This n' That
[thoughts from ~burning woman~ by Sha'Tara]
I'm retiring after 42 years at the same job. It's a major shift, naturally, and it makes one think – as if I needed an excuse to do that.
Anyway, some thoughts, some ideas, some mine, some quoted verbatim, some partially plagiarized (but carefully and lovingly bandaged). Here goes...
It is a truism that even in the most ethical of power structure, no governing system could ever survive a rigorous, systematic enforcement of its own laws. Hence why all power structures need to create and maintain, scapegoats. Knowing this, re-read your history and watch it turn completely on its head.
"Do you believe in God?"
"I believe in punishment."
"What do you mean by that?"
"The death of a world is judgment of its inadequacy. Death removes the unnecessary and the false."
(from "The Forge of God" by Greg Bear)
Many addictions are quite legal—but they are still addictions. All addictions have this in common: they destroy will power.
Take a moment to stand in awe of a spider's web shimmering in sunrise dew, not because of its inherent beauty but because of the horror hiding within its dainty lace work.
............
Some thoughts from Peer's Law:
Finding a solution to a problem changes the nature of the problem.
The Great Myth of management is that it can.
If builders built the way programmers write programs, the first woodpecker to come along would destroy civilization.
Blessed are the end users who have no expectations for they shall suffer no disappointment.
...........
I once asked a literary agent what kind of writing paid the best. Without a moment's hesitation, he replied: ransom notes.
"We" are not one. I am one, you are one. The mystery is not that we can be "as one" but that as separate "identities" (objects) we can share a subjective reality. Learn this, apply it, and earth's greatest problem, that of relationships, disappears forever.
"Death is the future of everyone. Show me the future of the living." (Desolation Road – Ian McDonald)
A famous person may say something about an important subject and not be understood by anyone yet be believed by many.
The more complex a system, the more likely and quickly, it will become unstable, i.e., chaotic and unpredictable. The system we are living under is a metastable system, meaning a system prone to fall into instability. WARNING: When a single economy straddles a world, there is no safe place to stand.
"Who is minding the store? (Implied: no one.)
Question: How do you go about converting a mad mix of self-indulgent cultures into the crew of an interstellar spaceship? (Philip Jenkins, Tower to the Sky) Interesting if you can think of Earth as an interstellar spaceship.
Say what? "And then Robinson Crusoe stripped naked, swam back to his foundering ship, filled his pockets with biscuits and swam back to shore."
Grief is personal, but sorrow is to know beyond one's own pain, to understand another's suffering as if it were one's own.
It is far easier to mourn the dead than it is to protect the living. (The Parafaith War—L. E. Modesitt, Jr.)
Life is not a thing, it is a way. It is a series of happenings; it is the evolution of patterns which carry information; it is growth and decay and re-growth. Wherever the possibility of this exists, life will be. (The Avatar – Poul Anderson)
Nothing is absolute, and you have to go with the odds. The only thing that's absolute is death, and not even that if you believe [religions] (The Parafaith War—L. E. Modesitt, Jr.)
My favorite definition of "inspiration" is: the creative unity of the conscious and the unconscious. I like that. I don't know if I understand it, but it certainly has a nice ring to it. (The Sun, the Moon and the Stars—Stephen Brust)
Do you know how they got the custom of painting halos over the heads of saints? From the Greeks who put helmets on the statues of their gods to keep the birds from defecating on them. (Ibid.)
The line between insanity and madness may well be the simple ability to shed a few tears (Ibid.)
Only the very young see the life ahead and only the very old see the life behind. The others are so busy with living, they see nothing. (Ray Bradbury)
If you lived in a village of shoe-makers, how would you go about making a living selling shoes? By manufacturing a special, or superior type of shoe. And how does the global "shoe-making industry" go about selling its mass-produced, inferior shoes? By lying. But of course, they don't call it lying, they call it advertising, a process unavailable to them until the invention of mass media. Now it no longer matters how the shoe is made, nor how it comes about, but how it is advertised.
What's the best part about being crazy? Everything becomes possible. Rules are cancelled. Impossibility barriers fall of themselves. You stand alone, face to face with the cosmos with its infinite treasures.
We must learn to see beyond the propagated facts.
To the awakened, the road, however strange, always ends at one's chosen destination.
When he goes to sleep, the worlds are his. He becomes a great king, or a learned man; he enters the high and the low. As a great king travels as he pleases around his own kingdom, even so here, taking with him his senses, he travels as he pleases. (The Upanishads)
Look! These aren't freeways those commuters are passing over, they are slave-ways!
It's fine that you want to write something but shouldn't you have something to say first?
And how many people choose to trade in their brains for sacred truths that can be boiled down to poster slogans?
How can anyone teach who has yet to discover the purpose of one's own existence?
One's purpose should always feel greater than oneself. Any worthwhile purpose must be greater than I am; of some impossible nature, an impossible task; a task not imposed but freely chosen and accepted. It is I who create my place in this purpose by changing myself to become the kind of "hero" who can accomplish that impossible task.
"Nothing is impossible" said the Teacher YLea. "Believe all things, believe in nothing" she added. If nothing is impossible then it becomes possible to believe all things. Thus equipped, without the prosthetics of faith and hope (the trap of believing in something), to set forth to do that possible "impossible."
It has been said "life is a dance" and how true . However, it is not choreographed. Each participant must create and execute a particular set of steps. Each dance is totally personal.
There are those who never learn to create their own steps but choose the easier way of emulating others. When groups form to copy the steps of a leader, that is when life turns to death, for life is intensely personal and death, utterly impersonal.
The timeless touches all things in space and there is no distance between them.
I will be leaving the Southwest Slave Way soon after fighting traffic for 30 years, only to volunteer and get shackled on that suicide scene once again.
Some mighty fine gems of wisdom and some totally incomprehensible gibberish.
Love your intellect!
Ron
TRASK...
My favorite:
"Only the very young see the life ahead and only the very old see the life behind. The others are so busy with living, they see nothing. (Ray Bradbury)"
How perfect!