Quotes

Take a walk through Boston or any other city and see if you don’t see things around where there’s work to be done. Then take a look at those people over there who are idle and say, Wouldn’t they like to do the work? The answer is yes to both. There is tons of work to be done, and lots of people who would like to do the work. It’s just that the economic system is such a grotesque catastrophe that it can’t even put together idle hands and needed work, which would be satisfying to the people and which would be beneficial to all of us. That’s just the mark of a failed system. The most dramatic mark of it. Work is not something that you should try to escape from, or that ordinary human beings would want to escape from. It’s something you want to do because it’s fulfilling, it’s creative. There’s plenty of it around. It’s not being done because of the extreme inadequacies of the socioeconomic system.

In the realisation of Unity is the Hieros Gamos of the Divine Artist and the Muse, yet there is neither Lover nor Beloved – there is naught but the Mystery of the Agapae. In assuming the double form of the Opposer, the Adept achieves the Sacred Marriage of Life and Death within the Temple of Flesh, and thus begets the Child. The Adept, the Perfected One, is each moment born anew, like the Phoenix rising within the Flame of Transmutation. He goes forth robed in the verdant hues of ever-new life, the Holy Fool dancing upon the Dragon’s spine…

The Bible tells us to be like God, and then on page after page it describes God as a mass murderer. This may be the single most important key to the political behavior of Western Civilization

I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.

Because today we live in a society in which spurious realities are manufactured by the media, by governments, by big corporations, by religious groups, political groups… So I ask, in my writing, What is real? Because unceasingly we are bombarded with pseudo-realities manufactured by very sophisticated people using very sophisticated electronic mechanisms. I do not distrust their motives; I distrust their power. They have a lot of it. And it is an astonishing power: that of creating whole universes, universes of the mind. I ought to know. I do the same thing.

The nationalist not only does not disapprove of atrocities committed by his own side, but he has a remarkable capacity for not even hearing about them.

[Tumblr] rocks! Why? Because unlike Facebook, I have a clean slate. Instead of being associated with my name and my real life being, I am a newly founded pseudonym if I so choose. No one knows that page is mine except for the selective friends I may choose or ask to follow me. But Tumblr isn’t about seeing what my friends are up to. In fact, I know the creators of less than a handful of the dozens of blogs I follow. Because of this, it turns into a tool for discovery, following members of the community who share my interests versus my friends who can get boring seeing as, at least during the school year, I know what’s going on in their lives every day. But these bloggers, who live lives I don’t see first hand, are neat to read about; they voice opinions that I care about and are hard to find organized anywhere else in such a way, and they share new things that few of my friends know about (which is why I mostly reblog: passing along the things that I love).

Three hundred years ago, the Irish empiricist George Berkeley contributed a particularly prescient observation: The only thing we can perceive are our perceptions. In other words, consciousness is the matrix upon which the cosmos is apprehended. Color, sound, temperature, and the like exist only as perceptions in our head, not as absolute essences. In the broadest sense, we cannot be sure of an outside universe at all.

We humans, through old habits, and because of the inherent structure of human knowledge, have a tendency to make static, definite, and, in a way, absolutistic one-valued statements. But when we fight absolutism, we quite often establish, instead, some other dogma equally silly and harmful. For instance, an active atheist is psycho-logically as unsound as a rabid theist.

Yes, I am the beginning of something new, but not the beginning of a new religion. I am the beginning of a new kind of religiousness which knows no adjectives, no boundaries; which knows only freedom of the spirit, silence of your being, growth of your potential; and finally the experience of godliness within yourself – not of a God outside you, but a godliness overflowing from you.”

—Osho (via nirvikalpa)