imaginary preamble
"But just what is "spiritual," anyway? How do we recognize it in the vast full/emptiness of cyberspace? Is there not even more room for pseudo-truth and self-deception out there in the etheric foam of the digital sea? Of course, this is to some degree a subjective call: one man's spirituality may be another man's blasphemy. That's what's so remarkable about the Internet approach to the quest: it is at once universal, democratic and personal. You're not limited to any preprogrammed package of goods or anyone else's idea of what you should know or believe. All religions, sects, texts, and teachers await your consideration."
- Lonny J. Brown
does the internet have a buddha nature?
"Fundamentally, our experience as experienced is not different from the Zen master's. Where we differ is that we place a particular kind of conceptual overlay onto that experience and then proceed to make an emotional investment in that overlay, taking it to be "real" in and of itself rather than to be an "expression" of the "occasion" in which we think or talk about the given experience. In a sense, we have a double layered description:
First, there is the prereflective, not yet conceptualized, experience - what we all share, Zen master and the rest of us alike.
Second, there is the expression or characterization of any experience within a particular situation or occasion.
If the speaker brings no personal, egotistic delusions into this expression, the occasion speaks for itself, the total situation alone determines what is said or done. Thus, in the case of the Zen master, what-is-said is simply what-is. In the case of the deluded person, however, the "what-is" includes his excess conceptual baggage with its affective components, the deluded ideas about the nature of "self," "thing," "time," and so on that constitute the person's own particular distortion of what actually is.
The wisdom of Enlightenment is inherent in every one of us. It is because of the delusion under which our mind works that we fail to realize it ourselves, and that we have to seek the advice and the guidance of Enlightened ones before we can know our own Essence of Mind. You should know that so far as Buddha-nature is concerned there is no difference in an Enlightened person and an ignorant one. What makes the difference is one realizes it, while the other is ignorant of it."
- Dogen Zenji
"When the Buddha was walking along the road to Benares following his post-Enlightenment pause he was approached by a wandering ascetic. According to the custom of the time the ascetic greeted him and asked who his teacher was or what doctrine he followed. The Buddha told the wanderling that he was "the Victor and Conqueror of the World, superior to gods and men, an All-Enlightened One beholden to no teacher." The wandering ascetic could see no hint of anything of the Buddha's nature and wandered off as wanderlings are oft to do, mumbling under his breath something like, "If it were only so!"
- Buddhist teaching story
"Why do we sacrifice so much energy to our art? Not in order to teach others but to learn with them what our existence, our organism, our personal and unrepeatable experience have to give us; to learn to break down the barriers which surround us and to free ourselves from the breaks which hold us back, from the lies about ourselves which we manufacture daily for ourselves and for others; to destroy the limitations caused by our ignorance and lack of courage; in short, to fill the emptiness in us: to fulfill ourselves. Art is neither a state of the soul (in the sense of some extraordinary, unpredictable moment of inspiration) nor a state of man (in the sense of a profession or social function). Art is a ripening, an evolution, an uplifting which enables us to emerge from darkness into a blaze of light."
- Jerzy Grotowski
"This earth will grow cold,
a star among stars
and one of the smallest,
a gilded mote on blue velvet -
I mean this, our great earth.
This earth will grow cold one day,
not like a block of ice
or a dead cloud even
but like an empty walnut it will roll along
in pitch-black space . . .
You must grieve for this right now
- you have to feel this sorrow now -
for the world must be loved this much
if you're going to say "I lived"
- Nazim Hikmet
"Reality is neither the subject nor the object of true art which creates its own special reality having nothing to do with the average "reality" perceived by the communal eye."
- Vladimir Nabokov
2. Do not be awed by giant predecessors. Be ill-tempered with their renown. Point out flaws. Frighten interviewers from Time. Appear in Playboy. Sell to the movies.
3. Use unlikely materials. Who would choose Pnin as hero, but how did we live before Pnin?
4. Delight in perversity. Put a noun into the dictionary. Now we recognize the Lolita at every corner, see her sucking sweetened milk through straws at every soda fountain, dream her through all our fantasies.
5. Burn pedants in pale fire. Accept no fashions. Be your own fashion. Do not rely on earlier triumphs. Be new at each appearance.
6. Age indomitably, in the European manner. Do not finish your labours young. Be a planet, not a meteor. Honor the working day. Sit at your desk."
- Vladimir Nabokov
criticism, reminiscences, translations and tributes
"The wise man does not seek enlightenment, he waits for it. So while I was waiting, it occurred to me that seeking perplexity might be more fun.
. . . After all, enlightenment begins where perplexity ends."
- Terry Pratchett
"Perplexity is the beginning of knowledge."
- Kahlil Gibran
"Well, I am certainly wiser than this man. It is only too likely that neither of us has any knowledge to boast of, but he thinks that he knows something which he does not know, whereas I am quite conscious of my ignorance. At any rate it seems that I am wiser than he is to this small extent, that I do not think that I know what I do not know."
The Socrates Argument Clinic
"I'd like to have an argument, please."
"Certainly sir. Have you been here before?"
"No, I haven't, this is my first time."
"I see. Well, do you want to have just one argument,
or were you thinking of taking a course?"
The Argument Sketch
- Jay Bolter
"You fight your superficiality, your shallowness, so as to try to come at people without unreal expectations, without an overload of bias or hope or arrogance, as untanklike as you can be, sans cannon and machine guns and steel plating half a foot thick; you come at them unmenacingly on your own ten toes instead of tearing up the turf with your caterpillar treads, take them on with an open mind, as equals, man to man, as we used to say, and yet you never fail to get them wrong. You might as well have the brain of a tank. You get them wrong before you meet them, while you're anticipating meeting them; you get them wrong while you're with them; and then you go home to tell somebody else about the meeting and you get them all wrong again. Since the same generally goes for them with you, the whole thing is really a dazzling illusion empty of all perception, an astonishing farce of misperception. And yet what are we to do about this terribly significant business of other people, which gets bled of the significance we think it has and takes on instead a significance that is ludicrous, so ill-equipped are we all to envision one another's interior workings and invisible aims? Is everyone to go off and lock the door and sit secluded like the lonely writers do, in a soundproof cell, summoning people out of words and then proposing that these word people are closer to the real thing than the real people that we mangle with our ignorance every day? The fact remains that getting people right is not what living is all about anyway. It's getting them wrong that is living, getting them wrong and wrong and wrong and then, on careful reconsideration, getting them wrong again. That's how we know we're alive: we're wrong. Maybe the best thing would be to forget being right or wrong about people and just go along for the ride. But if you can do that - well, lucky you."
- Philip Roth
- Lama Thubten Yeshe
"Knowing has two poles, and they are always poles apart: carnal knowing, the laying on of hands, the hanging of the fact by head or heels, the measurement of mass and motion, the calibration of brutal blows, the counting of supplies; and spiritual knowing, invisibly felt by the inside self, who is but a fought-over field of distraction, a stage where we recite the monotonous monologue that is our life, a knowing governed by internal tides, by intimations, motives, resolutions, by temptations, secrecy, shame, and pride.
- William Grass
The Art of Self
Because knowledge is defined for the purpose of this product literature as "justified true belief", the manufacturer cannot prove that they "know" any of the information provided with this product to be true, correct, complete, or consistent because they cannot demonstrate their internal belief states through the principle of Philosophic Privacy.
Epistemological Denotation Warning:
The consumer must understand that due to the a-priori impossibility of assuring a shared denotation amongst independent agents, none of the advertising material, product literature, instructions, or safety warnings (including this one), associated with this product may contain what the consumer perceives to be factual information.
Non-Universal Ethics Notice:
Due to the possibility that a common notion of ethics are not universally shared by all sentient beings, and that therefore the manufacturer may have entirely different concepts of "fairness", "equity", "honesty", and "integrity" than the consumer, the consumer should not expect the product purchased to conform in any way to the advertised properties of the product.
"It is strange, the desire to show off or to be somebody. It seems so impossibly difficult to be simple, to be what you are, and not pretend. To be what you are is in itself very arduous without trying to become something, which is not difficult. You can always pretend, put on a mask, but to be what you are is an extremely complex affair; because you are always changing; you are never the same and each moment reveals a new facet, a new depth, a new surface. You can't be all this at one moment for each moment brings its own change. So if you are intelligent, you give up being anything."
- J. Krishnamurti
"You're not, and you never have been. That means what you see, and hear, and feel, and think... you think that that is your mind. But the real mind is invisible; you're less aware of it, while you think, than you are of your eye while you see . . . until something goes wrong with it. Then you become aware of it, with all its dislocated pieces and its rackety functioning, the same way you become aware of your eye when you get a cinder in it. Because it hurts ... Sure, it distorts things. But the strange thing, the thing that you can never explain to anyone, except another nut, or, if you're lucky, a doctor who has an unusual amount of sense - stranger than the hallucinations, or the voices, or the anxiety - is the way you begin to experience the edges of the mind itself ...in a way other people just can't."
- Samuel R. Delany
"Yet the Here and Now, which brings both joy and terror, comes but rarely - does not come even when we call it. That's the way it is: life includes a lot of empty space. We are one-tenth living tissue, nine-tenths water; life is one-tenth here and now, nine-tenths a history lesson. For most of the time the Here and Now is neither now nor here."
- Graham Swift
"It's vital to remember who you really are. It's very important. It isn't a good idea to rely on other people to do it for you, you see. They always get it wrong."
- Terry Pratchett
- Jordan S. Gruber
You Create Your Own Orthodoxy
"Hell is a place of boredom rather than a place of unending torture. Its color is grey rather than red. For an imaginative depiction of hell we should turn not to Dante, but to C.S. Lewis's Great Divorce, where hell is a dreary town lost down a crack in the floor of heaven. Its inhabitants are taken, from time to time, on a bus trip to the celestial realm to see if they would like to transfer there. Sadly, most of them return, unable to endure the bright reality of heaven."
- John Polkinghorne
Science & Religion: No Ends in Sight
"There is something in the dragon's image that appeals to the human imagination. It is, so to speak, a necessary monster, not an ephemeral or accidental one, such as the three-headed chimera or the catoblepas."
- Jorge Luis Borges
"All these, however, were mere terrors of the night, phantoms of the mind that walk in darkness; and though he had seen many spectres in his time, and been more than once beset by Satan in diverse shapes, in his lonely perambulations, yet daylight put an end to all these evils; and he would have passed a pleasant life of it, in despite of the devil and all his works, if his path had not been crossed by a being that causes more perplexity to mortal man than ghosts, goblins, and the whole race of witches put together, and that was - a woman."
- Washington Irving
The Legend of Sleepy Hollow
"But the reflective creature remains grounded, inexplicably,
briefly tastes of Paradise, and goes straight to hell,
returning to embrace Incomprehensibility -
has its moments, its dreams, and a story to tell,
but in the end is baffled, so very predictably.
Loose ends do not justify the means very well.
Our Conceptions are of stuff thinner than air.
How can the Here-and-Now be then or there?"
- Doug Webb
The Looking Glass, Book II, The Beveled Edge
"Somewhere along the journey of remembering who we really are, we may find ourselves in a very uncomfortable space, a void in which we realize that we haven't totally let go of our old beliefs, and on the other hand we have yet to fully plug into the new truths we have discovered. This awkward "place of mind" can bring on an internal crisis of uncertainty, instability, confusion, frustration, and a most unspeakable despair as the "dark night" sets in and makes its presence felt."
- Nicholas Schmidt
"At this stage the cosmological dark side rises up like a black mountain to bar the way. Death returns, the ugliness of society returns, and the personal devil returns, all dancing like puppets on the strings of nihilism, meaninglessness, suffering, and heedless despair at the impersonal nature of the cosmos. There is no answer that we can comprehend, no purpose of life that we can understand. At this point, we're each on our own - and its not very comforting to know that the books say we'll live through it."
- William Carl Eichman
"The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our own frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age."
- H. P. Lovecraft
- Alan Watts
"Lightly men talk of saying what they mean. Often when he was teaching me to write in Greek the Fox would say, 'Child, to say the very thing you really mean; that's the whole art and joy of words.' A glib saying.
When the time comes to you at which you will be forced at last to utter the speech which has lain at the centre of your soul for years, which you have, all that time, idiot-like, been saying over and over, you'll not talk about the joy of words. I saw well why the gods do not speak to us openly, not let us answer. Till that word can be dug out of us, why should they hear the babble that we think we mean? How can they meet us face to face till we have faces?"
- C. S. Lewis
When you're in love, the person is beautiful. When you hate, the person is ugly. You never become aware of how the same person can be beautiful and ugly.
The only way to reach the truth is to learn how to be immediate in your vision. The mind is the problem, because the mind projects its images on the screen you're looking at. What you see is just your projection. And there are as many worlds as there are minds, because every mind lives in his own world.
We get caught up in projecting movies of our own making onto the situations and people surrounding us. Instead of taking responsibility for our own expectations, desires and judgments, we attribute them to others. A projection can be good or bad, beautiful or ugly, disturbing or comforting, but it is still a projection that prevents us from seeing reality as it is. The only way out is to recognize the game."
- Osho
- William Faulkner
To keep our internals open we have to learn to read and write ourselves out of ourselves, and uncurl ourselves back into the world. Language is not a tool for communication that belongs to us. Language is not an exclusively human ability at all. It is a field of meanings and intentions that we inhabit. Human language grows out of the world itself. We speak because the world speaks. And because language and the symbols upon which it depends are the Breath of God, it has the power to penetrate to the very heart of things. Language in the broadest sense is creative because the world was spoken into being. Because of this, reading can be a means of transformation, of gnosis. The reading of the world that we need to learn has to be active and engaged. It must take the form of a dialogue that begins with a careful listening to the voices that speak to us from beyond the bounds of the known. We have to engage in a gentle kind of call and response, a reading that calls in turn for speech, and perhaps for writing, or other kinds of making, and that always turns back to listening."
- David Abram
- Muriel Rukeyser
"There's nothing to lose now, so I walk very slowly toward the eagle, looking away and acting uninterested. He seems content to watch me, or perhaps doesn't care now that he's beyond my reach. Foolish bird: nearly all dead or wounded eagles found in this part of the world have bullets in them. Finally, I stand almost beneath him, gazing up at the eagle as he looks back down at me.
The bird's placid demeanor gives rise to an idea. A gray skeleton of a tree leans beneath his perch, making a ramp I can climb to get closer. His eyes fix on me as I ease to the leaning trunk's base; but he holds fast to the branch. I've never been this close to a wild, free eagle. I think of the ancient hunters, lying hidden in loosely covered pits with bait fastened above, waiting to grab the descending talons. But I seek no blood, no torn sacred feather. Closeness is my talisman, the sharing of eyes, scents twisted together in the same eddy of wind, the soft sound of a wheezing breath, quills ticking in the breeze, feet scuttling on dry bark, and the rush of air beneath a down swept wing.
I inch slowly . . . slowly up the bare trunk, twist myself around the stubs of broken limbs, until I'm twenty feet from the bird and can't come closer. Nothing is left except to be here - two intense, predatory animals, given to great suddenness, for these moments brought within whatever unknowable circle surrounds us. Perhaps neither of us will ever be so near another of our respective kinds again. I don't need to believe that we communicate anything more than a shared interest and regard, as we blink across the distances that separate our minds.
When the eagle moves or teeters, I can see his feet clutch the branch more tightly, and the needle tips of his talons pierce more deeply through the brittle, flaking bark into the wood beneath. Two loose, downy feathers hang incongruously from his breast, out-of-place feathers that quiver in the gentle current of air. I think how strange it is that I expect an eagle to look groomed and perfect, like the ones in books.
The bird cranes his head down to watch me, so the plumage on his neck fluffs out. His head is narrow, pinched, tightly feathered; his eyes are silver-gold, astringent, and stare forward along the curved scythe of his beak. Burned into each eye is a constricted black pupil, like the tightly strung arrow of a crossbow aimed straight toward me. What does the eagle see when he looks at me, this bird who can spot a herring's flash in the water a quarter-mile away? I suppose every stub of whisker on my face, every mole and freckle, every eyelash, the pink flesh on the edge of my eyelid, the red network of vessels on the white of my eye, the radiating colors of my iris, his own reflection on my pupil, or beneath the reflection, his inverted image on my retina. I see only the eagle's eye, but wonder if he sees down inside mine. Or inside me perhaps.
I take a few more steps, until I stand directly beneath him, where for the first time he can't see me. This is too much. He leans forward, opens his wings and leaps out over my head, still staring down."
- Richard Nelson
The Island Within
"We begin to suspect, then, that the true meaning of the word 'substance' is fading from our consciousness. We tend to think of the spiritual as disembodied, diaphanous, even abstract. We set spirit on one side, and matter on the other, and increasingly only the material, the manipulable, has any real importance, any 'substance'. But when priority is given to the imaginal, the dichotomy between substance and spirit collapses. The spiritual is substantial. It is not disembodied. It is here, it is now. This is how we can reclaim a sense of the substantial presence and the concrete significance of human life. The real work for us is simultaneously a spiritual, ethical and physical struggle. Like can only be known by like: this means that thought and being are inseparable, that ethics and perception are complementary. The form of the soul is the form of your world. This fundamental unity of the faculties of human cognition and the world to which they give access is that eternal pagan substrate of all religion."
- Tom Cheetham
Within This Darkness
"One imagines that he is deeply, perpetually, unavoidably aware of something he calls "I" or "me." The philosopher then baptizes this thing his self or perhaps his mind, and the theologian calls it his soul. It is, in any case, something that is at the very heart of things, the very center of reality, that about which the heavens and firmament revolve. But should you not feel embarrassment to talk in such a way, or even to play with such thoughts? As soon as you begin to try saying anything whatever about this inner self, this central reality, you find that you can say nothing at all. It seems to elude all description. All you can do, apparently, is refer to it; you can never say what is referred to, except by multiplying synonyms - as if the piling of names upon names would somehow guarantee the reality of the thing named! But as soon as even the least description is attempted, you find that what is described is indistinguishable from absolute nothingness. Then when you realize that you began by fearing nothingness, that it was this invincible nothingness that was making you miserable, driving you toward madness; when you go back and review your thought and feeling and find it leading to the most familiar thing imaginable, you feel like a child caught making faces at itself in the mirror. You feel like a child plunged into anxiety by a skin blemish or ill-fitting pants, the absurdity is so overwhelming."
- Richard Taylor
Metaphysics
"Deep down, all of us are probably aware that some kind of mystical evolution is our true task. Yet we suppress the notion with considerable force because to admit it is to admit that most of our political gyrations, religious dogmas, social ambitions, and financial ploys are not merely counter-productive but trivial."
- Tom Robbins
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