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Swami
Vrhka Baba
MAXIMS
(Latin: Maxima Sententia - "greatest
pronouncements")
"EVERY
MAN TALKS - IF TALK HE MUST - THE SAME TRIPE."
Samuel Beckett
click
here for
Hungarian
translations
1.
I think - therefore I do not understand...
that other creatures also might think, and perhaps more simply,
better.
2.
Mankind's destiny and motto:
to change the world and not ourselves.
3.
"Perfection of the life or of the art" precludes -
as does our civilisation - perfection of the art of life.
4.
Just how 'superior' is our abuse of our 'superiority' to Nature
?
5.
Machines and institutions grind on while we do all the work
of failing to live well.
6.
The people we call 'great' are just the most-noisily dissatisfied.
7.
The worst of us are good citizens.
8.
The only Pillar of Wisdom: There is no human wisdom.
9.
Humans have 'suceeded' because we perform so well in crises.
So we have turned the world into a permanent crisis.
10.
Religion: institutional conspiracies to cut us off from Nature and
ourselves,
and efficient means of bending reality.
11.
Desire is both a form and a creator of suffering.
12.
We who have not killed ourselves know nothing of self-respect.
13.
The examined life may also not be worth living.
14.
The profoundest oppression is aspiration.
In a "free society" the most difficult freedoms are freedom
from
envy and disappointment.
15.
From the Indus to Silicon Valley, the most "successful"
societies have been the most dysfunctional.
16.
Physics and Philosophy are offshoots from Religion,
and religion is the supernatural justification of power
and power-structures.
17.
Love is like faith: not so much a leap in the dark as a windowless
room with daubed walls. It is also appropriation.
18.
Evil prospers - because prospering is malign.
19.
Man
is God's Original Sin, and farmers are his Cherubim.
20. In
a world devoured by his demons, the best of Man is his ruins.
21.
After conquering America the goddess Avaritia stepped out of the
closet and became Queen of Heaven.
22.
The past is an odourless lie - sanitised meat-dust and pain.
23.
The American Dream: globalising hallucination.
24.
Only self is shallower than mind.
25.
When the only spiritual value is Liberty, all falls apart
just as all falls apart when the only social value is Normality.
26.
The Outsider defines himself not by inclusion in any group but by
exclusion from all.
27.
The greatest
artists remain unknown.
28.
Without farmers there would be no armies.
Without armies there would be no farms.
29.
Depression, apathy, rage cruelty: what we are controlled
into.
30.
You cannot be smart and have a pure heart.
31.
All institutions are malignant because they quickly come to exist
only for their own perpetuation. Even if, like the French National
Assembly, they vote themselves out of existence, something worse
will take their place.
32.
Nelson Mandela spent a fifth of his life in solitary confinement.
A thousand million creatures spend their whole lives solitary confinement
and torture, as 'pets' and 'food' and laboratory animals.
33.
Progress is a kind of retrovirus.
34.
There is no
narrative but that which we impose:
the destruction of Nature through Reason.
35.
Those who do not worship trees and mountains
are already dead.
The universe is living - but for us whose consciousness
is a greed-hole in the head.
36.
An "Otherworld" is not another place or time or state
of consciousness, but another attitude.
37.
Just as most pædophilia is parental
most murderous terrorism is governmental.
38.
The Nation State shrinks people into mere function
(within 'Normality'). Thus Roma and 'vagrants' cannot be tolerated
- and freethinkers must be ignored.
39.
We cannot afford to understand that other mammals might communicate
rather better (and more economically) than we do.
40.
Humans do not so much communicate as create communication-problems.
41.
The
offer of 'personal salvation' by Religion is at best irresponsible,
and at worst cynical. 'Salvation' can only be global - and hence
is impossible. In any case, we have fully demonstrated that we have
no souls.
42.
Men without beards have an extra job to 'prove their masculinity'!
43.
Information is a dangerous myth, and the desire for it is just another
aspect of our galloping greed.
44.
The more technology we have
the more infantilised we get.
45.
Only the dead are wise. And, as Samuel Beckett said,
"The living wash in vain."
46.
You rarely see a man in public joy except at some kind of victory.
47.
The most spiritual beings are icebergs.
48.
Men are good a making structures.
Women are good at getting out of the way when they collapse.
49.
There are a few sages - but not one stupid tree.
50.
The oldest trap of consciousness is Novelty.
51. Self-contradiction is the hallmark of wisdom.
52.
Western civilisation has always been mechanistic:
e.g .the mechanical procession of the Saved to Heaven
and of the Damned to Hell.
53.
Every time I turn on a tap - or my computer - a piece of world dies.
54.
Most of us are too clever to understand that our intelligence is
our stupidity and Nature's mistake and misery.
55.
To a dog all the world is dog, but to us it is fragments of a dream
that we cannot reassemble.
56.
All of us behind windows, shut in by doors, ignore the crucifixion
of a tree.
57.
It
is perversely unfair to reward success -
which is surely its own reward.
58.
If you want to be happy - stop wanting.
59.
Our culture's obsession with success ensures our failure- and the
Sixth Extinction.
60.
Humanity is a word for the heartless. Whenever I hear it,
I feel sick.
61. The only limit to human horror is human imagination.
62.
The great human sharing: unacknowledged shame.
63.
'The
Deep' is a fantasy that we shallow beings place inside our heads.
64.
Culture: a thousand subtle forms of shallowness.
65.
Ritual: pompously-shared routine.
66.
Our brains are hooligans' footballs.
67.
An interesting accident of language:
fiction is the major part of crucifixion.
68.
Who now knows the difference between Thalamos and Thanatos (Marriage
and Death) ?
69.
Death is not dearth but payment to the earth.
70.
The answer to Chuang-tzu's question Where can I find someone
who has forgotten language so that I can have a word with him ?
is: Listen to a dog.
71.
Knowing my dog is like knowing God: a liminal being beyond world.
72.
The creator of Anti-Memes: doomed to failure!
73.
What we are is how we think and thought is only words.
74.
Explanations (the obsession of our culture) also are only words.
Having moved from cultures of miracles to a monoculture of explanation,
we now prefer words to miracles.
75.
Nationality is one of the most poisonous and lethal concepts of
the European mind.
76.
Farming: the first, greatest - and last - malignance.
77.
Employment is both the most trivial and the most dangerous form
of work.
78.
'What oft was thought, but ne'er so well express'd...'
What rubbish! Poetry is the opposite of the obvious.
79.
Because
vision does not depend on light but on sensitivity, there is no
such thing as darkness.
80.
Culture is awareness-abuse as "education" (which has long
since been only schooling) is childmind-abuse.
81. The chief function of culture is, by restricting our awareness,
to prevent us from committing suicide.
82.
We are indoctrinated with a belief in our superior power of reason
- but we abandon reason at the slightest and most unreasonable excuse
- and use reason to justify ourselves. Indeed the main use of reason
is self-justification.
83.
They think they have it - but there is no key to the Terrible Parade.
84.
The world is
nearly 100% non-human. What is human is surely only slightly interesting.
85.
Our brains are clever condoms filled with demented sperm.
86.
Most of us are too clever to understand that our intelligence is
our stupidity.
87.
The cruel, complicated shallows of that little reification, the
human 'soul'.
88.
The comfort of houses is the rape of the world.
89.
In the war against happiness
that is humanity,
Man has won: we are the sunset of the world.
90.
The greater the technology, the smaller the consciousness.
91.
Holocaust: The worst that we do to each other is nothing compared
with that we do to mammals, fish and birds.
92.
Outliving evolution, we are all idiots-savants
stupefied by the tyranny of our concocted words.
93.
Civilisation: the Experiment against Nature.
94. Those most afraid of death are those who never even thought
of beginning to live.
95.
Evolution is not just a one-way-street - but a cul-de-sac.
96.
Senseless to weep for the end when the whole of it calls for tears.
97.
The people who are lovelier than their bodies, the people who are
uglier than their bodies, and the people who are at least as ugly
as their bodies...
98.
Sex is the exchange of spiritual disability within a physical connection.
99.
Men's seed is tears rolling back into navel-tight eyes, into rotwork.
100. How to cut the crap, knowing that we are crap in the Empire
of NothingButConsumption ?
continued on
Speak out - but do nothing!
'Better, oh better cancel from the Scroll
of Universe one luckless Human Soul,
than, drop by drop, enlarge the Flood that Rolls
hoarser with Anguish as the Ages Roll!'
- Omar
Khayyám, translated by Edward FitzGerald
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destiny and destination