Category Archives: Statements

Quotations, seed thoughts, and individual components of the bigger picture.

Change and transformation

“We’re mistaken to think there are things that exist solidly within the flow of experience that is our life. We think of who we are as something that’s permanent, that continues over time in the same unchanging form, independent of external conditions. We also think that the world around us exists in the same solid way. Yet whether we look at ourselves, at objects large or small, or at the conditions of life, we don’t find anything that meets those criteria. We see only change and transformation.” – #DzogchenPonlop #rebelbuddha

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Put Away Those Foolish Thoughts

Put away those foolish thoughts, and
hide from sight your vain ideals!
Instead, seek what the world enjoys:
love what beseems a proper role,
or find yourself a friendless fool.
Survive! Just learn to subliminate;
one must pretend, or play-act, at least,
defining both pursuit and its happy goal
using someone else’s dictionary.

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The Book of Forms (revisited, Round 3)

If wondering I’m again creating daily poems using each poetry forms from #LewisTurco’s #BookofForms, 3rd Edition. Currently in the C’s.

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On Destinations

One’s destination is never a place but rather a new way of looking at things. – Henry Miller, US author (1891-1980)

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New Insights into Genius?

I am currently reading a fascinating biography of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart: Mozart: A Life, by Maynard Solomon. Of particular interest to me is its focus on the relationship between father and son as one of the defining aspects of Mozart’s personality and life pursuit. Another interesting aspect of the biography is reference to passages like this:

What is a poet? A poet is an unhappy being whose heart is torn by secret sufferings, but whose lips are so strangely formed that when the sighs and the cries escape them, they sound like beautiful music … And men crowd about the poet and say to him: ‘Sing for us soon again’; that is as much as to say: ‘May new sufferings torment your soul.’ — from Either/Or by Soren Kierkegaard

It is a literate biography and definitely worth reading.

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Treating the Symptoms, Not the Cause

Something to think about in the context of today’s America and unrest around the world (emphases mine):

Hitler was able to enslave his own people because he seemed to give them something that even the traditional religions could no longer provide; the belief in a meaning to existence beyond the narrowest self-interest.

The real degradation began when people realized that they were in league with the Devil, but felt that even the Devil was preferable to the emptiness of an existence which lacked a larger significance.

The problem today is to give that larger significance and dignity to a life that has been dwarfed by the world of material things. Until that problem is solved, the annihilation of Naziism will be no more than the removal of one symptom of the world’s unrest.

— Konrad Heiden, Der Fuehrer, 1944

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Give and Take

From Swami Satchidananda’s translation and commentary on the Bhagavad Gita:

Cherished by your spirit of sacrifice, the gods give you everything you want. (But remember) whoever receives gifts from the gods without offering anything back is a thief.

To take one hundred percent and give nothing in return is to be a thief.
To take one hundred percent and give only fifty percent is to be a debtor.
To take one hundred percent and give one hundred percent is to be a good business person.
To give one hundred percent and take only fifty percent is to be a righteous person.
To give one hundred percent and take nothing in return is to be a saint or a yogi.

We should always examine our transactions and discover in which category we put ourselves.

— Bhagavad Gita, Chapter Three, Verse Twelve

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