I am a witness for a self-aware world, a world that's not just chunks of matter, but an organism that dances matter into an entity that can know. It can know truth and fiction and the truth of fiction and the fiction of truth. It turns order into disorder, but with knowledge salad on the side. I'm a compartmentalized agent of a super-organism that is beyond my capacity to understand or speculate the purpose of. I am a lonely witness.
Ashtavakra Gita: by Bart Marshall
The One-Straw Revolution by Masanobu Fukuoka
If you’re looking to attain Enlightenment, you may have turned to someone like the Buddha or Epictetus for inspiration. But I’m here to tell you, if you can put these four pieces of Shakespearean wisdom into practice, you’ll have all you need to uplift your mind.
There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.
william Shakespeare, Hamlet
Through Yoga, practitioners learn to cultivate their inner “dispassionate witness.” In our daily lives, we’re constantly attaching value judgements and labels to everything with which we come into contact (not to mention the things that we merely imagine.) As a result, we tend to see the world not as it is, but in an illusory form.
The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves.
William shakespeare, julius caesar
In Psychology class, you may remember learning about the self-serving bias, a warped way of seeing the world in which one attributes difficulties and failures to external factors, while attributing successes and other positive outcomes to one’s own winning characteristics. Like Brutus, we need to learn to stop thinking of our experience of life as the sum of external events foisted upon us, and to realize that our experience is rooted in our minds and how we perceive and react to events.
The fool doth think he is wise, but the wise man knows himself to be a fool.
william shakespeare, as you like it
A quote from Hamlet also conveys the idea, “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.” If you grasp this idea, you may become both humbler and more readily capable of discarding bad ideas in favor of good. It’s common to want to think of yourself as a master, but this leads only to arrogance and to being overly attached to ineffective ideas. Be like Socrates.
Cowards die many times before their deaths; The valiant never taste of death but once.
william shakespeare, julius caesar
Fears and anxieties lead people into lopsided calculations in which a risky decision is rated all downside. Those who see the world this way may end up living a milquetoast existence that’s loaded with regrets. No one is saying one should ignore all risks and always throw caution to the wind, but our emotions make better servants than masters. One needs to realize that giving into one’s anxieties has a cost, and that that cost should be weighed against what one will get out of an experience.
There it is: Enlightenment in four bits of Shakespearean wisdom.
Human nature is a raging river which a few shitty sandbags of common sense will not detour. Some people stand on the bank and shout at the river. I will admit, I've done the same. But those words neither soak in nor bounce off that raging river -- they're made silent, dying in air. Some people try to steer the river by splashing at the lapping waters near its edge, But none of them is Moses, not one can dam a river by force of will. And - even if one could -- eventually, that person would have to let go, leaving a backed up and angry river to rage onward.
1.) If you spend more time each day faultfinding than feeling grateful, your philosophy is fucked. 2.) Drop useless ideas as one would drop a flaming marshmallow. 3.) If you shop recreationally, consider square dancing or kung fu. 4.) No idea should be beyond critique, but you don't have to be an ass about it.
They told it slant, but not all the truth, and it rolled into the ears of the willing and into the minds of the faithful. And in those minds it was built into a swift machine, one of great power -- if little reality. But deaths never required reality of motive, only reality of matter. So, the wild stories became wild ideas that were the bane of us all.
Romanticism: A Very Short Introduction by Michael Ferber
“I desire that there may be as many different persons in the world as possible”
Henry david thoreau, Walden
Too many people wish that the world consisted of those who held the same views as they - who loved what they loved, who believed what they believed, who would do what they would do. I can't imagine a more boring world than that. If there aren't those with different: ideas, desires, beliefs, and values, then who will show me something new: something that -- for good or for ill -- will change my world and advance my understanding. If truth be told, I'd just as soon spend time among the crazy sages who -- having rejected all programming -- will not be made prisoner to a train schedule, let alone to a norm or convention or protocol. The madmen who shaman one out of all mental conventions. But such as they are hand forged, each vibrating at his or her own wavelength -- hard to see and not easily found.
Introducing Wittgenstein: A Graphic Guide by John Heaton
Tiger Riding for Beginners 