Awakened in context

To know yourself as an awakened individual is also to know yourself as the being of the surrounding context.

-- Starseed: The Third Millennium

Open to enlightenment

Change people by opening them up to a new dimension of reality. Everyone has the potential for enlightenment if you are open to them. Accept the other person's reality if you are going to communicate with them; otherwise, you are just playing a word game.

-- Gridley Wright (1934-1979)

Paths and paths (Castaneda)

All paths are the same. They lead nowhere. They are paths going into the bush. In my own life I could say I have traversed long, long paths, but I am not anywhere. Does your path have a heart? If it does, the path is good; if it doesn't, it is of no use. Both paths lead nowhere, but one has a heart, the other doesn't. One makes for a joyful journey; as long as you follow it, you are one with it. The other will make you curse your life. One makes you strong, the other weakens you.

-- Carlos Castaneda

The one certain truth (Wm. James)

There is but one indisputably certain truth, and that is the truth that skepticism itself leaves standing: The truth that the present phenomenon of consciousness exists. That, however, is the bare starting-point of knowledge -- the mere admission of a stuff to be philosophized about. The various philosophies are but so many attempts at expressing what this stuff really is.

-- William James (1842-1910), from "The Will to Believe"

Testing tradition (Clifford)

In regard to the sacred tradition of humanity, we learn that it consists not in propositions or statements which are to be accepted on the authority of tradition, but in questions rightly asked, in conceptions which enable us to ask further questions, and in methods of answering questions. The value of all these things depends on their being tested day by day. The very sacredness of the precious deposit imposes upon us the duty and responsibility of testing it, of purifying and enlarging it to the utmost of our power.

-- William K. Clifford (1845-1879), British philosopher

Mind and God (Dyson)

I do not make any distinction between mind and God. God is what mind becomes when it has passed beyond the scale of our comprehension. Atoms and humans and God may have minds that differ in degree but not in kind. We stand midway between the unpredictability of atoms and the unpredictability of God. Atoms are small pieces of our mental apparatus, and we are small pieces of God's mental apparatus.

-- Freeman Dyson

Intelligence of the Abstract (Hertz)

One cannot escape the feeling that these mathematical formulas have an independent existence and an intelligence of their own; that they are wiser than we are, wiser even than their discoverers; that we get more out of them than was originally put into them.

-- Heinrich Hertz

The Lighted Way (Maharishi Mahesh Yogi)

There is a phrase: "Man is the master of his own destiny." So the destiny of every man doesn’t depend on the existence of a Maharishi or his absence. Man is the master of his own destiny. A Maharishi is showing a way. Who comes on the lighted way will get to the target, will get to the goal of the way; those who don’t, they won’t, that’s all. Man has a choice. Education is so very limited today, but a Maharishi’s message does not remain limited to his physical body. This is the message that was there before the body of a Maharishi, and it will remain there when the body of a Maharishi will not come up.

-- Maharishi Mahesh Yogi

Diary

"Everything is a self-portrait. Everything is a diary."

-- Chuck Palahniuk, from Diary: A Novel

Art (Chabon)

Every great work of art is one half of a secret handshake, a challenge that seeks the password, a heliograph flashed from a tower window, an act of hopeless optimism in the service of bottomless longing. Every great record or novel or comic book convenes the first meeting of a fan club whose membership stands forever at one but which maintains chapters in every city – in every cranium – in the world. Art, like fandom, asserts the possibility of fellowship in a world built entirely from the materials of solitude. The novelist, the cartoonist, the songwriter, knows that the gesture is doomed from the beginning but makes it anyway, flashes his bit of mirror, not on the chance that the signal will be seen or understood but as if such a chance existed.

– Michael Chabon, from Manhood for Amateurs