"Sometimes, getting what you want tastes even sweeter than loving what is."

- last line of an article reporting an interview that a reporter conducted with Byron Katie

I never saw a wild thing sorry for itself. A small bird will drop frozen dead from a bough without ever having felt sorry for itself.

- D H Lawrence

"Heavy physical work, the care of home and children, petty quarrels with neighbours, films, football, beer, and above all, gambling, filled up the horizon of their minds.

No attempt was made to indoctrinate them [the proles] with the ideology of the Party. It was not desirable that the proles should have strong political feelings. All that was required of them was a primitive patriotism which could be appealed to whenever it was necessary to make them accept longer working-hours or shorter rations. And even when they became discontented, as they sometimes did, their discontent led nowhere, because being without general ideas, they could only focus it on petty specific grievances. The larger evils invariably escaped their notice."

~George Orwell

LOVE.

Nature, everywhere the same,
Imparts to man a lustful flame;
In Russian snow or Indian fire,
All men alike indulge desire,

All alike, feel passion's heat,
All alike, enjoyment greet,
So that wheresoe'er you go,
Still the same voluptuous glow

Throbs through every purple vein,
Thirsts enjoyment to obtain;
'Mongst the dark, or with the fair,
Woman is empress everywhere.

Exercise is bunk. If you're healthy you don't need it. If you're sick you shouldn't do it.

- H. Ford

"My son, much tried by the fate of Ilium, you must know that Cassandra alone declared to me this fortune.

Now I recall her predicting these things as our people's destiny, often naming Hesperia, often the Italian realm."

[Anchises 1 to Aeneas (in exile). Virgil, Aeneid 3.182]

If the gambler's version of the First Law of thermodynamics is "you
can't win" and of the Second Law is "you can't break even," the
gambler's version of the Third Law of thermodynamics is "you can't get
out of the game."

-Eric Schneider ("Into the Cold")

(from Nathaniel Hawthorne - 'The Christmas Banquet')

"And looking back on your serene and prosperous life, how can you claim to be the sole unfortunate of the human race?"

"You will not understand it," replied Gervayse Hastings, feebly, and with a singular inefficiency of pronunciation, and sometimes putting one word for another. "None have understood it, not even those who experience the like. It is a chillness, a want of earnestness, a feeling as if what should be my heart were a thing of vapor, a haunting perception of unreality! Thus seeming to possess all that other men have, all that men aim at, I have really possessed nothing, neither joy nor griefs. All things, all persons,--as was truly said to me at this table long and long ago,--have been like shadows flickering on the wall. It was so with my wife and children, with those who seemed my friends: it is so with yourselves, whom I see now before one. Neither have I myself any real existence, but am a shadow like the rest."

"And how is it with your views of a future life?" inquired the
speculative clergyman.

"Worse than with you," said the old man, in a hollow and feeble
tone; "for I cannot conceive it earnestly enough to feel either hope or fear. Mine,--mine is the wretchedness! This cold heart,--this unreal life! Ah! it grows colder still."

What Practice Is Not -- Joko Beck



Many people practice and have strong ideas of what practice is.
What I want to do is to state from my point of view what practice is
not.

First, practice is not about producing psychological change. If we
practice with intelligence, psychological change will be produced; I
am not questioning that - in fact, it's wonderful. I am saying that
practice is not done in order to produce such change.

Practice is not about intellectually knowing the physical nature of
reality, what the universe consists of, or how it works. And again,
in a serious practice, we will tend to have some knowledge of such
matters. But that is not what practice is.

Practice is not about achieving some blissful state. It's not about
having visions. It's not about seeing white lights (or pink or blue
ones). All of these things may occur, and if we sit long enough they
probably will. But that is not what practice is about.

Practice is not about having or cultivating special powers. There
are many of these and we all have some of them naturally; some
people have them in extra measure. At the Zen Center Los Angeles I
sometimes had the useful ability to see what was being served for
dinner two doors away. If they were having something I didn't like,
I didn't go. Such abilities are little oddities, and again they are
not what practice is about.

Practice is not about personal power or joriki, the strength that is
developed in years of sitting. Again, joriki is a natural by-product
of zazen. And again it is not the way

Practice is not about having nice feelings, happy feelings. It's
not about feeling good as opposed to feeling bad. It's not an
attempt to be anything special or feel anything special. The product
of practice or the point of practice or what practice is about is
not to be always calm and collected. Again, we tend to be much more
so after years of practice, but it is not the point.

Practice is not about some bodily state in which we are never ill,
never hurt, one in which we have no bothersome ailments. Sitting
tends to have health benefits for many people, though in the course
of practice there may be months or even years of health disasters.
But again, seeking perfect health is not the way; although by and
large, over time, there will be beneficial health for most people.
But no guarantees!

Practice is not about achieving an omniscient state in which a
person knows all about everything, a state in which a person is an
authority on any and all worldly problems. There may be a little
more clarity on such matters, but clever people have been known to
say and do foolish things.

Practice is not about being "spiritual," at least not as this word
if often understood. Practice is not about being anything. So unless
we see that we cannot aim at being "spiritual," it can be a
seductive and harmful objective.

Practice is not about highlighting all sorts of "good" qualities and
getting rid of "bad" ones. No one is "good" or "bad." The struggle
to be good is not what practice is. That type of training is a
subtle form of athleticism.

We could continue our listing almost endlessly. Actually anyone in
practice has some of these delusions operating. We all hope to
change, to get somewhere! That in itself is the basic fallacy. But
just contemplating this desire begins to clarify it, and the
practice basis of our life alters as we do so. We begin to
comprehend that our frantic desire to get better, to
get "somewhere," is illusion itself, and the source of suffering.

If our boat full of hope, illusions, and ambition (to get somewhere,
to be spiritual, to be perfect, to be enlightened) is capsized, what
is that empty boat? Who are we? What, in terms of our lives, can we
realize? And what is practice?

Charlotte Joko Beck, Everyday Zen

You want to know how to be like Indians?
Live close to the earth. Get rid of some of your things. Help each other.
Talk to the Creator. Be quiet more.
Listen to the earth instead of building things on it all the time.

Neither Wolf nor Dog - On Forgotten Roads with an Indian Elder

Popular revolt against a ruthless, experienced

modern dictatorship, which enjoys a monopoly

over weapons and communications, ...is simply

not a possibility in the modern age.

- George Kennan

"Neither shall they say, Lo here!
or, lo there! for, behold,
the kingdom of God is within you."

Luke 17:21

"If someone throws a rock at your head, what you do, that is your martial art"

"...There is a real Self underlying the three states, who is by nature immortal and would survive the reduction to nothingness of the unreal, the ego.

Happiness is the very nature of that Self,and hence the Egoless State is the one thing that is desirable, beyond all comparison with anything that there is in relativity.

The one great difficulty that the intellect finds in accepting this teaching is this.
The intellect demands a rational link between the world it knows and the Self or Reality it is told about.It wants a bridge over which it can pass and re-pass between the two. Such a bridge does not exist,and cannot possibly be built by anyone--even by a Sage.

The reason is extremely simple, namely,the fact that the world and the reality are negations of each other. We have seen before that what appears as the world is just the Reality.And this was made intelligible to us by the analogy of the snake seen in a rope.

So too the world and the Reality are negations of each other. They cannot be seen simultaneously. The rope is unrelated to the snake; it did not give birth to the snake.

So too the world and the Reality are negations of each other,in the sense that he that sees one of them does not and cannot at the same time see the other. The two cannot be experienced simultaneously. He that sees the world sees not the Self, the Reality; on the other hand he that sees the Self does not see the world.

So one of them alone can be real-not both.Hence there is no real relation between them.The world did not come into existence from the Reality. The latter is wholly unrelated to the former. Therefore, it is clear that the bridge that the intellect demands does not exist and cannot be built...."

-Ramana

"I do not seek to follow in the footsteps of men of old: I seek the things they sought."

-- Basho

"When all is said and done, an artist is simply someone who is tortured beyond endurance by the lack of tenderness in the world"

- Lawrence Durrell

For me, I'd have to say that it came about when I was training with my buddy Ian, and I remarked that I had noticed that he gotten better since the last time we trained together, and he said, "I just don't care anymore," meaning that he had decided not to care so much whether or not a particular movement worked or not and would allow himself to figure out how deal with a particular situation in his own time, and in his own way. This type of mentality allows for true relaxation, and for the subconsious mind to take over more during training.

-Brian Holland

'I wouldn't do it.' Ulla said, frowning. 'I hate sadness. I can't bear it. I would rather have nothing at all than even a little sadness. I think that why I love to sleep so much, na? It's impossible to be really sad when you're asleep. You can be happy and afraid and angry in your dreams, but you have to be wide awake to be sad, don't you think?'

- Gregory David Roberts, 'Shantara'

To flame or not to flame, that is the question:
Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous trolling,
Or to take arms against a sea of N00bz,
And by opposing end them?

"Hearts will never be practical until they can be made unbreakable."

- The Wizard of Oz

"We must remember that one man is much the same as another
and he is best who is trained in the severest school."

-Thucydides

"It takes a special type of asshole to brag about being humble."

- anonymous internet guy