1. One ought to hold on to one’s heart; for if one lets it go, one soon loses control of the head too.
2. There is more wisdom in your body than in your deepest philosophy.
3. On the mountains of truth you can never climb in vain: either you will reach a point higher up today, or you will be training your powers so that you will be able to climb higher tomorrow.
4. When one has a great deal to put into it a day has a hundred pockets.
5. Glance into the world just as though time were gone and everything crooked will become straight to you.
6. What is the mark of liberation? No longer being ashamed in front of oneself.
7. And those who were seen dancing were thought to be insane by those who could not hear the music.
8. In individuals, insanity is rare; but in groups, parties, nations and epochs, it is the rule.
9. The individual has always had to struggle to keep from being overwhelmed by the tribe. If you try it, you will be lonely often, and sometimes frightened. But no price is too high to pay for the privilege of owning yourself.
10. People who have given us their complete confidence believe that they have a right to ours. The inference is false, a gift confers no rights.
11. All things are subject to interpretation. Whichever interpretation prevails at a given time is a function of power and not truth.
12. There are no facts, only interpretations.
13. It is my ambition to say in ten sentences what others say in a whole book.
14. Many are stubborn in pursuit of the path they have chosen, few in pursuit of the goal.
15. Admiration for a quality or an art can be so strong that it deters us from striving to possess it.

Be content with what you have;
Rejoice in the way things are.
When you realize there is nothing lacking,
The whole world belongs to you.

– Lao Tzu

The Paradox of Our Age

We have bigger houses but smaller families;
more conveniences, but less time.

We have more degrees but less sense;
more knowledge but less judgment;
more experts, but more problems;
more medicines but less healthiness.

We’ve been all the way to the moon and back,
but have trouble in crossing the street to meet our new neighbor.

We built more computers to hold more copies than ever,
But have less real communication;
We have become long on quantity,
but short on quality.

These are times of fast foods but slow digestion;
Tall men but short characters;
Steep profits but shallow relationships.

It’s a time when there is much in the window
But nothing in the room.

– The 14th Dalai Lama.

As Karl Jaspers wrote: “The human being is an open possibility, incomplete and incompletable. Hence it is always more and other than what he has brought to realisation in himself.” Nevertheless, it is our responsibility to try imagining what that human being could be at the next stage of its history.

p.234 – The Evolving Self, by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

Beyond Self-Actualization is of course Transcendence, which is easiest to conceptualize as the light outside of the self into which the self dissolves… Symbols are unsatisfactory at this point, suffice it to say that the non-dual awareness of the unity in the cosmos which one may or may not attempt to reach or enter into is ____________________. < Just indescribable > What we can say is that for those unique souls that can and often do make a habit of self-actualizing – it is to you that Transcendence is most accessible and Enlightenment most tantalizingly close! … And we do hope that you stick around and help brighten up the place here a bit before you depart. : )

This just-found quote points at the reason why we must be careful, why even this blogger must be careful, to live the life and experience the world (wu-wei) and to just sample (and sometimes observe) the advance of technology (extropy) — for what technology (name one!) can more easily improve our lives than our own determination to, let’s say, just walk for an hour every day and breathe in the natural air? Henry David Thoreau said it best…

Our inventions are wont to be pretty toys,
which distract our attention from serious things.
They are but improved means
to an unimproved end.

It is not the appearance that binds you,
it’s the attachment to appearance that binds you.