tao of jeet kune do

Have read a bit of this in the last day or so. Structured largely as a selection of thematically arranged fragments, it is about the most quotable book ever. And Bruce Lee is a philosophical genius. I sort of knew that already – one of my favourite quotes for years has been his “absorb what is useful, discard what is useless, add that which is essentially your own” – but beyond the odd interview in which he had always impressed me, I hadn’t penetrated to the core of his wisdom.

All I can say is holy shit, this guy is worth checking out. Behind the badass legend lies a philosopher king.

Truth has no path. Truth is living and, therefore, changing. It has no resting place, no form, no organised institution, no philosophy. When you see that, you will understand that this living thing is also what you are.

Gurdjieff said you can talk to any man who knows how to do something well. The process of becoming a true master of anything involves certain similar stages and realisations.

True mastery transcends any particular art. It stems from mastery of oneself – the ability, developed through self – discipline, to be calm, fully aware, and completely in tune with oneself and the surroundings. Then, and only then, can a person know himself.

Bruce Lee was definitely a master.

Nothing is what it seems

Hits shay haghase nu dai che khkari

Nothing is what it seems

- Pashtu proverb

“All those foreigners,” he said, “are looking for something quite different than the Indians. Both have contrasting demands on their gurus. Indian people – especially those in villages and small towns – are looking for a cure for illness and increased prosperity. Guru means “dispeller of darkness”, but that’s not what the Westerners are after. They’re looking for someone to praise them – to reinforce their self-confidence.”

- Hakim Feroze, Indian sorceror

in Tahir Shah – Sorcerer’s Apprentice

Declaration of Evolution

Out of everything Timothy Leary said and did, for all the acid of the 60′s, I always thought that this was the most fundamental reason why Leary was regarded by the authorities as the most dangerous man in America. (The kicker is in the 2nd to last paragraph, but the whole thing is well worth reading.)

Declaration of evolution by Timothy Leary, PhD. ———————————————————

When in the course of organic evolution it becomes obvious that a mutational process is inevitably dissolving the physical and neurological bonds which connect the members of one generation to the past and inevitably directing them to assume among the species of Earth the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and Nature’s God entitle them, a decent concern for the harmony of species requires that the causes of the mutation should be declared.

We hold these truths to be self evident:

That all species are created different but equal;

That they are endowed, each one, with certain inalienable rights;

That among them are Freedom to Live, Freedom to Grow, and Freedom to pursue Happiness in their own style;

That to protect these God-given rights, social structures naturally emerge, basing their authority on the principles of love of God and respect for all forms of life;

That whenever any form of government becomes destructive of life, liberty, and harmony, it is the organic duty of the young members of that species to mutate, to drop out, to initiate a new social structure, laying its foundations on such principles and organizing its power in such form as seems likely to produce the safety, happiness, and harmony of all sentient beings.

Genetic wisdom, indeed, suggests that social structures long established should not be discarded frivolous reasons and transient causes. The ecstasy of mutation is equally balanced by the pain. Accordingly all experience shows that members of a species are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, rather than to discard the forms to which they are accustomed.

But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, all pursuing invariably the same destructive goals, threaten the very fabric of organic life and the serene harmony of the planet, it is the right, it is the organic duty to drop out of such morbid covenants and to evolve new loving social structures.

Such has been the patient sufferance of the freedom-loving peoples of this earth, and such is now the necessity which constrains us to form new systems of government.

The history of the white, menopausal, mendacious men now ruling the planet earth is a history of repeated violation of the harmonious laws of nature, all having the direct object of establishing a tyranny of the materialistic aging over the gentle, the peace-loving, the young, the colored. To prove this, let Facts be submitted to the judgement of generations to come.

These old, white rulers have maintained a continuous war against other species of life, enslaving and destroying at whim fowl, fish, animals and spreading a lethal carpet of concrete and metal over the soft body of earth.

They have maintained as well a continual state of war among themselves and against the colored races, the freedom-loving, the gentle, the young. Genocide is their habit.

They have instituted artificial scarcities, denying peaceful folk the natural inheritance of earth’s abundance and God’s endowment.

They have glorified material values and degraded the spiritual.

They have claimed private, personal ownership of God’d land, driving by force of arms the gentle from passage on the earth.

In their greed they have erected artificial immigration and customs barriers, preventing the free movement of people.

In their lust for control they have set up systems of compulsory education to coerce the minds of the children and to destroy the wisdom and innocence of the playful young.

In their lust for power they have controlled all means of communication to prevent the free flow of ideas and to block loving exchanges among the gentle.

In their fear they have instituted great armies of secret police to spy upon the privacy of the pacific.

In their anger they have coerced the peaceful young against their will to join their armies and to wage murderous wars against the young and gentle of other countries.

In their greed they have made the manufacture and selling of weapons the basis of their economies.

For profit they have polluted the air, the rivers, the seas. In their impotence they have glorified murder, violence, and unnatural sex in their mass media.

In their aging greed they have set up an economic system which favors age over youth.

They have in every way attempted to impose a robot uniformity and to crush variety, individuality, and independence of thought.

In their greed, they have instituted political systems which perpetuate rule by the aging and force youth to choose between plastic conformity or despairing alienation.

They have invaded privacy by illegal search, unwarranted arrest, and contemptuous harassment.

They have enlisted an army of informers.

In their greed they sponsor the consumption of deadly tars and sugars and employ cruel and unusual punishment of the possession of life-giving alkaloids and acids. They never admit a mistake.

They unceasingly trumpet the virtue of greed and war. In their advertising and in their manipulation of information they make a fetish out of blatant falsity and pious self-enhancement.

Their obvious errors only stimulate them to greater error and noisier selfapproval. They are bores.

They hate beauty. They hate sex. They hate life.

We have warned them from time to time to their inequities and blindness.

We have addressed every available appeal to their withered sense of righteousness.

We have tried to make them laugh.

We have prophesied in detail the terror they are perpetuating. But they have been deaf to the weeping of the poor, the anguish of the colored, the rocking mockery of the young, the warnings of their poets. Worshipping only force and money, they listen only to force and money. But we shall no longer talk in these grim tongues.

We must therefore acquiesce to genetic necessity, detach ourselves from their uncaring madness and hold them henceforth as we hold the rest of God’s creatures in harmony, life brothers, in their excess, menaces to life.

We, therefore, God-loving, peace-loving, life-loving, fun-loving men and women, appealing to the Supreme Judge of the Universe for the rectitude of our intentions, do, in the name and by the Authority of all sentient beings who seek gently to evolve on this planet, solemnly publish and declare that we are free and independent, and that we are absolved from all Allegiance to the United States Government and all governments controlled by the menopausal, and that grouping ourselves into tribes of like-minded fellows, we claim full power to live and move on the land, obtain sustenance with our own hands and minds in the style which seems sacred and holy to us, and to do all Acts and Things which independent Freemen and Freewomen may of right do without infringing on the same rights of other species and groups to do their own thing.

And for the support of this Declaration of Evolution with a firm reliance on the protection of Divine Providence, and serenely confident of the approval of generations to come, in whose name we speak, do we now mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes, and our Sacred Honor.

yup

I am certain that none of the world’s problems… have any hope of solution except through total democratic society’s becoming thoroughly and comprehensively self-educated – Buckminster Fuller

And you, what do you seek?

I am dead because I lack desire;
I lack desire because I think I possess;
I think I possess because I do not try to give.
In trying to give, you see you have nothing;
Seeing you have nothing, you try to give of yourself;
Trying to give of yourself, you see that you
are nothing;
Seeing you are nothing, you desire to become;
In desiring to become, you begin to live.

- From a letter by Rene Daumal

on authorship

“Although I am going to talk about what I have written, my books and papers and so on, unfortunately I forget what I have written practically as soon as it is finished. There is probably going to be some trouble about that. But nevertheless I think there is also something significant about it, in that I don’ t have the feeling I have written my books. I have the feeling that my books get written through me and that once they have got across me I feel empty and nothing is left.” – Claude Levi-Strauss, from the introduction to Myth and Meaning.

It is nice to see someone else say this. It is something I have experienced with my books – a peculiar sense of not having written them, despite obviously having done so. More puzzling, too, as writing is such an intimate and all-consuming act, for such a lengthy period. But afterwards… it is done, the past.

(Though I would add a caveat to his sense of “nothing is left”. Writing is, in part, an act of purgation, paradoxically through gluttinous immersion; so when the book is done, the self is purged of whatever it was. If the process has been completed successfully, nothing is left of whatever it was, and the author is free to move on to other things.)

Writing is a wee bit mysterious, really.

On Love

To love is to will the self-fulfilment of the beloved, and to find, in the very activity of loving, an incidental but vitalizing increase of oneself.

- Olaf Stapledon, Star Maker

yet moore on magic

AM: No. No, I draw a sharp distinction between magic and religion. I see them almost as the spiritual parallels of say, fascism and anarchy in the political arena. To me, politics does not divide into right-wing and left-wing, in that capitalism and communism are both just two different ways of ordering industrial societies, which have not been around for a vast amount of time and probably won’t be around for a lot longer. To me, the two poles of politics are fascism, which… from the original Roman concept, the symbol for it was a bundle of bound twigs. The idea being, “In unity there is strength.” Religion is almost the political equivalent of that. I mean, religion, strictly speaking, doesn’t even have to be about anything spiritual. The Conservative Party is a religion in that they are bound together by belief. Almost any organization has its religious aspects. With magic, I worship a second-century Roman snake god who, on the best evidence that I can dredge up from that period, was some kind of elaborate glove-puppet that was being controlled by a second-century snake-oil salesman, basically a complete fraud, huckster, and showman. I don’t want anybody else to start worshipping this god. I find something a bit unnatural in the idea of being bound together in spiritual ideas with people. I’m sure that, in our natural state, we all believe something entirely different. I don’t necessarily want anybody to believe the same things I believe, which is one of the reasons why I’ve adopted such a patently mad sort of deity. The idea of the deity is all I’m interested in, so that’s fine for my purposes. It would be a bit creepy if everybody else suddenly started worshipping this second-century glove-puppet. Magic to me is more like anarchy. The roots of the word anarchy are an archos, no leaders, which is not really about the kind of chaos that most people imagine when the word anarchy is mentioned. I think that anarchy is, to the contrary, about taking personal responsibility for yourself. I believe that fascism is about abandoning your personal responsibility to the group or to society. You say, “In unity there is strength,” which inevitably will become, “In uniformity there is strength.” It’s better if all those sticks are the same size and length, because then they’ll make a tidier bundle, which consequently leads to the kind of fascism that we saw in the ’30s and ’40s. I mean, anarchy is about taking complete responsibility for yourself. And I would extend that into the spiritual area, with the differences between religion and magic. All I would be urging people to do in Promethea is to explore, in their own way, by whatever means they personally feel comfortable with, using whatever system they happen to feel comfortable with, whether that be Christianity, or paganism, or Hinduism, or anything else, to explore the kind of rich world that I think all of us have inside us. I just want to tell them that that world is there, that there are a variety of ways of exploring it. It doesn’t really matter which way you use, or which system you adopt. It’s a territory I find very rewarding, very fulfilling, very human. To point out that territory to other people is something I feel happy about doing. To erect a huge church there and officiate over rituals, is not.

http://www.avclub.com/articles/alan-moore%2C13740/#

sometimes, i just wanna sit under a tree for a few years, you know?

Now, take your country. (I don´t mean any criticism.) Here the social laws, the political formation, everything is made to facilitate man´s journey in this life. He may live very happily so long as he is on this earth. Look at your streets – how clean! Your beautiful cities! And in how many ways a man can make money! How many channels to get enjoyment in this life! But, if a man here should say, ´Now look here, I shall sit down under this tree and meditate; I don´t want to work,´ why, he would have to go to jail. See? There would be no chance for him at all. None. A man can live in this society only if he falls in line. He has to join this rush for the enjoyment of good in this life, or he dies.

- Swami Vivekananda (from An Unpublished Lecture, in Vedanta For The West.)

If only there had been someone there he could have turned to and said: “Let’s get out of here.” But they all sat there in another world, talking feverishly about nothing, approving and protesting, each one delighted with the sound his own ideas made when they were turned into words.

- Let it come down, Paul Bowles

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