"Although many of us are daunted by the thought of trying to master a new language, the average Canadian could acquire one every year in the time he now spends watching television."

"There is indeed a way in which we can compare the souls of civilizations, and the different phases of one civilization. This is according to their view of the universe.

In the earlier part of this present book we tried to establish the general structure of the universe. We had to suppose a philosophical Absolute, in which swam, so to speak, infinite numbers of galaxies. Similarly within our own galaxy or Milky Way swam innumerable sum. Within our solar system swam planets. Upon the surface of our planet, the Earth, swam the world of organic life. Within this world of organic life swam individual man, within man cells, within cells molecules, within molecules electrons.

Now each world or cosmos is incommensurable with the one which contains it. It disappears in the greater one, becomes invisible in relation to it. The higher cosmos contains infinite possibilities for the lower, is god for the lower. In this sense every world may be taken as absolute or as god for the smaller scale of entity. Yet man, by his extraordinarily complex nature, is apparently endowed with the power of apprehending not only the world immediately above him -that is, the world of organic life of which he forms part -but many higher worlds, the Earth, the Sun, the Milky Way, and he can even philosophically suppose an Absolute of absolutes. So that man has many absolutes or gods from which to choose.

If we now consider different civilizations, and even different peoples within the same civilization, we see that in a general way man has set his absolute, that is, his conception of god, now higher and now lower in the universe.

At various times, often at the beginnings of civilizations, attempts have been made to spread the idea of an Absolute of absolutes, an abstract and formless One. But this idea is evidently impossible for ordinary use, for immediately any name or attributes are attached to it, or it is associated with a particular heaven or heavenly body, it has already descended to another level. And since no general worship or study can be carried on without names and images, this level of 'god' is completely out of range of man.

Occasionally we find a galactic absolute, like the Egyptian Khepera, creator of the gods themselves, or like Shiva in a twinkling of whose eye passes the whole life of the Solar System. But such a conception is still much too difficult for ordinary men, and never passes beyond the priesthood or brahmin caste.

Usually, at the very outset of each civilization, along with these abstract ideas, a more possible absolute is set at the level of the Sun. Men can feel the warmth and light of the Sun, understand their utter dependence on it, intellectually study its nature, and emotionally rejoice in it as the source of life, seasons, the beauty of colour, and so on. According to our study, they may even attain its nature. So that often a deification of the Sun gave men a real and living absolute, which could command their worship in a very immediate way. Ra in Egypt, Apollo in Greece, Baal in Syria, Tonatiuh in Mexico, and Indra in India were gods set at such a level.

At other times, often in a later and already rather degenerate stage of civilization, general worship began to shift to the level of the planets, or to the Earth itself. In the late Greek and Roman worlds, in the late Middle Ages, and particularly in many 17th century sects, planetary beings become the highest concept or absolute, and from the idea of the interplay of their influences, or of using or working with these influences in some way, arose the pseudo-science of magic. The prevalence of ideas of magic is nearly always connected with the polytheism inherent in taking the planets as god or absolute.

At a still further stage of degeneration, usually to be seen in the distant descendants of ancient civilizations who now exist as savages; the highest powers are associated with manifestations of nature -thunder, rain, forests, mountains, and so on -that is to say, with the world of organic life, the next above man. This is to place the absolute at a still lower level.

In this way, we have a scheme for the study of comparative religion; and we also see that the development of each civilization is usually accompanied by a degeneration of the idea of the absolute to ever lower and lower levels. On the face of it, this seems absurd, since later men could presumably look backwards and see higher conceptions revealed behind them in history. But a curious trick of human psychology makes the downward transition quite simple. These higher conceptions, seen through the distorting lens of time, appear to more degenerate man as superstition. And applying this name to them he remains entirely satisfied with his own level of understanding.

We spoke of savages who took the world of nature as absolute or god. There is, however, still another stage of degeneration, particularly prevalent in our own age. This is expressed by the acceptance of a man as absolute or god. That is, in taking ordinary undeveloped man as the highest being or power in the universe. This is of course quite distinct from the idea of saints, for saints immediately presuppose a god or much higher power for whom the saint acts as intermediary. The deification of a Roman emperor, the worship of a Hitler, absolute obedience to some party government, or on the other hand the idealization of an imaginary figure like the Common Man, when no higher power is recognized, are examples of taking man as god or absolute.

Below this lies only the nightmare of superstition -by no means unknown today when
men believe microbes, bacteria and other sub-human organisms to be stronger than man or god, that is, the final power in the universe.

All this is usually indicative of the working of the pathological or criminal process in the body of a civilization. For the characteristic of this process, as we saw much earlier when considering it in the Solar System and in man, is wrong relation between the part and the whole. A general belief in man or microbe as the highest power in the universe means that for the time being mankind has completely lost its right relation with the whole cosmic body. From such a pathological state civilizations rarely recover. And it is then time to reconstruct everything from the beginning, for a quite new civilization to be born."

- Rodney Collin, "Theory of Celestial Influence"

After Quasimodo passed away, the bishop of the cathedral of Notre Dame sent
word through the streets of Paris that a new bellringer was needed.

The bishop decided that he would conduct the interviews personally and went
up into the belfry to begin the screening process. After observing several
applicants demonstrate their skills, he decided to call it a day, when a
lone, armless man approached him and announced that he was there to apply
for the bellringers job.

The bishop was incredulous. "You have no arms!" "No matter," said the man,
"Observe!" He then began striking the bells with his face, producing a
beautiful melody on the carillon. The bishop listened in astonishment,
convinced that he had finally found a suitable replacement for Quasimodo.
Suddenly, rushing forward to strike a
bell, the armless man tripped, and plunged headlong out of the belfry window
to his death in the street below.

The stunned bishop rushed to his side. When he reached the street, a crowd
had gathered around the fallen figure, drawn by the beautiful music they had
heard only moments before. As they silently parted to let the bishop
through, one of them asked, "Bishop, who was this man?" "I don't know his
name," the bishop sadly replied, "but his face rings a bell."

...

The following day, despite the sadness that weighed heavily on his heart due
to the unfortunate death of the armless campanologist, the bishop continued his interviews for the bellringer of Notre Dame. The first man to approach him said, "Your excellency, I am the brother of the poor, armless wretch that fell to his death from this very
belfry yesterday. I pray that you honor his life by allowing me to replace
him in this duty."

The bishop agreed to give the man an audition, and as the armless man's
brother stooped to pick up a mallet to strike the first bell, he groaned,
clutched at his chest and died on the spot. Two monks, hearing the bishop's
cries of grief at this second tragedy, rushed up the stairs to his side.
"What has happened?", the first breathlessly asked, "Who is this man?"

"I don't know his name," sighed the distraught bishop, "but he's a dead
ringer for his brother."

A very sad example of the disease that's affecting most people today:

"Jenny, 34, describes how her husband's brilliant mind was besieged by chaotic, "racing" thoughts which left him utterly exhausted. He told her it was like being on a treadmill at the gym and unable to get off. "Disconnected, fragmented thoughts rushed into his mind unbidden," she says, remembering how it exhausted them both.

"They came with such intensity, such speed, that he felt as though he had no control. They made no sense. They stole his mental peace. He felt he was being attacked and assailed by them. He kept saying, 'What if I go mad?', though he never sounded mad and he wasn't hearing voices. The lack of control really frightened him, especially as he was normally such a great orator, someone who took care over every word."

Less than a week before his death on March 20, David Brunton, 39, was diagnosed with bipolar disorder, a commonly misdiagnosed illness characterised by recurring bouts of depression and chaotic thoughts. He was admitted to the Priory Clinic in Roehampton and, though he was mistrustful of the diagnosis, agreed to a new mood-stabilising treatment, having had conventional anti-depressants until then."

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/portal/main.jhtml;jsessionid=EF2NVFIFBUC1FQFIQMFCFGGAVCBQYIV0?xml=/portal/2007/05/03/nosplit/ftbrunton103.xml

Holy crap!

Though art school everywhere is bound to be lame, I'm glad I don't attend art school in America:

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0364955/board/nest/35001939

There is an old story of how the cathedral of Chartres was struck by lightning and burned to the ground. Then thousands of people came from all points of the compass, like a giant procession of ants, and together they began to rebuild the cathedral on its old site. They worked until the building was completed — master builders, artists, labourers, clowns, noblemen, priests, burghers. But they all remained anonymous, and no one knows to this day who built the cathedral of Chartres.

Regardless of my own beliefs and my own doubts, which are unimportant in this connection, it is my opinion that art lost its basic creative drive the moment it was separated from worship. It severed an umbilical cord and now lives its own sterile life, generating and degenerating itself. In former days the artist remained unknown and his work was to the glory of God. He lived and died without being more or less important than other artisans; 'eternal values,' 'immortality' and 'masterpiece' were terms not applicable in his case. The ability to create was a gift. In such a world flourished invulnerable assurance and natural humility. Today the individual has become the highest form and the greatest bane of artistic creation.

The smallest wound or pain of the ego is examined under a microscope as if it were of eternal importance. The artist considers his isolation, his subjectivity, his individualism almost holy. Thus we finally gather in one large pen, where we stand and bleat about our loneliness without listening to each other and without realizing that we are smothering each other to death. The individualists stare into each other's eyes and yet deny the existence of each other.
We walk in circles, so limited by our own anxieties that we can no longer distinguish between true and false, between the gangster's whim and the purest ideal. Thus if I am asked what I would like the general purpose of my films to be, I would reply that I want to be one of the artists in the cathedral on the great plain. I want to make a dragon's head, an angel, a devil — or perhaps a saint — out of stone. It does not matter which; it is the sense of satisfaction that counts.
Regardless of whether I believe or not, whether I am a Christian or not, I would play my part in the collective building of the cathedral.

That I wasn't interested in politics or social matters, that's dead right. I was utterly indifferent. After the war and the discovery of the concentration camps, and with the collapse of political collaborations between the Russians and the Americans, I just contracted out. My involvement became religious. I went in for a psychological, religious line... the salvation-damnation issue, for me, was never political. It was religious. For me, in those days, the great question was: Does God exist? Or doesn't God exist? Can we, by an attitude of faith, attain to a sense of community and a better world? Or, if God doesn't exist, what do we do then? What does our world look like then? In none of this was there the least political colour.

My basic view of things is — not to have any basic view of things. From having been exceedingly dogmatic, my views on life have gradually dissolved. They don't exist any longer... I've a strong impression that our world is about to go under. Our political systems are deeply compromised and have no further uses. Our social behavior patterns — interior and exterior — have proved a fiasco. The tragic thing is, we neither can nor want to, nor have the strength to alter course. It's too late for revolutions, and deep down inside ourselves we no longer even believe in their positive effects. Just around the corner an insect world is waiting for us — and one day it's going to roll in over our ultra-individualized existence. Otherwise I'm a respectable social democrat.

One of the strongest feelings I remember from my childhood is, precisely, of being humiliated; of being knocked about by words, acts, or situations. Isn't it a fact that children are always feeling deeply humiliated in their relations with grown-ups and each other? I have a feeling children spend a good deal of their time humiliating one another. Our whole education is just one long humiliation, and it was even more so when I was a child. One of the wounds I've found hardest to bear in my adult life has been the fear of humiliation, and the sense of being humiliated. . . Every time I read a review, for instance — whether laudatory or not — this feeling awakes. . . To humiliate and be humiliated, I think, is a crucial element in our whole social structure. It's not only the artist I'm sorry for. It's just that I know exactly where he feels most humiliated. Our bureaucracy, for instance. I regard it as in high degree built up on humiliation, one of the nastiest and most dangerous of all poisons.

John Mclaughlin is my favourite musician of all time. Here're some excerpts from an interview:

"I feel very strongly about playing more than notes with the people, particuarly in jazz music or Indian music or any music that deals with improvisation. I have always felt that improvisation is like the most honest kind of music in the sense that if you're spontaneous then you're being yourself. Because you can only be yourself spontaneously, and you can only be spontaneous with other people. I mean, I used to run into Paul Motian in the Sufi center in the late '60s and early '70s and we'd see Hazrat Inyat Khan speaking and this guy is a very, very high person. And he would stand up in front of the 40 or 50 people there who were into him and he'd just be looking out at people in the audience without saying anything for about three or four minutes, which is a long time if you're waiting for somebody to speak. But he'd be like in the ozone but in a very special way, waiting for the words to come and being totally real and totally spontaneous with the people. And this is really beautiful to see. In fact, it's the most natural state of human beings. Anyway, that's kind of an analogy to what I feel about music, which is to say we're really ourselves most naturally when we're being spontaneous with each other, which is the best way to be in life anyways. You know, when you have a family, everybody is spontaneous with each other and sometimes a little brutally honest, but nevertheless it's spontaneous so it cannot really be bad. And that is really my philosophical foundation, if you like, about how groups should be. And maybe this is why I always want great players. I need stimulation, I need them to kick my ass, as it were, and provoke me in some way that will push me to a place that I don't know, that I've never been before. "

"Yeah, but you know...I was struggling in my 20s. I was really struggling because I couldn't find any guitar player that really spoke to me. The only people that really spoke to me were people like Miles and Coltrane and Bill Evans and their drummers. And by this time, of course, it was like late '64-65...this was some period, man. I mean, don't forget when Kind of Blue came out...that was '59 and that swept me away. Of course, Milestones was before that. And then Trane came out with his thing and Miles kept doing his thing. Cannonball and Trane were both in Miles' band, then Cannonball got his band together with his brother Nat. And these guys were all killing! For me, at that time, it was just normal. It was the music that was happening at that time. But when I look back at it now I see it was like a phenomenal period for jazz and for music in general. Man, just think of all that was going on in the early '60s, and I was caught up right in the middle of it. I mean, I loved to listen to Wes Montgomery and Tal Farlow, but that was the old school. What can I tell you' And I always used to wonder why Miles and Trane didn't have guitar players. Why not, you know' I used to wonder, "Why isn't there somebody out there doing it on guitar like these guys are doing it on saxophones and trumpets'" So I was trapped in this frustrating place. And you know, when you're a guitar player and you listen to Coltrane all the time and you're hearing him ripping up and down his instrument, playing those sheets of sound...and you're hearing Miles, of course, playing gorgeous melodies like always...just trying to get a conception for my own instrument that was anywhere near that level was tough. And in the meantime, I'm dropping acid and I finally figured out, "Well, I've got to find a way to alter my state of consciousness without chemicals." And that's another trip...trying to get your life together and be strong in a natural way. It was rough, it was very rough. You know, I tried lot of different things. I joined some meditation group and even before that it was the Theosophical Society in London. But you know, the only good thing about that was they had a good library and I found some good books in there that opened me up to some new ideas. Then I started doing yoga and started doing meditation and became a member of some group in London, but it just wasn't happening for me. So I just quit that right away and continued (my search). And I just kept doing yoga until I became a disciple of Sri Chinmoy. I was already in New York by that time. But by early '68, before I came over, I'd finished the whole studio scene. I just couldn't deal with it anymore and I was just back to my poverty-stricken days but at least happy about not having to go and deal with Tom Jones and Petula Clark"

"I'm looking for new forms, trying to find something new. And of course, we can go on forever looking for new forms. Fortunately in music you can go on forever. And I will die looking for new forms. But that's the way I'm made, so I just accept it like that. Maybe growing up with the background that I had...you know I'm trying to be a jazzman, I'm into Trane and Miles, I'm hearing all this great music -- A Love Supreme and Miles in Europe where he's playing all these standards. And then, of course, in my early days when I was a teenager I was so crazy about flamenco music that I wanted to be a flamenco guitar player. Meanwhile, I'm playing r&b with Georgie Fame, and that's cool because when you hear Charles Mingus that's r&b too. You take the r&b out of jazz, you don't have any jazz. And I'm also into Rahsaan Roland Kirk, whom I had the great fortune to play with in London. Rahsaan was totally jazz but he was so funky and had such a blues thing too. That's why I love Mingus and Monk, because you could feel the blues so deeply in their music. So I'm a young guitarist in love with jazz but in the meantime I'm trying to survive by playing tunes by James Brown, who I love also, I gotta tellya. I love that music. But I was being pulled every which way by all these movements, all these different kinds of music -- jazz, flamenco, r&b, blues -- so in the end I was just a big melting pot where they all kind of mix up. And you know, that's what I am. I'm just a big mix of all these cultural influences tied up with my own restlessness. Anyway, who can figure out what we are."

"My parents were divorced when I was seven. They split. And they tried to get together quite a few years later, and I was already 12 or 13 by this time and playing guitar. My mother allowed me the chance to study piano when I was about eight years old and that was really great. She was wonderful, my mother. She was just one of my greatest inspirations. What she did for me I will never be able to describe. Anyway, one day my father was back and they were trying to, like, get it together. I must've been 13. So it was just me and him in living room and one point he says to me, "So what do you want to do when you grow up'" And I said, "I'm gonna be a musician." And he said, "No, a real job." I mean, what a moron this guy is, what an idiot! I mean, he doesn't know anything. And that was a real clincher for me."

"BM: Speaking of re-education, I don't know if you know about the Pat Martino story. (Martino suffered a brain aneurysm in 1980 which robbed him of his memory, forcing him to relearn the guitar from scratch).

BM: Well, he's finally back on top of his game, but it's taken him 10 years to get there.

JM: Yeah, I heard him play recently. He's killing.

BM: Yeah, and there was a period of time when he was struggling and of course he had to relearn the instrument. He woke up from surgery and had no memory of guitar whatsoever.

JM: Unbelievable!

BM: And then he very meticulously began relearning his instrument.

JM: I know, it's phenomenal. It's like a real victory of the spirit, that's all I can say."

Voice of Hibakusha

Eye-witness accounts of the bombing of Hiroshima, from the video HIROSHIMA WITNESS produced by Hiroshima Peace Cultural Center and NHK

http://www.inicom.com/hibakusha/

The Light Verse is: "God is the light of the heavens and the earth, the similitude of His light is like a niche in which is a lamp, the lamp is in a glass, the glass is as if it were a brilliant shimmering star kindled from a blessed tree, an olive (tree) neither of the East nor of the West, whose oil illuminates even if fire does not touch it; light upon light, God leads to His light whom He wills. And God gives parables to men (for their understanding). And God has knowledge of everything." (SAA)

The Veils Hadith is: "God has seventy veils of light and darkness. Were He to lift them, the majestic glories of His face would burn completely anyone whose eyesight perceived Him." (SRA)

Two quotes from the Koran.

What's interesting is that these are pretty much completely meaningless - even moreso after translation, no doubt - but my response to them is emotionally powerful, and for reasons I cannot ascertain. It is expression and communication taken to a level that is absent in all non-religious work - like the real meaning is understood by elements within the person not belonging to the conscious brain. Things that I used to consider primitive, superstitious, backward, tribal and nonsensical now seem to affect me in ways I barely understand.

I think that is the purpose of art. And to affect people "inexplicably", in ways they cannot understand, one needs to have a very high understanding and a real, immediate experience of the things they idealise and imagine and only hazily perceive this very yearning.

http://www.alibinetwork.com/index.jsp

I thought this is a joke, but apparently it is not.

My dream from last night is burned in my mind. I was in school, and sent out to take photographs for a project, with a small camera. All of us spread out, and went to different locations. It had been silent and still, but now a strong wind started to blow. The place didn't look like school at all - there were huge fields and tall fir trees, and their tops covered the land as they billowed in a quickening gale. It looked like a village in the English countryside. About six of us took the lift, and even inside we could hear the howling wind. We reached up to about the seventieth floor, and the sky was almost black. I remember very well the obese cumulo-nimbus clowds and the taste of excitement and the threat that comes with a pregnant storm.

There were many things going on, up there. People were fighting: teenage boys in black robes in two factions beating each other. They were pushing each other to the ledge, and they were all angry with the other group. I stepped around them, and so did all my friends - they didn't bother us. There were many strange things going on in the stairwells - and it was possible to see and experience the weather outside, because the stairwell was not a covered, indoor structure and only a flimsy grille stood in place of its walls. I saw Whoopi Goldberg in an exquisite Native American robe, but wearing a bandeau and a nun's veil, standing on a carton of tea bags, fighting an evil witch. They were using poisoned darts as weapons. Suddenly, all my friends were gone. I heard one complain faintly about how it was an unfair project, that it was really a useless thing to do. I remembered that the instructions for the project had been unclear. I was told by a passerby (a nun) in the stairwell that all my friends were on the 40th floor.

By now, there was heavy rain and a hurricane and it looked like armageddon outside. The building didn't seem very safe - it felt like even a 300-metre tall block of concrete could topple in these insane winds. When I got to the 40th floor, I saw that there had been a massacre. Suddenly, I saw a leg and a part of the torso sticking to the roof. I imagined the worst and pulled it down. I was the mid-section of a human being, cut-up. I was petrified with horror and fear, but again a passer-by - again a nun - told me it wasn't anyone I knew, that my friends were elsewhere. I heaved a sigh of relief, and then I looked outside, through the thin grille. I was soaked by now, and the sound of the wind was deafening and its force apocalyptic. It had completely uprooted many of the firs - I could see these 20-foot trees being swept and blown away into the sky. I was convinced that it had to be the end of the world. Here the dream ended.

http://www.mollen.net/corpnazi.html

"Today the world is threatened by an extremely serious split between a science that is totally and consciously projected into the future, and a rigid and stereotyped morality which all of us recognize as such and yet sustain out of cowardice and sheer laziness. Where is this split most evident? What are its most obvious, its most sensitive, let us even say its most painful, areas?

Consider the Renaissance man, his sense of joy, his fullness, his multifarious activities. Those were men of great magnitude, skillful craftsmen and at the same time artistically creative, capable of recognizing their own sense of dignity, their own sense of importance as human beings: the Ptolemaic fullness of man. Then man discovered that his world was Copernican, an extremely limited world in an unknown universe.

And today a new man is being born, fraught with all the fears, terrors and stammerings that are associated with a period of gestation. And what is even more serious, this new man immediately finds himself burdened with a heavy baggage of emotional traits which cannot exactly be called old and outmoded, but rather unsuited and inadequate. They condition us without offering us any help, they create problems without suggesting any possible solutions. And yet it seems that man will not rid himself of this baggage. He reacts, he loves, he hates, he suffers under the sway of moral forces and myths which today, when we are at the threshold of reaching the moon, should not be the same as those that prevailed in Homeric times, but nevertheless are.

Man is quick to rid himself of his technological and scientific mistakes and misconceptions. Indeed, science has never been more humble and less dogmatic than it is today. Whereas our moral attitudes are governed by an absolute sense of stultification. In recent years, we have examined those moral attitudes very carefully, we have dissected them and analyzed them to the point of exhaustion. We have been capable of all this, but we have not been capable of finding new ones. We have not been capable of making any headway whatsoever toward solving the problem of this ever-increasing split between the moral and the scientific man, a split which is becoming more and more serious, and more and more accentuated.

Naturally, I don't care to, nor can I, resolve it myself; I am not a moralist, and my film is neither a denunciation nor a sermon. It is a story told through images whereby, I hope, it may be possible to perceive not the birth of a mistaken attitude but the manner in which attitudes and dealings are misunderstood today. Because, I repeat, the present moral standards we live by, these myths, these conventions are old and obsolete. And we all know they are, yet we honor them. Why? The conclusion reached by the protagonists in my film is not one of sentimentality. If anything, what they finally arrive at is a sense of pity for each other. You might say that this too is nothing new. But what else is left if we do not at least succeed in achieving this? Why do you think eroticism is so prevalent today in our literature, our theatrical shows, and elsewhere? It is a symptom of the emotional sickness of our time. But this preoccupation with eroticism would not become obsessive if Eros were healthy, that is, if it were kept within human proportions. But Eros is sick; man is uneasy, something is bothering him. And whenever something bothers him, man reacts, but he reacts badly, only on erotic impulse, and he is unhappy.

The tragedy in L’Avventura stems directly from an erotic impulse of this type: unhappy, miserable, futile. To be critically aware of the vulgarity and the futility of such an overwhelming erotic impulse, as is the case with the protagonist in L’Avventura, is not enough or serves no purpose. And here we witness the crumbling of a myth, which proclaims it is enough for us to know, to be critically conscious of ourselves, to analyze ourselves, in all our complexities and in every facet of our personality. The fact that matters is that such an examination is not enough. It is only a preliminary step. Every day, every emotional encounter gives rise to a new adventure. For even though we know that the ancient codes of morality are decrepit and no longer tenable, we persist, with a sense of perversity that I would only ironically define as pathetic, in remaining loyal to them. Thus, the moral man who has no fear of the scientific unknown is today afraid of the moral unknown. Starting out from this point of fear and frustration, his adventure can only end in a stalemate. "

CANNES STATEMENT by Michelangelo Antonioni (after his film L'Avventura won the Grand Jury Prize at Cannes)

http://www.alleycatscratch.com/lotr/Hobbit/Pippin/PipArmor.htm

Man I'd love to get one of these and wear it on a regular basis. Everyday clothing for guys is so BORING.

"Listen: there was once a king sitting on his throne. Around him stood great and wonderfully beautiful columns ornamented with ivory, bearing the banners of the king with great honor. Then it pleased the king to raise a small feather from the ground, and he commanded it to fly. The feather flew, not because of anything in itself but because the air bore it along. Thus am I, a feather on the breath of God."

- Hildegard of Bingen, 17 September 1179

http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/med/hildegarde.html

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/B000001TYF/qid=1135404750/sr=1-2/ref=sr_1_2/002-6765846-7900046?v=glance&s=classical

"A certain kind possessed a garden which through all four seasons never lacked for fragrant herbs, verdant grasses and joyous pleasances; great waters therein flowed, and all manner of birds sitting in the branches poured forth songs of every kind. Indeed, every melody that could enter the mind and every beauty that imagination might conceive, all was to be found in that garden. Moreover a company of peacocks, exceedingly graceful, elegant and fair, had there made their abode and dwelling-place. One day the king laid hold of one of the peacocks and gave orders that he should be sewn up in a leather jacket, in such wise that naught of the colours of his wings remained visible, and however much he tried he could not look upon his own beauty. He also commanded that over his head a basket should be placed having only one aperture, through which a few grains of millet might be dropped, sufficient to keep him alive. Some time passed, and the peacock forgot himself, the garden-kingdom and the other peacocks. Whenever he looked at himself he saw nothing but a filthy, ugly sack of leather and a very dark and disagreeable dwelling place. To that he reconciled himself, and it became fixed in his mind that no land could exist larger than the basket in which he was. He firmly believed that if anyone should pretend that there was a pleasurable life or an abode of perfection beyond it, it would be rank heresy and utter nonsense and stupidity. For all that whenever a breeze blew and the scent of the flowers and trees, the roses and violets and jasmine and fragrant herbs was wafted to him through the hole, he experienced a strange delight and was curiously moved, so that joy of flight filled his heart. He felt a mighty yearning within him, but knew not the source of that yearning, for he had no idea that he was anything but a piece of leather, having forgotten everything beyond his basket-world and fare of millet. Again, if ever he heard the modulations of the peacocks and the songs of the other birds he was likewise transported with yearning and longing; yet he was not wakened out of his trance by the voices of the birds and the breath of the zephyr." - Sohrawardi Maqtul (executed in 1191)

Finally:

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B00067F1CE/qid%3D1134481124/sr%3D11-1/ref%3Dsr%5F11%5F1/002-6765846-7900046

Amazon.com sells tanks - a dream day for all the militia from Wyoming. I wonder how much they charge for "shipping and handling".

"When we practice and strive in the manner of someone who feels that his body will break up if he keeps on doing it, because he is so weak, lazy and irresolute, it seems to me that we are like lazy inconsequential fools who think they are going to bore a hole through a mountain using a small auger, and they are very anxious to do this within the time of a single day. It is so ludicrous that those who are truly wise with sharp wisdom and who really do strive, just laugh at it. We should think and look at the manner of striving of those who were sons of the Sakya - The savakas of the Buddha at the time of the Buddha, and see how they acted, and then compare it with our own striving which is like someone who goes to the shore and just smacks the sea with his hand, which is enough to make us feel sorry and disheartened that his longing for Nibbana is only to the extent of getting his hands wet! Look, think and see how the defilements are like an ocean and the efforts we make are like the water on our hands - how far apart are they? People in this age of just "wetting their hands in the ocean" make little in the way of effort, yet their intention is to get free from the realm of samsara. Then when this does not happen as they expect it to, they find some excuse to blame the religion, the time, the place and the people of this or that period of time. They are not in the least ashamed of the way in which they display their own incompetence and stupidity so that those teachers who are truly wise and skilled feel disheartened and laugh wryly, saying that there is no way in which they can do anything about such people." - from Patipada, or the Mode of Practice of Ven. Ajahn Mun

"Only imperfectly we know and imperfectly we prophesy

When comes perfection, the imperfect will cease.

When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child.
When I became a man, I have laid down the things of a child.

We see now through a mirror in riddles, then we shall see face to face. Now I know in
part, then I shall know fully, and be known fully.

So remain, Faith, Hope and Love, these three. But the greatest of these is Love."

I Corinthians 13 literal translation

http://www.xs4all.nl/~beren/picshtm/cor3.html

What I find incredible is that the truth is written in plain language for everyone, but they have no idea what these words mean. It is staggering to consider that great empires were architectured and have fallen, many millions have lived and died serving strange empty causes, millenia have passed and the whole earth has been changed while some of the most important words from the most widely read book have been understood and acted upon by some precious few. It is such a marvel to consider this, as if we live in completely different realities than others', and that each person has his or her own separate, parallel universe. Like fat and stupid donkeys over high mountains, our egos and thinking patterns need to be beaten to the point of breaking if we intend for them to change direction in their blind, inevitable, lugubrious parade towards degeneration and fatal falls.

Brief excerpts from William Blake's biography:

As a child, Blake viewed the world in the light of what Wordsworth, in his Ode: Intimations of Immortality, would later call a “visionary gleam.” When he was about nine, he told his parents he had seen “a tree filled with angels” on one of his walks; he later reported a similar vision of “angelic figures walking” in a field among workers as they gathered in the hay. Unlike the child in Wordsworth’s poem, however, Blake never outgrew these visions. He was past fifty when he described seeing the rising sun as “an Innumerable company of the Heavenly host crying Holy Holy Holy is the Lord God Almighty”.

Besides plaster casts, the young Blake also began to collect inexpensive prints from shops and auctions. His taste ran to Raphael, Michelangelo, Giulio Romano, Albrecht Dürer, and Maerten Heemskerck, artists whose work was not widely appreciated at the time. He never wavered in his conviction that they were superior to the more fashionable painters of the Venetian and Flemish schools. In the catalogue for an exhibition of his own work in 1809, he accuses artists “who endeavour to raise up a style against Rafael, Mich. Angelo, and the Antique” of attempting to destroy art.

Even as a student, Blake followed his own taste in art. When the elderly George Moser, Keeper of the Royal Academy, advised him to study Lebrun and Rubens instead of the “stiff” and “unfinished” works of Raphael and Michelangelo, the young Blake balked: “These things that you call Finishd are not Even Begun,” he later reported himself as having replied; “how can they then, be Finishd?”