Favorite Foolish Wisdom Sayings

"If you lose your sense of humor, it's just not funny" - Wavy Gravy, '60s activist, clown and recent Berkeley political candidate
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Douglas Adams' "The Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy": The Three Stages of Human Evolution: 1) "We Eat!" 2) "Why Do We Eat?" 3) "Where Do We Have Lunch?"
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My three stages of human evolution - 1) Discover fire 2) Invent the wheel 3) Move where it's warm!
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"It is questionable if all the mechanical inventions yet made have lightened the day's toil of any human being." - John Stuart Mill
(Technology is neither a necessary nor sufficient criteria for evolutionary advance - earth human technology is simply an incidental and unfortunately distracting autoerotic fascination on the part of a happenstance ape-form with opposable thumbs. Only 15% of life-forms in the universe are humanoid. Eventually, regardless of transitory physical form, all societies learn the yogic psycho-spiritual 'disciplines of the personality' that allow freedom of communication and movement throughout the cosmos without the need for recourse to temporary technological crutches - Jody)

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"All human evil comes from a single cause, man's inability to sit still in a room." - Blaise Pascal
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"The Truth Will Set You Free, but First It Will Piss You Off" - bumper sticker by Unity Rev. Chad O'Shea
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"If you tell the truth, make them laugh, or they'll kill you" - George Bernard Shaw
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"There are no jokes" - Freud
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"Astronomy is Looking Up" - anonymous bumper sticker
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Sign at the End of the Universe: "Staff Only Beyond This Point" - Duane Ackerson
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"No matter where you go, there you are" - Jackie Mason, comedian, ex-rabbi
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"I'm in! I'm out! I'm in! I'm out!" - comedian Jimmy Durante, jumping back and forth through a doorway
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"To do is to be" - Camus
"To be is to do" - Sartre
"Do be do be do" - Sinatra
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"If the result confirms the hypothesis, then you've made a measurement. If the result is contrary to the hypothesis, then you've made a discovery."
- (physicist, "father of the atom bomb") Enrico Fermi
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"It is not a sign of good health to be well adjusted to a sick society." - J. Krishnamurti
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"The plural of anecdote is data" - biologist Marc Bekoff
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"Most of what goes on in nature is invisible, yet we don't deny that it exists" - neuroscientist Jaak Panksepp
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"Imagination is more important than knowledge." - Albert Einstein
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"Few people are capable of expressing with equanimity opinions which differ from the prejudices of their social environment. Most people are even incapable of forming such opinions." - Albert Einstein
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"Probably all education is but two things: first, the parrying of the ignorant children's impetuous assault on the truth, and second, the gentle, imperceptible, step-by-step initiation of the humiliated children into the Lie." - Franz Kafka
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"Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it's time to pause and reflect." - Mark Twain
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"There is nothing more odious than the majority. It consists of a few powerful men who lead the way; of accommodating rascals and submissive weaklings and a mass of men who trot after them without in the least knowing their own minds." - Goethe
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"I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings"
- Maya Angelou
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"I Know Why the Caged Monkey Throws Shit" - Me... thrown probably at an early hour at the blasted singing bird
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"Shit Happens - bumper sticker
"Miracles Happen" - bumper sticker
"Shit's a Miracle" - Me - where would we be without it? life in the compost heap...
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"One morning, Mom, Dad, and little Thomas, aged two or three, are having breakfast in the kitchen. After awhile Mom gets up and goes over to the kitchen sink, and Dad - yes, Dad - flies up and floats around under the ceiling while Thomas sits watching. What do you think Thomas says? Perhaps he points up at his father and says, "Daddy's flying!" Thomas will certainly be astonished, but then he very often is. Dad does so many strange things that this business of a little flight over the breakfast table makes no difference to him. Every day Dad shaves with a funny machine, sometimes he climbs onto the roof and turns the TV aerial - or else he sticks his head under the hood of the car and comes up black in the face.

Now it's Mom's turn. She hears what Thomas says and turns around abruptly. How do you think she reacts to the sight of Dad floating nonchalantly over the kitchen table?

She drops the jam jar on the floor and screams with fright. She may even need medical attention once Dad has reluctantly returned respectably to his chair. (He should have learned better table manners by now!) Why do you think Thomas and his mother react so differently?

It all has to do with habit. (Note this!) Mom has learned that people cannot fly. Thomas has not. He still isn't certain what you can and cannot do in this world.

But what about the world itself, Sophie? Do you think it can do what it does? The world is also floating in space.

Sadly it is not only the force of gravity we get used to as we grow up. The world itself becomes a habit in no time at all. It seems as if in the process of growing up we lose the ability to wonder about the world. And in doing so, we lose something central - something philosophers try to restore. For somewhere inside ourselves, something tells us that life is a huge mystery. This is something we once experienced, long before we learned to think the thought." - Jostein Gaarder, Professor of Philosophy, Sophie's World
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"Was there life after death? This was another question the cat was blissfully unaware of.

It was not long since Sophie's grandmother had died. For more than six months Sophie had missed her every single day. How unfair that life had to end!

Sophie stood on the gravel path, thinking. She tried to think extra hard about being alive so as to forget that she would not be alive forever. But it was impossible. As soon as she concentrated on being alive now, the thought of dying also came into her mind. The same thing happened the other way around: only by conjuring up an intense feeling of one day being dead could she appreciate how terribly good it was to be alive. It was like two sides of the same coin that she kept turning over and over. And the bigger and clearer one side of the coin became, the bigger and clearer the other side became too.

You can't experience being alive without realizing that you have to die, she thought. But it's just as impossible to realize you have to die without thinking how incredibly amazing it is to be alive." - Jostein Gaarder, Sophie's World
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"...nothing worth proving can be proven,
Nor yet disproven." - Tennyson, "The Ancient Sage"
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"Skeptics are like the dog who chased a car and caught it" - Me
In Greek philosophy, the skeptics held the stance that the truth about the nature of the universe cannot be known - cowards! - but of course it can. Check out Heraclitus!
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[The closed minded] "...have their head up their past." - Robert J. Reseter
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"A thousand years ago everybody knew as a fact that the Earth was the center of the universe. Five hundred years ago they knew it was flat. Fifteen minutes ago you knew we humans were alone on it. Imagine what you'll know tomorrow." - Tommy Lee Jones as secret agent K in the movie MIB
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"Live through this!" - Courtney Love
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"I'm impatient with stupidity. My people have learned to live without it." - klaatu, The Day the Earth Stood Still
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"The significant problems we face today cannot be solved by the same level of thinking that created them." - Albert Einstein
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Or as this is often paraphrased, "You can't solve a problem at the level of the problem". See logical mathematician Kurt Godel's Incompleteness Theorem, basically proving that within any given level of system, there will be true statements that cannot be proven within the logic of that system, but that imply larger or higher levels of systems in which these statements will be provable, yet these levels will also contain further statements that, while true, will be unprovable within the higher level of system though, in turn, will be provable in the next larger or higher system, and so on... this is the nature of true science, yet is also 3D earth's difficulty understanding "paranormal" phenomena such as Ufos, anomalies, missing links, etc, ie the Flatland problem, of a being at one level perceiving phenomena from a higher level...
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"A leveling, rancorous, rational sort of mind
That never looked out of the eye of a saint
Or out of a drunkard's eye" - W.B. Yeats
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"Everybody's looking for strange" - Richard Gere, in American Gigolo
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"If I were you, who'd be me?" - Jackie Mason
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"How very like himself he was" - Kurt Vonnegut, "Welcome to the Monkey House"
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"Unless we change direction, we are likely to end up where we are headed" - Old Chinese Proverb
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"If you don't know where you're going, any way will take you there" - paraphrased by the Mad Hatter, Alice in Wonderland, from the Talmud
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"By indirection, find direction out" - Hamlet
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"Until the tide goes out you don't know who's swimming naked" - Warren Buffett
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"Do not fear the enemy that attacks you with the roar of many horses and their flags waved openly in the wind for all to see. But fear the enemy that hides in the shadows behind the pillars of government." - Cicero
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"Why of course the people don't want war. Why should some poor slob on a farm want to risk his life in a war when the best he can get out of it is to come back to his farm in one piece? Naturally the common people don't want war: neither in Russia, nor in England, nor for that matter in Germany. That is understood. But, after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the peacemakers for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country." - Hermann Goering, Nazi Reichsmarschall
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"Our rulers will become corrupt, our people careless... the time for fixing every essential right on a legal basis is [now] while our rulers are honest, and ourselves united. From the conclusion of this war we shall be going downhill. It will not then be necessary to resort every moment to the people for support. They will be forgotten, therefore, and their rights disregarded. They will forget themselves, but in the sole faculty of making money, and will never think of uniting to effect a due respect for their rights. The shackles, therefore, which shall not be knocked off at the conclusion of this war, will remain on us long, will be made heavier and heavier, till our rights shall revive or expire in a convulsion." - Thomas Jefferson in "Notes on the State of Virginia", Query 17, p. 161, 1784
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First they came for the Jews
and I did not speak out
because I was not a Jew.

Then they came for the Communists
and I did not speak out
because I was not a Communist.

Then they came for the trade unionists
and I did not speak out
because I was not a trade unionist.

Then they came for me
and there was no one left
to speak out for me.

- Pastor Martin Niemller
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"Your Flag Decal Won't Get You Into Heaven Anymore"

While digesting Reader's Digest
In the back of a dirty book store
A plastic flag with gum on the back
Fell out on the floor
I picked it up and I ran outside
Slapped it on my window shield
And if I could see old Betsy Ross
I'd tell her how good I feel.

Chorus:
But your flag decal won't get you
Into Heaven any more
They're already overcrowded
From your dirty little war
Now Jesus don't like killin'
No matter what the reason's for
And your flag decal won't get you
Into Heaven any more.

Well, I went to the bank this morning
And the cashier she said to me,
"If you join the Christmas club
We'll give you ten of them flags for free."
Well, I didn't mess around a bit
I took her up on what she said
And I stuck them stickers all over my car
And one on my wife's forehead.

Well, I got my window shield so filled
With flags I couldn't see
So I ran the car upside a curb
And right into a tree
By the time they got a doctor down
I was already dead
And I'll never understand why the man
Standing at the Pearly Gates said...

Your flag decal won't get you
Into Heaven any more
We're already overcrowded
From your dirty little war
Now Jesus don't like killin'
No matter what the reason's for
And your flag decal won't get you
Into Heaven any more.

- John Prine - Atlantic Records - 1971
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"This book is dedicated to all those whom it does not mention: to the few men who refuse to be manipulated, to the few women who are not venal, and to all those fortunate enough to have lost their market value because they are either too old, too ugly, or too ill." - Esther Vilar, The Manipulated Man
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"The Universe is full of magical things, patiently waiting for our wits to grow sharper" - Eden Philpotts
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As The Chief said to the Itinerant Whiteman, as he dug fast into the unknown-meat stew after a hard day's work, "Dig deep, find puppy" - Kiowa elder, quoted in "Tales of an Itinerant Whiteman" by David French
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"To the blind, everything is sudden" - ?
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"Benjamin Franklin said, 'Better one good schoolmaster than twenty poets.' That's why when we have most need of the imagination we have only 'special effects' and histrionics. But for a fellow like me, the real temptation of abyssifiying is to hope that the approach of the 'last days' might compel us to reconsider deeply, earnestly. In these last days we have a right and even a duty to purge our understanding. In the general weakening of authority, the authority of the ruling forms of thought also is reduced, those forms which have done much to bring us into despair and into the abyss. I don't need to mind them anymore. For science there can be no good or evil. But personally I think about virtue, about vice. I feel free to. Released, perhaps, by all the crashing. And in fact everybody has come under the spell of 'last days.'" - Saul Bellow, The Dean's December
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"Black Elk on seeing his people on the blue road: 'I did not know then how much was ended.'" - Blue Highways, by William Least Heat-Moon
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"Looking at the stars always makes me dream... Why, I ask myself, shouldn't the shining dots of the sky be as accessible as the black dots on the map of France? Just as we take the train to get to Tarascon or Roven, we take death to reach a star." - Saul Bellow, The Dean's December
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"I asked them to look into the Abyss, and, both dutifully and gladly, they have looked into the Abyss, and the Abyss has greeted them with the grave courtesy of all objects of serious study, saying: 'Interesting, am I not? And exciting, if you consider how deep I am and what dread beasts lie at my bottom. Have it well in mind that a knowledge of me contributes materially to your being whole, or well-rounded, men.'" - Lionel Trilling, "On the Teaching of Modern Literature"
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"Have you heard it's in the stars? Next July we collide with Mars? Well, did you evah? What a swell party this is." - Cole Porter, 'What A Swell Party This Is'
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"Let Earth unbalanc'd from her orbit fly,
Planets and Suns run lawless thro' the sky,
Let ruling Angels from their spheres be hurl'd,
Being on being wreck'd, and world on world" - Alexander Pope, An Essay on Man
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"Sometimes in life all we need is a change of weather" - Marcel Proust
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"Baba loved scoundrels. Of course, Baba loved everyone, all the 'broken furniture,' as he called human beings. But scoundrels were his special children. Remember that God does not need your virtue. God will take the worst of you. Never try to be too good." - 80-year-old devotee of Meher Baba
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"Praise not the day until evening has come;
a woman until she is burnt;
a sword until it is tried;
a maiden until she is married;
ice until it has been crossed;
beer until it has been drunk."
- Viking Proverb
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"He who has not the spirit to be bad, has not the spirit to be good." - French saying
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"Our 'fatal flaws' are our 'saving graces.'" - Me (and in fact, are our path: you can "get 'there' from 'here'")
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Ram Dass, when asked if he was any less neurotic after years of meditation - "No, but I'm more comfortable with it."
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"Art is a lie which makes us realize the truth." - Picasso
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"The future is not envisioned by think tanks like The Stanford Research Institute, but through artists, visionaries, mystics and crazies" - M.I.T. Cultural and Futures Historian and Lindisfarne Founder William Irwin Thompson
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"Our practice is not to clear up the mystery, but to make the mystery clear" - Robert Aitken Roshi
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"A man who does not desire to link himself to the latest of the saints (in time), in all love and humility, owing to a certain distrust, will never be linked with the preceding saints, and will not be admitted to their succession even though he thinks he possesses all possible faith and love for God and for all His saints" - St. Simeon the New Theologian
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"The next earthquake comes when the last one is forgotten" - Peruvian saying
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"Only after the last tree has been cut down;
Only after the last fish has been caught;
Only after the last river has been poisoned;
Only then will you realize that money cannot be eaten." - Cree Indian Prophecy
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"Money does not exist in the 24th century. The acquisition of wealth is no longer the driving force. We work to better ourselves and the rest of humanity." - Cpt. Picard, Star Trek - First Contact
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"In India we feel that the only way through suffering is to suffer it" - Hindu student, impatient with lippy middle-class Western psychotherapeutic rationalizations in the Counseling Psychology program I "suffered" through
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"I have a right not to know" and "Actions speak louder than words" - My father's antidote for pop-psych self-indulgence (as in my Psych Counseling Program) and meaningless info-overload (as in the media and web)
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"Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?" - T.S. Eliot, Choruses from "The Rock"
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"Never let the facts get in the way of a good story" - My (Irish) father
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"It's all fiction" - Me
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Guru on mountaintop to seeker asking the mystery of life - "There are no grownups"
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"I still feel the same inside..." - My mother, in the wise perplexity of holy innocence, on aging
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"Enlightenment is a 'senior moment'" - Me
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"I thought I was a puffin" - One of the Queen of England's Royal Guards, describing an LSD experience while on duty
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"If God dropped acid, would he see people?" - Steven Wright
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"People are donuts!" - Me, after experiencing the central no-self, beyond and within the toroid-shaped (donut-shaped) time/space/electromagnetic field/self (this shape is archetypal, as in the shape of the universe, star formation, planetary magnetic fields, atmospheric flow patterns, auras, red blood cells, atoms and atomic particles, etc)
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"Give me a glazed!" - Kenneth Paolini, fellow consciousness researcher
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"Are we serving donuts in another solar system?" - Zippy the Pinhead cartoon, tapping a "man-on-the-street" earthling on the shoulder (on the wall of the pantry at Napa State Psychiatric Hospital, where we served donuts and eggnog nightly)
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"Out on the edge where it's flat" - Firesign Theatre
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Gate
Gate
Paragate
Parasamgate
Bodhi Svaha!

Gone
Gone
Gone Beyond
Gone Beyond Beyond
Hail the Goer!
- Buddhist Mantra from the Heart Sutra
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Come to me, my kinsman, my Light, my Guide.
Since I went forth into the darkness I was given water to drink.
I bear up beneath a burden which is not mine own.
I am in the midst of my enemies, the beasts surrounding me;
The burden which I bear is of the powers and principalities.
They burned in their wrath, they rose up against me.
Matter and her sons divided me up amongst them,
They burnt me in their fire, they gave me a bitter likeness.
The strangers with whom I mixed, me they know not;
They tasted my sweetness, they desired to keep me with them.
I was life to them, but they were death to me;
I bore up beneath them, they wore me as a garment upon them.
I am in everything, I bear the skies, I am the foundation,
I support the Earths;
I am the Light that shines forth, that gives joy to the souls.
I am the life of the world;
I am the milk that is in all trees;
I am the sweet water flowing beneath the sons of matter.
I bore these things until I had fulfilled the will of my Father;
The First Man is my Father Whose Will I have carried out.
Lo, the darkness I have subdued;
Lo, the fire of the fountains I Have extinguished,
As the sphere turns hurrying round,
As the sun receives the refined part of life.
O soul, raise your eyes to the height and contemplate your bond, Lo, your Fathers are calling you.
Now go aboard the Ship of Light and receive your garland of glory And return to your kingdom and rejoice with all the Aeons.
- Manichean Prayer
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"The really efficient laborer will be found not to crowd his day with work, but will saunter to his task surrounded by a wide halo of ease and leisure." - Henry David Thoreau
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"Work smarter, not harder." - my father
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"As long as you are afraid of living 'on the street', the universe will put you there. When you are no longer afraid, the universe will also put you there - to be of service to those who are afraid." - Me
"It's their street" - a fellow counselor on a psychiatric unit
"Everywhere is 'the street'" - Me
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"I cannot afford to waste my time making money." - Jean Louis Agassiz
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"I never worried about making a living," he said, "but I've done thinking about making a life. It's hard to know the difference sometimes, and it must be getting harder, judging by all them that don't know the difference now."
"And what is the difference?"
"Best way to tell it is that if you're trying to make a killing, what's going to get killed is your life." - John Day, quoted in Blue Highways, by William Least Heat-Moon
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"In proportion that we simplify our life, the laws of the universe will appear less complex, and solitude will not be solitude, nor poverty poverty, nor weakness weakness. - Henry David Thoreau
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"While reading 'A Wanderer in the Perfect City,' I found myself thinking of the Bhagavad Gita - not that strange an association, since Ramachander often paraphrased its tenets. What struck me was the idea of nonattachment: when it comes to work, the joy should be in the doing, not in the gathering of rewards. One cannot force one's work to be successful. Fruition requires an element of 'grace,' in its original sense of 'gratis, for free,' Weschler writes. 'One works and works and works at something, which then happens of its own accord: it would not have happened without all the prior work, true, but its happening cannot be said to have resulted from all that work, the way effects are said to result from a series of causes.' Rather, grace descends and, in ways that can be as funny as they are extraordinary, what Weschler terms 'the humdrum' takes flight." - M.G. Lord, reviewing "A Wanderer in the Perfect City" by Lawrence Weschler, in The New York Times Book Review, April 25, 1999
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"Think about leaving. Just like that.
The Wanderers. They were always thinking about leaving. Moving like the moons against the fixed and gleaming stars. But brighter, Ishak had liked to say. Brighter than the stars and gentler than the sun. And he and she had had their home here... for so long now.
The Lions of Al-Rassan, Guy Gavriel Kay
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"Before I left home, I had told someone that part of my purpose for the trip was to be inconvenienced so I might see what would come from dislocation and disrupted custom. Answer: severe irritability." - William Least Heat-Moon, in Blue Highways; A Journey into America
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"Closing time
You don't have to go home but you can't stay here
I know who I want to take me home
Take me home
Closing time
Time for you to go out to the places you will be from
Closing time
This room won't be open till your brothers or your sisters come
So gather up your jackets, move it to the exits
I hope you have found a friend
Closing time
Every new beginning comes from some other beginning's end"
"Closing Time", from "Feeling Strangely Fine", by Semisonic
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"I don't like coming home. It keeps me from being nostalgic." - Stewart O'Nan
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"So long and thanks for all the fish" - Dolphin ETs departing Earth in Douglas Adams' "Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy"
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"Tis the Wind of night; A lonely wanderer between earth and cloud" - Rain Dream, William Cullens
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"From the faraway nearby" - Georgia O'Keefe
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"The Lost Tribe"

How long, how long must I regret?
I never found my people yet;
I go about, but cannot find
The blood-relations of the mind

Through my little sphere I range,
And though I wither do not change;
Must not change a jot, lest they
Should not know me on my way.

Sometimes I think when I am dead
They will come about my bed,
For my people well do know
When to come and when to go.

I know not why I am alone,
Nor where my wandering tribe is gone,
But be they few, or be they far,
Would I were where my people are!

- Ruth Pitter
In: Pitter, Ruth. Collected Poems. London, Macmillan, 1968. (cl969) 280 p.

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Come my friends,
'Tis not too late to seek a newer world.
Push off, and sitting well in order smite
The sounding furrows; for my purpose holds
To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths
Of all the Western stars, until I die
- Tennyson, "Ulysses"
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The Road goes ever on and on
Down from the door where it began.
Now far ahead the Road has gone,
And I must follow, if I can,
Pursuing it with eager feet,
Until it joins some larger way
Where many paths and errands meet.
And whither then? I cannot say.

The Road goes ever on and on
Out from the door where it began.
Now far ahead the Road has gone,
Let others follow it who can.
Let them a journey new begin,
But I at last with weary feet
Will turn towards the lighted inn,
My evening-rest and sleep to meet.
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In western lands beneath the Sun
the flowers may rise in Spring
the trees may bud, the waters run,
the merry finches sing.
Or there maybe 'tis cloudless night
and swaying beeches bear
the Elven-stars as jewels white
amid their branching hair.
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Though here at journey's end I lie
in darkness buried deep,
beyond all towers strong and high,
beyond all mountains steep,
above all shadows rides the Sun
and Stars for ever dwell:
I will not say the day is done,
nor bid the stars farewell.
- The Lord of the Rings, J.R.R. Tolkien
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"Do not be an embodier of fame; do not be a storehouse of schemes; do not be an undertaker of projects; do not be a proprietor of wisdom. Embody to the fullest what has no end and wander where there is no trail. Hold on to all that you have received from Heaven but do not think you have gotten anything. Be empty, that is all. The Perfect Man uses his mind like a mirror---going after nothing, welcoming nothing, responding but not storing. Therefore he can win out over things and not hurt himself." -- Chuang Tzu
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"The perfect man has no self, the spirit-endowed man no achievements, the sage no reputation." - Lao Tzu, Taoist Sage
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"Consider the postage stamp: its usefulness consists in the ability to stick to one thing till it gets there." - Josh Billings
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"The keynote of a cat's character is independence: it dwells under our roof, sleeps by our fire, endures our blandishments and apparently enjoys our society, without for one moment forfeiting its sense of absolute freedom, without acknowledging any servile relation to the human creature who shelters it." - ?
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"The Cat Who Walked By Himself" by Rudyard Kipling
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My Cheshire Cat/Wanderer's Poem

or, the dilemma of (physicist) Schroedinger's Cat

"It's Like This Cat..."
"It's Like This, Cat..."
"It's Like, This Cat..."
"It's, Like, This, Cat..."
"It's, Like, This Cat..."
"It's, Like This Cat..."
"It's Like This..."
"It's Like..."
"It's..."
"..."
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Om Sai Ram

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