"Karma means you don't get away with anything."
~ Buddha's little instruction book
I want to see everything now.
And while none of it will be me when it goes in,
after a while it'll all gather together inside and it'll be me.
Look at the world out there, my God, my God, look at it out there,
outside me, out there beyond my face and the only way to really touch it
is to put it where it's finally me, where it's in the blood,
where it pumps around a thousand times ten thousand a day.
I get hold of it so it'll never run off.
I'll hold on to the world tight some day.
I've got one finger on it now; that's a beginning.
Flying is the art of throwing yourself at
the ground and missing.
~ Douglas Adams
God is a circle whose center is everywhere and circumference nowhere.
~ Voltaire
Here is God's purpose --
for God, to me, it seems,
is a verb,
not a noun,
proper or improper.
~ R. Buckminster Fuller
I consider myself a Hindu, Christian, Moslem, Jew, Buddhist, and Confucian.
~Mahatma Ghandi
They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety. ~ Benjamin Franklin 1759
Our greatest glory is not in never falling,
But in rising everytime we fall.
~ Confucius
The dumber people think you are, the more surprised they're going to be when you kill them.~ William Clayton
The statement below is true.
The statement above is false.
The Tao begot one.
One begot two.
Two begot three.
And Three begot
the Ten Thousand Things.
Tao Te Ching
Yeah, and then you have to find someplace to put them.
~Paul Busch
What are all these things doing in our lives, burdening us down with our possession of them?
~Karl Jones
one of my gurus, Tom Robbins...
...organized religion is a major obstacle to peace and understanding...a paramount contributor to human misery. It is not merely the opium of the masses, it is the cyanide....Religion is nothing but institutionalized mysticism. The catch is, mysticism does not lend itself to institutionalization. The moment we attempt to organize mysticism, we destroy its essence. Religion, then, is mysticism in which the mystical has been killed....not only is religion divisive and oppressive, it is also a denial of all that is divine in people; it is a suffocation of the soul....The illusion of the seventh veil is the illusion that you can get somebody else to do it for you....each and every single individual had to establish his or her own special, personal, particular, unique, direct, one-on-one, hands-on relationship with reality, with the universe, with the Divine.
- Skinny Legs and All
...Unwilling to wait for mankind to improve, the outlaw lives as if that day were here....
...there are two kinds of people in this world: those who believe there are two kinds of people in this world and those who are smart enough to know better.
...ideas turn into dogma, and it is this process whereby a fresh, stimulating, humanly helpful idea turns into robot dogma that is deadly....Ideas are made by masters, dogma by disciples [anyone else get the feeling Kevin Smith read Tom Robbins?]....That is how the loving ideas of Jesus Christ became the sinister cliches of Christianity [aside by Jen: "We're not Christians, we're Jesusians."]
- Still Life With Woodpecker
talk about pearls out of oysters...
Is this really a wise strategy for living? Insisting that most of life isn't to be taken seriously. Relentlessly viewing it as a cosmic joke. Having only four guiding principles:
one, do as little harm to others as possible;
two, be there always for your friends;
three, be responsible for yourself and ask nothing of others;
four, grab all the fun you can.
Put no stock in the opinions of anyone but those closest to you. Forget about leaving a mark on the world. Ignore the great issues of your time and thereby improve your digestion. Don't dwell in the past. Don't worry about the future. Live in the moment. Trust in the purpose of your existence and let meaning come to you instead of straining to discover it. When life throws a hard punch, roll with it -- but roll with laughter. Catch the wave, dude.
This is how Bobby lives, and he is the happiest and most well-balanced person I have ever known.
- Fear Nothing, Dean Koontz
how corny is this, but I don't care, I still think it works...
THE GOLDEN RULE: Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.
Because, guess what, there's a reason for sayings like
"What goes around comes around" and
"As ye sow so shall ye reap" and
"Cast thy bread upon the waters: for thou shalt find it after many days" and
"Save up your Karma points, you just might need them!"
as long as we're being corny, here's some more old fashioned wisdom we shouldn't be afraid to live by...
A Time for Everything
To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven:
a time to be born, and a time to die;
a time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is planted;
a time to kill, and a time to heal;
a time to break down, and a time to build up;
a time to weep, and a time to laugh;
a time to mourn, and a time to dance;
a time to cast away stones, and a time to gather stones together;
a time to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing;
a time to get, and a time to lose;
a time to keep, and a time to cast away;
a time to rend, and a time to sew;
a time to keep silence, and a time to speak;
a time to love, and a time to hate;
a time of war, and a time of peace.
...so you don't have to try to do everything at once!
There is a time for multi-tasking, and a time not to multi-task!
He must be smart, he thinks like me! Except I think the pronoun is "us"
and the gender is "both"
from Angels & Demons by Dan Brown
"Do you believe in God, Mr. Langdon?"
...Although he studied religion for years, Langdon was not a religious man.
He respected the power of faith, the benevolence of churches,
the strength religion gave so many people...and yet, for him,
the intellectual suspension of disbelief that was imperative if
one were truly going to "believe" had always proved too big an
obstacle for his academic mind. "I want to believe," he heard himself say.
..."So why don't you?"
..."Well, it's not that easy. Having faith requires leaps of faith,
cerebral acceptance of miracles -- immaculate conceptions and divine interventions. And then there are the codes of conduct. The Bible, the Koran, Buddhist scripture...they all carry similar requirements -- and similar penalties. They claim that if I don't live by a specific code I will go to hell. I can't imagine a God who would rule that way."
"I hope you don't let your students dodge questions that shamelessly."
..."What?"
"Mr. Langdon, I did not ask if you believe what man says about God.
I asked if you believed in God. There is a difference.
Holy scripture is stories...legends and history of man's quest to
understand his own need for meaning. I am not asking you to pass
judgment on literature. I am asking if you believe in God.
When you lie out under the stars, do you sense the divine?
Do you feel in your gut that you are staring up at the work of God's hand?"
..."May I ask you a question, Ms. Vetra?...As a scientist and the
[adopted] daughter of a Catholic priest, what do you think of religion?"
..."Religion is like language or dress. We gravitate towards the
practices with which we were raised. In the end, though, we are all
proclaiming the same thing. That life has meaning. That we are grateful for the power that created us."
..."So you're saying that whether you are a Christian or a Muslim simply
depends on where you were born?"
"Isn't it obvious? Look at the diffusion of religion around the globe."
"So faith is random?"
"Hardly. Faith is universal. Our specific methods for understanding it are
arbitrary. Some of us pray to Jesus, some of us go to Mecca, some of us study
subatomic particles. In the end we are all just searching for truth,
that which is greater than ourselves."
Langdon wished his students could express themselves so clearly.
Hell, he wished he could express himself so clearly. "And God?...Do you
believe in God?"
Vittoria was silent for a long time. "Science tells me God must exist.
My mind tells me I will never understand God. And my heart tells me I am not
meant to."
..."So you believe God is fact, but we will never understand Him."
"Her....Your Native Americans had it right."
..."Mother Earth."
"Gaea. The planet is an organism. All of us are cells with different purposes.
And yet we are intertwined. Serving each other. Serving the whole."
Dear Lord, We realize that lately everything's changing too damn fast.
And all sorts of things are always the same, even things we hated,
like shoveling the turkey and stuffing the snow and going through the
same crap year in and year out...
Your food's getting cold.
...As I was saying, dear Lord, before my wife interrupted me,
even those old fashioned pain in the ass traditions like Thanksgiving,
which really mean something to us, even though God damn it we couldn't
tell you what it is, are starting to stop. And thousand year old trees
are falling over dead and they shouldn't.
That's all from this end. Amen.
- Henry and Adele Larson, played brilliantly by Charles Durning and Anne Bancroft
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