THE MAXIMS OF SWAMI VRHKA BABA

202. Literature is only lies from which truth occasionally drips like blood from meat.
Science is stories of our desire to explain and control. Art is only lipstick on the monster of humanity.

203. Truth - and the tender indifference of non-human nature - are what less than one percent of one percent of 1% of human beings have the shame to face.
All our secrets are the same.

204. Those who are true to themselves the false call 'failures'.

205. True 'respect for life', human or non-human, is refusal to be involved in bringing it and its consequences into the world.

206. Science - and hence our culture - is largely based on Wishful Thinking harnessed to technology. Myth, its opposite, is concerned with Hubris and Retribution. We would do well to abandon the unreality of Science and immerse ourselves in the truths of Myth.

207. Myth is immortal because it is meaningless.

208. There can be neither 'enlightenment' nor 'happiness' until all human beings abandon hope and action. Happiness starts from the embracing of pessimism - which is why dogs, too, though divine heroes and saints, flagrantly ruled by desire, cannot be happy.

209. In the world-holocaust every drop of milk and every mouthful of meat is a war-crime. But humiliated, infinitely-forgiving Nature does not accuse.

210. The higher the standard of living, the lower the standards of people.

211. Slaughter for its own sake:
All the animals gratuitously slaughtered - and all the humans who are slaughtered and uneaten.

212. Not just because all property is theft from Nature
all governments are criminal.

213. What we call 'instinct' is usually conditioning;
what we call 'progress' is usually increasing dependence upon technology.

214. A 'free' press loves bad news, but the censored medical and pharmaceutical press almost never prints it.

215. Foot-and-mouth disease: civilisation never misses an opportunity to indulge in 'necessary' slaughter.

216. Foot-and-mouth disease: Nature will thank you for not eating meat or milk. And thank you for not breeding, either.

217. Quite apart from our destructive internal problems, the external problem of mankind is the problem of scale.
Because we have been overweeningly successful as a species, everything we take, we take way too far. Everything we do, we do to excess, too much, too often, way beyond reason.

218. Power in and over the world is not only confined to one species, but because of the terrible discovery of agriculture which has the biosphere on the run, and the totalitarian essence of civilisation, it is confined to the ever more powerful and greedy within that species - that less-than-1% who are systematically plundering the planet and impoverishing us all.

219. Evil is inevitable when activity becomes industry.

220. Industrialised farming is a greater threat to the planet than nuclear power - or nuclear war.

221. When Science rolls up its sleeves for Money,
the whole world must shrink into cowed and deferential silence.

222. Animals are totally themselves, while we are mostly not ourselves but cultural artifacts. Thus man is the only banal animal.

223. To produce the first billion Homo sapiens sapiens took about a million years. To produce the third billion of our species took only fourteen years.

224. Man's most permanent achievement is squalor.

225. 225 hectares of forest a day are cut down in the Himalayan foothills, not for newsprint, but to burn the dead in pyres.

226. Out of the seven thousand kinds of food once grown by man, only nine are now grown.
Forty-seven of the hundred largest economies in the world are not states but companies. At least thousand known species will disappear from the earth in the next twenty-five years - and thousands of species remain unknown.

227. We are all born human, but from our very first day are turned into cultural artefacts, normalised into "members of society".

228. The world is cursed by those who think their minds belong to them.

229. Man can do the unimaginable - but cannot live with his fellow-beings (much less with other species), nor himself, nor the world in which he slowly evolved.

230. Language is itself a noisy admission of failure to communicate. And because language is not transparent, thought is not transparent, either.

231. Religion is the crass attempt to cram the vacuum caused by consciousness.

232. "There are certain types of success," said Degas, "that are indistinguishable from hysteria." Living in luxury undreamed by Roman Emperors we are not ecstatic cats but moan and complain about our neighbours and the price of luxuries.

233. As the seed that is Osiris chokes the world, the planet needs successful people like it needs a hole in the ozone layer.
The species that makes things happen makes only terrible things happen.

234. We are told the lie that culture and art can improve us from without. 'Western Democracy' is a frightening cargo-cult of lies and fantasies.

235. Tolstoy spun a story of a Russian princess who went to the theatre in the depth of winter and was moved to pity by the play while her coachman died of the cold outside.
We are not improvable from without, but only from within, by being utterly honest and authentic.

236. Even music - even Classical Indian music - reduces life to the spectacle of our own refined emotions. We are moved by Sibelius or Raag Malkauns - as Hitler was moved by Wagner.

237. Knowledge is a kind of self-licking arse. The only insight is doubt.

238. Civilisation is like meringue: sickly sophistication surrounding a void.

239. A concept (such as 'importance') is a fantasy, a trick or a tool, a lie, or a totalitarian criminality. To paraphrase Radakhrishnan: the mind (which of course is itself a concept) which has a concept becomes trapped by it. The most perverted of concepts is the concept of Normality.

240. Our contribution to the planet is tragedy.
In this word is our history, for 'tragos' in ancient Greek meant goat. Tragedy was an ode to the goat-god - and it was the overgrazing of the lands of the southern Mediterranean which made them so barren. The goat-god eventually turned into mediæval devil - not, however, because he had created deserts - but because of his sexy smell and allegedly uncontrolled concupiscence.

241. Considering ourselves the only creatures with the power of reason, we have by our selective use of that power filled the world with pain and death. We use reason like a mask, or like a horse, or like a hammer.

242. 'The Sixth Extinction' of the Earth has not come about by man's exuberance and joie-de-vivre, not as an unfortunate result of everyone having a great time, but by the relentless grind and dull routines of sub-human truculence and misery.
'Humanity' is the Mad Genie of Dreariness escaped from the bottle of Nature.

243. The wisest man in all the world is far, far less visible than I.

244. To act seems to be useless; not to act is to seem to sink into the hateful confederacy of smug.

245. 'Progress' is the now-exponential growth of uneasy contempt of rich for poor, cities for swamps, and the 'successful' for 'failures'.

246. Art is not honest, but tricks us into believing that we are.

247. Truth, knowledge, wisdom, happiness cannot be secret - but they are invisible to those who believe in Education.

248. 'Better to die,' Ananda Coomaraswamy said, 'ten years too early than ten minutes too late.'

249. We cannot come to terms with our intelligence, so we endlessly seek irrational powers through reason selectively applied.

250. The moment of suicide will come like a taste for champagne - or a revelation: the ultimate oracle.

251. No society is better than its prisons.

252. The truly insane are not locked up - they are those who dictate our lives.

253. Living justly involves the constant contemplation of suicide (or self-eradication) - for to live is to live unjustly.

254. The greatest genius is to live well and consume very little, but we have reached the stage where to be alive at all is to consume too much.

255. To live justly involves the refusal of parenthood one way or another.

256. The 'ethical animal' is the impossible animal: the only one who acts on irrational fears and crazy desires, who tramples on its own aesthetics, which are more rational and kinder than ethics.

257. The only moral species is the only stupid one, the only ugly species, the only criminal one: morals, as Genet pointed out, are invented by criminals.

258. Cultural Alienation: to think that hospitality is something to be paid for.

259. The world is dying not through the tyranny of tyrants but from the sham of mass democracy.

260. Civilisation is degeneration from dance to transaction,
and knowledge is the slide from the symbolic to the literal.

261. "Western Society" has become one vast private boarding-school run not for our benefit but to make money by providing a false solution ('success') to an artificial problem ('achievement') which obscures the real problem of blasphemy.

262. Happiness is simply a romantic fantasy in the narrow reality of the double-glazed gulags of consumption.

263. Consciousness is a committee of simpletons, self-servers and sycophants in the head.

264. Our first communication is crying.

265. The universal desire (all cultures being drug cultures) to alter our state of consciousness and the quality of awareness which controls it, whether very crudely through alcohol or glue or amyl nitrite, or more sophisticatedly by music or sex, or more seriously through fasting, ritual or non-euphoric mushrooms, suggests that the state of consciousness regarded as 'normal' is in fact a depressed state of consciousness.

266. To smoke marijuana (for example) is to consult an oracle. The oracle is always inside, and has to be tempted out or up. Unfortunately, our culture is anti-oracular as it is anti-mythic, and so people who smoke marijuana usually do it to get 'out of their heads' rather than into their heads. They do not realise that any drug is a vehicle, and that all destinations are within us, not within the drug or outside our inborn capabilities. Casual, euphoria-seeking users reject or block out the oracle, of course, because our increasingly hedonistic and anti-mythic culture has suppressed all sense and knowledge of the oracular.
(The poet drowns in the sea of prose.).

267. If the world is dreaming us, it will wake up dead.

268. Instead of being polymorphously perverse, we have made ourselves monoculturally banal through celebrity and money.

269. Our uncontrollable rape of the planet would suggest that we do not live in harmony within our heads. History is not victories, but rapes and abortions.

270. Because Jesus of Galilee's original Work was an anti-conformist, anti-family, commensal, Outsider Network of Compassion, it is interesting that the word cretin derives from the French for Christian.

271. Georges Simenon was convinced that the future was for the insects, which 'possess powers unimaginable even to God'.

272. Shakespeare (England's Verdi) is a pile of bandages which is claimed to be a marvellous tapestry.

273. Even if every household recycled everything, the destruction of the biosphere would continue unabated, because the real problem for the planet is not the private individual, but business.

274. All the wisdom of the world can be written on a couple of pages - which is why it is never published.

275. Replicators replicate, communicators almost communicate, but the wise are silently wise.

276. Doctors kill more people than soldiers, and humans kill a million times more animals than other animals.

277. The last taboo: to challenge the pretence that people are likeable - much less loveable.

278. The greatest (and only true) achievement of 'high achievers' is to make the rest of us feel inferior.

279. To be able to admit that you're wrong is a sign of maturity. Governments never do. We are ruled by infantile institutions. Institutions are by definition infantile.

280. On either side of sex were constructed religion, then sport, and finally, above it, love. And all of them are only as important as we persuade ourselves to think they are.

281. Love which wants loyalty is worthless. Sex is mostly lust and lies told to oneself as well as to others. It chooses to forget the banality of orgasm.

282. To devise and live your own agenda you must assume that little that you're told is rational, much less true.

283. 'Only on the firm foundation of unyielding despair can the soul's habitation henceforth safely be built', wrote Bertrand Russell. But human beings are the only creatures without souls.

284. "The Milk of Human Kindness" is how the rapist might describe his sperm.

285. Caring about what the world thinks is the opposite of caring about the world.

286. Time is a big bolt of cloth which we tear into bandages.

287. What man has the arrogance to say 'A child would be glad to have me as a father.' ?

288. The notions of coherence and consistency alienate us both from Nature and our nature.

289. Drugs of dependence - whether nicotine or opiates - make one dependent on Big Business. The most powerful, cruel and insidious addictions are to the cancer of comfort and the progress of banality.

290. The Rights of Man tend to lead to natural wrongs.
The most popular human right: the right to remain deceived.

291. Art is mostly harmless - except when used to justify culture.

292. Apocalypse is when and where all will and power are one.
And before 'humanity' drowns in the banal shallows of its own complexity.

293. Armageddon: it is interesting that a hill in Samaria should so accidentally have as resonant a name as Auschwitz or Hiroshima.

294. When I hear or read the word 'humanity'
I think 'sentimental malice'.

295. The only true Christian I have heard of is a female Japanese missionary who washes the feet of Native Canadian and other prostitutes.

296. "The only thing to distrust is The Normal." - John Buchan

297. Territories are the womb of terrorism; there is no fear where no fence runs.

298. The two most powerful and enduring forces for evil - apart from agriculture - that the world has yet known are 'United':- 'Kingdom' and 'States'. The latter was launched from the terrible platform of the former. And agriculture led to both. Without agriculture there are no empires, no tyrannies, no prisons, no religions.

299. Everything we want is worthless, in the face of the banality of suffering
and pain and poverty.

300. Among the hundreds of thousands of caring people who are dedicated to helping people destroy all other living creatures,
biologists estimate that there are five thousand times too many human beings on the planet.

Dancing Shaman: linoprint by Anthony Weir

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