Steppenwolf

By: Hermann Hesse

Did you know Steppenwolf, the band that wrote Born to Be Wild and Magic Carpet Ride, took their name straight from a 1929 Hermann Hesse novel? 

A tad heavy at the start, it picks up speed, the concept of your “personality” and “self” start to splinter, and then pieces of you are everywhere and going a thousand miles an hour as, for a moment, you glimpse eternity.

A real philosophical trip, I had no idea novels so “spiritual,” psychedelic, and masterfully written were coming out of anybody in the 1920’s.

Along with Siddhartha, this is the second Hesse novel added to my Bookshelf. Hesse is a master and mentor from another age. I bow with gratitude to the dude for refining timeless, golden wisdom into such stirring, striking story.

Favorite Quotes:

“I have no doubt that they are for the most part fictitious, not, however, in the sense of arbitrary invention. They are rather deeply lived spiritual events which he has attempted to express by giving them the form of tangible experiences.”

“The human merry-go-round sees many changes: the illusion that cost India the efforts of thousands of years to unmask is the same illusion that the West has labored just as hard to maintain and strengthen.”

“As for the way to true manhood, the way to the immortals, he has, it is true, an inkling of it and starts upon it now and then for a few hesitating steps and pays for them with much suffering and many pangs of loneliness. But as for striving with assurance, in response to that supreme demand, towards the genuine manhood of the spirit, and going the one narrow way to immortality, he is deeply afraid of it. He knows too well that it leads to greater sufferings, to proscription, to the last renunciation, perhaps to the scaffold, and even he is still unwilling to suffer all these sufferings and die all these deaths. Though the goal of manhood is better known to him than the bourgeois, still he shuts his eyes. He is resolved to forget that the desperate clinging to the self and the desperate clinging to life are the surest ways to eternal death, while the power to die, to strip one’s self naked, and the eternal surrender of the self bring immortality with them. When we worships his favorites among the immortals, Mozart, perchance, he always looks at him in the long run through bourgeois eyes. His tendency is to explain Mozart’s perfected being, just as a schoolmaster would, as a supreme and special gift rather than as the outcome of his immense powers of surrender and suffering, of his indifference to the ideals of the bourgeois, and his patience under that last extremity of loneliness which rarefies the atmosphere of the bourgeois world to an ice cold ether, around those who suffer to become men, that loneliness of the Garden of Gethsemane.”

“Instead of narrowing your world and simplifying your soul, you will have to absorb more and more of the world and at last take all of it up in your painfully expanded soul, if you are ever to find peace. This is the road that the Buddha and every great man has gone, whether consciously or not, insofar as fortune favored his quest. All births mean separation from the All, the confinement within limitation, the separation from God, the pangs of being born ever anew. The return into the All, the dissolution of painful individuation, the reunion with God means the expansion of the soul until it is able once more to embrace the All.”

““I like that very much,” cried Hermine. “In your case, for example, the spiritual part is very highly developed, and so you are very backward in all the little arts of living. Harry, the thinker, is a hundred years old, but Harry, the dancer, is scarcely half a day old. It’s he we want to bring on, and all his little brothers who are just as little and stupid and stunted as he is.””

“It is what I call eternity. The pious call it the kingdom of God. I say to myself: all we who ask too much and have a dimension too many could not contrive to live at all if there were not another air to breathe outside the air of this world, if there were not eternity at the back of time; and this is the kingdom of truth. The music of Mozart belongs there and the poetry of your great poets. The saints, too, belong there, who have worked wonders and suffered martyrdom and given a great example to men… The communion of the saints, in earlier times it was set by painters in a golden heaven, shining, beautiful, and full of peace and it is nothing else but what I meant a moment ago when I called it eternity. It is the kingdom on the other side of time and appearances. It is there we belong. There is our home. It is that which our heart strives for. And for that reason, we long for death.”

“Was it not perhaps I who made him talk, spoke, indeed, with his voice? Was it not, too, my own soul that contemplated me out of his black eyes like a lost and frightened bird, just as it had out of Hermine’s grey ones?”

“You were striving, were you not, for escape? You have a longing to forsake this world and its reality and to penetrate to a reality more native to you, to a world beyond time. You know, of course, where this other world lies hidden. It is the world of your own soul that you seek. Only within yourself exists that other reality for which you long. I can give you nothing that has not already its being within yourself. I can throw open to you no picture gallery but your own soul. All I can give you is the opportunity, the impulse, the key. I can help you make your own world visible. That is all.”

“You would be checked and blinded at every turn by what you are pleased to call your personality. You have no doubt guessed long since that the conquest of time and the escape from reality, or however else it may be that you choose to describe your longing, means simply the wish to be relieved of your so-called personality. That is the prison where you lie. And if you were to enter the theater as you are, you would see everything through the eyes of Harry and the old spectacles of the Steppenwolf. You are therefore requested to lay these spectacles aside and to be so kind as to leave your highly esteemed personality here in the cloakroom where you will find it again when you wish.”

“Now, true humor begins when a man ceases to take himself seriously.”

“The mistaken and unhappy notion that man is an enduring unity is known to you. It is also known to you that man consists of a multitude of souls, of numerous selves. The separation of the unity of the personality into these numerous pieces passes for madness. Science has invented the name schizomania for it. Science is in this so far right as no multiplicity may be dealt with unless there be a series, a certain order and grouping. It is wrong insofar as it holds that one only and binding and lifelong order is possible for the multiplicity of subordinate selves. This error of science has many unpleasant consequences, and the single advantage of simplifying the work of the state-appointed pastors and masters and saving them the labors of original thought. In consequence of this error many persons pass for normal, and indeed for highly valuable members of society, who are incurably mad; and many, on the other hand, are looked upon as mad who are geniuses. Hence it is that we supplement the imperfect psychology of science by the conception that we call the art of building up the soul. We demonstrate to anyone whose soul has fallen to pieces that he can rearrange these pieces of a previous self in what order he pleases, and so attain to an endless multiplicity of moves in the game of life. As the playwright shapes a drama from a handful of characters, so do we from the pieces of the disintegrated self build up ever new groups, with ever new interplay and suspense, and new situations that are eternally inexhaustible. Look!”

“When you listen to the radio you are a witness of the everlasting war between idea and appearance, between time and eternity, between human and the divine. Exactly, my dear sir, as the radio for ten minutes together projects the most lovely music without regard into the most impossible places, into respectable drawing rooms and attics and into the midst of chattering, guzzling, yawning and sleeping listeners, and exactly as it strips this music of its sensuous beauty, spoils and scratches and beslimes it and yet cannot altogether destroy its spirit, just so does life, the so called reality, deal with the sublime picture-play of the world and make a hurley-burley of it. It makes its unappetizing tone—slime of the most magic orchestral music. Everywhere it obtrudes its mechanism, its activity, its dreary exigencies and vanity between the ideal and the real, between orchestra and ear. All life is so, my child, and we must let it be so; and, if we are not asses, laugh at it. It little becomes people like you to be critics of radio or of life either. Better to learn to listen first! Learn what is to be taken seriously and laugh at the rest.”

“I knew that all the hundred thousand pieces of life’s game were in my pocket. A glimpse of its meaning had stirred my reason and I was determined to begin the game afresh. I would sample its tortures once more and shudder again at its senselessness. I would traverse not once more, but often, the hell of my inner being. One day I would be a better hand at the game. One day I would learn how to laugh. Pablo was waiting for me, and Mozart too.”

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The Mission of Art

By: Alex Grey

The Mission of Art is a philosophical text about what art is about.

Written by Alex Grey, a mystic visionary artist, it makes a monumental case that throughout history, the arc of art is actually a record, and means, of the evolution of consciousness.

After the astounding psychedelic experience of an “infinite ‘web of life’ in which I was one node of life intrinsically woven into infinite others,” as I wrote in a notebook later that day, Alex’s artwork became a remarkable means of describing that ineffable experience to others (see Net of Being, Rainbow Eye Ripple, and Order). The Mission of Art puts into words the philosophy and perspective underlying those transcendent works of art.

One need not be an artist to resonate and perhaps even be transformed by a piece of art and one need not be an artist to resonate and perhaps even be transformed by this book.

Some of my highest flying perspectives, intuitions, and aims were both altered and affirmed.

Favorite Quotes:

“We all organize and interpret life according to a unique psychological filter or lens, our worldview. This psychological context, the way we hold the realities of life, including who we think we are, mostly goes unnoticed. Our minds and body use it somewhat automatically. In order to notice our own worldview, we have to think about the way we think; we have to rise above our habitual thought patterns and notice that they are habits. We have to question who we think we are. This happens only when our worldview is sufficiently challenged, when new visions collide with and unsettle our existing vision of life. If the challenge is great enough, our worldview and sense of self will dissolve and either regress, break down, or transform to a higher and deeper vision.”

“Although human greed, hatred, and ignorance have led us to the current crisis of our overpopulated and polluted world, the question is, can enough individuals personally awaken to a reverence for life, as Schweitzer called it, and then, through their creative actions and interventions, redirect the tendency of society away from self-destruction.”

“The poet is a light and winged and holy thing and there is not invention in him until he’s been inspired and is out of his senses, and the mind is no longer in him.”

— Socrates

“Individual will is aligned with divine will, attaining a spiritual overview and unity with the cosmos.”

“The conceptual mind constructs a coded world of meaning by assigning names to things and then comparing them. The everyday functioning of civilizations is completely dependent on the powers of the conceptual mind and its coded world. The downside is that by creating a world of isolated distinct objects, the conceptual mind creates a trap of limits and opposites, distinguishing our isolated self from everything else. The ego is the construction of this intellectual self-distinction. The conceptual mind creates a seductively logical prison of words that only spiritual insight can cure by transcending.”

“Timeless spirit is the ultimate context or reference point that the flesh-and-bone human refers to for meaning. Contact with spiritual ground provides the true basis for meaning in our lives. We experience an altered, or in this case “altared,” state of consciousness, a contact with infinite love, infinite bliss, and infinite awareness. The meaning of the physical world is realized to be a beautiful dream symbol requiring our lucid participation, a shadow play cast by the transcendental sun.”

“Idealist visionary art reveals hidden spiritual truths. Fantastic and surreal art depend upon no ground of ultimate truth, no reference to God. All is dream from which there is no awakening, except to the realization that we are all dreaming. Idealist and mystical art evoke a positive altruistic force and a basis for appreciating the divine dream show we call reality.”

“The mystical experience imparts a sense of unity within oneself and potentially with the whole of existence. With unity comes a sense that ordinary time and space have been transcended. replaced by a feeling of infinitely and eternity. The experience is ineffable, beyond concepts, beyond words. The mental chatterbox shuts up and allows the ultimate and true nature of reality to be revealed, which seems more real than the phenomenal world experienced in ordinary states of consciousness. When we waken from a dream, we enter the “realness” of our waking state and notice the unreal nature of the dream. In the mystical state we awaken to a higher reality and notice the dreamlike or superficial character of our normal waking state.”

“In a dream, two friends and I were climbing on the radiant, mountainous face of a God. The head was made of glowing golden crystal rock. As we perilously ascended this huge Godhead, my friend who was a writer stopped and rested at the mouth, my friend who was a musician climbed into the ear, and I struggled to the eye. At our separate stations, we could no longer see each other, but we were united by the same illuminated Godhead, having placed ourselves at the spiritual sensory gates that governed our art.”

“To see, in the ideal sense, is to contemplate the causal spiritual realm beyond physical appearances.”

“At the very moment when at sunset we were making our way through a herd of hippopotamuses, there flashed upon my mind, unforeseen and unsought: “Reverence for Life.” The iron door had yielded: The path in the thicket had become visible. Now I had found my way to the idea in that life-affirmation and ethics are contained side by side! Thus, to me, ethics is nothing else than reverence for life. Reverence for life affords me my fundamental principal of morality, namely that good consists of maintaining, assisting and enhancing life, and that to destroy, to harm or hinder life is evil… Reverence for life dictates the same sort of behavior as the ethical principle of love. But reverence for life contains within itself the rationale of the commandment to love and calls for compassion for all creature life. Reverence for life means being seized by unfathomable, forward moving will that is inherent in all Being.”

— Albert Schweitzer

“Imaginal travel, from the furthest realms of outer space to the tiniest subatomic realms, can only leave one in a state of eye-bugging awe at the magnitude of our universe and our minds.”

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Psychomagic: The Transformative Power of Shamanic Psychotherapy

By: Alejandro Jodorowsky

Alejandro Jodorowsky is a creative of the highest order, acclaimed movie director, and inventor of a form of psychotherapy called “psychomagic.”

His art — controversial, spiritual, and surreal — spans life’s spectrum in full. His personal story could be described similarly and reads near mythical. His films were banned for causing riots in Mexico and ushered into the United States by John Lennon and Yoko Ono. His “Psychomagic” a conscious reverse-engineering of the unconscious forces wielded by a famous medicine woman he apprenticed and decades of “acts” aimed at the unconscious level.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Jodorowsky approaches and sees everything quite differently than most people. Psychomagic offers a look through his eyes, at his life, and the mechanics of the non-mechanical shamanistic view of reality, “as a dream swarming with signs and symbols, a field of interaction where multiple forces and influences meet.”

It’s one of the most shocking and instructive books I have ever read.

Favorite Quotes:

“I truly believe in the magic of reality. But for this magic to operate, it is benefitting to cultivate in oneself a certain number of qualities that are at times contradictory, at least in appearance: innocence, self-control, faith, bravery… putting this magic into motion requires a lot of audacity, and also purity, and a lot of work on oneself. So I insist that I devote my existence to perfecting myself, to knowing myself, and to making myself internally accessible. It is important to never lose sight of all the discipline without which this approach to existence would be but an illusion. Life is not there for satisfying the desires of the first sloth that was created! Life is wonderful to us when we abandon ourselves to it and when we overcome our egocentrism.”

“You know, a labyrinth is no more than a tangle of straight lines.”

“The magic we have called forth does not operate except by detachment. What makes the game possible is the lucidity of the witness, whereas identification with consensus reality, on the contrary, shrinks existence and reduces the realm of possibility. In dreams, as in daily life, the same laws operate: the more one is detached, the more one can enjoy perceiving all of existence as a vast playground. The less one is detached, the more life turns into a dead end. Dreaming thus taught me, paradoxically, to wake up and maintain a lucid current as a thread of existence, even if this requires a major effort. Because God knows how marvelous life can be when one is, above all, open to its magic!”

“It is our belief in an “objective” world, our modern, self-stylized rational mentality that makes this kind of question torment us. We always allege to place ourselves as detached observers of a supposed exterior phenomenon, and so the mechanisms should be clearly defined. In the ‘shamanic’ mentality, to contrast, this kind of problem is not even posed. There is not a subject-observer and an object-observed; there is the world as a dream swarming with signs and symbols, a field of interaction where multiple forces and influences meet.”

“Gurdjieff said drugs are useful for that: you are in the cellar of a building, and the drug makes you rise quickly to the terrace. You are in the underground garage, and you jump fifty flights. You see the whole horizon, the whole city, and when you return, you realize that to go up again, you have to climb each floor on your own, without drugs.”

“Instead of my wife, the being with which I share my life.”

“To go from one tradition to another does not have a true effect, because one god is equal to the other. It is another caricature, another limitation. It is necessary to rise above the limitation in order to be open to life. The age we are living in has to stop being religious so it can be mystical.”

“To be alive is an unimaginable gift.”

“But on top of all those, there exists a level of cosmic consciousness where the being lives in the whole universe, infinite space, eternal time, permanent impermanence… at this level the big themes are found like “know thyself.” And even further beyond that exists another divine consciousness where we know this construct we have named God.”

“The majority of people want to be like others, and this drives them to a death in life. It is necessary to find what distinguishes us from others in order to be something. To the extent that we try to be like others, we convert ourselves into zombies.”

“…always moved by a constant attention, by a constant desire of curiosity and of knowing without fear. This is audacity. It is the secret to life.”

“The unconscious uses metaphors. If, for example, you give someone who has caused you a lot of pain a ball painted black, and you tell him, “Take this. It is your cancer, not mine. Keep it.” This is a metaphor.”

“You don’t have to fall victim to that reality; what you have to do is navigate it, overcome the winds and sandstorms. Amid the storms at sea and the signs, you must move forward calmly and look toward the port you’re heading for… if a ship crosses the sea without a purpose, it will arrive at no port. What prevents life from devouring us is having a purpose. The higher it is, the further it will carry us. As a mystic, I have but one aim: to know God. Not the God talked about everywhere, but this incredible thing that moves the universe. Further still: to dissolve myself calmly into that. This is my purpose, and for that, I do not need to be a guru, or a visionary, or any sort of paper doll.”

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Turn Your Life Into Art: Lessons in Psychomagic from the San Francisco Underground

By: Caveat Magister

For a few years now, I’ve been experimenting in experiences. Experiences like Knights of the Round Stool and WONDER WANDER. Experiences that evoke depth, aliveness, meaning — and at their best — maybe even revelation and transformation.

When I began, I had no idea what I was doing. But through trial and error and by following intuition, started figuring some things out. Last fall, a month before the third annual WONDER WANDER, emailing back and forth with cameraman Paul Shelton, he wrote:

I like your idea of creating specific experiences for the group. It's actually pretty similar to a book I'm reading now called “Turn Your Life into Art: Lessons in Psychomagic from the San Francisco Underground” all about experience design.

It seems so naive to me now, but I didn’t know anyone else was doing this sort of thing. I had never head of experience design. Or psychomagic. I’d soon realize I did know of an experience the “San Francisco Underground” puts on. You probably have too. It’s called “Burning Man”… somehow I had never looked deeper into what Burning Man was about.

I ordered the book. And it turns out, all this new and interesting ground I thought I was breaking in hosting these participatory experiences had already been traversed. It was already known! Turn Your Life Into Art is a literal how-to guide for doing what I have been trying to do! People have been designing out-of-this-world experiences for decades in San Francisco. Burning Man was an eighty-thousand person gathering based on many of the same principles I thought I was discovering! I felt like a wizard inventing magic, only to discover Hogwarts already exists and enrolls eighty-thousand students each year.

If hosting deep, participatory, transformative experiences interests you, read this book. It is phenomenal, and a whole lot more than an instruction manual. Part how-to, part history lesson, and part memoir, Turn Your Life Into Art paints a picture of an underground scene that created experiences designed to blow minds, breakdown psychological barriers, and open people up to the possible. The ideas and principles are powerful and totally legit (I have spent the past few years figuring out some of this stuff on my own and have come to many of the same conclusions). The fun you can have with this stuff can change lives, including your own.

Favorite Quotes:

“They go to bars because they want to have an experience, and more than just an experience of pleasure or friendship or dancing… they want an experience in which something unexpected can happen and they can play a role in it.”

“Chicken would tell the crowd that since this was a circus with no talent, anybody could join. They had the opportunity, tonight, before the bus left in the wee hours of the morning, to run away and join the circus. This was really happening. They could really do that, if they wanted.”

“Our personal mythologies are subjectively real to us as the laws of physics, and to the extent that they change, we’re used to them changing very slowly, over time. To have a sudden change to your inner notions of what is possible is not traumatic, even if it makes you fell vulnerable and baffled, is equally powerful, but wondrous. When effective experiences like this can leave you with the opposite of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (Post-Transcendence Serenity Discovery), a sense of awe and wonder that infuses the rest of your life and that you cannot shake easily.”

“In the 21st century, religion isn’t the opium of the masses — being entertained without being engaged and challenged is.”

“And this is my bet with you: no matter how amazing Disney World can make the experience, there is no experience Disney World can create that will be as thrilling as breaking into Disney World.”

“People who don’t see their choices having an impact withdraw from the process. Once they do that, it is exponentially more difficult to reach their unconscious. Their daimonic selves will not see any growth potential in a scenario in which they do not really matter. At this point people are just putting one foot in front of the other until the experience is over and they can go home.”

“Burning Man creates infinite psychomagical gardens. Participants literally co-create a city together, based on their idiosyncratic passions, and then get to explore it. You never know what’s going to happen when you cross the street.”

“One of the reasons psychomagical experiences are so important is precisely that most of us reach a stasis point in our lives where we have taken all the kinds of risks we are able to convince ourselves to take, and are not able to convince ourselves to take the remaining risks that would be good for us. We protect ourselves with complexes, with projections, we cannot see what is standing right in front of us. Deep down we usually know what we need to do. We just buried the urges under piles of anxiety and dread masquerading as sensible fears and precautions. The urge to psychological integration gets hidden below the toxic manifestations of our inner mythology. Going through psychomagical experiences, even the absurd and silly and pointless (sometimes especially those) puts us in vulnerable positions where we would not put ourselves; it motivates our daimonic impulses to grow and self-healing to take the risks we’ve been avoiding; and makes sure our unconscious psyches are paying rapt attention.”

“Trying to make meaningful art in a society that doesn’t believe in anything requires breaking down the rigidity of specialization, the segregation of functions and activities, both within the personality and within the community as a whole. It means reintroducing the artist in his role as shaman - a mystical priestly, and political figure in prehistoric cultures, who, after coming close to death through accident or severe illness, because a visionary and a healer. The shaman’s function is to balance and center society, integrating many planes of life-experience, and defining the culture’s relationship to the cosmos. When these various domains (the human and divine) fall out of balance, it is the shaman’s responsibility to restore the lost harmony and reestablish equilibrium. Only an individual who successfully masters his actions in both realms is a master shaman.”

— Suzi Gablik

“That’s because Burning Man has a participatory ethos instead — everybody contributes. It is an amateur ethos which means that while some people are better at things than others there is no exclusively “professional class” who are the only people allowed to create or do certain kinds of work. That doesn’t refer to just psychomagic, but it applies there all the same: Burning Man doesn’t anoint artists as a priestly class, because it wants everybody to be doing art.”

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The Dice Man

By: Luke Rhinehart

The Dice Man shakes things up. Playing with the overlooked role of chance in the universe and our lives, the novel chronicles the wild exploits of Dr. Luke Rhinehart, a bored psychologist who decides to make all decisions with the roll of a dice.

With counter-culture subversiveness, Dr. Rhinehart lays siege to planning and reason. While surely overdoing it at times, he ultimately hits his mark in offering deeply intoxicating perspectives of possibility and chance.

Dependent on their values, people tend to love or hate this book. It was loaned to me by eighty-seven year old, fun-loving, deeply engrossed-in-life Ed Buryn, author of Vagabonding in Europe and Vagabonding in America. A great rascal of a human I am unsurprised totally loved the book.

After reading, I threw a convinced half a dozen friends to participate in a nine day “dice life” experiment with me. A couple of them still carry a die around today. I still dream of hosting a “dice party” some fateful night.

Update: I threw a “dice party” at WONDER WANDER 2022. Infused with the philosophy and results of chance, it was very rad. A year later, someone literally tattooed a pair of dice on their arm to mark the experience and remember to “dance on the feet of Chance.”

Favorite Quotes:

“My aim is to bring out a psychic state in which my patient begins to experiment with his own nature — a state of fluidity, change and growth, in which there is no longer anything eternally fixed and hopelessly petrified.”

— Carl Jung

“What else might the dice dictate? Well, that I stop writing silly analytic articles; that I sell all my stock, or buy all I could afford; that I make love to arlene in our double bed while my wife slept on the other side; that I take a trip to San Francisco, Hawaii, Peking... I might become a college professor... a stock broker... a real estate salesman... zen master... used car salesman... My choice of profession suddenly seemed infinite. That I didn’t want to be a used car salesman, didn’t respect the profession, seemed almost a limitation on my part, an idiosyncrasy. My mind expanded with possibilities. The boredom I had been feeling for so long seemed unnecessary. I pictured myself saying after each random decision, “the die is cast.””

“Becoming the dice man was difficult because it involved a continual risking of failure in the eyes if the adult world. As a dice man I “failed” (in the second sense) again and again. I was rejected by Lil, by the children, by my esteemed colleagues, by my patients, by strangers, by the image of society’s values branded into me by thirty years of living. In the second sense of failure I was continually failing and suffering, but in the first sense I never failed... From children to men we cage ourselves in patterns to avoid facing new problems and possible failure; after a while men become bored because there are no new problems. Such is life under the fear of failure. Fail! Lose! Be bad! Play, risk, dare.”

“How we laugh and take joy in the irrational, the purposeless and the absurd. Our longing for these bursts out of us against all the restraints of morality and reason. Riots, revolutions, catastrophes: how they exhilarate us. How depressing it is to read the same news day after day. Oh God, if only something would happen: meaning if patterns would only break down.”

“To change man, the audience by which he judges himself must be changed. A man is defined by his audience: by the people, institutions, authors, magazines, movies heroes, philosophers by whom he pictures himself being cheered and booed.”

“It’s the job of dice therapy, like the job of revolution in the world as a whole, to enlarge free territory.”

“At first they often cast the dice and think: “Now I must have the willpower to do it.” That’s bad. The illusion that an ego controls or has “willpower” must be abandoned. The student’s got to see his relation to the dice first as that of a baby in a rubber raft on a flooded river: each motion of the river is pleasant; he doesn’t need to know where he’s going or when, if ever, he’ll arrive. Motion is all. And then he’s got to reach the point where he and the Die are each playing with one another. It’s not that the person has gained equality with the Die, it’s that the human vessel is now so infused with the Spirit of the Die that it’s become in effect a Sacred Vehicle, a Second Cube. The student has become the Die.”

“Most of us go through our lives from one thing to the next mechanically, without thought. We study, write, eat, flirt, fornicate, fuck as the result of habitual patterns. “Pop” comes a dice veto: it wakes us up.”

“But what is this nature of man you’re so gung-ho to defend? Look at yourself. Whatever happened to the real inventor in you? to the lover? or the adventurer? or the saint? or the women? You killed them. Look at yourself and ask: “Is this image the Image of God in which man was created?” Dr. Rhinehart looked from Peerman to Cobblestone to Weinburger to Moon to Mann. “Blasphemy. God creates, experiments, rides the wind. He doesn’t wallow in the accumulated feces of His past.””

“Over all things stand the heaven Accident, the heaven Innocence, the heaven Prankishness, the heaven Chance. And Chance is the most ancient Divinity of the world, and behold, I come to deliver all things from their bondage under Purpose and to restore on the throne to reign over all things the heaven Chance. The mind is in bondage to Purpose and Will, but I shall free it in Divine Accident and Prankishness when I teach that in all one thing is impossible: reason. A little wisdom is possible indeed, just enough to confuse things nicely, but this blessed certainty I have found in every atom, molecule, substance, plant, creature or star: they would rather dance of the feet of Chance.”

““Terry, the reason you must have faith in the Die is simple.”

”Yes.”

”The Die is God.””

“In the beginning was Chance, and Chance was with God and Chance was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things were made by Chance and without him not anything made that was made. In Chance was life and life was the light of men.”

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The Wisdom of Insecurity

By: Alan Watts

The Wisdom of Insecurity is the book that I — as an agnostic, scientifically-trained human with an inkling there might be “something more” but was put off by the dogma of most religions — was looking for.

It uproots many western culture’s most foundational assumptions, from individualism and future focus to our egoic sense of soul, and offers how to aim our awareness in a very different way at this eternally present moment (which, as Watts so poignantly points out, is really all there is).

This book is a maker of mystics, hurling a monkey wrench into vital cogs of the mental mechanics of the cultural approach. Riddled with paradox, it explains why those who have the most feel the least secure, moves purpose from future-focused to present-found, and offers a shift identity from individual to All.

More than any book I’ve ever read, The Wisdom of Insecurity makes it so plain and obvious: here and now is where it’s at.

Favorite Quotes:

“If you try to capture running water in a bucket, it is clear that you do not understand it and that you will alway be disappointed, for the water in the bucket does not run. To “have” running water you must let go of it and let it run. The same is true of life and of God.”

“The movement in which I am a pattern or convolution began incalculable ages before the (conventionally isolated) event called birth, and will continue long after the event called death. Only words and conventions can isolate us from the entirely undefinable something which is everything.”

“Religion wants to assure the future beyond death, and science wants to assure it until death. But tomorrow and plans for tomorrow can have no significance at all unless you are in full contact with the reality of the present, since it is in the present and only in the present that you can live. There is no other reality than the present reality, so that, even if one were to live for endless ages, to live for the future would be to everlastingly miss the point.”

“It must be obvious, from the start, that there is a contradiction in wanting to be perfectly secure in a universe whose very nature is momentariness and fluidity. But the contradiction lies a little deeper than the mere conflict between the desire for security and the fact of change. If I want to be secure, that is, protected from the flux of life, I am wanting to be separate from life. Yet it is this very sense of separateness which makes me feel insecure. To be secure means to isolate and fortify the “I,” but it is just the feeling of being an isolated “I” which makes me feel lonely and afraid. In other words, the more security I get, the more I shall want.”

“From one point of view, each moment is so elusive and so brief that we cannot even think about it before it has gone. From another point of view, this moment is always here, since we know no other moment than the present moment. It is always dying, always becoming the past more rapidly than imagination can conceive. Yet at the same time it is always being born, always new, emerging just as rapidly from the complete unknown which we call the future. Thinking about it almost makes you breathless.”

“Once this is understood, it is really absurd to say that there is a choice or an alternative between these two ways of life, between resisting the stream in a fruitless panic, and having one’s eyes opened to a new world, transformed, ever new with wonder... There is no rule but “Look!””

“Faith is not clinging but letting go.”

“Obviously, it all exists for this moment. It is a dance, and when you are dancing you are not intent on getting somewhere. You go round and round, but not under the illusion that you are pursuing something, or fleeing from the jaws of hell. How long have the planets been circling the sun? Are they getting anywhere, and do they go faster and faster in order to arrive? The meaning and purpose of dancing is the dance.”

“From this other and, we think, deeper point of view, religion is not a system of predictions. Its doctrines have to do not with the future and the everlasting, but with the present and eternal. They are not a set of beliefs and hopes but, on the contrary, a set of graphic symbols about present experience.”

“It is obvious that the only interesting people are interested people, and to be completely interested is to have forgotten about “I.””

“What he does not know seems to increase in geometric progression to what he knows. Steadily he approaches the point where what is unknown is not a mere blank space in a web of words but a window in the mind, a window whose name is not ignorance but wonder.”

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The Denial of Death

By: Ernest Becker

Following the “red pill or blue pill” metaphor of The Matrix, The Denial of Death is the most “red pill” book I have ever read.

Ernest Becker takes us on a philosophical journey through the perspectives of some of history’s greatest minds — Kierkegaard, Maslow, Freud, Rank, and others — on the human situation and “why” of human existence, exposing some of our most fundamental illusions. As we grow up, our perceptions narrow and we adopt a few vital lies to shield ourselves from the awesome mystery and terror of being a temporary, living, breathing, eating, pooping creature.

After exposing these illusions, the book stands on the shoulders of giants and examines them, wrestling with the obvious question: where to go from here? It applies a more western, psychological lens to giving oneself over to a Higher Power, why “the road to creativity passes so close to the madhouse,” and delves into handful of other more mystic concepts in a way even the most secular, scientific-minded individual will find approachable.

At sixteen years old, a mosquito bite and bout with meningoencephalitis stripped me of my ability to “deny death,” utterly altering my outlook on life. I suspect The Denial of Death was a particularly powerful read for me, simply because it explained so much. Yet — as the book makes so clear — the main function of the cultural-hero-system we all live by is to “deny death.” I suspect this book will rock the world of just about anyone.

Favorite Quotes:

“As Aristotle somewhere put it: luck is when the guy next to you gets hit with the arrow.”

“Heroism is first and foremost a reflex of the terror of death. We admire most the courage to face death; we give such valor our highest and most constant adoration; it moves us deeply in our hearts because we have doubts about how brave we ourselves would be. When we see a man bravely facing his own extinction we rehearse the greatest victory we can imagine. And so the hero has been the center of human honor and acclaim since probably the beginning of human evolution. But even before that our primate ancestors deferred to others who were powerful and courageous and ignored those who were cowardly. Man has elevated animal courage into a cult.”

“Why does man accept to live a trivial life? Because of the danger of a full horizon of experience of course. This is the deeper motivation of philistinism, that it celebrates the triumph over possibility, over freedom. Philistinism knows its real enemy: freedom is dangerous. If you follow it too willingly it threatens to pull you into the air; if you give it up too wholly, you become a prisoner of necessity. The safest thing is to toe the mark of what is socially possible.”

“If we put this whole progression in terms of our discussion of the possibilities of heroism, it goes like this: man breaks through the bounds of merely cultural heroism; he destroys the character lie that had him perform as a hero in the everyday social scheme of things; and by doing so he opens himself up to infinity, to the possibility of cosmic heroism, to the very service of God. His life thereby acquires ultimate value instead of merely social and cultural, historic value. He links his secret inner-self, his authentic talent, his deepest feelings of uniqueness, his inner yearning for absolute significance, to the very ground of creation. Out of the ruins of the broken cultural self there remains the mystery of the private, invisible, inner self which yearned for ultimate significance, for cosmic heroism. The invisible mystery at the heart of every creature now attains cosmic significance by affirming its connection with the invisible mystery at the heart of creation. This is the meaning of faith.”

“But the recognition of such social constraints still leaves unexplained the inner urge of the human being to feel good and right — the very thing that awed Kant seems to exist independent of any rules: as far as we can tell — as I put elsewhere — “all organisms like to ‘feel good’ about themselves.” They push themselves to maximize this feeling. As philosophers have long noted, it is as though the heart of nature is pulsating with its own joyful self-expansion.”

“If he gives into his natural feeling for cosmic dependence, the desire to be a part of something bigger, it puts him at peace and at oneness, gives him a sense of self-expansion in a larger beyond, and so heightens his being, giving him truly a feeling of transcendent value... He can expand his self-feeling not only by [this] Agape merger but also by the other ontological motive Eros, the urge for more life, for exciting experience, for the development of self-powers, for developing the uniqueness of the individual creature, the impulsion to stick out of nature and shine... it is the urge for individuation: how do I realize my distinctive gifts, make my own contribution to the world through my own self-expansion?

Now we see what we might call the ontological or creature tragedy that is so particular to man: If he gives into Agape he risks failing to develop himself, his active contribution to the rest of life. If he expands Eros too much he risks cutting himself off from natural dependency, from duty to a larger creation. ”

“By pushing the problem of man to its limits, schizophrenia also reveals the nature of creativity. If you are physically unprogrammed in the cultural causa-sui project, then you have to invent your own: you don’t vibrate to anyone else’s tune. You see that the fabrications of those around you are a lie, a denial of truth — a truth that usually takes the form of showing the terror of the human condition more fully than most men experience it. The creative person becomes then, in art, literature, and religion the mediator of natural terror and a new way to triumph over it. He reveals the darkness and the dread of the human condition and fabricates a new symbolic transcendence over it. This has been the function of the creative deviant from the shamans through Shakespeare.”

“When we are young we are often puzzled by the fact that each person we admire seems to have a different version of what life ought to be, what a good man is, how to live, and so on. If we are especially sensitive it seems more than puzzling, it is disheartening. What most people usually do is follow one person’s ideas, and then another’s, depending on who looms largest on one’s horizon at the time. The one with the deepest voice, the strongest appearance, the most authority and success is usually one who gets momentary allegiance; and we try to pattern our ideals after him. But as life goes on we get a perspective on this, and all those different versions of truth become a little pathetic. Each person thinks that he has the formula for triumphing over life’s limitations and knows with authority what it means to be a man, and he usually tries to win a following for his particular patent. Today we know that people try so hard to win converts for their point of view because it is more than merely an outlook on life: it is an immortality formula.”

“Religion is an experience and not merely a set of intellectual concepts to meditate on.”

“What do we mean by the lived truth of creation? We have to mean the world as it appears to men in a condition of unrepression; that is, as it would appear to creatures who assessed their true puniness in the face of the overwhelmingness and majesty of the universe, of the unspeakable miracle of even the single created object, as it probably appeared to the earliest men on the planet and to those extrasensitive types who have filled the roles of shaman, prophet, saint, poet, and artist.”

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The Overstory

By: Richard Powers

In addition to being one of the best written novels I’ve ever read, The Overstory is an invitation to reconnect to something huge we lost long ago. While told through the tales of humans, the real, overarching story is that of trees, ecosystems, and life itself on planet Earth. 

As a novel, I found it an astonishing complex, brilliant weave of the lives of human characters touched and forever altered, by trees. A captivating read rife with wisdom and deep in philosophy. What really mattered to me, though, was that it felt like a five hundred page homage to the hard-to-see-today truth my favorite Ed Abbey quote points to:

“A weird lovely fantastic object out of nature, like Delicate Arch, has the curious ability to remind us — like rock and sunlight and wind and wilderness — that out there is a different world, older and greater and deeper by far than ours, a world which surrounds and sustains the little world of men as sea and sky sustain a ship.  The shock of the real.  For a little while we are again able to see, as a child sees, a world of marvels.  For a few moments we discover that nothing can be taken for granted, for if this ring of stone is marvelous all which shaped it is marvelous, and our journey here on earth, able to see and touch and hear in the midst of tangible and mysterious things-in-themselves, is the most strange and daring of all adventures.”

The Overstory is an invitation overboard the “little world of men” into “different world, older and greater and deeper by far than ours,” a world we all come from, and I believe, all deeply, unconsciously miss — a connection with the whole of life we lost many generations ago.

Favorite Quotes:

“But it’s Idaho, and when you spend all your hours with horses, your soul expands a bit until the ways of men reveal themselves to be no more than a costume party you’d be well advised not to take at face value.”

“Time stops. He lies on his shattered back, looking upward. The dome above him hovers, a cracked shell about to fall in shards all around him. A thousand — a thousand thousand — green-tipped, splitting fingerlings fold over him, praying and threatening. Bark disintegrates; wood clarifies. The trunk turns into stacks of spreading metropolis, networks of conjoined cells pulsing with energy and liquid sun, water rising through long thin reeds, rings of them bonded together into pipes that draw dissolved minerals up through their waving tips while sun-made sustenance drops down in tubes just inside them. A colossal, rising, reaching, stretching space elevator of a billion independent parts, shuttling the air into the sky and storing the sky deep underground, sorting possibility out from nothing: the most perfect piece of self-writing code that his eyes could hope to see. Then his eyes close in shock and Neely shuts down.”

“What frightens people most will one day turn to wonder.”

“The branch wants only to go on branching. The point of the game is to keep playing.”

“… they’re all imprisoned in a shoe box, and they have no idea. I just want to shake them and yell, Get out of yourselves, damn it! Look around! But they can’t Nicky. Everything alive is just outside of their field of view.”

“But people have no idea what time is. They think it’s a line, spinning out from three seconds behind them, then vanishing just as fast into the three seconds of fog just ahead. They can’t see that time is just one spreading ring wrapped around another, outward and outward until the thinnest skin of Now depends for its being on the enormous mass of everything that has already died.”

“The books diverge and radiate, as fluid as finches on isolated islands. But they share a core so obvious it passes for a given. Every one imagines that fear and anger, violence and desire, rage laced with the surprise capacity to forgive — character — is all that matters in the end. It’s a child’s creed, of course, just one small step from the belief that the Creator of the Universe would care to dole out sentences like a judge in federal court. To be human is to confuse a satisfying story with a meaningful one, and to mistake life for something huge with two legs. No: life is mobilized on a vastly larger scale, and the world is failing precisely because no novel can make the contest for the world seem as compelling as the struggles between a few lost people.”

“We’re cashing in a billion years of planetary savings bonds and blowing it on assorted bling. And what Douglas Pavlicek wants to know is why this is so easy to see when you’re by yourself in a cabin on a hillside, and almost impossible to believe once you step out of the house and join several billion folks doubling-down on the status quo.”

“Why? Why am I sick? What’s wrong with me? Loneliness. But not for people. You’re mourning a thing you never even knew.
What thing?
A great, spoked, wild, woven-together place beyond replacing. One you didn’t even know was yours to lose.
Where did it go?
Into making us. But it still wants something.”

“It strikes her that she envies him. His years of enforced tranquility, the patience of his slowed mind, the expansion of his blinkered senses. He can watch the dozen bare trees in the backyard for hours and see something intricate and surprising, sufficient to his desires, while she — she is still trapped in a hunger that rushes past everything.”

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The Book

By: Alan Watts

If you, like me, have lived your life with a largely unquestioned concept of “the soul” — the separate, eternal spirit inherent in each human being — The Book will shake at the very foundations of your reality. Whether The Book will shift the very foundations of your reality, I do not know, but I finished it a month ago and grow increasingly confident it did mine.

The subtitle, “On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are,” refers to the “sensation of the self” and our unwillingness to examine it. In his typical flowery yet tight, brilliant yet simple word and metaphor, Alan Watts explores the implications of this tiny yet titanic shift in the idea of “self” — a true linchpin to our understanding of the world in which change radiates out in the most profound and jarring of ways throughout all aspects of life.

Whether you feel this blasphemous or righteous, frightening or riveting, I encourage you to give The Book and the “self” some examination. At minimum, it is fascinating. And trippy. But more important: the more schools of thought you lose yourself in exploration of and feel you have found the answer and then lose that feeling again, the deeper connection you sow to the insurmountable mystery of existence. Whether or not you jive with the “universal perspective” is less important than the willingness to entertain other perspectives, to get beyond the dogma of perspectives, and live in recognition of the inherent mystery of being that all perspectives attempt to explain.

Favorite Quotes:

“We do not need a new religion or a new bible. We need a new experience—a new feeling of what it is to be “I.” The lowdown (which is, of course, the secret and profound view) on life is that our normal sensation of self is a hoax, or, at best, a temporary role that we are playing, or have been conned into playing—with our own tacit consent, just as every hypnotized person is basically willing to be hypnotized. The most strongly enforced of all known taboos is the taboo against knowing who or what you really are behind the mask of your apparently separate, independent, and isolated ego.”

“The sensation of “I” as a lonely and isolated center of being is so powerful and commonsensical, and so fundamental to our modes of speech and thought, to our laws and social institutions, that we cannot experience selfhood except as something superficial in the scheme of the universe. I seem to be a brief light that flashes but once in all the aeons of time—a rare, complicated, and all-too-delicate organism on the fringe of biological evolution, where the wave of life bursts into individual, sparkling, and multicolored drops that gleam for a moment only to vanish forever. Under such conditioning it seems impossible and even absurd to realize that myself does not reside in the drop alone, but in the whole surge of energy which ranges from the galaxies to the nuclear fields in my body. At this level of existence “I” am immeasurably old; my forms are infinite and their comings and goings are simply pulses or vibrations of a single and eternal flow of energy.”

“Why not sit back and let things take their course? Simply because it is part of “things taking their course” that I write. As a human being it is just my nature to enjoy and share philosophy. I do this in the same way that some birds are eagles and some doves, some flowers are lilies and some roses.”

“It is a fight — a fight haunted by a sense of chronic frustration, because we are doing something as crazy as trying to keep the mountains and get rid of the valleys.”

“However, there is a third possibility. The individual may be understood neither as an isolated person nor as an expendable humanoid working machine. He may be seen, instead, as one particular focal point at which the whole universe expresses itself — as an incarnation of the Self, of the Godhead, or whatever one may choose to call IT. This view retains and, indeed amplifies our apprehension that the individual is in some way sacred. At the same time it dissolves the paradox of the personal ego, which is to have attained the “precious state” of being a unique person at the price of perpetual anxiety for one’s survival.”

“Thus bamboozled, the individual — instead of fulfilling his unique function in the world — is exhausted and frustrated in efforts to accomplish self-contradictory goals. Because he is now so largely defined as a separate person caught up in a mindless an alien universe, his principle task is to get a one-up on the universe and conquer nature. This is palpably absurd, and since the task is never achieved, the individual is taught to live and work for some future in which the impossible will at last happen, if not for him, then at least for his children. We are thus breeding a type of being incapable of living in the present — that is, of really living.”

“For if you know what you want, an will be content with it, you can be trusted. But if you do not know, your desires are limitless and no one can tell you how to deal with you. Nothing satisfies an individual incapable of enjoyment. I am not saying that American and European corporations are run by greedy villains who live off the fat of the land at everyone else’s expense. The point becomes clear only as one realizes, with compassion and sorrow, that many of our most powerful and wealthy men are miserable dupes and captives in a treadmill, who — with the rarest of exceptions — have not the ghost of a notion how to spend and enjoy money.”

“If, then, after understanding, at least in theory, that the ego trick is a hoax and that, beneath everything, “I” and “universe” are one, you ask, “So what? What is the next step of practical application” — I will answer that the absolutely vital thing is to consolidate your understanding, to become capable of enjoyment, of living in the present, and of the discipline which this involves. Without this you have nothing to give — to the cause of peace or racial integration, to starving Hindus and Chinese, or even your closest friends. Without this, all social concern will be meddlesome meddling, and all work for the future will be planned disaster.”

“When this new sensation of self arises, it is at once exhilarating and a little disconcerting. It is like the moment when you first got the knack of swimming or riding a bicycle. There is the feeling that you are not doing it yourself, but that it is somehow happening on its own, and you wonder whether you will lose it — as indeed you may if you try forcibly to hold on to it. In immediate contrast to the old feeling, there is indeed a certain passivity to the sensation, as if you were a leaf blown along by the wind, until you realize that you are both the leaf and the wind. The world outside your skin is just as much you as the world inside: they move together inseparably, and at first you feel a little out of control because the world outside is so much vaster than the world inside. Yet you soon discover that you are able to go ahead with ordinary activities — to work and make decisions as ever, though somehow this is less of a drag. Your body is no longer a corpse which the ego has to animate and lug around. There is a feeling of the ground holding you up, and of hills lifting you when you climb them. Air breathes itself in and out of your lungs, and instead of looking and listening, light and sound come to you on their own. Eyes see and ears hear as wind blows and water flows. All space becomes your mind. Time carries you along like a river, but never flows out of the present: the more it goes, the more it stays, and you no longer have to fight or kill it.”

“As it is, we are merely bolting our lives — gulping down undigested experiences as fast as we can stuff them in — because awareness of our own existence is so superficial and so narrow that nothing seems to us more boring than simple being. If I ask you what you did, saw, heard, smelled, touched and tasted yesterday, I am likely to get nothing more than the thin, sketchy outline of the few things that you noticed, and of those only what you thought worth remembering. Is it surprising that an existence so experienced seems so empty and bare that its hunger for an infinite future is insatiable? But suppose you could answer, “It would take me forever to tell you, and I am much too interested in what’s happening now.” How is it possible that a being with such sensitive jewels as the eyes, such enchanted musical instruments as the ears, and such a fabulous arabesque of nerves as the brain can experience itself as anything less than a god? And, when you consider that this incalculably subtle organism is inseparable from the still more marvelous patterns of its environment — from the minutest electrical designs to the whole company of the galaxies — how is it conceivable that this incarnation of all eternity can be bored with being?”

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Practical Obsession

By: N. Nosirrah

A direct, heartless, at times brilliant assault on the known. If Hunter S. Thompson had set out to find Buddha-like enlightenment rather than to be the next F. Scott Fitzgerald, I suspect something like Practical Obsession would have been the result.

A quick, brash 116 page read, this “autobiography” without storyline recounts the life of “n. Nosirrah” (to spill the beans, that’s Harrison spelled backwards, I believe the book to be a more of a raving, mystic attempt to convey by a wise man named Steven Harrison). The book is a takedown of the idea of self, and suggests that “you” and “I” are not individuals, but false concepts momentarily held by life itself. Even if you believe this is utter nonsense, the cascade of implications are a jarring, fascinating, potentially existential crisis inducing trip.

From disgust to fanaticism, I sense that people will have a remarkable variety of reactions to reading this book. Reading over the below quotes, I seem to have pulled the interspersed gems of a more clean lucidity from among what is also often meandering and brutish — it’s a curious read.

Favorite Quotes:

“We exist only in our concept of our self; that concept is itself just a form of resistance to the vast nothingness that awaits the silence of the mind. We maintain our busy life of the mind as a kind of anxiety about our emptiness, and that anxiety is what we think of as our self. We say we want peace, but peace is the end of anxiety, and therefore the end of the self. So what we really want is to want peace, not to have it, because wanting peace is more anxiety and therefore more self. To end wanting peace and to simply be peace is to be nothing and that is a fearless state, or rather, a fearless non-state.”

“You will be free when you look death directly in the eye and embrace that finality, a finality that is not in some future, and is not now, but a death that has already happened. You will be free when you are not. You will be free in a moment, and that moment will be celebrated at your funeral because most will not recognize it until then. Your liberation is the strange gift of death — great intensification, total mystery, raw emotion without any resolution and the relentless ongoingness of everything else as if nothing happened at all, which is the paradoxical aspect, that, in fact, nothing at all has happened.”

“Those who walked by me on the streets were not experiencing their life fundamentally but rather as it is socially constructed, where certain behaviors are clearly better than others. They are lost in the fallacy of occupying only the social construct rather than the whole perspective from phenomenological to social.”

“Drop the idea of self and you don’t need to incarnate, reincarnate, or disincarnate. Nothing left to die or be born, just life itself, which is all their ever was and all their ever will be. You just picked up that funny meme that you exist in separation and so you strove to build that retirement account while you raised those kids and argued with your spouse and cut your lawn and all the while fearing you might die, which was just a diversion from the real issue, which is that you were never born, just the idea of you that your parents gave you and their parents gave them. Your real issue was that you were a concept without independent reality, an idea built on agreements made from ideas, you, in short, are a house of cards in a hall of mirrors built on quicksand on a sinking continent that is part of a dying planet falling into a sun going supernova before itself dying and falling with all that surrounds into a black hole made up of nothing but super compressed nothingness and infinite gravity. No wonder you have taken up spirituality to avoid your dilemma.”

“Compassion is that knowing what you see is what you are.”

“I went up afterward and told him Bukowski said, “Don’t try.” He said to me, “Don’t try misses the point. The issue isn’t trying, it is trying to act differently than you already are. That is a futile fight with what is. Everything that needs to happen springs from that space of what you are, but what you are is dynamic.””

“As the stories are told and confirmed, over and over, you will come to remember them as if they actually occurred. Nothing occurs. Everything is story, everything is constructed. The past only exists as you build it, and its burden is only the one that you take on by your own creation.”

“All that I have seen, all that I have achieved, all that I have become amounts to the dust on my desk as I write this. All that you will ever accumulate in your life, all the honors and all the failures, all the wounds and all the love, all of this in its totality is dust. This is not pejorative, it is an invitation to release yourself from the burden of collecting memories and experiences. Imagine a life that is freed from the past, open and available to the nuances of full contact with the world.”

“We can utilize the old because we know what it is, we don’t see it as current, and in that contact with the actual we can extract utility from the past without deluding ourselves that it is still alive.”

“You are that, nothing less than the movement of the universe creating something out of nothing, and nothing out of something. This is the story of my life, it is the story of your life, and it is, in the end, the autobiography of life itself.”

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The Last Temptation of Christ

By: Nikos Kazantzakis

Along with many other books that winter, I read The Last Temptation of Christ in the silent, fluorescent, faded breakroom of a Flagstaff, Arizona motel. Often with only a dozen or so guests to check-in each three to eleven PM shift, there was a lot of downtime.

At the time, I was particularly feeling the weight of the path I had chosen to walk in life. This depressing motel, splitting a bedroom and rent with my in-college brother, the heaviness of winter — this innate call into the unknown I had answered with the past five years of my life, “it brought me here?” I couldn’t help but ask myself.

But the way Kazantzakis’s Jesus profoundly struggles, doubts, and ultimately overcomes in those five hundred pages… it was a molotov cocktail defiantly hucked into the waning fires of my spirit. I closed that book for the final time and looked up and suddenly loved those rusty, white-aging-to-yellow lockers on the wall, my soggy peanut butter and jelly sandwich, and all that my journey touched.

Initially, I assumed it was my situation at that moment that triggered such a powerful response in me. But well over a year later, and my eyes run across that book on my (actual) bookshelf, and I ring with this crazy emotional charge and want the whole of my path, not just the sunny side of it.

I include The Last Temptation of Christ among the best I’ve ever read.

Favorite Quotes:

“The Last Temptation of Christ fanned the inquisitional flames all the more, but by this time Kazantzakis—who had experienced thirty years of non-recognition and then, when recognition came, the complete misrepresentation of his aims—had learned the Nietzschean lesson that the struggle for freedom must be fought not only without fear but without hope.

He saw Jesus, like Odysseus, as engaged in this struggle, and as a prototype of the free man. In The Last Temptation of Christ Jesus is a superman, one who by force of will achieves a victory over matter, or, in other words, is able, because of his allegiance to the life force within him, to transmute matter into spirit. But this overall victory is really a succession of particular triumphs as he frees himself from the various forms of bondage—family, bodily pleasures, the state, fear of death. Since, for Kazantzakis, freedom is not a reward for the struggle but rather the very process of struggle itself, it is paramount that Jesus be constantly tempted by evil in such a way that he feel its attractiveness and even succumb to it, for only in this way can his ultimate rejection of temptation have meaning.”

— P.A. Bien

““Judas, my brother,” the youth repeated, “the crucifier suffers more than the crucified.””

“The Lord puffs and wants to incinerate the world, and up come the snakes to make love! For a moment the old man’s mind succumbed to the enticement and wandered. But suddenly he shuddered. Everything is of God, he reflected; everything has two meanings, one manifest, one hidden. The common people comprehend only what is manifest. They say, ‘this is a snake,’ and their minds go no further; but the mind which dwells in God sees what lies behind the visible, sees the hidden meaning. These snakes which crept out today in front of the doors of the cell and began to hiss at precisely this moment, just after the son of Mary’s confession, must assuredly have a deep, concealed meaning. But what is that meaning?”

“Where? Toward what? They themselves did not know; all they knew was that they were suffocating.”

“The more he approached the people and perceived their anger-filled eyes and the dark, tortured fierceness of their expressions, the more his heart stirred, the more his bowels flooded with deep sympathy and love. These are the people, he reflected. They are all brothers, every one of them, but they do not know it—and that is why they suffer. If they knew it, what celebrations there would be, what hugging and kissing, what happiness!”

“Look at the faith of the birds in the air. They neither sow nor reap, and yet the Father feeds them. Consider the flowers of the earth. They do not spin or weave, but what king could ever dress in such magnificence? Do not be concerned about your body, what it will eat, what it will drink or wear. Your body was dust and will return to dust. Let your concern be for the kingdom of heaven and for your immortal soul!”

“Jesus smiled and looked into the old man’s eyes. This was not the first time he had seen rapacious jaws, the fat naps and quickly-moving eyes of the glutted. They made him shudder. These people ate, drank and laughed, thought the whole world belonged to them; they stole, danced, whored—and had not the slightest idea that they were burning in the fires of hell. It was only at rare times, in sleep, that they opened their eyes and saw… Jesus looked at the old glutton, looked at his flesh, his eyes, his fear—and once more, the truth inside him became a tale.”

““He who drinks of the water of this well will thirst again,” Jesus answered, “but he who drinks the water that I shall give him will not thirst again for all eternity.”

“The old law instructs you to honor your father and your mother; but I say, Do not imprison your heart within your parents’ home. Let it emerge and enter all homes, embrace the whole of Israel from Mount Hermon to the desert of Idumea and even beyond: east and west—the entire Universe. Our father is God, our mother is Earth. We are half soil and half sky. To honor your father and your mother means to honor Heaven and Earth.”

“Do not fear death, comrades. May it be blessed! If death did not exist, how could we reach God and remain with him forever? Truly I say to you, death holds the keys and opens the door.”

“Life on earth means: to eat bread and transform the bread into wings, to drink water and transform the water into wings. Life on earth means: the sprouting of wings.”

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Cat's Cradle

By: Kurt Vonnegut

Kurt Vonnegut was once so accurately called “a laughing prophet of doom.” Thus far, Cat’s Cradle is my favorite of his prophecies. It’s about society’s overbearing belief in science and “objective truth,” and where that will ultimately take and leave us.

When I began reading Cat’s Cradle, I had been long wrestling with an article about the shortcomings of objectivity and was shocked to have unintentionally picked up a novel on the subject from 1963. A side-splitting, philosophical journey of apocalypse, midgets, and a Vonnegut invented religion, I recommend it with both great seriousness and hearty laughter.

Favorite Quotes:

“Live by the harmless untruths that make you brave and kind and healthy and happy.”

“Anyone unable to understand how a useful religion can be founded on lies will not understand this book either. ”

“The miracle of Felix — and I sincerely hope you’ll put this in your book somewhere — was that he always approached old puzzles as though they were brand new.”

““Dr. Breed keeps telling me that the main thing with Dr. Hoenikker was truth.”
”You don’t seem to agree.”
”I don’t know whether I agree or not. I just have trouble understanding how truth, all by itself, could be enough for a person.””

“As a Bokononist, of course, I would have agreed gaily to go anywhere anyone suggested. As Bokonon says, “Peculiar travel suggestions are dancing lessons from God.””

““From the way she talked,” I said, “I thought it was a very happy marriage.”
Little Newt held his hands six inches apart and he spread his fingers. “See the cat? See the cradle?””

““Maturity,” Bokonon tells us, “is a bitter disappointment for which no remedy exists, unless laughter can be said to remedy anything.””

“The only way I can feel the least bit important is to think of all the mud that didn’t even get to sit up and look around.”

“I was grateful to Newt for calling it to my attention, for the quotation captured in a couplet the cruel paradox of Bokononist thought, the heartbreaking necessity of lying about reality, and the heartbreaking impossibility of lying about it.

Midget, midget, midget, how he struts and winks,
For he knows a man’s as big as what he hopes and thinks!”

“Eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we die.”

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Falling Upward

By: Richard Rohr

Richard Rohr is a Franciscan friar, a sort of monk of the Catholic Church. The number of times I’ve entered a church could probably be counted on my hands—I’m unsure if I’ve even entered a Catholic one. So, you might wonder how and why I’ve come to so highly recommend this book?

A great fan of The On Being Podcast, I listened to Richard’s 2017 episode “Growing Up Men,” in which I sensed him particularly wise and oddly unbound by the blinders often imposed by organized religion. Rooted in Catholicism, yet open to the examination of the world at large, I remained open to him and ordered his book. The title, Falling Upward intrigued me, as I’m so aware one of my greatest falls—a life-threatening bout of meningoencephalitis—paradoxically became one of the most important, eye-opening events of my own life.

Falling Upward now holds the record for the most index cards I’ve gleaned from a book for my Commonplace Book. Perhaps excessively, I transcribed almost one-hundred forty passages from the book’s one-hundred sixty pages. Richard illuminates a path to and a place of wisdom well beyond the reach of our current cultural roadmap—beyond the common goal of thriving at surviving few seem to look beyond today. For this awareness alone, this book is worth the read, but Richard has woven a great many other universal tenants and gifts within.

Favorite Quotes:

“Holding our inner blueprint, which is a good description of our soul, and returning it humbly to the world and to God by love and service is indeed of ultimate concern. Each thing and every person must act out its nature fully, at whatever cost. It is our life’s purpose, and the deepest meaning of “natural law.” We are here to give back fully and freely what was first given to us—but now writ personally—by us! It is probably the most courageous and free act we will ever perform—and it take both halves of our life to do it fully. The first half of life is discovering the script, and the second half of life is actually writing it and owning it.”

— Richard Rohr

“We are more struggling to survive than to thrive, more just “getting through” or trying to get to the top than finding out what is really at the top or was already at the bottom.”

— Richard Rohr

“As I began to say in the Introduction, the task of the first half of life is to create a proper container for one’s life and answer the first essential questions: “What makes me significant?” “How can I support myself?” and “Who will go with me?” The task of the second half of life is, quite simply, to find the actual contents than this container was meant to hold and deliver. As Mary Olver puts it, “What is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?” In other words, the container is not an end in itself, but exists for the sake of your deeper and fullest life, which you largely do not know about yourself! Far too many people just keep doing repair work on the container itself and never “throw their nets into the deep” (John 21:6) to bring in the huge catch that awaits them.”

— Richard Rohr

“We have only to follow the thread of the hero path. Where we had thought to find and abomination, we shall find a god; where we had thought to slay another, we shall slay ourselves; where we had thought to travel outwards, we shall come to the center of our own existence; where we had thought to be alone, we shall be with all the world.”

— Joseph Campbell

“In the first half of life, we fight the devil and have the illusion and inflation of “winning” now and then; in the second half of life, we always lose because we are invariably fighting God. The first battles solidify the ego and create a stalwart loyal soldier; the second battles defeat the ego because God always wins. No wonder so few want to let go of their loyal soldier; no wonder so few have the faith to grow up. The ego hates losing, even to God.”

— Richard Rohr

“The tragic sense of life is ironically not tragic at all, at least in the Big Picture. Living in such deep time, connected to past and future, prepares us for necessary suffering, keeps us from despair about our own failure and loss, and ironically offers us a way through it all. We are merely joining the great parade of humanity that has walked ahead of us and will follow after us. The tragic sense of life is not unbelief, pessimism, fatalism, or cynicism. It is just ultimate and humiliating realism, which for some reason demands a lot of forgiveness of almost everything.”

— Richard Rohr

“You learn to positively ignore and withdraw your energy from evil or stupid things rather than fight them directly. You fight things only when you are directly called and equipped to do so. We all become a well-disguised mirror image of anything that we fight too long or too directly. That which we oppose determines the energy and frames the question after a while. You lose all inner freedom.”

— Richard Rohr

“The general pattern in story and novel is that the heroes learn and grow from encountering their shadow, whereas villains never do. Invariably, the movies and novels that are most memorable show real “character development” and growing through shadow work. This inspires us all because it calls us all.”

— Richard Rohr

“So our question now becomes, “How can I honor the legitimate needs of the first half of life, while creating space, vision, time, and grace for the second?” The holding of this tension is they very shape of wisdom. Only hermits and some retired people can almost totally forget the first and devote themselves totally to the second, but even they must eat, drink, and find housing and clothing! The human art form is in uniting fruitful activity with a contemplative stance—not one or the other, but always both at the same time.”

— Richard Rohr

“We are so attached to our frame, game, and raft that it becomes a substitute for objective truth, because it is all we have! Inside such entrapment, most people do not see things as they ARE; they see things as THEY are. In my experience, this is most of the world, unless people have done their inner work, at least some shadow work, and thereby entered into wisdom, or nondualistic thinking.”

— Richard Rohr

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Collected Poems

By: Jack Gilbert

Jack Gilbert was an ascetic, a poet who attempted to live poetry. He found immediate fame in his first work. Rather than relish in it, he headed for Europe and obscurity. Living a simple life in near poverty among common folk, twenty years would pass before he published a second book of poems, again to great acclaim. He chose to spend his life in authentic, direct contact with the world — the personification of Henry David Thoreau’s line: “I did not wish to take a cabin passage, but rather to go before the mast and on the deck of the world, for there I could best see the moonlight amid the mountains.”

What’s best about reading Jack’s Collected Poems, is that they help you find roaring awe in the raw material of life. I keep my copy within arm’s length of the commode. Each encounter serves as an antidote to the wants of consumerism and comfort and the “good life” we could have if we just had a little bit more.

Jack Gilbert reminds of the basic and the real. Rather than buy that new car, he’ll make you want to sell the one you already have and wander. Or fall in love and have your heart shattered. Or walk through the poor part of town at high noon in the summer and sweat and sunburn and smile about it. His work is a testament to the unrelenting joy hidden within the blast furnace of the everyday.

Favorite Quotes:

I’m not going to include quotes for this book. I haven’t had the inclination to cleave the whole of a poem.

Instead, here’s the entirety of one of my favorites:

Failing and Flying

Everyone forgets that Icarus also flew.
It’s the same when love comes to an end,
or the marriage fails and people say
they knew it was a mistake, that everybody
said it would never work. That she was
old enough to know better. But anything
worth doing is worth doing badly.
Like being there by that summer ocean
on the other side of the island while
love was fading out of her, the stars
burning so extravagantly those nights that
anyone could tell you they would never last.
Every morning she was asleep in my bed
like a visitation, the gentleness in her
like antelope standing in the dawn mist.
Each afternoon I watched her coming back
through the hot stony field after swimming,
the sea light behind her and the huge sky
on the other side of that. Listened to her
while we ate lunch. How can they say
the marriage failed? Like the people who
came back from Provence (when it was Provence)
and said it was pretty but the food was greasy.
I believe Icarus was not failing as he fell,
but just coming to the end of his triumph.

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The Stoic Philosophy of Seneca

By: Seneca

Seneca is generally regarded as one of the three great Stoics (along with Marcus Aurelius and Epictetus). Born right around the time our calendar flipped from B.C. to A.D., Seneca’s writings have timelessly echoed throughout the past two millennia. The Stoic Philosophy of Seneca, a collection of his words on adversity, thrift, mortality, virtue, and other pillars of the human experience, points a straightforward, practical path towards an unflappable kind of contentment.

The work of a master, I see such universal applicability in Seneca’s writings and believe anyone will encounter, and hopefully adopt, many a worthwhile principle. His thoughts on excessive wealth, the gifts of hardship, and seeing for oneself have particularly influenced my worldview.

Favorite Quotes:

“You must know that good men should behave similarly; they must not shrink from hardship and difficulty or complain of fate; they should take what befalls in good part and turn it to advantage. The thing that matters is not what you bear but how you bear it.”

“Avoid luxury, avoid debilitating prosperity which makes men’s minds soggy and which, unless something intervenes to remind them of the human condition, renders them comatose as in unending inebriation. If a man has always been protected from the wind by glass windows, if his feet have been kept warm by the constant relays of poultices, if the temperature of his dining room has been maintained by hot air circulating under the floor and through the walls, he will be dangerously susceptible to a slight breeze.”

“To stick to safety is the part of the puny and the spiritless; virtue marches on high.”

“It is because you live as if you would live forever; the thought of human frailty never enters your head, you never notice how much of your time you have already spent. You squander it as though your store were full to overflowing, when in fact the very day of which you make a present to someone or something else may be your last. Like the mortal you are, you are apprehensive of everything; but your desires are unlimited as if you were immortal.”

“Certain people who brag of their foresight are the stupidest of all. They are always preoccupied with work so that they may be in position to live better; they spend life in making provisions for life. Their plans are designed for the future, but procrastination is they greatest waste of life. It robs us of each day as it comes, and extorts the present from us on the promise of the future. Expectancy is the greatest impediment to living: in anticipation of tomorrow it loses today. You operate with what is in Fortune’s hand but let go of what is in your own. What is your range? What is your objective? Everything future is uncertain; live now!”

“And with this measure we shall be content if we have learned to be content with thrift, without which no amount of wealth can satisfy and with which any amount suffices, especially since a remedy is available: even poverty can transform itself into wealth by applying thrift. We must habituate ourselves to reject ostentation and value things by their utility, not by their trappings.”

“A man who keeps himself within the bounds of nature, therefore, will not feel poverty; but one who exceeds those bounds will be pursued by poverty even in the greatest opulence.”

“What should you put down as a thing especially to be avoided? I say a crowd; it is not yet safe for you to trust yourself to one. At least, I confess my own infirmity: I never bring back the same character I took with me.”

“Money may come unsought, office may be bestowed, influence and prestige may be thrust upon you, but virtue is not an accident.”

“A dwarf is not big even if he stands on a mountain top, and a colossus retains his stature even if he stands in a well. This is the mistake which misleads us; we are imposed upon because we never estimate a man by what he is but add his trappings on. If you wish to arrive at a true estimate of a man and understand his quality, look at him naked. Make him lay aside his inheritance, his titles, Fortune’s other trimmings; make him lay even his body aside and look at his soul to ascertain its quality and size and whether its greatness is its own or detachable.”

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Lila: An Inquiry into Morals

By: Robert Persig

Lila is Robert Persig’s follow-up to one of my all-time favorite books, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. While “Zen” enjoyed massive commercial success, Lila didn’t. For years, I falsely assumed this book wasn’t worth the read. Curiosity eventually prevailed and I picked a copy of Lila up last spring to read on a west coast of the USA road trip. Utterly enrapt, I was unable to put the book down, reading the last 100 pages straight on a rainy day at a Burger King in Oregon.

Perhaps an overzealous claim, I found Lila nothing short of revolutionary: a reality-quaking contribution to human understanding that was filtered out by the very cultural immune-system it defines.

Lila explores a variety of insights, but what is most important is Persig’s “Metaphysics of Quality,” this Inorganic vs. Biological vs. Societal vs. Intellectual march toward greater complexity in the universe and the relationship between dynamic and static quality, something I have personally felt, and even been guided by the past few years, but was unable to fully conceptualize until I read this book.

Read it and I doubt you’ll see the world the same.

Favorite Quotes:

“There’s an old analogy of a cup of tea. If you want to drink a new cup of tea you have to get rid of the old tea that’s in your cup, otherwise your cup just overflows and you get a wet mess. Your head is like that cup. It has a limited capacity and if you want to learn something about the world you should keep your head empty in order to learn about it. It’s very easy to spend your whole life swishing old tea around in your cup thinking it’s great stuff because you’ve never really tried anything new, because you could never really get it in, because the old stuff prevented its entry because you were so sure the old stuff was so good, because you never really tried anything new... on and on in an endless circular pattern.”

“The reason for hammering on this so hard is that we have a culturally inherited blind spot here. Our culture teaches us to think it is the hot stove that directly causes the oaths. It teaches that the low values are a property of the person uttering the oaths. Not so. The value is between the stove and the oaths. Between the subject and the object lies the value. This value is more immediate, more directly sensed than any “self” or “object” to which it might be later assigned. It is more real than the stove. Whether the stove is the cause of the low quality or whether possibly something else is the cause is not yet absolutely certain. It is the primary empirical reality from which such things as stoves and heat and oaths and self are later intellectually constructed.”

“But if Quality or excellence is seen as the ultimate reality then it becomes possible for more than one set of truths to exist. Then one doesn’t seek the absolute “Truth.” One seeks instead the highest quality intellectual explaination of things with the knowledge that if the past is any guide of the future this explaination must be taken provisionally; as useful until something better comes along. One can then examine intellectual realities the same way he examines paintings in an art gallery, not with an effort to find out which one is the “real” painting, but simply to enjoy and keep those that are of value.”

“These are haunting questions, but with Quality divided into Dynamic and Static components, a way of approaching them emerges. A home in suburban Short Hills, New Jersey, on an ordinary Wednesday afternoon is filled with static patterns. A hurricane in Key Largo promises a Dynamic relief from static patterns. The man who suffers a heart attack and is taken off the train at New Rochelle has had all his static patterns shattered, he can’t find them, and in that moment only Dynamic Quality is available to him. That is why he gazes at his own hand with a sense of wonder and delight.”

“Static quality patterns are dead when they are exclusive, when they demand blind obedience and suppress Dynamic change. But static patterns, nevertheless, provide a necessary stabilizing force to protect Dynamic progress from degeneration. Although Dynamic Quality, the Quality of freedom, creates this world in which we live, these patterns of static quality, the quality of order, preserve our world. Neither static nor Dynamic Quality can survive without the other.”

“How do you tell the saviors from the degenerates? Particularly when they look alike, talk alike and break all the rules alike? Freedoms that save the saviors also save the degenerates and allow them to tear the whole of society apart. But restrictions that stop the degenerates also stop the creative Dynamic forces of evolution.”

“But the Paradise was always somewhere pointed to, always somewhere else. Paradise was never here. Paradise was always at the end of some intellectual, technological ride, but you knew that when you got there paradise wouldn’t be there either. You would just see another sign saying:

PARADISE > PARADISE > PARADISE”

“The idea that, “man is born free but is everywhere in chains” was never true. There are no chains more vicious than the chains of biological necessity into which every child is born. Society exists primarily to free people from these biological chains. It has done that job so stunningly well intellectuals forget the fact and turn upon society with a shameful ingratitude for what society has done.”

“If you eliminate suffering from this world you eliminate life. There’s no evolution. Those species that don’t suffer don’t survive. Suffering is the negative face of the Quality that drives the whole process.”

“It says the subject-object people are almost right when they identify religious mysticism with insanity. The two are almost the same. Both lunatics and mystics have freed themselves from the conventional static intellectual patterns of their culture. The only difference is that the lunatic has shifted over to a private static patterns of his own, whereas the mystic has abandoned all static patterns in favor of pure Dynamic Quality.”

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The Power of Now

By: Eckhart Tolle

The Power of Now is a straightforward introduction to what we in the western world refer to as “eastern philosophy,” or what I've come to recognize as a set of basic truths we can experience firsthand that nobody ever told us about. If you've never encountered the concepts of Buddhism, Taoism, or the thought that we might be something other than an individual brain or soul separate from all else, this book is a great place to start.

I read the first third of this book before attending a ten-day silent Vipassana meditation course and the rest in the wake of those one hundred hours of meditation. One of the most mind-blowing experiences of my life, I experienced this what much of this book points at.

I wouldn't call The Power of Now a “religious text,” but better understanding of being.

Favorite Quotes:

“A beggar had been sitting by the side of a road for over thirty years. One day a stranger walked by. “Spare some change?” mumbled the beggar, mechanically holding out his old baseball cap. “I have nothing to give you,” said the stranger. Then he asked: “What’s that you are sitting on?” “Nothing,” replied the beggar, “Just an old box. I have been sitting on it for as long as I can remember.” “Ever look inside?” asked the stranger. “No,” said the beggar. “What’s the point? There’s nothing in there.” “Have a look inside,” insisted the stranger. The beggar managed to pry open the lid. With astonishment, disbelief, and elation, he saw that the box was filled with gold.

I am the stranger who has nothing to give you and who is telling you to look inside. Not inside any box as in the parable, but somewhere even closer: inside yourself.”

“You believe that you are your mind. This is the delusion. The instrument has taken you over.”

“Do you find this frightening? Or is this a relief to know this? All of these things you will have to relinquish sooner or later. Perhaps you find it hard to believe and I am certainly not asking you to believe that your identity cannot be found in any of those things. You will know the truth of it for yourself. You will know it at the latest when you feel death approaching. Death is a stripping away of all that is not you. The secret of life is to “die before you die”—and find that there is no death.”

“How do you drop a piece of hot coal that you are holding in your hand? How do you drop some heavy and useless baggage that you are carrying? By recognizing that you don’t want to suffer the pain or carry the burden anymore and then by letting go of it.”

“Are you so busy getting to the future that the present is reduced to a means of getting there?”

“It is also possible to fail completely in your outer purpose and at the same time totally succeed in your inner purpose. Or the other way around which is actually more common: outer riches and inner poverty, or to “gain the world and lose your soul,” as Jesus put it. Ultimately, of course, every outer purpose is doomed to “fail” sooner or later, simply because it is subject to the law of impermanence of all things. The sooner you realize that your outer purpose cannot give you lasting fulfillment, the better. When you have seen the limitations of your outer purpose, you give up your unrealistic expectations that it should make you happy, and you make it subservient to your inner purpose.”

“Even inside every physical body there is far more “nothing” than “something.” Physicists tell us that solidity of matter is an illusion. Even seemingly solid matter, including your physical body, is nearly 100 percent empty space. What is more, even inside every atom there is mostly empty space. What is left is more like a vibrational frequency than particles of solid matter, more like a musical note. Buddhists have known that for over 2,500 years. “Form is emptiness, emptiness is form,” states the Heart Sutra, one of the best known ancient Buddhist texts. The essence of all things is emptiness.”

“Happiness depends on conditions being perceived as positive; inner peace does not.”

“And when you live in complete acceptance of what is – which is the only sane way to live – there is no “good” or “bad” in your life anymore. There is only a higher good – which includes the “bad.” Seen from the perspective of the mind, however, there is a good-bad, like-dislike, love-hate. Hence, in the Book of Genesis, it is said that Adam and Eve were no longer allowed to dwell in “paradise” when they “ate of the tree of knowledge of good and evil.””

“To perceive yourself as a vulnerable body that was born and a little later dies – that’s the illusion. Body and death: one illusion. You cannot have one without the other. You want to keep one side of the illusion and get rid of the other, but that is impossible. Either you keep all of it or you relinquish all of it.”

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Sapiens

By: Yuval Noah Harari

The subtitle “A Brief History of Humankind” describes the subject of this book quite well. However, it doesn't convey the fascination, philosophy, and impact contained in this bird’s eye view of human history. Rather than focus on what happened, Sapiens is about how and why our history unfolded the way it did. Armed with ingenious metaphors, wit, and an eye for the big picture, Yuval Noah Harari delivers what I’m tempted to call a ‘masterpiece’ with unparalleled clarity.

Sapiens was intellectual lighter fluid for me. It stoked my interest in myth and minimalism, exposed the influences underlying my desire for novel experiences, and caused me to examine my future with our future in mind.

Of most importance: Sapiens was the straw to break the camel's back convincing me to sign-up for a ten-day Vipassana meditation course.

This was a good decision.

Favorite Quotes:

“Much of history revolves around this question: how does one convince millions of people to believe particular stories about gods, or nations, or limited liability companies? … When it succeeds, it gives Sapiens immense power, because it enables millions of strangers to cooperate and work towards common goals.”

“One of history’s few iron laws is that luxuries tend to become necessities and to spawn new obligations. Once people get used to a certain luxury, they take it for granted. Then they begin to count on it. Finally they reach a point they can’t live without it.”

“While agricultural space shrank, agricultural time expanded. Foragers usually didn’t waste much time thinking about next month or next summer. Farmers sailed in their imagination years and decades into the future.”

“For instance, the most cherished desires of present-day Westerners are shaped by romantic, nationalistic, capitalist and human myths that have been around for centuries. Friends giving advice often tell each other, “Follow your heart.” But the heart is a double agent that usually takes its instructions from the dominant myths of the day, and the very recommendation to “Follow your heart” was implanted in our minds by a combination of nineteenth-century romantic myths and twentieth-century consumerist myths.”

“Ever since the French Revolution, people throughout the world have gradually come to see both equality and individual freedom as fundamental values. Yet the two values contradict each other. Equality can be insured only by curtailing the freedoms of those who are better off. Guaranteeing that every individual will be free to do as he wishes inevitably short-changes equality. The entire political history of the world since 1789 can be seen as a series of attempts to reconcile this contradiction.”

“In short, scientific research can flourish only in alliance with some religion or ideology. The ideology justifies the cost of the research. In exchange, the ideology influences the scientific agenda and determines what to do with the discoveries. Hence in order to comprehend how humankind has reach Alamogordo and the moon—rather than an number of alternative destinations—is not enough to survey the achievements of physicists, biologists and sociologists. We have to take into account the ideological, political and economic forces that shaped physics, biology and sociology, pushing them in certain directions while neglecting others.”

“Today the tables have turned. The rich take great care managing their assets and investments, while the less well heeled go into debt buying cars and televisions they don’t really need. The capitalist and consumerist ethics are two sides of the same coin, a merger of two commandments. The supreme commandment of the rich is ‘Invest!’ The supreme commandment of the rest of us is ‘Buy!’”

“Romantic literature often presents the individual as somebody caught in a struggle against the state and the market. Nothing could be further from the truth. The state and the market are the mother and the father of the individual, and the individual can survive only thanks to them.”

“People are liberated from suffering not when they experience this or that fleeting pleasure, but rather when they understand the impermanent nature of all their feelings and stop craving them. This is the aim of Buddhist meditation practices. In meditation you are supposed to closely observe your mind and body, witness the ceaseless arising and passing of all your feelings, and realize how pointless it is to pursue them. When the pursuit stops, the mind becomes very relaxed, clear and satisfied. All kinds of feelings go on arising and passing—joy, anger, boredom, lust—but once you stop craving particular feelings, you can just accept them for what they are. You live in the present moment instead of fantasizing about what might have been.

The resulting serenity is so profound that those who spend their lives in the frenzied pursuit of pleasant feelings can hardly imagine it. It is like a man standing for decades on the seashore, embracing certain ‘good’ waves and tying to prevent them from disintegrating while simultaneously pushing back ‘bad’ waves to prevent them from getting near him. Day in, day out, the man stands on the beach, driving himself crazy with this fruitless exercise. Eventually, he sits down on the sand and just allows the waves to come and go as they please. How peaceful!”

“Moreover, despite the astonishing things that humans are capable of doing, we remain unsure of our goals and we seem to be as discontent as ever. We have advanced from canoes to galleys to steam ships to space shuttles—but nobody knows where we’re going. We are more powerful than ever before, but have very little idea what to do with all that power. Worse still, humans seem to be more irresponsible than ever. Self-made gods with only the laws of physics to keep us company, we are accountable to no one. We are consequently wreaking havoc on our fellow animals and on the surrounding ecosystem, seeking little more than our own comfort and amusement, yet never finding satisfaction.

Is there anything more dangerous than dissatisfied and irresponsible gods who don’t know what they want?”

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When Breath Becomes Air

By: Paul Kalanithi

At sixteen, I nearly died from a mosquito bite that resulted in this profound realization of time's value and the fragility of life. No event echoes louder through my days. Yet, I still often get caught up in trivial and lose sight of the remarkable opportunity of being. Reading When Breath Becomes Air is like going through that realization for the first time all over again.

The book's written by cancer-ridden neurosurgeon Paul Kalanithi, a gifted thinker and wordsmith dying as the medical career he put a decade of devoted preparation into is about to begin. It's a gift, wholeheartedly cast back to the living, from a dying man.

Favorite Quotes:

“Throughout college, my monastic, scholarly study of human meaning would conflict with my urge to forge and strengthen human relationships that formed that meaning. If the unexamined life was not worth living, was the unlived life worth examining?”

“I spent the next year in classrooms in the English countryside, where I found myself increasingly often arguing that direct experience of life-and-death questions was essential to generating substantial moral opinions about them. Words began to feel as weightless as the breath that carried them. Stepping back, I realize that I was confirming what I already knew: I wanted that direct experience. It was only in practicing medicine that I could pursue serious biological philosophy. Moral speculation was puny compared to moral action.”

“Indeed this is how 99% of people select their jobs: pay, work environment, hours. But that’s the point. Putting lifestyle first is how you find a job—not a calling.”

“Had the confirmation of my fears—the CT scan, in the lab results, both showing not merely cancer but a body overwhelmed, nearing death—released me from the duty to serve, from my duty to patients, to neurosurgery, to the pursuit of goodness? Yes, I thought, and therein was the paradox: like a runner crossing the finish line only to collapse, without that duty to care for the ill pushing me forward, I became an invalid.”

““Don’t you think saying goodbye to your child will make your death more painful?” “Wouldn’t it be great if it did?” I said. Lucy and I both felt that life wasn’t about avoiding suffering. Years ago, it had occurred to me that Darwin and Nietzsche agreed on one thing: the defining characteristic of the organism is striving. Describing life otherwise was like painting a tiger without stripes. After so many years of living with death, I’d come to understand that the easiest death wasn’t necessarily the best.”

“During the pastor’s scripture reading, I suddenly found myself chuckling. It featured a frustrated Jesus whose metaphorical language receives little interpretation from his followers.”

“We build scientific theories to organize and manipulate the world, to reduce phenomena to manageable units. Science is based upon reproducibility and manufactured objectivity. As strong as that makes its ability to generate claims about matter and energy, it also makes scientific knowledge inapplicable to the existential, visceral nature of human life, which is unique and subjective and unpredictable. Science may provide the most useful way to organize empirical, reproducible data, but its power to do so is predicated on its inability to grasp the most central aspects of human life: hope, fear, love, hate, beauty, envy, honor, weakness, striving, suffering, virtue.”

“In the end, it cannot be doubted that each of us can see only a part of the picture. The doctor sees one, the patient sees another, the engineer a third, the economist a fourth, the pearl diver a fifth, the alcoholic a sixth, the cable guy a seventh, the sheep farmer an eighth, the Indian beggar a ninth, the pastor a tenth. Human knowledge is never contained in one person. It grows from the relationships we create between each other and the world, and is still never complete. And Truth comes somewhere above all of them.”

“… two people huddled together, as one faces the abyss.”

“Everyone succumbs to finitude. I suspect I am not the only one who reaches this pluperfect state. Most ambitions are either achieved or abandoned; either way they belong to the past. The future, instead of the ladder toward the goals in life, flattens out into a perpetual present. Money, status, all the vanities the preacher Ecclesiastes described hold so little interest: a chasing after wind, indeed.”

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The Snow Leopard

By: Peter Matthiessen

The true account of a biological excursion into the Himalayas, outwardly searching for the illusive snow leopard, which becomes an overarching metaphor for the author's inward search for enlightenment. It's an adventure in the high mountains of philosophy—the outer and inner journey of a curious spirit interspersed with explanations of the most profound perceptions of the eastern religions.

The Snow Leopard deepened my awe for life, stoked my love of wandering through wilderness for both the external and internal experience, and reinforced my understanding of how little we need to be perfectly content.

Favorite Quotes:

“Compare the wild, free paintings of the child with the stiff, pinched “pictures” these become as the painter notices the painting and tries to portray “reality” as others see it; self-conscious now, he steps out of his own painting and, finding himself apart from things, notices the silence all around and becomes alarmed by the vast significations of Creation. The armor of the “I” begins to form, the construction and desperate assertion of separate identity, the loneliness: “Man has closed himself up, till he sees all things through the narrow chinks of his cavern.””

— Peter Matthiessen

“The fact that many a man who goes his own way ends in ruin means nothing… He must obey his own law, as if it were a daemon whispering to him of new wonderful paths… There are not a few who are called awake by the summons of the voice, whereupon they are at once set apart from the others, feeling themselves confronted with a problem about which the others know nothing. In most cases it is impossible to explain to the others what has happened, for any understanding is walled off by impenetrable prejudices. “You are no different from anybody else,” they will chorus, or “there’s no such thing,” and even if there is such a thing, it is immediately branded as “morbid.” … He is at once set apart and isolated, as he has resolved to obey the law that commands him from within. “His own law!” everybody will cry. But he knows better: it is the law… The only meaningful life is a life that strives for the individual realization—absolute and unconditional—of its own particular law… To the extent that a man is untrue to the law of his being… he has failed to realize his life’s meaning.
The undiscovered vein within us is a living part of the psyche; classical Chinese philosophy names this interior way “Tao,” and likens it to the flow of water that moves irresistibly to one’s goal. To rest in Tao means fulfillment, wholeness, one’s destination reached, one’s mission done; the beginning, end, and perfect realization of the meaning of existence innate in all things.”

— Carl Jung

“Do not imagine that the journey is short; and one must have the heart of a lion to follow this unusual road, for it is very long… One plods along in a state of amazement, sometimes smiling, sometimes weeping.”

— Sufi Fable

“As in the great religions of the East, the native American makes small distinction between religious activity and the acts of every day: the religious ceremony is life itself.”

— Peter Matthiessen

“And it is true that everywhere dangers and difficulties are exaggerated by the local people, if only as a good excuse for extortion or malingering: one must go oneself to know the truth.”

— Peter Matthiessen

“Amazingly, we take for granted that instinct for survival, fear of death, must separate us from the happiness of pure interpreted experience, in which body, mind, and nature are the same. And this debasement of our vision, the retreat from wonder, the backing away like lobsters from free swimming life into safe crannies, the desperate instinct that our life passes unlived, is reflected in proliferation without joy, corrosive money rot, the gross befouling of the earth and air and water from which we come.”

— Peter Matthiessen

“But the courage-to-be, right here and now and nowhere else, is precisely what Zen, at least, demands: eat when you eat, sleep when you sleep! Zen has no patience with “mysticism,” far less the occult although its emphasis on the enlightenment experience (called kensho or satori) is what sets it apart from other regions and philosophies.”

— Peter Matthiessen

“You never enjoy the world alright, till the Sea itself flows in your veins, till you are clothed with the heavens, and crowned with the stars: and perceive yourself to be the sole heir of the world, and more than so, because men are in it who are every one sole heirs as well as you.”

— Thomas Traherne

“The secret of the mountains is that the mountains simply exist, as I do myself: the mountains exist simply, which I do not. The mountains have no “meaning,” they are meaning; the mountains are. The sun is round. I ring with life, and the mountains ring, and when I can hear it, there is a ringing that we share. I understand all this, not in my mind but in my heart, knowing how meaningless it is to try to capture what cannot be expressed, knowing that mere words will remain when I read it all again, another day.”

— Peter Mathiessen

“GS murmurs, “Unless it moves, we are not going to see it, not even on the snow—these creatures are really something.” With our binoculars, we study the barren ridge face, foot by foot. Then he says, “You know something? We’ve seen so much, maybe it’s better if there are some things we don’t see.” He seems startled by his own remark, and I wonder if he means this as I take it—that we have been spared the desolation of success, the doubt: is this really what we came so far to see? When I say, “That was the haiku—writer speaking,” he knows just what I mean, and we both laugh. GS strikes me as much less dogmatic, more open to the unexplained then he was two months ago. In Kathmandu, he might have been suspicious of this haiku, written on our journey by himself:

Cloud-men beneath loads.
A dark line of tracks in the snow.
Suddenly nothing.”

— Peter Matthiessen

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