Seven days later, I’m struck by the whole concept that if one suffers enough, he (or she) will pile up great spiritual beauty and become a martyr. This approach seems to mark the principal thrust of Christianity; reflects a hatred of life, and breeds gloom. (So I observed at the time.)
Meditative action spiritual practice, in contrast, has God found within rather than above; life can be light and compassion.
“Have you been saved?”
“Yes. Have you been liberated?”
How to befuddle a Jesus freak.
The experimental aspect of yoga/Zen excites me: the practitioner is not ordered to embrace any dogmatic dictates but rather told to observe how he reacts: what he (or she) feels, tastes, hears, and intuits in a set of carefully ordered settings. The adept suspends judgment long enough to experience first-hand.
Tonight in hatha class Bev was bewildered by the possibility of her own divinity, as introduced through Sivananda’s Practical Lessons.
Knocking down walls? “What do you have left? It seems like you are denying life.”
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Thanksgiving Day: I used to think there was a glory, a kind of permanence to newspaper work: I valued craftsmanship and perfection. Now, regarding a faded, brittle 1952 clipping sent to the office last week, my feelings of temporality are reenforced. It is as permanent as an ocean wave on the shore.
Are modern civilizations, as the Club of Rome suggests, headed for THE GREAT DARK AGES within a century?
Joe Dell: “There’s no excuse for making a bad cup of coffee. Keep your equipment clean, buy a good quality coffee. Now you take these chain restaurants, they have these modern management techniques. If you’re gonna eat a chain restaurant, do it at the beginning of the month. About the middle of the month, they have to start cutting back to meet their quotas. They even buy a cheaper brand of coffee. That’s what the salesman said.”
Capitalism, not labor unions, is the ruin of the country.
Sometimes American society seems to break down into crooks and Quakers. [Now I just hope they never overlap.]
I am not at home here. I will never be.
Always the missionary.
I am my best, moving with the bright lightning bolt from deep within.
I must publish [in literary journals] within the next year.
The first American to perform magic in Europe called himself Philadelphia.
American Indians kept their magic private: make snakes appear and acorn and beanstalks grow.
The catching the bullet-in-the-teeth trick finally proved fatal to Chung Ling Soo.
Typhoid suicide.
Madness “made idiotic by the use of tobacco” with a frog in the stomach the real cause.
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From Spiralbound Flatland, with commentary from now.
Jnana's Red Barn 