This was another quote Chris Hedges used in I Don’t Believe in Atheists that I found interesting because both Neil Postman (End of Education) and Huxley’s Brave New World heavily influenced my decision to homeschool.

A poll taken last year showed that in the U.S., only 1 person out of every 4 had read a book that year!  And it is mostly older people who read!  To go an entire year without reading a book is completely unfathomable to me!

This quote is from Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death:

What Orwell feared were those who would ban books.  What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one.  Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information.  Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism.  Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us.  Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance.  Orwell feared we would become a captive culture.  Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with some equivalent of the feelies, the orgy porgy, and the centrifugal bumblepuppy.  As Huxley remarked in Brave New World Revisisted, the civil libertarians and rationalists who are ever alert to oppose tyranny ‘failed to take into account man’s almost infinite appetite for distraction’.  In 1984, Huxley added, people are controlled by inflicting pain.  In Brave New World, they are controlled by inflicting pleasure.  In short, Orwell feared that what we hate will ruin us.  Huxley feared that what we love will ruin us.

Reinhold Niebuhr quote used by Chris Hedges in I Don’t Believe in Atheists:

The idea of progress is compounded of many elements.  It is particularly important to consider one element of which modern culture is itself completely oblivious.  The idea of progress is possible only upon the ground of a Christian culture.  It is a secularized version of Biblical apocalypse and of the Hebraic sense of a meaningful history, in contrast to the meaninglessness history of the Greeks.  But since the Christian doctrine of the sinfulness of man is eliminated, a complicating factor in the Christian philosophy is removed and the way is open for simple interpretations of history, which relate historical process as closely as possible to biological process and which fail to do justice either to the unique freedom of man or the daemonic misuse which he may make of that freedom.

From the Nature and Destiny of Man

From The Culture of Counter-Culture:

One ordinarily feels that one is a separate individual in confrontation with a world that is foreign to one’s self that is “not me”. In the mystical kind of experience, though, that separate individual finds itself to be of one and the same nature or identity as the outside world. In other words, the individual suddenly no longer feels like a stranger in the world; rather, the external world feels as if it were his or her own body.

The next aspect of the mystical feeling is even more difficult to assimilate into our ordinary practical intelligence. It is the overwhelming sense that everything that happens - everything that I or anybody else has ever done - is part of a harmonious design and that there is no error at all.

Now, I am not talking about philosophy; I am not talking about a rationalization or some sort of theory that somebody cooked up in order to explain the world and make it seem a tolerable place in which to live. I am talking about a rather whimsical, unpredictable experience that suddenly hits people - an experience that includes this feeling of the total harmoniousness of everything.

I realize that those words - the total harmoniousness of everything - can carry with them a sort of sentimental or pollyanna feeling. There are various religions in our society today that try to inculcate the belief that everything is harmonious unity. They want, in a sense, to propogandize the belief that everything is harmonious.

To my mind, that is a kind of pseudomysticism. It is an attempt to make the tail wag the dog or to make the effect produce the cause - because the authentic sensation of the true harmony of things is never brought about by insisting that everything is harmonious. When you do that - when you say to yourself, “All things are light, all things are God, all things are beautiful” - you are actually implying that they are not, because you wouldn’t be saying it if you really knew it to be true.

So the sensation of universal harmony cannot come to us when it is sought or when we look for it as an escape from the way we actually feel or as compensation for the way we actually feel. It comes out of the blue. And when it does, it is overwhelmingly, convincing. It is the foundation for most of mankind’s profound philosophical, mystical, metaphysical, and religious ideas. Someone who has experienced this sort of thing cannot restrain himself. He has to get up and tell everybody about it. And, alas, he becomes the founder of religion, because people say, “Look at that man, how happy he is, what conviction he has. He has no doubts. He seems so sure in everything he does.”

…..

And so, in the same way when somebody has an authentic mystical experience, it just comes forth. He just has to tell everybody about it, because he notices everybody around him looking dreadfully serious. Looking as if they had a problem. Looking as if the act of living were extremely difficult. But from the standpoint of the person who has had this experience, they look funny. They don’t understand that there isn’t any problem at all.

The mystic has seen that the meaning of being alive is just to be alive… It is so plain and so obvious and so simple. And yet, everybody rushes around in a great panic as if it were necessary to achieve something beyond themselves. The funny thing is, they are not even quite sure what they need to achieve, but they are devilishly intent on achieving it.

This is a little late since Easter was last weekend. But I think it’s still right on time.
Originally posted by Blog of the Grateful Bear…

The Sufis are fond of saying, “Die before death and resurrect now.” We are all dying every moment, dying to our own fears, our own false concepts of ourselves, our own limitations. But we know this already, haven’t we been told? Let us die willingly and resurrect gloriously, spiraling into the future, consciously joining all those who believe and trust in the ultimate goodness of humanity, and serving with love and patience those who do not.~ Theresa King

That which is not seen by the eye, but by which the eye is able to see: know that alone to be the Brahman, not this which people worship here.

That which cannot be heard by the ear, but by which the ear is able to hear: know that alone to be Brahman, not this which people worship here.

That which none breathes with the breath, but by which breath is in–breathed: know that alone to be the Brahman, not this which people worship here.

Kena Upanishad

“Your Holiness,” someone asked, “your Buddhist tradition has so wonderful a way of overcoming suffering.  What do you have to say to the Christian tradition that seems to be preoccupied with pain?”   With his compassionate smile the Dalai Lama gave an answer that went straight to the common ground of the two traditions:  “Suffering,” he said, “is not overcome by leaving pain behind.  Suffering is overcome by bearing pain for the sake of others.”  (Christ and Bodhisattva embraced at that moment.  Across seven hundred years of history I could hear Meister Eckhart laughing with joy.  Or was it God’s eternal laughter?)

Brother David Steindl-Rast, 1995, in the Forward to Meister Eckhart, from Whom God Hid Nothing

A friend of mine brought up Thomas Merton a few days ago which I just noticed on her blog today. It inspired me to pull out a book I had read by Merton some time ago - Zen and the Birds of Appetite. I know I’ve read the Authors Note to the book several times before, but for some reason it struck me much more deeply tonight. It’s beautiful…

When there is carrion lying, meat-eating birds circle and descend. Life and death are two. The living attack the dead, to their own profit. The dead lose nothing by it. They gain too, by being disposed of. Or they seem to, if you must think in terms of gain and loss. Do you then approach the study of Zen with the idea that there is something gained by it? This question is not intended as an implicit accusation. But it is, nevertheless, a serious question. Where there is a lot of fuss about “spirituality,” “enlightenment” or just “turning on,” it is often because there are buzzards hovering around a corpse. This hovering, this circling, this descending, this celebration of victory, are not what is meant by the Study of Zen - even though they may be a highly useful exercise in other contexts. And they enrich the birds of appetite.

Zen enriches no one. There is no body to be found. The birds may come and circle for a while in the place where it is thought to be. But they soon go elsewhere. When they are gone, the “nothing,” the “no-body” that was there, suddenly appears. That is Zen. It was there all the time but the scavengers missed it, because it was not their kind of prey.

There are many things to be grateful “for” but, as I ripen with the seasons of life, the many reasons blend into a sacred mystery. And, most deeply, I realize that living gratefully is its own blessing.    Michael Mahoney

Violence exists in our world and you can’t simply ignore it. You
have to show it, especially if you want to tell powerful stories as I
want to. Those who only want to tell about the joys of being and the
art of picking cherries shouldn’t start making films at all. Because
good people are boring. Only the bad guys have style.  David Lynch

Nice people with common sense do not make good characters.  They only make good ex-spouses.  Isabelle Allende

I like this quote by French Catholic mystic Francois Fenelon..

Slowly you will learn that all the troubles in your life - your job, your health, your inward failings - are really cures to the poison of your old nature.”

Wish I could learn it quickly.