"If there are self-made purgatories, then we all have to live in them."

- Spock

"This Side of Paradise"

Stardate 3417.7

        ++++++++++++++++++

I would defend the liberty of consenting adult creationists to practice whatever intellectual perversions they like in the privacy of their own homes; but it is also necessary to protect the young and innocent.
- Arthur C. Clarke


        ++++++++++++++++++

The dinosaurs disappeared because they could not adapt to their changing environment. We shall disappear if we cannot adapt to an environment that now contains spaceships, computers — and thermonuclear weapons.
- Arthur C. Clarke


        ++++++++++++++++++

The Universe is a creation entirely within a being that is outside time and space, and dreaming about what we are. Everything is connected, because it's all being created by this one consciousness. And we are tiny reflections of the mind that is creating the universe. That's what the alchemy says. -Augustus Owsley Stanley

        ++++++++++++++++++

"Through vibration comes motion. Through motion comes color. Through color comes tone."
~Pythagoras

        ++++++++++++++++++

"If I can get out of the way, if I can be pure enough, and if I can be generous and loving and caring enough to abandon what I have and my own preconceived, silly notions of what I think I am - and become truly who in fact I am - then the music can really use me. And therein lies my fulfillment. That's when the music starts to happen."
- John McLaughlin

        ++++++++++++++++++

If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.
--George Orwell, 1945

        ++++++++++++++++++

"The meeting of
two personalities is like
the contact of two
chemical substances:
if there is any reaction
both are transformed"
--CARL JUNG

        ++++++++++++++++++

"The superior man tries to promote music as a means to the perfection of human culture. When such music prevails and people's minds are led towards
the right ideals and aspirations, we may see the appearence of a great world."
- Confucius

        ++++++++++++++++++

...every atom that belongs to me
as good belongs to you...
~Walt Whitman

        ++++++++++++++++++

We've all been in prison
because we couln't tell the truth

Ya know each man has made
the very bars he's clinging to

~Mike Cochran

        ++++++++++++++++++

Sometimes I say to a poem,

"Not now,
can't you see I am bathing!"

But the poem usually doesn't care
And quips,

"Too bad, Hafiz,
No getting lazy--

You promised God you would help out

and He just came up with this
new tune."

Sometimes I say to a poem,

"I don't have the strength
To wring out another drop
Of the Sun."

And the poem will often
Respond

By climbing onto a barroom table:

Then lifts its skirt, winks,
Causing the whole sky to
Fall.

--Hafiz

        ++++++++++++++++++

Play is our first act. If we are lucky, it will be our last. "The child's toys and the old man's reasons," wrote Blake, "are the products of the two seasons." We begin in play, and in our wisdom return to it. Play is the taste of paradise from which we came; a foretaste of the paradise we will enter... Play is a peak experience, the feeling of 'that which was, is, and ever shall be.'
~~George Sheehan, from Running and Being

        ++++++++++++++++++

"... It had been five years since the brutal but transformative illumination of my own Bwiti initiation in the damp jungles of secretive Gabon, and it seemed, abstractly, a good idea to check in with the ancestors and the hard-ass Iboga spirit once again. And the trip would be paid for..."

- Daniel Pinchbeck, 2012: The Return of Quetzalqoatl

        ++++++++++++++++++

Does sunset sometimes look
like the sun's coming up?
Do you know what a faithful love is like?

You're crying. you say
you've burned yourself.
But can you think of anyone who's not
hazy with smoke?
-- Rumi

        ++++++++++++++++++

"We are all the same person trying to shake hands with our self."
- Wavy Gravy

        ++++++++++++++++++

We saw ourselves as anthropologists from the twenty-first century inhabiting a time module set somewhere in the dark ages of the 1960s. On this space colony we were attempting to create a new paganism and a new dedication to life as art.

-Timothy Leary on Millbrook

        ++++++++++++++++++

"The best way to predict the future is to invent it." ~Alan Kay

        ++++++++++++++++++

You make your own dream. That's the Beatles' story, isn't it? That's Yoko's story. That's what I'm saying now. Produce your own dream. If you want to save Peru, go save Peru. It's quite possible to do anything, but not to put it on the leaders and the parking meters. Don't expect Jimmy Carter or Ronald Reagan or John Lennon or Yoko Ono or Bob Dylan or Jesus Christ to come and do it for you. You have to do it yourself. That's what the great masters and mistresses have been saying ever since time began. They can point the way, leave signposts and little instructions in various books that are now called holy and worshiped for the cover of the book and not for what it says, but the instructions are all there for all to see, have always been and always will be. There's nothing new under the sun. All the roads lead to Rome. And people cannot provide it for you. I can't wake you up. You can wake you up. I can't cure you. You can cure you."
- John Lennon


        ++++++++++++++++++

"Try now to get a picture of that luminous reality, the grand orchestra of the universe. Its heavenly strains are not only filling all interstellar space but they are ringing with far more enchanting music through all the higher worlds beyond the utmost bounds of the physical. The higher we go, the more enchanting the music. In those higher worlds the music is less mixed with matter, and so it is not dulled. After passing the Third Region on the Path of the Masters, this sublime chorus becomes so overwhelmingly attractive that the soul grows impatient to go on up. It is absorbed in it. It lives in it day and night. It is its life, its joy, its spiritual food. There is not a cubic millimeter of space in existence which is not filled with this music. Sweeter and sweeter its heavenly strains vibrate through every living being, great or small, from world to world, and from universe to universe. Its life-giving melodies may not be consciously heard by those who are not trained to catch them, but there is not one living being in all creation which does not derive its life from this current. All joy that has ever thrilled a living soul has come out of this divine harmonic. How great is this luminous reality!"
- Julian Johnson, "The Path of the Masters"



        ++++++++++++++++++

"I'll play it first and tell you what it's called later."
~Miles Davis

        ++++++++++++++++++

A good way to threaten somebody is to light a stick of dynamite. Then you call the guy and hold the burning fuse up to the phone. "Hear that?" you say. "That's dynamite, baby."
- Jack Handy

        ++++++++++++++++++

"If we can locate, at the very center of our silence, our individual 'still small voice', we will have found our greatest ally in life."
-Robert Lawrence Smith,Quaker Book of Wisdom

        ++++++++++++++++++

Thinking is a momentary dismissal of irrelevancies.
- Buckminster Fuller

        ++++++++++++++++++

"Music should go right through you, leave some of itself inside you, and take some of you with it when it leaves."
~Henry Threadgill

        ++++++++++++++++++

"From the metaphysical point of view there is nothing that can touch the formless except the art of music which in itself is formless."
~Hazrat Inayat Khan


        ++++++++++++++++++

I want to stay as close to the edge as I can without going over. Out on the edge you see all kinds of things you can't see from the center.
-Kurt Vonnegut

        ++++++++++++++++++

Socrates died for your sins.
~~Lazlo Kovaks

        ++++++++++++++++++

Aaah, Music....a magic beyond all we do here!
~~Albus Dumbledore, Headmaster, Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry

        ++++++++++++++++++

Possess nothing and be possessed by nothing. Put away what you have in your head, give what you have in your heart. Here a world and there a world, we are seated on the threashold.
- Sufi saying (from Red Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson)

        ++++++++++++++++++

Your imagination is supposed to be the engine of your destiny. It is the wizard's wand you can use to design your future. Your imagination is your power to create mental pictures of things that don't exist yet and that you want to bring into being. Every human creation on this earth has begun as a vision in someone's imagination.
~~Rob Breszny

        ++++++++++++++++++

Come faith, come love,
come be in me -

Come dwell in broken pottery -

Come the empty, come unfilled -
come all being, come to me -

I'm not living, I'm not rolling,
not walking paths of the dead -

I'm not living,
I'm not living,
in the Shadow of God anymore.

- D Cravens



        ++++++++++++++++++

DEMAND 7: I demand that you seek out and create stories that make you feel that the universe is friendly and life is on your side. You could hunt down stories about how, for example, rising rates of intermarriage are helping to dissipate ethnic and religious strife worldwide; how the violent crime rate in America has been steadily declining for 30 years; how death rates from cancer are shrinking; the birth rate among teenage mothers is the lowest it's been in six decades; acreage devoted to organic farming is increasing rapidly; the number of refugees and weapons sales all over the world are way down from the level they were 15 years ago, and how the actual bare naked truth is that levels of literacy and education and political freedom and peace and wealth are steadily growing all over the world.
~~Rob Breszny

        ++++++++++++++++++

"Whether you're playing in a bar, a strip joint, or the Himalayas, the first duty of music is to compliment and enhance life."
~Carlos Santana

        ++++++++++++++++++

"The Sound eventually becomes louder and louder and begins to pull the spirit up. This mystic Sound reverberating ceaselessly within us lifts our soul above body-consciousness. At each stage the Celestial Music becomes more and more enrapturing. When the soul hears this divine Melody, it gets magnetized and attracted to it, and the soul soars within. Traveling on that Sound, we travel higher and higher to worlds of unimaginable joy." - (Sant Rajinder Singh)

        ++++++++++++++++++

Dance like no one's watching,
Love like you'll never be hurt,
Sing like no one's listening,
Live like it's heaven on earth.

        ++++++++++++++++++

I'm not here, I've gone out to look for myself. If I come back before I return, please tell me to wait.
-Andrea Pusillo

        ++++++++++++++++++

In the beginner's mind
there are many possibilities;
in the expert's mind
there are few

~~Shunryu Suzuki

        ++++++++++++++++++

"Without music to decorate it, time is just a bunch of boring production deadlines or dates by which bills must be paid."
- Frank Zappa

        ++++++++++++++++++

I am quite sure now that often, very often, in matters concerning religion and politics a man's reasoning powers are not above the monkey's.
- Mark Twain in Eruption

        ++++++++++++++++++

"We need a renaissance of wonder. We need to renew, in our hearts and in our souls, the deathless dream, the eternal poetry, the perennial sense that life is miracle and magic. "- E. Merrill Root

        ++++++++++++++++++