them ("God is dead"). His ideas then landed like bombs among the comfortable bourgeoisie of the liberal democracies. And in attacking so powerfully what was wrong with the "slave morality" of Christianity, Nietzsche opened the way for disaster by glorifying so powerfully a radical individualism and self-assertiveness. Yet the neocollective society of totalitarianism, such as the Nazis, re-accepted the "slave morality" under political control as opposed to religious. Nietzche himself was opposed to all that dehumanized and objectified. His direction was that of existential individualism. His followers, on the other hand, were unable to face the real meaning of Nietzsche's existentialism with its radical doubt and meaninglessness and in ignorant support of him, turned to their neurotic anxiety into a neocollective society, that of totalitarianism, as opposed to the semicollectivism in religious control. Both of these departed significantly from the radical doubt of meaninglessness and individualism of Nietzsche's Existentialism. "The Question Concerning Technology. "The man who is deranged [Nietzsche's Madman who 'ran to the market place, and cried incessantly, "I seek God! I seek God!" . . . "Whither is God" . . . "I shall tell you. We have killed him - you and I"'1a] . . . has nothing in common with the kind of men standing about in the market place 'who do not believe in God.' For these men are not unbelievers because God as God has to them become unworthy of belief, but rather because they themselves have given up the possibility of belief, inasmuch as they are no longer able to seek God. They can no longer seek because they no longer think. Those standing about in the market place have abolished thinking and replaced it with idle babble that scents nihilism in every place in which it supposes it own opinion to be endangered." - MARTIN HEIDEGGER, (1889-1976). The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays. Translated and with an Introduction by William Lovitt. New York, NY: Harper & Row, Publishers, Inc., 1977. [See Part II: The Word of Nietzsche: "God Is Dead," especially pp. 59-60 and p. 112].