We are all of us very arrogant and conceited about running down other people’s ghosts but just as ignorant and barbaric and superstitious about our own.
The branches and leaves move with each light breeze as if it were expected, were what had been waited for all this time.
Drifting is what one does.
The statement “To travel is better than to arrive” comes back to mind again and stays. We have been traveling and now we will arrive. For me a period of depression comes on when I reach a temporary goal like this and have to reorient myself toward another one.
We want to make good time, but for us now this is measured with emphasis on “good” rather than “time” and when you make that shift in emphasis the whole approach changes.
The mythos that says the forms of this world are real but the Quality of this world is unreal, that is insane!
For this you keep a lab notebook. Everything gets written down, formally, so that you know at all times where you are, where you’ve been, where you’re going and where you want to get.
You see things vacationing on a motorcycle in a way that is completely different from any other. In a car you’re always in a compartment, and because you’re used to it you don’t realize that through that car window everything you see is just more TV. You’re a passive observer and it is all moving by you boringly in a frame.
It is as though two old friends, a Catholic and Protestant, were sitting drinking beer, enjoying life, and the subject of birth control somehow came up. Big freeze-out.
From all this awareness we must select, and what we select and call consciousness is never the same as the awareness because the process of selection mutates it.
What you need is an hypothesis for how you’re going to get that slotless screw out of there and scientific method doesn’t provide any of these hypotheses. It operates only after they’re around. This is the zero moment of consciousness. Stuck. No answer. Honked. Kaput. It’s a miserable experience emotionally. You’re losing time. You’re incompetent. You don’t know what you’re doing. You should be ashamed of yourself.
Mu becomes appropriate when the context of the question becomes too small for the truth of the answer.
People entered the park and became polite and cozy and fakey to each other because the atmosphere of the park made them that way. In the entire time he had lived within a hundred miles of it he had visited it only once or twice.
The famous University of Chicago Great Books program and the reorganization of the University structure along Aristotelian lines and the establishment of the “College,” in which a reading of classics was initiated in fifteen-year-old students, were some of the results.
But apart from a personality what is there? Some bones and flesh. A collection of legal statistics, perhaps, but surely no person.
His work was just barely passing by academic standards at this time, but this wasn’t because he wasn’t working or thinking. He was thinking too hard, and the harder you think in this high country of the mind the slower you go. Phaedrus read in a scientific way rather than a literary way, testing each sentence as he went along, noting doubts and questions to be resolved later, and I’m fortunate in having a whole trunkful of volumes of these notations.
He is not stubborn, not narrow-minded, not lazy, not stupid. There was just no easy explanation. So it was left up in the air, a kind of mystery that one gives up on because there is no sense in just going round and round and round looking for an answer that’s not there.
Schools teach you to imitate. If you don’t imitate what the teacher wants you get a bad grade.
I started to roll over for more sleep but heard a rooster crowing and then became aware we are on vacation and there is no point in sleeping.
In all of the Oriental religions great value is placed on the Sanskrit doctrine of Tat tvam asi, “Thou art that,” which asserts that everything you think you are and everything you think you perceive are undivided. To realize fully this lack of division is to become enlightened.