december 08
Delancey Place.com, 11.25.08
In today's excerpt--Reinhold Niebuhr, Missouri-born theologian and cassandric commentator on American culture in the mid-twentieth century, is invoked by a twenty-first century cassandra, Andrew Bacevich, in his commentary The Limits of Power:
"As pastor, teacher, activist, theologian, and prolific author, Niebuhr was a towering presence in American intellectual life from the 1930s through the 1960s. Even today, he deserves recognition as the most clear-eyed of American prophets. Niebuhr speaks to us from the past, offering truths of enormous relevance to the present. As prophet, he warned that what he called 'our dreams of managing history' ... posed a potentially mortal threat to the United States.' ...
"Niebuhr wrote after World War II [that] ... a position of apparent preeminence placed the United States 'under the most grievous temptations to self-adulation.' ...
"Niebuhr once wrote disapprovingly of Americans, their 'culture soft and vulgar, equating joy with happiness and happiness with comfort.' ... In Niebuhr's words, they will cling to 'a culture which makes 'living standards' the final norm of the good life and which regards the perfection of techniques as the guarantor of every cultural as well as every social-moral value.' ...
"Niebuhr [also] wrote, "One of the most pathetic aspects of human history is that every civilization expresses itself most pretentiously, compounds its partial and universal values most convincingly, and claims immortality for its finite existence at the very moment when the decay which leads to death has already begun.' ...
" 'The trustful acceptance of false solutions for our perplexing problems,' he wrote a half century ago, 'adds a touch of pathos to the tragedy of our age.' ... For all nations, Niebuhr once observed, 'The desire to gain an immediate selfish advantage always imperils their ultimate interests. If they recognize this fact, they usually realize it too late.' "
Andrew J. Bacevich, The Limits of Power, Metropolitan, Copyright 2008 by Andrew J. Bacevich, pp. 8-12, 182.
november 08
Unskillful Parenting is at the root of many of the world's problems -
No one is born a murderer--or a socially conscious citizen. This chapter gives shocking information on how loving, well-meaning, but unskillful parents can be inadvertently responsible for damaging the lives of their children-- and the quality of life for all of us on Earth.
.... fear, guilt, and shame can burn up the spirit of a child before it is three years old. (Some parents)... claim that the child's... self-confidence must be broken, and replaced by strict obedience... If the parent is clever and uses a velvet tone of voice most of the time, children will bear this brutal attack on their true-self "for their own good." In their first years, they will accept the pain needed to develop a false-self. And they will usually even feel love for such a parent who will go to so much trouble to help them grow up "right".
When the true-self is split, the resources of the child's unconscious mind will be focused on avoiding pain. It may choose to appear to conform... or to rebel and stand the hell. No longer can their spirit unfold in joyful, happy, fun-filled, and eventually, socially constructive ways. Their unconscious mind will be distracted from fulfilling its primary functions of creating fun and energy and supporting the immune system.When the child's "will" is broken, the "adult-child" may focus on avoiding "mistakes" that trigger the dreaded fear, guilt, and shame. Resistance to authority is to be avoided--or deviously done in a passive-aggressive way. Instead of engaging their creative resources to look for new solutions to problems, they mainly want to know what the "authorities" say.
Deep within their unconscious mind, there is a continually festering wound... Their energy may be depleted by constantly keeping a lid on the... repressed unconscious resentment, anger, hatred, and violence that were not safe to express in childhood. The result will be pent-up anxiety, depression, illness, and occasionally violence... when their emotional time bombs are triggered by life events.
John Bradshaw in Homecoming helps us understand how dysfunctional parents damage their children:
Any child from a dysfunctional family system will feel emotional deprivation and abandonment. The natural response... is a deep-seated toxic shame that engenders both primal rage and a deep-seated sense of hurt. There is no way you could grieve this in infancy. You had no ally who could be there for you and validate your pain, no one to hold you while you cried your eyes out or raged at the injustice of it all. In order to survive, your primary ego defenses kicked in and your emotional energy was left frozen and unresolved. Your unmet needs have been clamoring to be filled ever since your infancy.We're All Wounded
The old style of parenting that most of us had to survive was ignorant of the life-damaging, false-self programming going into our unconscious mind. All of us have a wounded child inside us. Unless we reclaim the missing parts of our true-self, we cannot become the alive, creative, life-affirming, kind, generous, warm, and loving person that is our true-self birthright. When we murder parts of the souls of our children, they have no choice but to pass on to their children the same abusive ways they painfully experienced as a child. Without retraining how could they parent differently? And "they" are us!
We live today in a dangerous society that is increasing in violence, mass destruction, and ruthlessness. We are rapidly ruining the quality of life for our descendants. Theft, white collar crime, arson, political scandals, and personal violence are increasing. We are plagued with enormous, escalating violence connected with illegal drugs.
Our ancient styles of parenting create a continuous turmoil between our two brains. This book has been written in the hope that it will awaken us to the Armageddon (nuclear war and environmental deterioration) we may face in the 21st century. When we begin to skillfully parent both the conscious and unconscious minds of our children, we can turn our "civilization" around. We will begin to pass on to future generations their true-self birthright of understanding, compassion, and love-instead of the increasing violence, fear, guilt, and shame that blight our lives today.
In the next chapter, we will discuss what our species must quickly do to give our children a future on Planet Earth.
excerpts from: Your Road Map to Lifelong Happiness, © 1995 by Ken Keyes, Jr.
note: since this was written in 1995 there has been some progress in parenting thanks in part to people like ken keyes - tk
october 08
Disfunctional Ego
... you may need to protect yourself or someone else from being harmed by another, but beware of making it your mission to “eradicate evil,” as you are likely to turn into the very thing you are fighting against. Fighting unconsciousness will draw you into unconsciousness yourself. Unconsciousness, dysfunctional egoic behavior, can never be defeated by attacking it. Even if you defeat your opponent, the unconsciousness will simply have moved into you, or the opponent reappears in a new disguise. Whatever you fight, you strengthen, and what you resist, persists.
These days you frequently hear the expression "the war against" this or that, and whenever I hear it, I know that it is condemned to failure. There is the war against drugs, the war against crime, the war against terrorism, the war against cancer, the war against poverty, and so on. For example, despite the war against crime and drugs, there has been a dramatic increase in crime and drug-related offenses in the past twenty-five years. The prison population of the United States has gone up from just under 300,000 in 1980 to a staggering 2.1 million in 2004. The war against disease has given us, amongst other things, antibiotics. At first, they were spectacularly successful, seemingly enabling us to win the war against infectious diseases. Now, many experts agree that the widespread and indiscriminate use of antibiotics has created a time bomb and that antibiotic-resistant strains of bacteria, so-called super bugs, will in all likelihood bring about a reemergence of those diseases and possibly epidemics. According to the Journal of the American Medical Association, medical treatment is the third-leading cause of death after heart disease and cancer in the United States.
Homeopathy, and Chinese medicine are two examples of possible alternative approaches to disease that do not treat the illness as an enemy and therefore do not create new diseases.War is a mind-set, and all action that comes out of such a mind-set will either strengthen the enemy, the perceived evil, or, if the war is won, will create a new enemy, a new evil equal to and often worse than the one that was defeated. There is a deep interrelatedness between your state of consciousness and external reality. When you are in the grip of a mind-set such as "war," your perceptions become extremely selective as well as distorted. In other words, you will see only what you want to see and then misinterpret it. You can imagine what kind of action comes out of such a delusional system. Or instead of imagining it, watch the news on TV tonight.
Recognize the ego for what it is: a collective dysfunction, the insanity of the human mind. When you recognize it for what it is, you no longer misperceive it as somebody's identity. Once you see the ego for what it is, it becomes much easier to remain nonreactive toward it. You don't take it personally anymore. There is no complaining, blaming, accusing, or making wrong. Nobody is wrong. It is the ego in someone, that's all. Compassion arises when you recognize that all are suffering from the same sickness of the mind, some more acutely than others. You do not fuel the drama anymore that is part of all egoic relationships. What is its fuel? Reactivity. The ego thrives on it.
from: A new Earth, © by Eckhart Tolle
september 08
Sokrates on Love
... Sokrates said that truth could not be served as a slave serves a master, who gives no reason for his commands; we should seek her rather, he said, as a true lover seeks knowledge of the beloved, to learn entirely what he is and what he needs, not like base lovers seeking only to know what they can turn to gain. And so, from this, he began to speak of love.
Love, he said, is not a god, for a god cannot want anything; but one of those great spirits who are messengers between gods and men. He does not visit fools, who are content with their low condition, but those who aware of their own need desire, by embracing the beautiful and good, to beget goodness and beauty; for creation is man's immortality and brings him nearest to the gods. All creatures, he said, cherish the children of their flesh; yet the noblest progeny of love are wisdom and glorious deeds, for mortal children die, but these live forever; and these are begotten not of the body but the soul. Mortal passion sinks us in mortal pleasure, so that the wings of the soul grow weak; and such lovers may rise to the good indeed, but not to the very best. But the winged soul rises from love to love, from the beautiful that is born and dies, to beauty in itself eternal; the life itself, of which mortal beauty is only a moving shadow flung upon a wall.
excerpt page 94, The Last of the Wine by Mary Renault, Modern Library © 1956
august 08
Thomas Merton - a chapter from New seeds of contemplation, 1962
THE GENERAL DANCE
The Lord made His world not in order to judge it, not in order merely to dominate it, to make it obey the dictates of an inscrutable and all-powerful will, not in order to find pleasure or displeasure in the way it worked: such was not the reason for creation either of the world or of man.
The Lord made the world and made man in order that He Himself might descend into the world, that He Himself might become Man. When He regarded the world He was about to make He saw His wisdom, as a man-child, "playing in the world, playing before Him at all times." And He reflected, "my delights are to be with the children of men."
The world was not made as a prison for fallen spirits who were rejected by God: this is the gnostic error. The world was made as a temple, a paradise, into which God Himself would descend to dwell familiarly with the spirits He had placed there to tend it for Him.
The early chapters of Genesis (far from being a pseudoscientific account of the way the world was supposed to have come into being) are precisely a poetic and symbolic revelation, a completely true, though not literal, revelation of God's view of the universe and of His intentions for man. The point of these beautiful chapters is that God made the world as a garden in which He himself took delight. He made man and gave to man the task of sharing in His own divine care for created things. He made man in His own image and likeness, as an artist, a worker, homofaber, as the gardener of paradise. He let man decide for himself how created things were to be interpreted, understood and used: for Adam gave the animals their names (God gave them no names at all) and what names Adam gave them, that they were. Thus in his intelligence man, by the act of knowing, imitated something of the creative love of God for creatures. While the love of God, looking upon things, brought them into being, the love of man, looking upon things, reproduced the divine idea, the divine truth, in man's own spirit.
As God creates things by seeing them in His own Logos, man brings truth to life in his mind by the marriage of the divine light, in the being of the object, with the divine light in his own reason. The meeting of these two lights in one mind is truth.
But there is a higher light still, not the light by which man "gives names" and forms concepts, with the aid of the active intelligence, but the dark light in which no names are given, in which God confronts man not through the medium of things, but in His own simplicity. The union of the simple light of God with the simple light of man's spirit, in love, is contemplation. The two simplicities are one. They form, as it were, an emptiness in which there is no addition but rather the taking away of names, of forms, of content, of subject matter, of identities. In this meeting there is not so much a fusion of identities as a disappearance of identities. The Bible speaks of this very simply: "In the breeze after noon God came to walk with Adam in paradise." It is after noon, in the declining light of created day. In the free emptiness of the breeze that blows from where it pleases and goes where no one can estimate, God and man are together, not speaking in words, or syllables or forms. And that was the meaning of creation and of Paradise. But there was more.
The Word of God Himself was the "firstborn of every creature." He "in Whom all things consist" was not only to walk with man in the breeze after noon, but would also become Man, and dwell with man as a brother.
The Lord would not only love His creation as a Father, but He would enter into His creation, emptying Himself, hiding Himself, as if He were not God but a creature. Why should He do this? Because He loved His creatures, and because He could not bear that His creatures should merely adore Him as distant, remote, transcendent and all powerful. This was not the glory that He sought, for if He were merely adored as great, His creatures would in their turn make themselves great and lord it over one another. For where there is a great God, then there are also god-like men, who make themselves kings and masters. And if God were merely a great artist who took pride in His creation, then men too would build cities and palaces and exploit other men for their own glory.
This is the meaning of the myth of Babel, and of the tower builders who would be "as Gods" with their hanging gardens, and with the heads of their enemies hanging in the gardens. For they would point to God and say: "He too is a great builder, and has destroyed all His enemies."
(God said: I do not laugh at my enemies, because I wish to make it impossible for anyone to be my enemy. Therefore I identify myself with my enemy's own secret self.)
So God became man. He took on the weakness and ordinariness of man, and He hid Himself, becoming an anonymous and unimportant man in a very unimportant place. And He refused at any time to Lord it over men, or to be a King, or to be a Leader, or to be a Reformer, or to be in any way Superior to His own creatures. He would be nothing else but their brother, and their counsellor, and their servant, and their friend. He was in no accepted human sense an important person, though since that time we have made Him The Most Important Person. That is another matter: for though it is quite true that He is the King and Lord of all, the conqueror of death, the judge of the living and of the dead, the Pantokrator, yet He is also still the Son of Man, the hidden one, unknown, unremarkable, vulnerable. He can be killed. And when the Son of Man was put to death, He rose again from the dead, and was again with us, for He said: "Kill me, it does not matter."
Having died, He dies no more in His own Person. But because He became man and united man's nature to Himself, and died for man, and rose as man from the dead, He brought it about that the sufferings of all men became His own sufferings; their weakness and defenselessness became His weakness and defenselessness; their insignificance became His. But at the same time His own power, immortality, glory and happiness were given to them and could become theirs. So if the God-Man is still great, it is rather for our sakes than for His own that He wishes to be great and strong. For to Him, strength and weakness, life and death are dualities with which He is not concerned, being above them in His transcendent unity. Yet He would raise us also above these dualities by making us one with Him. For though evil and death can touch the evanescent, outer self in which we dwell estranged from Him, in which we are alienated and exiled in unreality, it can never touch the real inner self in which we have been made one with Him. For in becoming man, God became not only Jesus Christ but also potentially every man and woman that ever existed. In Christ, God became not only "this" man, but also, in a broader and more mystical sense, yet no less truly, "every man."
The presence of God in His world as its Creator depends on no one but Him. His presence in the world as Man depends, in some measure, upon men. Not that we can do anything to change the mystery of the Incarnation in itself. but we are able to decide whether we ourselves, and that portion of the world which is ours, shall become aware of His presence, consecrated by it, and transfigured in its light.
We have the choice of two identities: the external mask which seems to be real and which lives by a shadowy autonomy for the brief moment of earthly existence, and the hidden, inner person who seems to us to be nothing, but who can give himself eternally to the truth in whom he subsists. It is this inner self that is taken up into the mystery of Christ, by His love, by the Holy Spirit, so that in secret we live "in Christ."
Yet we must not deal in too negative a fashion even with the "external self." This self is not by nature evil, and the fact that it is unsubstantial is not to be imputed to it as some kind of crime. It is afflicted with metaphysical poverty: but all that is poor deserves mercy. So too our outward self, as long as it does not isolate itself in a lie, it is blessed by the mercy and the love of Christ. Appearances are to be accepted for what they are. The accidents of a poor and transient existence have, nevertheless, an ineffable value. They can be transparent media in which we apprehend the presence of God in the world. It is possible to speak of the exterior self as a mask: to do so is not necessarily to reprove it. The mask that each man wears may well be a disguise not only for that man's inner self but for God, wandering as a pilgrim and exile in His own creation.
And indeed, if Christ became Man, it is because He wanted to be any man and every man. If we believe in the Incarnation of the Son of God, there should be no one on earth in whom we are not prepared to see, in mystery, the presence of Christ.
What is serious to men is often very trivial in the sight of God. What in God might appear to us as "play" is perhaps what He Himself takes most seriously. At any rate the Lord plays and diverts Himself in the garden of His creation, and if we could let go of our own obsession with what we think is the meaning of it all, we might be able to hear His call and follow Him in His mysterious, cosmic dance. We do not have to go very far to catch echoes of that game, and of that dancing. When we are alone on a starlit night; when by chance we see the migrating birds in autumn descending on a grove ofjunipers to rest and eat; when we see children in a moment when they are really children; when we know love in our own hearts; or when, like the Japanese poet Basho we hear an old frog land in a quiet pond with a solitary splash - at such times the awakening, the turning inside out of all values, the "newness," the emptiness and the purity of vision that make themselves evident, provide a glimpse of the cosmic dance.
For the world and time are the dance of the Lord in emptiness. The silence of the spheres is the music of a wedding feast. The more we persist in misunderstanding the phenomena of life, the more we analyze them out into strange finalities and complex purposes of our own, the more we involve ourselves in sadness, absurdity and despair. But it does not matter much, because no despair of ours can alter the reality of things, or stain the joy of the cosmic dance which is always there. Indeed, we are in the midst of it, and it is in the midst of us, for it beats in our very blood, whether we want it to or not.
Yet the fact remains that we are invited to forget ourselves on purpose, cast our awful solemnity to the winds and join in the general dance.
from Thomas Merton: Spiritual Master, The Essential Writings, edited by Lawrence S. Cunningham, Paulist Press, © 1992
Thomas Merton (31 January 1915 – 10 December 1968) was one of the most influential Catholic writers of the 20th century. A Trappist monk of the Abbey of Our Lady of Gethsemani, in the state of Kentucky, Merton was the author of numerous acclaimed works of spirituality, a prolific poet, social activist and student of comparative religion. He wrote more than 60 books, scores of essays and reviews, and is the subject of several biographies. Merton was a keen proponent of inter-religious understanding, engaging in spiritual dialogues with the Dalai Lama, Thich Nhat Hanh and D.T. Suzuki. His life and career were suddenly cut short at the age of 53, when he was electrocuted stepping out of his bath.
july 08
Delancey Place.com, 7.8.08
In today's excerpt - evolutionary biologist Robert Trivers (b. 1943) argues that, consciously or subconsciously, we keep our rationales for our actions and beliefs carefully arrayed near the surface-ready as necessary for our defense:
"The reason the generic human arguing style feels so effortless is that, by the time the arguing starts, the work has already been done. Robert Trivers has written about the periodic disputes ... that are often part of a close relationship, whether a friendship or a marriage. The argument, he notes, 'may appear to burst forth spontaneously, with little or no preview, yet as it rolls along, two whole landscapes of information appear to lie already organized, waiting only for the lightning of anger to show themselves.'
"The proposition here is that the human brain is, in large part, a machine for winning arguments, a machine for convincing others that its owner is in the right--and thus a machine for convincing its owner of the same thing. The brain is like a good lawyer: given any set of interests to defend, it sets about convincing the world of their moral and logical worth, regardless of whether they in fact have any of either. Like a lawyer, the human brain wants victory, not truth; and, like a lawyer, it is sometimes more admirable for skill than virtue.
"Long before Trivers wrote about the selfish uses of self-deception, social scientists had gathered supporting data. In one experiment, people with strongly held positions on a social issue were exposed to four arguments, two pro and two con. On each side of the issue, the arguments were of two sorts: (a) quite plausible, and (b) implausible to the point of absurdity. People tended to remember the plausible arguments that supported their views and the implausible arguments that didn't, the net effect being to drive home the correctness of their position and the silliness of the alternative.
"One might think that, being rational creatures, we would eventually grow suspicious of our uncannily long string of rectitude, our unerring knack for being on the right side of any dispute over credit, or money, or manners, or anything else. Nope. Time and again--whether arguing over a place in line, a promotion we never got, or which car hit which--we are shocked at the blindness of people who dare suggest that our outrage isn't warranted."
Robert Wright, The Moral Animal, Vintage, Copyright 1994 by Robert Wright, pp. 280- 281.
june 08
Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass (1855)
I have said that the soul is not more than the body,
And I have said that the body is not more than the soul
And nothing, not God is greater to one than one's self is,
And whoever walks a furlong without sympathy walks to his own funeral dressed in his shroud,
And I or you pocketless of a dime may purchase the pick of the earth,
And to glance with an eye or show a bean in its pod confounds the learning of all times,
And there is no trade or employment but the young man following it may become a hero,
And there is no object so soft but it makes a hub for the wheeled universe,
And any man or woman shall stand cool and supercilious before a million universes.And I call to mankind, Be not curious about God,
For I who am curious about each am not curious about God,
No array of terms can say how much I am at peace about God and about death.I hear and behold God in every object, yet I understand God not in the least,
Nor do I understand who there can be more wonderful than myself.Why should I wish to see God better than this day?
I see something of God each hour of the twenty-four, and each moment then,
In the faces of men and women I see God and in my own face in the glass;
I find letters from God dropped in the street, and every one is signed by God's name,
And I leave them where they are, for I know that others will punctually come, forever and ever.
april 08
authentic art
what makes a work of art authentic? enabling it to possess our deepest feelings - even though at first, and maybe for a long time, we were only curious about it and unable to make a true connection - perhaps caught up in our conditioned, busy thoughts about it and how it fit into the art scene and what it meant - but at some point we may have caught sight of it as a presence and our experience changed radically - from interest on a mental level to being gripped by its mysterious power - the power to connect us to the center of our being, our consciousness, to a universal communion with our fellow beings and the world -
it's impossible to translate the source of this presence into words - what components of the artwork combine to create it? does the artist have to be a genius, with a huge talent, intellect, schooling, a master of the medium? too often the artist may have all these qualities and be considered a genius by the public but is unable to produce works of presence - in fact if the artist becomes proud of being a genius the mysterious connection that allows presence to enter the art may be lost - it requires a grateful spirit of humility and a commitment to service to attain this connection - in these moments of enlightenment the artist is a channel for forces that create on a higher level than otherwise possible - and this enlightenment shines out of the work as presence or quality - producing in us a state of enlightenment, if only for a moment, and freeing our obsessive identification with the story in our heads we believe is reality - this is why authentic art is of such value to the world - not because of aesthetics or history or being radically different, but because of its power to transform us -
inauthentic art has the opposite effect - re-enforcing our identification with our false ideas of who we are - all the thoughts that our ego thrives on - that swell our self-importance and celebrate our specialness and separation from others - this pseudo-art prides itself on how clever it is - how 'cutting edge' -and on its 'brand name' that provides an identity-enhancer for those who buy it - to do this it must be expensive so others can't afford it, and therefore is 'exclusive' - a product of our materialistic age and our new academy of the shallow - that have dictated that presence and quality are now unacceptable words for contemporary art - this is because authentic art exposes pseudo-art as a pretentious sham - enlightenment dissolves the false self like water did the wicked witch -
to achieve authenticity the creative process must be conducted within the realm of spirit and without recourse to control - when 'in the zone' the artist (in any field, including sports, etc) must avoid distractions or attempts to force the result toward any desired result - the artist must avoid making judgments and accept unconditionally what is produced - even after the work is finished the artist must remain a humble 'bystander' seeking to understand what has been produced - this understanding may take a long time and requires continuance of humility until a breakthrough arrives - impatience results in the artist becoming judgmental, interfering with the creation and degrading it - authentic creations may be so 'far out', even to their creator, that patience is necessary - for the creator as well as the viewer - avoid consideration of how the work fits into one's previous output - authentic art has no marketing strategy involved in its creation -
ted knerr
april 2008
march
Courtesy
George Washington knew the importance of showing courtesy. This helped him unite and lead a raw country that had little in the way of good manners.
"A set of precepts that meant much to Washington and that has drawn the attention of historians, though perhaps not enough, was one that he had copied out by hand at sixteen, 'The Rules of Civility and Decent Behavior in Company and in Conversation' -- one hundred and ten in all -- which were based on a set composed by French Jesuits in 1595. ...
"The focus of the set was established in the very first rule. 'Every action done in company ought to be done with some sign of respect to those that are present.' The 'Rules of Civility' are 'virtues of humanity' -- guidelines for dealing with others, based on attending to their situations and sensibilities. ... 'When you see a crime punished, you may be inwardly pleased; but show pity to the offending sufferer' (rule #23). '... treat artificers and persons of low degree with affability and courtesy, without arrogance' (rule #36). 'When a man does all he can, though it succeed not well, blame not him that did it' (rule #44). ... Washington also bought books of politeness as an adult, and instances of his courtesy, or comments on it, are legion. ...
"[Today] we worry about our authenticity -- about whether our presentation reflects who we 'really' are. Eighteenth-century Americans attended more to the outside story and were less avid to drive putty knives between the outer and inner man. 'Character' ... was a role one played until one became it. ...
"Courtesy and reputation -- the medium and stimulus of Washington's morality -- operate on and through other people. Courtesy is how you treat them, reputation is what they think of you. ... Courtesy and reputation made it possible for Washington to say to his countrymen, we, and to command a response."
Richard Brookhiser, Founding Father, Free Press, Copyright 1996 by Richard Brookhiser, pp. 127-132, 136.
february
A spirited mind never stops within itself;
it is always aspiring and going beyond its strength;
it has impulses beyond its powers of achievement.
If it does not advance and press forward
and stand at bay and clash, it is only half alive.
Its pursuits are boundless and without form;
its food is wonder, the chase, ambiguity.
-- Montaigne
contributed by bill hollis - an old friend
visit his website
~~~
Don't aim at success - the more you aim at it and make it a target, the more you are going to miss it. For success, like happiness, cannot be pursued; it must ensue...as the unintended side-effect of one's personal dedication to a course greater than oneself.
-- Viktor Frankl
january 2008
Tao Te Ching - chapter thirty-eight
The highest kind of man or woman has innate goodness,
And that is what he or she rules with.
The lesser person brags about how good they are
And isn't much good, I can tell you.
A Man or Woman of Te rules by wu-wei
Doing nothing for themself or of themself.
The lesser person acts from their ego
And what they want is gratification.
A person who rules with compassion
Acts through it - and no one even realizes.
A legal person acts judiciously
But they are still serving their own ends.
And the rigid person uses laws
And if people don't like it, force.
If the true Tao is lost
then morality takes its place.
If that fails, we have 'conscience'.
When that fades, we get 'justice'.
When that disappears, we have the status quo.
Confusion reigns.
No one knows what's going on.
Forecasts and prophecies abound -
and they are merely a gloss on the Tao,
they are the root of all twisted guidance.
So the sage only looks at what is really real.
He or she doesn't just look at the surface -
But blows away the dust and drinks the water ...
They don't just go for the flower
But also for the roots and the fruit.
Blow away the dust, now:
Come to the living water.note: converted to gender-neutral words for yin/yang balance
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