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“Everything is theoretically impossible, until it is done.”
- Robert A. Heinlein

“The essence of life is statistical improbability on a colossal scale.”
- Richard Dawkins

“For small creatures such as we, the vastness is bearable only through love.”
- Carl Sagan

(Thanks to @SaganSchools for these wonderful quotes)

“The right idea has the power to overcome any challenge. We can always find that idea.”

- Ray Kurzweil

“If you love the truths that you find in your soul, do not abandon them because someone outside of your soul does not agree with them or ridicules or questions them. You are not saying that your truth is THE truth. You are saying that it is YOUR truth.

There is no such thing as THE truth. We’ve already gone over that. Let it be enough that you get in touch with YOUR truth.”

- Neale Donald Walsch in Home with God.

“We keep on climbing
But we never find the top
It’s all downhill from here.”

- The Evens, ‘Shelter Two’

“I will stop living life for a future happiness that does not & may never exist. I will live for now & stop wasting my time. Every moment I live can be as beautiful as a fantasy. Every second of life is precious. I vow to stop wasting my time on these dreams that turn my life into a nightmare. I vow to live, to be mindful, to pay attention to life & hold it hard to my heart. Every beat another second going by.”

- Margaret Cho

“Everything passes away – suffering, pain, blood, hunger; pestilence. The sword will pass away too, but the stars will still remain when the shadows of our presence and our deeds have vanished from the earth. There is no man who does not know that. Why, then, will we not turn our eyes toward the stars? Why?”

- Mikhail Bulgakov, The White Guard

Some excerpts from a most excellent article by Osho that I read recently (which you can read in full here):

“Anything can be creative — you bring that quality to the activity. Activity itself is neither creative nor uncreative. You can paint in an uncreative way. You can sing in an uncreative way. You can clean the floor in a creative way. You can cook in a creative way.

Creativity is the quality that you bring to the activity you are doing. It is an attitude, an inner approach — how you look at things.”

“Not everybody can be a painter — and there is no need also. If everybody is a painter the world will be very ugly; it will be difficult to live. And not everybody can be a dancer, and there is no need. But everybody can be creative.

Whatsoever you do, if you do it joyfully, if you do it lovingly, if your act of doing it is not purely economical, then it is creative. If you have something growing out of it within you, if it gives you growth, it is spiritual, it is creative, it is divine.”

“We destroy creativity. Nobody is born uncreative, but we make ninety-nine percent of people uncreative.

But just throwing the responsibility on the society is not going to help — you have to take your life in your own hands. You have to drop wrong conditionings. You have to drop wrong, hypnotic auto-suggestions that have been given to you in your childhood. Drop them! Purify yourself of all conditionings… and suddenly you will see you are creative. To be and to be creative are synonymous. It is impossible to be and not to be creative.”

“People have a very limited idea of what being creative is — playing the guitar or the flute or writing poetry — so people go on writing rubbish in the name of poetry. You have to find out what you can do and what you cannot do. Everybody cannot do everything! You have to search and find your destiny. You have to grope in the dark, I know. It is not very clear-cut what your destiny is — but that’s how life is. And it is good that one has to search for it — in the very search, something grows.”

“If God were to give a chart of your life to you when you were entering into the world — this will be your life: you are going to become a guitarist — then your life would be mechanical. Only a machine can be predicted, not a man. Man is unpredictable. Man is always an opening… a potentiality for a thousand and one things. Many doors open and many alternatives are always present at each step — and you have to choose, you have to feel. But if you love your life you will be able to find.”

“Each man comes into this world with a specific destiny — he has something to fulfill, some message has to be delivered, some work has to be completed. You are not here accidentally — you are here meaningfully. There is a purpose behind you. The Whole intends to do something through you.”

Little doggy looks out over Edinburgh from Blackford Hill

“I wish we could get our act together
Make some sense of present tense, alright
Take our time with what we find and feel it
Don’t you know there’s some place else that we can go
A billion trees to climb”

- Stephen Malkmus, ‘Us’

Os Gemeos wall mural, Coney Island

There’s no common goal
There’s no moral action
There’s no modern age
From which to run away

- Stephen Malkmus, ‘We Can’t Help You’

Been listening to a lot of Stephen Malkmus’ solo work lately. It’s quite brilliant.

“If you want to freely live or die, go or stay, to take off or put on your clothes, then right now recognize the person who is listening to this discourse. That one is without form, without characteristics, without root, without source, and without any dwelling place, yet is brisk and lively. As for all the manifold responsive activities, the place where they are carried on is, in fact, no place. Therefore, when you look for him, he retreats farther and farther; when you seek him, he turns more and more the other way: this is called the “Mystery.””

- Linji (d.866)

I recently revisited this excellent interview with Jon Cobb in Shannon Laratt’s ‘Opening Up‘. You can download the 460-page PDF for free, and the interview I’m quoting is the second one that Laratt did with him. There’s so much wisdom in his words and so much that I really agree with and find true to my experience of life. I also really love the photos that went with the article so I’m reposting them here.

Here are some parts that resonated with me:

“People see my Om neck brand and they understand they aren’t dealing with something from their world, in the sense that when an Indian woman walks into a deli with a large nose ring and a bindi, most Americans aren’t going to walk up to them and say “didn’t that hurt? what’s your mother think?” Intuitively they know that she is not from around here. We are not cut from the same cloth.”

“Hair, nails, body language, body shaping — that’s all body modification. To a large degree, when a woman gets up and “puts on her face”, that becomes her face. You are speaking volumes about yourself, whether it is to embrace as one more facet of the business suit the potential for going farther down that road, so in a sense you’re trading yourself in, or to beautify yourself just for your own sake… that’s modification.”

“Western culture has made it so that in order to get ahead, it’s screw unto others, or let us prey, and that’s P-R-E-Y. What’s wrong? You get gray hair, you trade in, and you get your Volvo. Men haven’t been like that until the past two hundred years. We spent the previous years being mysticism and faith based and listening to that, because if not we’d be eaten in the wild, we’d get lost, any number of things. Instead of the house payment, the Volvo payment, the nine to five job, we spent a lot more time being creative, dancing, sharing, communicating.”

“I do need to be at work, but I’ve chosen to be where I am and I’m not trading myself in. I help people find themselves, decorate themselves, and embrace the one thing you get in a culture where you are what you do — the body. And people don’t even realize you can do that any more, and that’s a very natural human thing — to decorate and cherish. You are your own medium and it’s the only thing you’re going to get to take with you.”

“The most beautiful thing is the natural self, and I try not to think of it as enhancement so much as an extension of self, or a trade for an image that is representing something that was worth the trade. It’s a very big deal to me to trade in self, and it will not be taken lightly.”

“Everyone that I know that gets a neck tattoo that’s not a spider web, that means something to them, has found a way. Because if you don’t eat, you will die, and if you are working and eating with a neck tattoo, you are working for yourself, doing something for yourself. Itcommits you to you, absolutely. If you’re not prepared to walk a very hard road for the rest of your life you shouldn’t do it — Not everyone is on a spiritual plain high enough where they are able to struggle through those hardships. What do you do when you have a face full of tattoos and not even MacDonalds will hire you? The nice thing is, you will never be able to work at MacDonalds. As Jimi Hendrix said, “Hey there businessman, you can’t dress like me”. It’s a very tough road and you’d better be prepared to make sacrifices and not value material things, but people.

And my favourite:
“There is a security possible. You invest in happiness and you invest in people. All other things will crumble in time.”