Moneyless in Moab

Interweaving philosophical conversations with suelo in his cave and treehouse with colorful footage of his daily activities in town and in nature, MONEYLESS IN MOAB offers an intimate look at a person who embodies a radical alternative to our excessively consumeristic american way of life. The film opens our eyes to the fact that it is indeed possible to live happily without money, and to do so with joy, grace, and dignity, even in a world gone mad with attachment. about suelo Daniel Shellabarger (aka suelo) is a student of world religions and anthropology who is unhappy with the worldwide “money religion” and currently lives without the direct use of money. He likes nature, travel, and tequila—when someone else is buying. He is currently hitchhiking and roaming around the pacific northwest, living in the moment and practicing non-attachment. His blog is a good place to read his reflections as he surfs though this universe.

Link

Blog

http://www.everythingahead.com/watch.html

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A Difficult Week

As life continues to meander ever steadily from its source, the undulating landscape causes periodic turbulence, disrupting the steady flow. Unconsciously, one is jolted to a clear, lucid vision of immediate reality. A sandstorm of daily routine sweeps us unknowingly off our feet, blinding us of the immediacy of our existence.

The delightfully pessimistic 19th Century German Philosopher Arthur Schopenhaur succinctly alluded: ‘That which has been no longer is; it as little exists as does that which has never been. But everything that is in the next moment has been. Thus the most insignificant present has over the most insignificant past the advantage of actuality, which means that the former bears to the latter the relation of something to nothing.’

The hullaballoo of everyday life is overpowering on the senses, causing one to fatalistically neglect the present moment. Maintaining awareness of what is, in the face of grippingly powerful illusions of what might be and what has already been, is no mean feat. Plato summed up this notion in five powerfully profound words: ‘Continual becoming and never being.’

Wrestling oneself from this illusory state is a challenge that will last a lifetime. There is no finishing line, only endless laps to be run.

Events of the last week have provided me with a perceptual nudge in the direction of appreciating what is. I was indiscriminately attacked for reasons that will forever remain a mystery. One hears of incidents like this daily, but one remains oblivious to their arsenal of negative energy, until one becomes the victim.

Brutish, dirty, and thuggish episodes imprint themselves on the psyche, and are not easily erased. One must remain strong in the face of crazy thoughts, fighting off the urge to react like a wild animal. One must make a positive from a negative, and not fester in soul destroying hatred and self pity. To achieve this, a painful, yet liberating shift in thinking is required: Is one going to be thrown about violently in stormy sea of emotions, or take charge and say all is quite well? It’s a perceptual flick of a switch that frees one from falling into an abyss of negativity.

One has simply to be happy with what is, as this is all there is. Schopenhaur phrases this concept beautifully once again: ‘In the first place no man is happy but strives his whole life long after supposed happiness and he seldom attains it; as a rule, however, he finally enters harbour shipwrecked and dismasted.’

This week has been physically and mentally an uphill struggle, but an illuminated one all the same. Existentially, a golden egg has fallen from the sky and landed in my lap. For that I am grateful.

Mike

Being and Time, part 4: Thrown into this world How do we find ourselves in the world, and how can find our freedom here?

Simon Critchley, The Guardian, Monday 29th June, 2009.

As I already tried to show, Heidegger seeks to reawaken perplexity about the question of being, the basic issue of metaphysics. In Being and Time, he pursues this question through an analysis of the human being or what he calls Dasein. The being of Dasein is existence, understood as average everyday existence or our life in the world, discussed in the last entry. But how might we give some more content to this rather formal idea of existence?

Heidegger gives us a strong clue in Division 1, Chapter 5 of Being and Time, which is a long, difficult, but immensely rewarding chapter and where things really begin to get interesting. The central claim of this chapter - which is deepened in the remainder of Being and Time - is that Dasein is thrown projection (Dasein ist geworfener Entwurf). Let me try and unravel this thought.

Heidegger tends to advance his investigation in concept clusters. One cluster contains three concepts: state of mind, mood and thrownness. State of mind is a rather questionable rendering of Befindlichkeit, which William Richardson nicely translates as 'already-having-found-oneself-there-ness'. OK, it's not particularly elegant, but the thought is the human being is always already found or disclosed somewhere, namely in the 'there' of its being-in-the-world. This 'there' is the Da of Dasein.

Furthermore, I am always found in a mood, a Stimmung. This is mood is the strong Aristotelian sense of pathos, a passion of the soul or an affect, something befalls us and in which we find ourselves. The passions are not, for Heidegger, psychological colouring for an essentially rational agent. They are rather the fundamental ways in which we are attuned to the world. Indeed, musicologically, Stimmung is linked to tuning and pitch: one is attuned to the world firstly and mostly through moods. One of the compelling aspects of Heidegger's work is his attempt to provide a phenomenology of moods, of the affects that make up our everyday life in the world.

This is another way of approaching his central insight: that we cannot exist independently of our relation to the world; and this relationship is a matter of mood and appetite, not rational contemplation.

Such moods disclose the human being as thrown into the 'there' of my being-in-the-world. As Jim Morrisson intoned many decades ago, 'Into this world we're thrown'. Thrownness (Geworfenheit) is the simple awareness that we always find ourselves somewhere, namely delivered over to a world with which we are fascinated, a world we share with others.

We are always caught up in our everyday life in the world, in the throw of various moods, whether fear, boredom, excitement or – as we will see in the next entry – anxiety.

But, Heidegger insists, Dasein is not just thrown into the world. Because it – we – are capable of understanding, we can also throw off our thrown condition. Understanding is, for Heidegger, a conception of activity. It is always understanding how to do something or how to operate something. Understanding is the possession of an ability (etwas können) and the authentic human is characterised by the ability or potentiality to be (Seinkönnen).

So, the human being is not just a being defined by being thrown into the world. It is also one who can throw off that thrown condition in a movement where it seizes hold of its possibilities, where it acts in a concrete situation. This movement is what Heidegger calls projection (Entwurf) and it is the very experience of what Heidegger will call, later in Being and Time, freedom. Freedom is not an abstract philosophical concept. It is the experience of the human being demonstrating its potential through acting in the world. To act in such a way is to be authentic.

Being and Time, part 3: Being-in-the-world (How Heidegger turned Descartes upside down, so that we are, and only therefore think)

Simon Critchley, The Guardian, Monday 22nd June, 2009.

I talked in my first blog entry about Heidegger's attempt to destroy our standard, traditional philosophical vocabulary and replace it with something new. What Heidegger seeks to destroy in particular is a certain picture of the relation between human beings and the world that is widespread in modern philosophy and whose source is Descartes (indeed Descartes is the philosopher who stands most accused in Being and Time). Roughly and readily, this is the idea that there are two sorts of substances in the world: thinking things like us and extended things, like tables, chairs and indeed the entire fabric of space and time.

The relation between thinking things and extended things is one of knowledge and the philosophical and indeed scientific task consists in ensuring that what a later tradition called "subject" might have access to a world of objects. This is what we might call the epistemological construal of the relation between human beings and the world, where epistemology means "theory of knowledge". Heidegger does not deny the importance of knowledge, he simply denies its primacy. Prior to this dualistic picture of the relation between human beings and the world lies a deeper unity that he tries to capture in the formula "Dasein is being-in-the-world". What might that mean?

If the human being is really being-in-the-world, then this entails that the world itself is part of the fundamental constitution of what it means to be human. That is to say, I am not a free-floating self or ego facing a world of objects that stands over against me. Rather, for Heidegger, I am my world. The world is part and parcel of my being, of the fabric of my existence. We might capture the sense of Heidegger's thought here by thinking of Dasein not as a subject distinct from a world of objects, but as an experience of openedness where my being and that of the world are not distinguished for the most part. I am completely fascinated and absorbed by my world, not cut off from it in some sort of "mind" or what Heidegger calls "the cabinet of consciousness".

Heidegger's major claim in his discussion of world in Being and Time is that the world announces itself most closely and mostly as a handy or useful world, the world of common, average everyday experience. My proximal encounter with the table on which I am writing these words is not as an object made of a certain definable substance (wood and iron, say) existing in a geometrically ordered space-time continuum. Rather, this is just the table that I use to write and which is useful for arranging my papers, my laptop and my coffee cup. Heidegger insists that we have to "thrust aside our interpretative tendencies" which cover over our everyday experience of the world and attend much more closely to that which shows itself.

The world is full of handy things that hang together as a whole and which are meaningful to me. In even more basic terms, the world is a whole load of stuff that is related together: my laptop sits on my desk, my spectacles sit on my nose, the desk sits on the floor, and I can look over to the window at the garden and hear the quiet hum of traffic and police sirens that make up life in this city. This is what Heidegger calls "environment" (Umwelt), where he is trying to describe the world that surrounds the human being and in which it is completely immersed for the most part.

Heidegger insists that this lived experience of the world is missed or overlooked by scientific inquiry or indeed through a standard philosophy of mind, which presupposes a dualistic distinction between mind and reality. What is required is a phenomenology of our lived experience of the world that tries to be true to what shows itself first and foremost in our experience. To translate this into another idiom, we might say that Heidegger is inverting the usual distinction between theory and practice. My primary encounter with the world is not theoretical; it is not the experience of some spectator gazing out at a world stripped of value. Rather, I first apprehend the world practically as a world of things which are useful and handy and which are imbued with human significance and value. The theoretical or scientific vision of things that find in a thinker like Descartes is founded on a practical insight that is fascinated and concerned with things.

Heidegger introduces a distinction between two ways of approaching the world: the present-at-hand (Vorhandenheit) and the ready-to-hand (Zuhandenheit). Present-at-hand refers to our theoretical apprehension of a world made up of objects. It is the conception of the world from which science begins. The ready-to-hand describes our practical relation to things that are handy or useful. Heidegger's basic claim is that practice precedes theory, and that the ready-to-hand is prior to the present-at-hand. The problem with most philosophy after Descartes is that it conceives of the world theoretically and thus imagines, like Descartes, that I can doubt the existence of the external world and even the reality of the persons that fill it – who knows, they might be robots! For Heidegger, by contrast, who we are as human beings is inextricably bound up and bound together with the complex web of social practices that make up my world. The world is part of who I am. For Heidegger, to cut oneself off from the world, like Descartes, is to miss the point entirely: the fabric of our openedness to the world is one piece. And that piece should not be cut up. Furthermore, the world is not simply full of handy, familiar meaningful things. It is also full of persons. If I am fundamentally with my world, then that world is a common world that experienced together with others. This is what Heidegger calls "being-with" (Mitsein)

Being and Time, part 2: On 'mineness'

Simon Critchley, The guradian, Monday 15th June, 2009.

As Heidegger makes clear from the untitled, opening page with which Being and Time begins, what is at stake in the book is the question of being. This is the question that Aristotle raised in an untitled manuscript written 2500 years ago, but which became known at a later date as the Metaphysics. For Aristotle, there is a science that investigates what he calls "being as such", without regard to any specific realms of being, eg the being of living things (biology) or the being of the natural world (physics).

Metaphysics is the area of inquiry that Aristotle himself calls "first philosophy" and which comes before anything else. It is the most abstract, universal and indefinable area of philosophy. But it is also the most fundamental.

With admirable arrogance, it is the question of being that Heidegger sets himself the task of inquiring into in Being and Time. He begins with a series of rhetorical questions: Do we have an answer to the question of the meaning of being? Not at all, he answers. But do we even experience any perplexity about this question? Not at all, Heidegger repeats. Therefore, the first and most important task of Heidegger's book is to recover our perplexity for this question of questions: Hamlet's "To be or not to be?"

For Heidegger, what defines the human being is this capacity to be perplexed by the deepest and most enigmatic of questions: Why is there something rather than nothing? So, the task of Being and Time is reawakening in us a taste for perplexity, a taste for questioning. Questioning – Heidegger will opine much later in his career – is the piety of thinking.

The first line of the text proper of Being and Time is, "We are ourselves the entities to be analysed". This is the key to the crucial concept of mineness (Jemeinigkeit), with which the book begins: if I am the being for whom being is a question – "to be or not to be" – then the question of being is mine to be, one way or another.

In what, then, does the being of being human consist? Heidegger's answer is existence (Existenz). Therefore, the question of being is to be accessed by way of what Heidegger calls "an existential analytic". But what sort of thing is human existence? It is obviously defined by time: we are creatures with a past, who move through a present and who have available to them a series of possibilities, what Heidegger calls "ways to be". Heidegger's point here is wonderfully simple: the human being is not definable by a "what", like a table or a chair, but by a "who" that is shaped by existence in time. What it means to be human is to exists with a certain past, a personal and cultural history, and by an open series of possibilities that I can seize hold of or not.

This brings us to a very important point: if the being of being human is defined by mineness, then my being is not a matter of indifference to me. A table or chair cannot recite Hamlet's soliloquy or undergo the experience of self-questioning and self-doubt that such words express. But we can.

This is the kernel of Heidegger's idea of authenticity (Eigentlichkeit), which more accurately expresses what is proper to the human being, what is its own. For Heidegger, there are two dominant modes of being human: authenticity and inauthenticity. Furthermore, we have a choice to make between these two modes: the choice is whether to be oneself or not to be oneself, to be author of oneself and self-authorising or not. Heidegger insists, as he will do throughout Being and Time, that inauthenticity does not signify a lower or lesser being, but many readers have had reason to doubt such assurances. Theodor Adorno, famously critical of Heidegger, asks: doesn't authenticity end up being a jargon that we are better off without? Let's just say that the point is moot.

Regardless of the twin modes of authenticity and inauthenticity, Heidegger insists early in Being and Time that the human being must first be presented in its indifferent character, prior to any choice to be authentic or not. In words that soon become a mantra in the book, Heidegger seeks to describe the human being as it presented "most closely and mostly" (Zunächst und Zumeist).

Note the radical nature of this initial move: philosophy is not some otherworldly speculation as to whether the external world exists or whether the other human-looking creatures around me are really human and not robots or some such. Rather, philosophy begins with the description – what Heidegger calls "phenomenology" – of human beings in their average everyday existence. It seeks to derive certain common structures from that everydayness.

But we should note the difficult of the task that Heidegger has set himself. That which is closest and most obvious to us is fiendishly difficult to describe. Nothing is closer to me than myself in my average, indifferent everyday existence, but how to describe this? Heidegger was fond of quoting St Augustine's Confessions, when the latter writes, "Assuredly I labour here and I labour within myself; I have become to myself a land of trouble and inordinate sweat." Heidegger indeed means trouble and one often sweats through these pages. But the moments of revelation are breathtaking in their obviousness.

Being and Time, part 1: Why Heidegger Matters

Simon Critchley, The Guardian, Monday 8 June 2009

The most important and influential continental philosopher of the last century was also a Nazi. How did he get there? What can we learn from him?


Martin Heidegger (1889-1976) was the most important and influential philosopher in the continental tradition in the 20th century. Being and Time, first published in 1927, was his magnum opus. There is no way of understanding what took place in continental philosophy after Heidegger without coming to terms with Being and Time. Furthermore, unlike many Anglo-American philosophers, Heidegger has exerted a huge influence outside philosophy, in areas as diverse as architecture, contemporary art, social and political theory, psychotherapy, psychiatry and theology.

However, because of his political commitment to National Socialism in 1933, when he assumed the position of Rector of Freiburg University in south-western Germany, Heidegger continues to arouse controversy, polemic and much heated misunderstanding.

The hugely important matter of the relation between Heidegger and politics is the topic for another series of blogs entries. Indeed, to my mind, the nature and extent of Heidegger's involvement in National Socialism only becomes philosophically pertinent once one has begun to understand and feel the persuasive power of what takes place in his written work, especially Being and Time.

The task I have set myself in this series of blogs is to provide a taste of the latter book and hopefully some motivation to read it further and study it more deeply. But once you have read Being and Time and hopefully been compelled by it, then the question that hangs over the text, like the sword of Damocles, is the following: how could arguably the greatest philosopher of the 20th century also have been a Nazi? What does his political commitment to National Socialism, however long or short it lasted, suggest about the nature of philosophy and its risks and dangers when stepping into the political realm?
Being and Time

Being and Time is a work of considerable length (437 pages in the German original) and legendary difficulty. The difficulty is caused by the fact that Heidegger sets himself the task of what he calls a "destruction" of the philosophical tradition. We shall see some of the implications of this in future entries, but the initial consequence is that Heidegger refuses to avail himself of the standard terminology of modern philosophy, with its talk of epistemology, subjectivity, representation, objective knowledge and the rest.

Heidegger has the audacity to go back to the drawing board and invent a new philosophical vocabulary. For example, he thinks that all conceptions of the human being as a subject, self, person, consciousness or indeed a mind-brain unity are hostages to a tradition of thinking whose presuppositions have not been thought through radically enough. Heidegger is nothing if not a radical thinker: a thinker who tries to dig down to the roots of our lived experience of the world rather than accepting the authority of tradition.

Heidegger's name for the human being is Dasein, a term which can be variously translated, but which is usually rendered as "being-there". The basic and very simple idea, as we will see in future entries, is that the human being is first and foremost not an isolated subject, cut off from a realm of objects that it wishes to know about. We are rather beings who are always already in the world, outside and alongside a world from which, for the most part, we do not distinguish ourselves.

What goes for Dasein also goes for many of Heidegger's other concepts. Sometimes this makes Being and Time a very tough read, which is not helped by the fact that Heidegger, more than any other modern philosopher, exploits the linguistic possibilities of his native language, in his case German. Although Macquarrie and Robinson, in their 1962 Blackwell English edition, produced one of the classics of modern philosophical translation, reading Being and Time can sometimes feel like wading through a conceptual mud of baroque and unfamiliar concepts.
The basic idea

That said, the basic idea of Being and Time is extremely simple: being is time. That is, what it means for a human being to be is to exist temporally in the stretch between birth and death. Being is time and time is finite, it comes to an end with our death. Therefore, if we want to understand what it means to be an authentic human being, then it is essential that we constantly project our lives onto the horizon of our death, what Heidegger calls "being-towards-death".

Crudely stated, for thinkers like St Paul, St Augustine, Luther and Kierkegaard, it is through the relation to God that the self finds itself. For Heidegger, the question of God's existence or non-existence has no philosophical relevance. The self can only become what it truly is through the confrontation with death, by making a meaning out of our finitude. If our being is finite, then what it means to be human consists in grasping this finitude, in "becoming who one is" in words of Nietzsche's that Heidegger liked to cite. We will show how this insight into finitude is deepened in later entries in relation to Heidegger's concepts of conscience and what he calls "ecstatic temporality".

Being and Time begins with a long, systematic introduction, followed by two divisions, each containing six chapters. I have just finished teaching the whole book in a 15-week lecture course at the New School for Social Research in New York and I estimate that I spoke for about 2 hours a week. As they say here in New York, just do the math! Therefore, in the following 7 short blog entries, I can only give a taste of the book and offer some signposts for readers who would like to explore further.

There is Manifest Beauty in Simply Being.

I just read a very well written and thought provoking piece by a fellow blogger entitled 'The mysterious Avoidance of Philosophy in American Schools,' and it got me thinking.

The writer in the blog in question read Alan Watts for the first time when she was 18 and as a result saw the world differently.

The awakening she experienced with Mr Watts was akin to myself, when I first read 'The Tibet Book of Living and Dying.'

I too started to look at things in a different light and question what I had always perceived to be real - all there is. The whole business was indeed an eye opener, and something that required further investigation.

Being educated in the West only teaches the existence of duality, and it's unwavering commitment to rational thought. We are only here on this tiny planet for a infinitesimal period of time, thus to say one understands 'life' as we know it; is to show an arrogance that I can't comprehend.

For when when one looks at a great piece of art or stands on top of a mountain and gets that feeling that there is more to all of this than form, that we are connected and interconnected to the greater scheme of things; the duality that we once held close to our hearts fades away into nothingness.

Essentially though, this only happens for a short period of time, then the 'thinker' and the 'doer' come back into play, and the separation from the nature of reality steamrollers on with it's desires, expectations and frustrations.

It really would be proper if the education system in the West made provision for the teaching of some basic Eastern philosophy, as it would give many people a chance to see life in a way that they had never imagined.

There is more to life that rationality and definite conclusions.

I think everyone deserves that chance to see themselves without the shackles of a pronoun and battle with the idea that the mind itself creates our reality, nothing else.

'I think therefore I am not,' as the dictum so imperiously states.

Mike

Alan Watts-Music and Life

Mike

Alice and Reality

If I had a world of my own, everything would be nonsense. Nothing would be what it is, because everything would be what it isn't. And contrary wise, what is, it wouldn't be. And what it wouldn't be, it would. You see?'

In this quote Lewis Carroll was hinting at the illusion of perceived reality and all its enticing trappings. It’s all too easy for one to drift through life in a five sense bubble, (sight, hearing, taste, touch, smell) thinking this is all there is, and believing one is the centre of all that exists. One needs to recoil from this premise and free one's self from the illusory nature of this blinkered, conditioned perception.

Imagine yourself sitting in a cinema, enjoying the latest blockbuster on the 50foot screen in front of you. One is engrossed in this movie and one feels an infinity with the car chases and the fight scenes. Sitting there in this darkened room of pass-time entertainment, one perceives the sequenced events on the movie screen, momentarily, as 'reality'. This is how individuals their lives, staring at the screen we call 'reality.' absorbed in the five senses, seeing it as all there is. Now, imagine for a moment in that cinema one loses interest in the movie, and starts to become move aware of surroundings; the seat one is sitting on, who is beside and behind you, how the air conditioning feel against one's skin. At once, one notices the light beaming through the room on to the screen and the dust particles dancing in the air through it's image giving path. One then follows the light, curious to know where it's source lies. To achieve this one follows the light to the rear of the room, inside a space unknown to the individual. This is what we need to do in life. Stop for a moment, and experience our surroundings, and get accustomed to them. Then we can follow that energy which causes our thoughts back to its source, here one finds the nature of reality, our pure mind. Once one has done this, one will quickly realize that we create our own reality and then project it outwardly, just like the cinema projector. Once we know this we can start dipping our toe more in the illuminated, beautiful emptiness of the mind, becoming the creator, rather than the follower of what we perceive to be real.

Mike

Why are babies cute? Why is cake sweet?

Why are babies cute? Why is cake sweet? Philosopher Dan Dennett has answers you wouldn't expect, as he shares evolution's counterintuitive reasoning on cute, sweet and sexy things. For a topping, try his new theory on why jokes are funny.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TzN-uIVkfjg

A dam fine seven odd minutes.

Mike

Words to live by

Ancient Monastery on Mt. East

Artist: Chen Jun

"The ancients wishing to exhibit goodness throughout the kingdom, first ordered well their own states. To order well their own states, they first brought order into their families. To bring order into their families, they first cultivated their persons. Wishing to cultivate their persons, they first rectified their hearts. To rectify their hearts, they first sought to be sincere in their thoughts. Wishing to be sincere in their thoughts, they first extended to the utmost their knowledge. Such extension of knowledge lay in the investigation of things."

"The investigation of things rounded out knowledge. Their knowledge being rounded out, their thoughts were sincere. Their thoughts being sincere, their hearts were then rectified. Their hearts being rectified, their persons were cultivated. Their persons being cultivated, order was brought into their families. Their families being in order, their states were rightly governed. Their states being rightly governed, the whole kingdom was made tranquil and happy."

From The Great Learning:
Confucius (551 BCE to 479 BCE)

Its as easy as that.

Pikey

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance Extract

At the moment I am reading and enjoying immensely 'Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance' by Robert M Pirsig.

This particular passage jumped out at me and I felt that I needed to share it with blog.

'To speak of a certain government and establishment institutions as 'the system' is to speak correctly, since these organisations are founded upon the same structural conceptual relationships as a motorcycle. They are sustained by structural relationships even when they have lost all other meaning and purpose.People arrive at a factory and perform a totally meaningless task from eight to five without question because the structure demands it be that way. There's no villain, no "mean guy" who wants they to live meaningless lives, it's just that the structure, demands it and no one is willing to take on the formidable task of changing the structure because it is meaningless.

But to tear down a factory or to revolt against a government or to avoid repair of a motorcycle because it is a system is to attack effects rather than causes; and as long as the attack is on effects only , no change is possible. The true system, the real system, is our present construction of systematic thought itself, rationality itself, and if a factory is torn down but the rationality that produced it is left standing, then that rationality will simply produce another factory. If a revolution destroys a systematic government, but the systematic patterns of thought that it produced that government are left intact, then those patterns will repeat themselves in the succeeding government. There's so much talk about the system, a so little understanding.

Food for thought.

Pikey

Emptiness

The thirty spokes unite in the one nave; but it is on the empty space (for the axle) that the wheel depends.Clay is fashioned into vessels; but it is on their empty hollowness, that their use depends. The doors and windows are cut out to form an apartment; but it is on the empty space that it's use depends. Therefore what has a (positive) existence serves for profitable adaption, and what has not that for (actual) usefulness.

Lao Tzu

I love this notion of nothingness being all there is. The nature of the mind, in its pure form being IT. There is nothing more, and only when you settle in this natural resting place can you truly develop and grow. External reality (as we know it) takes us away from the essence of truth, blinding us with sensory desires and tempts us towards the illusion.

The truth then lies not between the lines or in the depths of philosophical discussion, it is simple and access able to all. Its has been called 'grounded luminosity' or likened to the pause between words, or massive emptiness, but one can be sure that resting in the ego less plains of the meditative mind, can help one appreciate how beautiful and simple the moment is.

No past,
Nor future,
No worries,
Nor dreams,

Just now.


Pikey

Voltaire Quotes 1694-1778

This enlightenment thinker's belief in civil liberties, social reform despite censorship and questioning of religious dogma, make his ideas essential in todays Britain.

Here are some good quotes:


"Judge a man by his questions rather than by his answers"

"Prejudices are what fools use for reason."

"It is dangerous to be right in matters on which the established authorities are wrong"

"The best government is a benevolent tyranny tempered by an occasional assassination."

"Every man is guilty of all the good he didn't do"

"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"

"Everything's fine today, that is our illusion."

"I have never made but one prayer to God, a very short one: 'O Lord, make my enemies ridiculous.' And God granted it."

"The multitude of books is making us ignorant."

"There are some that only employ words for the purpose of disguising their thoughts."

"Use, do not abuse; neither abstinence nor excess ever renders man happy."

"God is always on the side of the big battalions."

"Man is free at the moment he wishes to be."

"Common sense is not so common."

"This is no time to make new enemies."

There are some amazing images cast up by reading these I am sure you will agree.

Pikey