The Fable of Porcupines

The moderate distance, which they at last discovered, is the only tolerable condition of intercourse by the code of politeness and fine manners. A man who has some heat in himself prefers to remain outside where he will neither prick other people nor get pricked himself.

Agnosticism

Carl Sagan was proud to be an agnostic when asked whether there was life elsewhere in the universe. When he refused to commit himself, his interlocutor pressed him for "gut feeling" and he immortally replied: "But I try not to think with my gut. Really, it's okay to reserve judgment until the evidence is in." --Richard Dawkins

Two types Agnosticism: TAP---Temporary Agnosticism in Practice; PAP---Permanent Agnosticism in Principle.

That I take to be the agnostic faith, which if a man keeps whole and undefiled, he shall not be shamed to look the universe in the face, no matter what the future may have in store for him. --T. H. Huxley (inventor of the Agnostic)

Peak Experience

Peak experience contains two components: an emotional one of ecstasy and an intellectual one of illumination.

A peak experience is what you feel and perhaps "know" when you gain authentic elevation as a human being. It is like the promise of the rainbow. It comes and it goes and it cannot be forgotten.

It is empirically characteristic of the self-actualizing people that they have less doubt about right and wrong than average people do. They do not get confused just because 95% of the population disagrees with them.

A state of subjective well-being is a pretty good guide to what is best for the person.

Self-actualizing people involved in a cause outside their own skin: pursuing truth, beauty, and goodness of the ancients and perfection, simplicit, comprehensiveness...

Movie： “The Matrix Revolutions”

The conversations between Smith and Neo at the near end:

"Why Mr. Anderson
Why do you do it?
Why get up?
Why keep fighting?
Do you believe that you're fighting for something?
For more than your survival?
Can you tell me what it is?
Do you even know?
Is it freedom or truth?
Perhaps peace?
Could it be for love?
Illusion, Mr. Anderson,
Vagary of perception, temporary constructs of a feeble human intellect
Trying desperately to justify an existence that is without meaning or purpose
And all of them are as artificial as the matrix itself
Although only a human mind can invent something as insipid as love
You must be able to see it, Mr. Anderson,
You must know it by now that you can't win
It is pointless to keep fighting
Why, Mr. Anderson. Why? Why?
Why do you persist?"

"Because I choose to," Neo answered.

Growth - 成长

Always try to seek growth, not perfection.

From Priscilla Welch:
I don't know whether I've got my head in the sand or not. But I believe there's a lot you can get out of yourself at 45.
Gosh, if I've got to do this until I retire, it will be damned boring. There must be something else I can do with my life.
Running was making me a lot perkier, and a better person to live with. My exterior is a bit worn now, but the inside feels very young.

Priscilla Welch (born 1944) was a British marathon runner. She had a most unlikely career in international athletics, having been a smoker of a pack a day until she began running competitively at age 35. An officer in the British Army, Welch met her husband Dave while serving in Norway. She quit smoking, and under his tutelage, she ran in the 1980 London Marathon at age 35.
Four years later, she qualified for the British Olympic team at the 1984 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles. In the first women's Olympic marathon, Welch finished sixth, remarkable for someone who was nearly 40 years old. On her 40th birthday, Welsh qualified for the masters division and began setting age group world records.
In 1987, she won the New York Marathon with a 2:30:17. This was coupled with her second place finish in London where she set an age group world record running a 2:26:51, good for the sixth fastest time in the world for 1987. She was criticised for passing up the chance to win a medal at the World Championships in Rome that year. Welch set the age group world record in Boston by running a 2:30:48 in 1988. This record stood for 14 years.

The Jonah Complex: the evasion of growth, fear of one's own greatness, or evasion of one's destiny.

We fear our best as well as our worst.

Many of us evade our constitutionally suggested vocations--call, destiny, task in life, mission... We are just not strong enough to endure too much of peak experience. Our organisms are just too weak for any large doses of greatness.

Ordinary vs. Extraordinary

Everybody is after being extraordinary, so searching for extraordinary is ordinary. It is an ordinary desire. Therefore, being content with ordinariness is in a way extraordinary. To be ordinary is to be yourself, when you not strive to be somebody else. To be yourself is unique in itself. You have no need to become unique. You're unique from the very beginning. You don't need to cultivate it to have it. To become someone else cannot make you unique, but only make you lose your uniqueness. Searching for extraordinary is like holding a candle to search for fire. You already have the fire in your hand. There is no need for the extra work.

To be yourself is to be ordinary, and paradoxically, to be ordinary is the only way in lieu of extraordinary.

Power vs. Force

In the spiritual sense, power and force are different. Power is something that radiates from you, the source is within. Force is violent, a trespass on the freedom of others.

Love is power. Naturally there is no power higher than love. But love is not force. Power never becomes force. It becomes bigger and bigger; it can become universal, but it still remains power.

Power Corrupts

Lord Acton: Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.

But power is like a mirror. If you are potentially ready to be corrupted, power gives you the chance; if you are not potentially corruptible, then it is impossible for power to corrupt you. However, human life has many strange aspects to it. Only the potentially corruptible person moves toward power. The potentially good person has no desire for it because good can manifest without power. There is no need for good to have power. The will-to-power is the need of a corrupted being, because he knows that without power he will not be able to do what he wants to do.

Anything that needs power from outside is not good. It is something intrinsically impotent; it will live on borrowed life.

Kahlil Gibran made little story of beauty and ugliness, that ugliness took beauty's clothes and run away Only ugliness needs something to hide itself behind, to help it pretend---to have a false mask.

Truth & Crowd

Truth has nothing to do with the crowd; truth has always been attained by individuals. A Buddha attains it, a Jesus, A Mohammed, a Moses, a Zarathustra. But they attain truth when they are absolutely alone in their deep meditative states, when they forget all about the world and the other, when they are no longer obsessed by the other in any possible way, when they are utterly alone drowning in their own consciousness and reaching the very bottom core of it

A group can have a mind---not a soul. The soul is always individual; the mind is always a group.

God & the World

God created the world in six days, just 4,004 years before Jesus Christ was born. Why did he decide, on a certain day, to create the world? What caused the idea of creation? Was there something else that was forcing him to create? Was there some serpent seducing him to create? Why on a certain day, and not before. It is arbitrary, whimsical, whereas evolution is not arbitrary, whimsical.

On one hand God has created you; on the other hand, when you do something wrong you will be punished. But isn't he the responsible person and should be punished?

The very idea that you have been created makes you a thing, it takes away your being. You can be a being only if there is no God. God, and you as a being, cannot coexist. That is why I am sure God does not exist, because I see beings everywhere. The person who starts believing in God unknowingly is losing his being hood: he is becoming a thing.

God Is Dead and Man Is Free

God and freedom are incompatible. If you are free, then there is no God. How can you be free with a creator who is continuously watching you, who is continuously maintaining you and directing you? In the first place he has put everything in you as a fixed program.

But religion has to die too for man to be himself.

(Mohammedans burned the library of Alexandria.)

The Truth Does Not Grow

When mind knows, we call it knowledge.
When the heart knows, we call it love.
When being knows, we call it meditation. At the very center of your being there is nothing but silence.

Omnipotence, omniscience, and omnipresence.

The truth does not grow; only recognition grows, remembrance grows.

The personality has to be dropped so that your individuality can be discovered.

Mind cannot be still. Your brain is created by nature, but your mind is created by the society you live in. Mind is a created phenomenon. Any problem rooted in the mind cannot be solved without transcending the mind. A problem can solved only when you can go beyond it. If you cannot go beyond it, then you are the problem. A problem rightly understood is solved.

Greed

Just to understand the nature of greed is enough to get rid of it. You are full if you are in tune with the universe; if you are not in tune with the universe, then you are empty, and out of that emptiness comes greed---greed is to fill it, with money, houses, furniture, with friends, lovers, with anything, because one cannot live as emptiness. You have to do something about coming into communion with the whole, so the inner emptiness disappears. With it, all greed disappears.

Greed is not desire, but inner emptiness.

The Story of Lao Tzu, Confucius, and Buddha

The Book of Understanding - Osho

In paradise one afternoon, in its most famous cafe, Lao Tzu, Confucius, and Buddha are sitting and chatting. The waiter comes with a tray that holds three glasses of the juice called "Life," and offers them. Buddha immediately closes his eyes and refuses; he says, "Life is misery."

Confucius closes his eyes halfway---he is a a middlist, he used to preach the golden mean---and asks the waiter to give him the glass. He would like to have a sip---but just a sip, because without tasting how can one say whether life is misery or not? Confucius had a scientific mind; he was not much of a mystic, he had a very pragmatic, earthbound mind. He was the first behaviorist the world has known, very logical. And it seems perfectly right---he says, "First I will have a sip, and then I will say what I think." He takes a sip and he says, "Buddha is right---life is misery."

Lao Tzu takes all the three glasses and he says, "Unless one drinks totally, how can one say anything?" He drinks all the three glasses and starts dancing!

Buddha and Confucius ask him, "Are you not going to say anything?" And Lao Tzu says, "This is what I am saying---my dance and my song are speaking for me." Unless you taste totally, you cannot say. And when you taste totally, you still cannot say because what you know is such that no words are adequate.

Buddha is on one extreme, Confucius is in the middle. Lao Tzu has drunk all the three glasses. He has drunk them all; he has lived life in its three-dimensionality.

The Material and the Spritual

The Book of Understanding - Osho

The human being is like a tree, with its roots in the earth and the potential to flower. Science cares the roots, religion, the flower. What we need is a meeting of earth and sky: heaven and earth are united, utterly physical with a great consciousness, no split between matter and spirit, between the mundane and the sacred. Zorba is the root; Buddha is the flowering. It means living life wholeheartedly.

Jesus says, "Man cannot live by bread alone." But you cannot live without bread either. Two dimensions have to be both fulfilled, to be given equal opportunity for growth. The East has chosen consciousness and has condemned matter and everything material as maya. They have Buddha, but they also have millions of poor people. The West, in its pursuit of material abundance, lost its soul. What they have is meaninglessness, boredom, anguish. The house is full of things, but the master of the house is missing. In the East, on the contrary, the master is alive but the house is empty.

Live life undivided. Religions create duality in the human mind. If you are whole, you are beyond their control. 

(Zorba the buddha, Kabir-one of the 99 names of God in Islem, Nanak- a guru, Farid)

Meetings With Remarkable Men - Gurdjieff

Ordered four books today. From Gurdjieff, Meetings with Remarkable Men and Beelzebub's Tales to His Grandson. From P. D. Ouspensky, In Search of the Miraculous and The Fourth Way. Library only has two of the four and I only read once Ouspensky's first book. His writing has left a good impression on me. Early this morning I was going through Michel Waldberg's Gurdjieff: An Approach to His Ideas. Haven't finished it yet but have to return it today. Some simple quotes of his from G's Remarkable Men triggered me to make the purchase.

Here is the quotes:
Without salt, no sugar.

If a man is a coward, it proves he has will.

A man is satisfied not by the quantity of food, but by the absence of greed.

No elephant and no horse -- even the donkey is mighty.

In the dark a louse is worse than a tiger.

If there is 'I' in one's presence, the God and Devil are of no account.

Happy is he who sees not his unhappiness.

If you wish to be rich, make friends with the police.

If you wish to be famous, make friends with the reporters.

If you wish to be full -- with your mother-in-law.

If you wish to have peace -- with your neighbor.

If you wish to sleep -- with your wife.

If you wish to lose your faith -- with the priest.

Movie “A Prairie Home Companion”

From the black woman singer:
 The day is short,
The night is long,
Why do you work so hard
For something you don't even want?

"You have to lose your life before you get it."