THE MAXIMS OF SWAMI VRHKA BABA

103. Most people like the 'poetry' which just presents in elegant form the commonplaces inside their heads. But true poetry must be the opposite of the obvious. There is very little of it.

104. Meat bleeds the unsayable unsaid.

105. O the unutterable, unimpeachable pointlessness of writing poetry!

106. Wisdom (or 'enlightenment'): the other side of language.

107. The fundamental crime of civilisation is to separate Beauty from The Beast.

108. Elation is shallow, but sadness is profound.

109. The Last Emperor is the maddest marketer of Dream.

110. Life is violent conspiracy of matter.

111. There is no time that is not a time of the cruellest miracles.

112. If you want to know about evil, pay particular attention to those who mean well.

113. Upbringing is a slow portcullis in the brain.

114. Suffering's the only god, and everyone's his profit.

115. Love is estrangement's distorting mirror.

116. The only art that's true is how you mould your heart.

117. A hundred thousand stars within a galaxy among a hundred thousand galaxies: between Man's utter insignificance and arrogance lies bewildered consciousness.

118. Every human is born a terrorist against Nature.

119. Sex is hopelessly mired in the misconception that it is an adult activity.

120. The more complex the culture, the blander its people.

121. The greater the possessions, the smaller the awareness.
The wider the choice, the greater the alienation.

122. The expanding hole in the Ozone Layer
is the human 'soul'. The water at the North Pole - the first for fifteen million years - is the abused Earth-God's lake of tears.

123. There is no calmness in our culture of protagonism:
getting and spending, jailing and freeing, right and wrong, grab and bestow, charge and discharge - like a lavatory-cistern...

124. People are the opiate of religion.

125. The game of love is not worth the brief candle of sex.

126. The horrors of child sexual abuse are as nothing compared with the universal, institutionalised, apotheosised child mental abuse.

127. Culture is the enactment of wondering how to seem.

128. Employment: like school, another institution
to murder mind.

129. Refusal to be employed is the only true Religious Vocation now possible.

130. Paris: a dreary city made unbearable by amputated trees.

131. The snow falling tells me that I should stop thinking.

132. Dresden, Nagasaki, Laos, Cambodia, Viet-Nam, Afghanistan:
the totalitarianism of hypocrisy.

133. I heard on a radio programme that people had devised thousands of games to play. Now, thanks chiefly to the totalitarian competitiveness of the British Empire and its successors, just a couple of hundred are played.

134. Civilisation: the zig-zag between slickness and slaughter.

135. First they cut down the forests and exterminated the animals.
Then they bombed the zoos.
Finally they bombed what was left: the desert.

136. Every animal is true to its nature, but we, in the continual denial that is civilisation, haven't even an idea of what our nature is.

137. The first thing to say about Wisdom is that it is a non-communicable disease.

138. For the Chukchi of Siberia there are seven genders.
Where does this leave the "straight" and the "lesbian & gay" ? !
(Some slime-moulds have 14 sexes, all but one of them male.)

139. Mankind: the rotten idol.

140. We do life no favours by persisting in existence.

141. The humility of wisdom: hopelessly hiding from the hopelessness.

142. Ten cockroaches can live for a week off the glue on the back of a postage-stamp. Man's future has long since expired.

143. The one good thing about being ashamed of being human is that I care nothing for what humans think of me.

144. Sex has become not just a Golden Calf, a part of Luxury, but a Chimæra and a Red Herring in a cul-de-sac.

145. Consciousness - thy name is treachery.
'Humanity' - thy name is Hypocrite!

146. Reason cannot make us feel good, for it leads to despair.
The only thing which makes us feel good is the Fantasy of Well-being.

147. We are obsessed by Number (which is only a metaphor) because we are obsessed by what we make, destroy and - especially - own.

148. "The Disordered Species" has great difficulty in understanding the order of Nature and the Cosmos. It's not that the Cosmos is inscrutable, but that we are mangled trumpets, warped and blocked and out of tune.

149. Elvis Presley borrowed just one book from New York Public Libraries: English Fairy Tales...

150. My dog: being with a perfectly-adequate being makes me constantly aware of my inadequacies.

151. Although good art is true, art is the opposite of truth - which we find unfaceable.

152. The dreary triumph of law is to put the best beyond it.

153. If punishment prevented crime, there would be very little crime.

154. Lives without risk create their own risk: crime (as I know from my former habit of shoplifting).

155. School is where eternal truths are ignored or denied, and fashionable lies are promoted without examination.

156. Nothing is more fantastic than "the real world".
"The real world" is just collective fantasy.

157. I used to regret deeply that I was depressed.
Now that I am no longer depressed, I just regret that I'm alive.

158. All Ministries and Departments of "Defence" are mere and monstrous Ministries of Death.

159. "Manliness" - like a great many terms of approbation - is just a fancy way of saying "cruelty".

160. Between tragedy and triviality, beauty and monstrosity, runs the whole pathetic gamut called "humanity".

161. The closed mind is one which turns descriptions into classifications.

162. One of the myriad things that humans do not understand is that the need to control is beyond Nature's ken and contempt.

163. The only honourable employment is beggary;
the only honest philosophy is misanthropy.

164. Hunger is the only thing that diminishes the greed and meanness of the rich.

165. Secrets are more interesting - and honest - than confessions.

166. Human consciousness is a terrible affliction, dire inoculation,
dreadful plague upon us
as upon the planet we disrupt:
to be human is to be dangerously unpredictable -
untrustworthy, corruptible when not corrupt.

167. 'Reality' is only a screen.

168. Neither drugs nor sex do much for me -
and music flows into my sense of tragedy...

169. The more shrunken the awareness (hence the personality), the more famous, powerful and successful it appears in the World of Mere Appearance.

170. Every government is more than evil - it's ridiculous, because all institutions are self-perpetuatingly ridiculous.

171. Progress: the whole world becomes the instrument of gain and the vessel of banality.

172. The terrible thing about consumer-capitalism is not that it is conservative,
but that it is radical - uprooting everything that has gone before,
everything in its path.

173. The pursuit of humility - not happiness;
the rights of trees - not Man;
love of frugality,
the absence of desire - not fake democracy.

174. In the end, democracy is rule by whomever can best manipulate the electorate: the military-industrial complex, television and the tabloid press.

175. The goal of consumer-capitalism: to make us all no-men in one big no-man's-land. Everything should be ten times more expensive - then we could all stay in bed.

176. The problem with many art-forms (for example, the novel and the theatre) is that they are entertaining - so that only the unentertainable can be reached by them. This is why I write poetry that hurts, and depressing maxims - which are, of course, definitely not for masochists.

177. Religion is the pathetic admission that most people need a reason to keep on living - and a platform from which to launch their intolerance.

178. The big religions exist to justify the meanness of the inventors of mean gods.

179. At the greatest gathering in the history of Mankind - the Great Kumbh Mela at Allahabad, January 2001 - twenty-five million people gathered in peace and joy to purify themselves collectively in the Ganges. It was hardly reported in the West.
(Good news is no news.)
But a few days later an earthquake hit Gujarat, and the competing journalists flew in like vultures with the competing aid organisations, interviewing the bereaved and bereft - and our ears were stuffed with their excited reports. After which they left for the next tragedy on which to feed and feed us.

180. A society without holy men (as opposed to clerics) quickly gets out of control.
Europe has had no holy men since the 14th century when Francis of Assisi was neutralised not by burning as a heretic, but by canonisation.

181. Government is Man's crime against Humanity.
Humanity is Nature's crime against Nature.

182. To dogs we are neither gods nor devils,
but chattering power-monkeys.

183. In the sacred world almost every human act is blasphemy, defilement.

184. A definition of Truth is that it is necessarily contradictible, and hence betrayed, as poetry is, by the tired old tricks of metaphor, parable and allegory.

185. Religion is what people use to fill the vacuums of their personalities. Monotheisms (which are all about power and gluttony, false atonement and proxy-sacrifice, blood and semen) presume progress. Progress is just the ever-increasing manufacture of props to shore up the delusion that we are real. A 'Pygmy' can be entirely self-sufficient at the age of seven.

186. The sayings of philosophers who cannot cook are as empty as the thoughts of carnivores who cannot hunt and kill with their bare hands.

187. Everything American is very new
- and very soiled.

188. Democracy is just an extension of the fashion industry in the pursuance of cancerous comfort.

189. Truth is so new that it has never been revealed - and so old that it has evaporated with the mists of time. It cannot be revealed - only lived, as animals live truth.

190. Truth is a matter of choice - but there is neither truth nor freedom in choice, only in directionlessness and choicelessness.

191. The intimacy of sex is as imaginary as the truth of emotion.

192. The Republic of Nice is of course really
the Empire of Sanitised Nasty.

193. People who are concerned with 'life-style' are frighteningly unaware that life might actually be content
rather than form.

194. To be a child-molester is only a little worse
than being respectable.

195. The least-recognised and most basic virtue
(upon which all other virtues depend):
wholesomeness.

196. Civilisation is essentially against knowledge.
For hunter-gatherers know their environment, while farmers merely alter it and clear it and adapt it to their will - and then force their will on non-farmers. "Desolitudinem faciunt, pacem - atque humanitatem - appelant!"
'Education', too, is essentially anti-knowledge. For he (or she) who knows, despairs.

197. Between the Professors of Poetry and the Popular Poetry Performers stretch the desert of referential craftsmanship and the wasteland of entertainment.
Today a radio talk-show advertised a Professor of Princeton and Oxford's lecture on Emily Dickinson - whom the sickeningly-worldly likes of him unyieldingly despised.

198. 'Art' (a concept invented like so many in the 19th century - though the word 'GENOCIDE' did not appear until 1945) is merely highbrow infotainment. Nothing wrong with that, of course - except the snobbery which devours it.

199. The most vicious species doesn't even recognise its vicious mistakes, much less learn from them. The best thing in life is watching things grow that we have not planted. All achievement is blasphemy.

200. To be born is to lose immortality forever and not for good.

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"It is hard enough for me to remember my opinions - let alone my reasons for having them."
Friedrich Nietzsche