Quotes

[Voyageur]

The following quote below is first described with a brief description:

While out on the old motorcycle this weekend, had it parked alongside a few other bikes in town. The bike has a tank bag and a certain designation, that if noted at all, would link it to Zen Buddhist thinking. So upon approaching the bike to depart, a woman on her bike, with full helmet on and it running, indicated with her question if that was my bike. Said it was. She then said, i’ve left you a gift. Rather perplexed, yet unknowingly thankful as a few more words were exchanged, approached the bike and within the clear map-case top tank-bag she had put a small card (at first I was thinking she might have slipped me the ‘watch tower’ or something similar) with the following:

Believe nothing
no matter where you
read it or who has said it,
not even if i have said it,
unless it agrees with
your own reason and
your own common sense.
-Buddha-

 

[Deleted member 8431]

Scientist Quotes​

Max Planck

All matter originates and exists only by virtue of a force... We must assume behind this force the existence of a conscious and intelligent Mind. This Mind is the matrix of all matter.

Science cannot solve the ultimate mystery of nature. And that is because, in the last analysis, we ourselves are a part of the mystery that we are trying to solve.

We have no right to assume that any physical laws exist, or if they have existed up until now, that they will continue to exist in a similar manner in the future.

And this one is my favorite from him:

I regard consciousness as fundamental. I regard matter as derivative from consciousness. We cannot get behind consciousness. Everything that we talk about, everything that we regard as existing, postulates consciousness.

John Eccles

I believe that there is a fundamental mystery in my existence, transcending any biological account of the development of my body (including my brain) with its genetic inheritance and its evolutionary origin. ... I cannot believe that this wonderful gift of a conscious existence has no further future, no possibility of another existence under some other unimaginable conditions.

I maintain that the human mystery is incredibly demeaned by scientific reductionism, with its claim in promissory materialism to account eventually for all of the spiritual world in terms of patterns of neuronal activity. This belief must be classed as a superstition ... we have to recognize that we are spiritual beings with souls existing in a spiritual world as well as material beings with bodies and brains existing in a material world.

The more we discover scientifically about the brain the more clearly do we distinguish between the brain events and the mental phenomena and the more wonderful do the mental phenomena become. Promissory materialism is simply a superstition held by dogmatic materialists. It has all the features of a Messianic prophecy, with the promise of a future freed of all problems—a kind of Nirvana for our unfortunate successors.

And perhaps his most famous quote:

I want you to know that there are no colors in the real world, there are no fragrances in the real world, that there’s no beauty and there’s no ugliness.
Out there beyond the limits of our perceptual apparatus is the erratically ambiguous and ceaselessly flowing quantum soup. And we’re almost like magicians in that in the very act of perception, we take that quantum soup and we convert it into the experience of material reality in our ordinary everyday waking state of consciousness.

 

[Zadius Sky]

Man is concerned with man, and forgets the whole and the flowing.

- Ezra Pound

You do not have an inferior function, it has you.

- C.G. Jung

 

[NewOrleans]

"So long as I have not seen thee nature and movement of the mind, there is little sense in believing that I could be free of it. I am a slave to my mechanical thoughts. This is a fact. It is not the thoughts themselves that enslave me but my attachment to them. In order to understand this, I must not seek to free myself before having known what the slavery is."

Jeanne de Salzmann, "The Reality of Being"

 

[pstott]

Groucho Marx:

The secret of life is honesty and fair-dealing. If you can fake that you've got it made!

 

[Serendipity]

The man who never alters his opinions is like standing water, and breeds reptiles of the mind.

- William Blake

 

[treesparrow]

They f... you up, your mum and dad.
They may not mean to, but they do.
They fill you with the faults they had
And add some extra, just for you.

But they were f....d up in their turn
By fools in old-style hats and coats,
Who half the time were soppy-stern
And half at one another’s throats.

Man hands on misery to man.
It deepens like a coastal shelf.
Get out as early as you can,
And don’t have any kids yourself.

Philip Larkin

 

[ana]

Never let us be discouraged with ourselves. It is not when we are conscious of our faults that we are the most wicked; on the contrary, we are less so. We see by a brighter light; and let us remember for our consolation, that we never perceive our sins till we begin to cure them.

- Francois De Salignac Fenelon

 

[Zadius Sky]

A successful man is one who can lay a firm foundation with the bricks others have thrown at him.

- David Brinkley

 

[Mountain Crown]

So the days pass, and I ask myself sometimes whether one is not hypnotized, as a child by a silver globe, by life, and whether this is living.

Virginia Woolf (1882-1941)

 

[beherenow]

Hi all, yesterday I was reading this thread- Psychomantium Mirrors - Past, Present, Future?- and found this book-"Cosmic Consciousness of Humanity" that i downloaded. After finishing the thread and getting some dinner I started to read the intro of the book and stumbled across some Russian guys I hadn't heard of, and being the curious type, I Wikipedia-ed some of them, and found this guy, Vladimir Solovyov (philosopher). In there i found this rather Gurdjieffian sounding quote...though, it seems to me, even more grim than some of the things G says. I wonder if he and G ever crossed paths? Learning IS fun. Maybe one for the sott page?

"As long as the dark foundation of our nature, grim in its all-encompassing egoism, mad in its drive to make that egoism into reality, to devour everything and to define everything by itself, as long as that foundation is visible, as long as this truly original sin exists within us, we have no business here and there is no logical answer to our existence. Imagine a group of people who are all blind, deaf and slightly demented and suddenly someone in the crowd asks, "What are we to do?"... The only possible answer is "Look for a cure". Until you are cured, there is nothing you can do. And since you don't believe you are sick, there can be no cure."
Vladimir Solovyov

 

[sacriface]

Wow, that's exactly the 'mad machine' of which Gurdjieff spoke.

I just found something related to the above in the Cassiopedia I thought, might be useful on that note, about the risk of when a machine does, in the end, see that something might be wrong;

" The predator of internal considering may well claim to engage in merciless self-observation, to aspire to consciousness and being and any other virtues and even trick itself to believe it is progressing towards these goals while all the while only feeding its vanity and desire for recognition. "

Struggling with this is an infinite task, equally overwhelming and urgent..

 

[grini]

I began to understand that our reality is masked as a medium for growth. What we are growing is our Will which, when aligned with a given Thought Center, allows that Thought Center to manifest its Will in our reality to the extent we are in alignment and can be amplified! To be in alignment with the STO Thought Centers results in an increase of spiritual consciousness and a diminishment of the “sleeping” consciousness of matter. To align with the STS Thought Centers, as we are, results in an increase of the sleeping consciousness, or wishful thinking of matter, and a diminishment of spiritual consciousness.

- Laura Knight-Jadczyk - ''The Wave Chapter 41: The Realm of Archetypes''

 

[Therpo]

"We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then is not an act, but a habit" Aristotle

"There is not good and bad in war, only bad and worse" can't remember who

It is not the world that has been pulled over your eyes that are the problem. It's the world that you keep pulled over your eyes that are

Therpo

"Be kind for everyone you meet is fighting a great battle."

 

[Thomas Alan]

"Be kind for everyone you meet is fighting a great battle."

Thanks, Therpo: this one struck a cord with me. This is an important component of External Consideration, I think. Along with a heavy dose of discernment.

Mac