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By meditating on death, we can experience the shock of being alive."Buddhism Without Beliefs"
I'll be honest with you I hate war in all its forms Physical, psychological, spiritual Emotional, environmental I hate war And I hate having to struggle, I honestly do Because I wish I had been born into a world where it's unnecessary This context of struggle and being a warrior and being a struggler Has been forced on me by oppression Otherwise I would be a, a sculptor, or a gardener, carpenter You know, I would be free to be so much more I guess part of me or a part of who I am, a part of what I do Is being a warrior, a reluctant warrior, a reluctant struggler But, I do it because I'm committed to life We can't avoid it, we can't run away from it Because to do that is to be cowardice To do that is to be subservient to devils, subservient to evil And so that the only way to live on this planet With any human dignity at the moment is to struggle
The absolute best selfcare you can invest in is learning how to suffer.
If you love, you will suffer. If you live with courage, you will suffer. If you see beauty, you will suffer. If you explore the world, you will suffer.
We cannot avoid hard things without avoiding life.
Man is the only animal for whom his own existence is a problem which he has to solve.
Courage is indispensible because in politics not life but the world is at stake."Between Past and Future"
A man has made at least a start on discovering the meaning of human life when he plants shade trees under which he knows full well he will never sit.
Blight
Give me truths; For I am weary of the surfaces, And die of inanition. If I knew Only the herbs and simples of the wood, Rue, cinquefoil, gill, vervain and agrimony, Blue-vetch and trillium, hawkweed, sassafras, Milkweeds and murky brakes, quaint pipes and sun-dew, And rare and virtuous roots, which in these woods Draw untold juices from the common earth, Untold, unknown, and I could surely spell Their fragrance, and their chemistry apply By sweet affinities to human flesh, Driving the foe and stablishing the friend,-- O, that were much, and I could be a part Of the round day, related to the sun And planted world, and full executor Of their imperfect functions. But these young scholars, who invade our hills, Bold as the engineer who fells the wood, And traveling often in the cut he makes, Love not the flower they pluck, and know it not, And all their botany is Latin names. The old men studied magic in the flowers, And human fortunes in astronomy, And an omnipotence in chemistry, Preferring things to names, for these were men, Were unitarians of the united world, And, wheresoever their clear eye-beams fell, They caught the footsteps of the SAME. Our eyes And strangers to the mystic beast and bird, And strangers to the plant and to the mine. The injured elements say, 'Not in us;' And haughtily return us stare for stare. For we invade them impiously for gain; We devastate them unreligiously, And coldly ask their pottage, not their love. Therefore they shove us from them, yield to us Only what to our griping toil is due; But the sweet affluence of love and song, The rich results of the divine consents Of man and earth, of world beloved and lover, The nectar and ambrosia, are withheld; And in the midst of spoils and slaves, we thieves And pirates of the universe, shut out Daily to a more thin and outward rind, Turn pale and starve. Therefore, to our sick eyes, The stunted trees look sick, the summer short, Clouds shade the sun, which will not tan our hay, And nothing thrives to reach its natural term; And life, shorn of its venerable length, Even at its greatest space is a defeat, And dies in anger that it was a dupe; And, in its highest noon and wantonness, Is early frugal, like a beggar's child; Even in the hot pursuit of the best aims And prizes of ambition, checks its hand, Like Alpine cataracts frozen as they leaped, Chilled with a miserly comparison Of the toy's purchase with the length of life."Blight"
The type of personal integration we attain â or the effective lack thereof â depends on what possibilities our life situation offers us for the development of autonomy. It is a distorted development that is the root cause of the pathological and, ultimately, evil element in human beings.
The struggle for autonomy heightens our aliveness. Insofar as the socialization process blocks autonomy, however, this process engenders the evil it attempts to prevent. If parental love is so distorted that it demands submission and dependence for its self-confirmation, social adjustment turns into a test of obedience and the childâs efforts to comply bring with them the loss of genuine feelings. The human being then becomes the true source of evil."The Betrayal of the Self: The Fear of Autonomy in Men and Women"
I love to watch and encourage and thank the plants I see pushing up the sidewalks. That is the work we should be doing, and they are leading the way, teaching us how, these plants reaching through the concrete from the soil to the sky, these ants and birds and spiders going about their lives, all remind us that all times and in all places - even in cities - ecstatic life continues beneath the machine, waiting for the chance to return, to recover, and to reenter into relationship with those of us who are ready to live."Welcome to the Machine"
He has the feeling that merely by being alive he is blocking his own way. From this sense of hindrance, in turn, he deduces the proof that he is alive."Aphorisms"
Security is mostly a superstition. It does not exist in nature, nor do the children of men as a whole experience it. Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. Life is either a daring adventure, or nothing.
My departure from the volumes of science was a sin far less serious than that which consisted in having neglected to cast his eyes on the book of life.
The real damage is done by those millions who want to 'survive.' The honest men who just want to be left in peace. Those who donât want their little lives disturbed by anything bigger than themselves. Those with no sides and no causes. Those who wonât take measure of their own strength, for fear of antagonizing their own weakness. Those who donât like to make wavesâor enemies. Those for whom freedom, honour, truth, and principles are only literature. Those who live small, mate small, die small. Itâs the reductionist approach to life: if you keep it small, youâll keep it under control. If you donât make any noise, the bogeyman wonât find you. But itâs all an illusion, because they die too, those people who roll up their spirits into tiny little balls so as to be safe. Safe?! From what? Life is always on the edge of death; narrow streets lead to the same place as wide avenues, and a little candle burns itself out just like a flaming torch does. I choose my own way to burn."Sophie Scholl - The Last Days"
If something in the exterior world makes you discontent, then it is not that object which troubles you, but rather your judgement of it; yet to blot out this judgement instantly is within your power. And if your dissatisfaction is based on the condition of your soul, who can prohibit you from correcting your views? Likewise, if you are discontent because you are not doing what seems reasonable to you, why not be active rather than discontent? "But something stronger than me is obstructing me." Still, do not be discontent; for the cause for your inaction is not within you. "But life has no meaning for me if this is not done." Well then, end your life, as calm as if you had succeeded; but don't forget to forgive your adversaries."Meditations"
After the game, the king and pawn go into the same box.
The only possible metaphor one may conceive of for the life of the mind is the sensation of being alive. Without the breath of life, the human body is a corpse; without thinking, the human mind is dead.
Affirmation
I believe in living. I believe in the spectrum of Beta days and Gamma people. I believe in sunshine. In windmills and waterfalls, tricycles and rocking chairs. And I believe that seeds grow into sprouts. And sprouts grow into trees. I believe in the magic of the hands. And in the wisdom of the eyes. I believe in rain and tears. And in the blood of infinity. I believe in life. And I have seen the death parade march through the torso of the earth, sculpting mud bodies in its path. I have seen the destruction of the daylight, and seen bloodthirsty maggots prayed to and saluted. I have seen the kind become the blind and the blind become the bind in one easy lesson. I have walked on cut glass. I have eaten crow and blunder bread and breathed the stench of indifference. I have been locked by the lawless. Handcuffed by the haters. Gagged by the greedy. And, if I know any thing at all, itâs that a wall is just a wall and nothing more at all. It can be broken down. I believe in living. I believe in birth. I believe in the sweat of love and in the fire of truth. And I believe that a lost ship, steered by tired, seasick sailors, can still be guided home to port."Affirmation"
What good does it do me, after all, if an ever-watchful authority keeps an eye out to ensure that my pleasures will be tranquil and races ahead of me to ward off all danger, sparing me the need even to think about such things, if that authority, even as it removes the smallest thorns from my path, is also absolute master of my liberty and my life; if it monopolizes vitality and existence to such a degree that when it languishes, everything around it must also languish; when it sleeps, everything must also sleep; and when it dies, everything must also perish?
They looked at each other for a moment.
The moment became a longer moment, and suddenly it was a very long moment, so long one could hardly tell where all the time was coming from.
For Arthur, who would usually contrive to feel self-conscious if left alone for long enough with a Swiss cheese plant, the moment was one of sustained revelation. He felt on the sudden like a cramped and zoo-born animal who wakes one morning to find the door to his cage hanging quietly open and the savanna stretching grey and pink to the distant rising sun, while all around new sounds are waking.
He wondered what the new sounds were as he gazed at her openly wondering face and her eyes that smiled with a shared surprise.
He didn't realize that life speaks with a voice to you, a voice that brings you answers to the questions you continually ask of it, had never consciously detected it or recognized its tones until now it said something it had never said to him before, which was "yes.""Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy"
You are not the darkness you endured. You are the light that refused to surrender.
If we could see the miracle of a single flower clearly, our whole life would change.
The concentration camps, by making death itself anonymous (making it impossible to find out whether a prisoner is dead or alive), robbed death of its meaning as the end of a fulfilled life. In a sense they took away the individualâs own death, proving that henceforth nothing belonged to him and he belonged to no one. His death merely set a seal on the fact that he had never existed."The Origins of Totalitarianism"
The cost of a thing is the amount of what I will call life, which is required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run.
It is hard to have patience with people who say "There is no death" or "Death doesn't matter." There is death. And whatever is matters. And whatever happens has consequences, and it and they are irrevocable and irreversible. You might as well say that birth doesn't matter.
If only we try to live sincerely, it will go well with us, even though we are certain to experience real sorrow, and great disappointments, and also will probably commit great faults and do wrong things, but it certainly is true, that it is better to be high-spirited, even though one makes more mistakes, than to be narrow-minded and all too prudent. It is good to love many things, for therein lies the true strength, and whosoever loves much performs much, and can accomplish much, and what is done in love, is well done.
I say to you this morning, that if you have never found something so dear and so precious to you that you aren't willing to die for it then you aren't fit to live.
It is not that we have a short space of time, but that we waste much of it. Life is long enough, and it has been given in sufficiently generous measure to allow the accomplishment of the very greatest things if the whole of it is well invested. But when it is squandered in luxury and carelessness, when it is devoted to no good end, forced at last by the ultimate necessity we perceive that it has passed away before we were aware that it was passing.
The purpose of life is not to be happy. It is to be useful, to be honorable, to be compassionate, to have it make some difference that you have lived and lived well.
Preserving things and living beyond a reasonable time is based in fear of dying, a culture perpetuated by people that seem to emotionally not understand that letting go is ok.
What I Have Lived For
Three passions, simple but overwhelmingly strong, have governed my life: the longing for love, the search for knowledge, and unbearable pity for the suffering of mankind. These passions, like great winds, have blown me hither and thither, in a wayward course, over a great ocean of anguish, reaching to the very verge of despair.
I have sought love, first, because it brings ecstasy - ecstasy so great that I would often have sacrificed all the rest of life for a few hours of this joy. I have sought it, next, because it relieves lonelinessâthat terrible loneliness in which one shivering consciousness looks over the rim of the world into the cold unfathomable lifeless abyss. I have sought it finally, because in the union of love I have seen, in a mystic miniature, the prefiguring vision of the heaven that saints and poets have imagined. This is what I sought, and though it might seem too good for human life, this is whatâat lastâI have found.
With equal passion I have sought knowledge. I have wished to understand the hearts of men. I have wished to know why the stars shine. And I have tried to apprehend the Pythagorean power by which number holds sway above the flux. A little of this, but not much, I have achieved.
Love and knowledge, so far as they were possible, led upward toward the heavens. But always pity brought me back to earth. Echoes of cries of pain reverberate in my heart. Children in famine, victims tortured by oppressors, helpless old people a burden to their sons, and the whole world of loneliness, poverty, and pain make a mockery of what human life should be. I long to alleviate this evil, but I cannot, and I too suffer.
This has been my life. I have found it worth living, and would gladly live it again if the chance were offered me."Autobiography"
The important thing is not to stop questioning. Curiosity has its own reason for existing. One cannot help but be in awe when he contemplates the mysteries of eternity, of life, of the marvelous structure of reality. It is enough if one tries merely to comprehend a little of this mystery every day. Never lose a holy curiosity.
All real living is meeting.
If anyone went on for a thousand years asking of life: "Why are you living?" life, if it could answer, would only say, "I live so that I may live." That is because life lives out of its own ground and springs from its own source, and so it lives without asking why it is itself living.
We are focusing on the small details and hiding the misery in the world. Look at the smoker and we miss global warming, war, and the crap we eat--not the bad guys but smoking. I smoke and they talk about cancer, I eat and they talk about cholesterol, I make love, it's AIDS. Before AIDS and cholesterol and cancer there's the pleasure of making love and eating and smoking. I have to die someday, so if the thing that gave me pleasure all of my life kills me instead of me going under a truck, that's fine. Besides, why should I live so that when I die I give fresh meat to the worms? I hope that I am rotted and they don't want to eat me. F@#$ck the worms.
We have more life than we know what to do with. We have life far beyond the point where it becomes a sick caricature of itself. We prolong life until it becomes a sickness, an abomination, a miserable and pathetic flight from death that saps out and mocks everything that made life desirable in the first place.
Marry, and you will regret it; donât marry, you will also regret it; marry or donât marry, you will regret it either way. Laugh at the worldâs foolishness, you will regret it; weep over it, you will regret that too; laugh at the worldâs foolishness or weep over it, you will regret both. Believe a woman, you will regret it; believe her not, you will also regret it⌠Hang yourself, you will regret it; do not hang yourself, and you will regret that too; hang yourself or donât hang yourself, youâll regret it either way; whether you hang yourself or do not hang yourself, you will regret both. This, gentlemen, is the essence of all philosophy.
What can the world, or any nation in it, hope for if no turning is found on this dread road? The worst to be feared and the best to be expected can be simply stated. The worst is atomic war. The best would be this: a life of perpetual fear and tension; a burden of arms draining the wealth and the labor of all peoples; a wasting of strength that defies the American system or the Soviet system or any system to achieve true abundance and happiness for the peoples of this earth. Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities. It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population. It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some 50 miles of concrete highway. We pay for a single fighter plane with a half million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people. This, I repeat, is the best way of life to be found on the road the world has been taking. This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.
Life is the ultimate aim of moral design, which it must protect, advance, ennoble and enrich. Immoral design, which is also bad design, is the opposite. It takes life by stealing time; it impoverishes by pretending to be more than it is; it does not last; it deceives, harms, enrages and degrades. The difference between the two lies at the origin of the work, when the designer first establishes their true goals and decides whether it is to satisfy their destructively selfish aims, or it is to be something higher, something that respects and elevates peopleâs lives, something that they are not ashamed to put out into this world because they know that their heart lies in the right place; and if they fail to achieve what they set out to do, it will be but an error of affection, not ill work laden with guilt.
My life is a hesitation before birth.Diary, 24th January 1922
I love to watch and encourage and thank the plants I see pushing up the sidewalks. That is the work we should be doing, and they are leading the way, teaching us how, these plants reaching through the concrete from the soil to the sky, these ants and birds and spiders going about their lives, all remind us that all times and in all places - even in cities - ecstatic life continues beneath the machine, waiting for the chance to return, to recover, and to reenter into relationship with those of us who are ready to live."Welcome to the Machine"
Donât ask what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive, and go do it. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive.
Freedom has to be in tension with something, or itâs just randomness."The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity, and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy"
It is remarkable that there is little or nothing to be remembered written on the subject of getting a living; how to make getting a living not merely honest and honorable, but altogether inviting and glorious; for if getting a living is not so, then living is not. One would think, from looking at literature, that this question had never disturbed a solitary individual's musings. Is it that men are too much disgusted with their experience to speak of it?
Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness, that most frightens us.â We ask ourselves, Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small doesnât serve the world. Thereâs nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people wonât feel insecure around you. We are all meant to shine, as children do. We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. Itâs not just in some of us; itâs in everyone. And as we let our own light shine, we subconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As weâre liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others."A Return to Love: Reflections on the Principles of a Course in Miracles"
Weâre all going to die, all of us, what a circus! That alone should make us love each other but it doesnât. We are terrorized and flattened by trivialities, we are eaten up by nothing.
The purpose of life is not to be happy at all. It is to be useful, to be honorable. It is to be compassionate. It is to matter, to have it make some difference that you lived.
[..] The horseman serves the horse, The neatherd serves the neat, The merchant serves the purse, The eater serves his meat; 'T is the day of the chattel, Web to weave, and corn to grind; Things are in the saddle, And ride mankind. There are two laws discrete, Not reconciled,-- Law for man, and law for thing; The last builds town and fleet, But it runs wild, And doth the man unking. 'T is fit the forest fall, The steep be graded, The mountain tunnelled, The sand shaded, The orchard planted, The glebe tilled, The prairie granted, The steamer built. Let man serve law for man; Live for friendship, live for love, For truth's and harmony's behoof; The state may follow how it can, As Olympus follows Jove. [..]"Ode Inscribed to W. H. Channing"
PLAYBOY: Earlier, you referred to the U.S. Constitution as "inspiring." Do you endorse all of it - even the right to bear arms?
CARLIN: I have mixed feelings about that. I plan to get a gun if crime gets any worse. I believe my first duty is to survive. And I'm not just talking about criminals coming into my home. I once seriously considered getting a gun to protect myself from the police. If I need a weapon to continue living, I'll get one. And I'll use it.
PLAYBOY: But if violence in our society --
CARLIN: Look, I'm going to interrupt you: There are two ways to think about this existence we have. One of them is that it's Wednesday and it's three fifteen and we're talking here in my home, and at four o'clock I have to leave for another meeting. Now, that's a reality. But there's another reality. We're in the solar system of a second-rate star, three quarters of the way out on a spiral arm of an average galaxy in a thing called the Local Group. And ours is only one of billions of galaxies, each of which has billions of stars. Some star systems are binary, and there could be a planet that revolves around a center of gravity between two binary stars. So you'd have two sunrises and two sunsets every day. One could be a red giant, the other a white dwarf; two different-sized, -shaped, and -colored suns in the sky. And there might be other planets and comets. In other words, fuck Wednesday, fuck three fifteen, fuck four o'clock, fuck the United States, fuck the earth. It's all temporal bullshit. I like thinking about being out there and not thinking about the corporate structure, not worrying about freedom, and not worrying about guns. I chose a life of ideas. That entertains me. That nourishes me. And that's why I run from this conversation.
Yes to the Earth
So radiant in certain mornings' light With its roses and its trees Is Earth, or with its grain and olives So suddenly it is radiant on the soul, Which stands then alone and forgetful Though just a moment earlier the soul Wept bloody tears or dwelt in bitterness; So radiant in certain mornings' light Is Earth, and in its silence so expressive This wondrous lump rolling in its skies; Beautiful, tragic in solitude, yet smiling That the soul, unasked, replies, "Yes" replies, "Yes" to the Earth To the indifferent earth, "Yes!" Even though next instant skies Should darken, roses too, Or the effort of life grow heavier still, The act of breathing even more heroic, "Yes" replies the battered soul to Earth, So radiant in the light of certain mornings, Beautiful above all things, and human hope."Yes to the Earth"
Man always dies before he is fully born.