thegoodfellas/blogset-br huggingface dataset:
gestures gesturing. Pain and suffering are simply extreme forms of play, and there isn't anything in the whole universe to be afraid of because it doesn't happen to anyone! There isn't any substantial ego at all. The ego is a kind of flip, a knowing of knowing, a fearing of fearing. It's a curlicue, an extra jazz to experience, a sort of double-take or reverberation, a dithering of consciousness which is the same as anxiety."Of course, to say that life is just a gesture, an action without agent, recipient, or purpose, sounds much more empty and futile than joyous. But to me it seems that an ego, a substantial entity to which experience happens, is more of a minus than a plus. It is an estrangement from experience, a lack of participation. And in this moment I feel absolutely with the world, free of that chronic resistance to experience which blocks the free flowing of life and makes us move like muscle-bound dancers. But I don't have to overcome resistance. I see that resistance, ego, is just an extra vortex in the stream-part of itand that in fact there is no actual resistance at all. There is no point from which to confront life, or stand against it.How unfamiliarly natural it is to see pain as no longer a problem. For problematic pain arises with the tendency of self-consciousness to short-circuit the brain and fill its passages with dithering echoesrevulsions to revulsions, fears of fear, cringing from cringing, guilt about guilttwisting thought to trap itself in endless oscillations. In his ordinary consciousness man lives like someone trying to speak in an excessively sensitive echo-chamber; he can proceed only by doggedly ignoring the interminably gibbering reflections of his voice. For in the brain there are echoes and reflected images in every dimension of sense, thought, and feeling, chattering on and on in the tunnels of memory. The difficulty is that we confuse this storing of information with an intelligent commentary on what we are doing at the moment, mistaking for intelligence the raw materials of the data with which it works. Like too much alcohol, self-consciousness makes us see ourselves double, and we mistake the double image for two selvesmental and material controlling and controlled, reflective and spontaneous. Thus instead of suffering we suffer about suffering, and suffer about suffering about suffering.As has always been said, clarity comes with the giving up of self. But what this means is that we cease to attribute selfhood to these echoes and mirror images. Otherwise we stand in a hall of mirrors, dancing hesitantly and irresolutely because we are making the images take the lead. We move in circles because we are following what we have already done. We have lost touch with our original identity, which is not the system of images but the great self-moving gesture of this as yet unremembered moment. The gift of remembering and binding time creates the illusion that the past stands to the present as agent to act, mover to moved. Living thus from the past, with echoes taking
the lead, we are not truly here, and are always a little late for the feast. Yet could anything be more obvious than that the past follows from the present like a comet's tail, and that if we are to be alive at all, here is the place to be?Evening at last closes a day that seemed to have been going on since the world began.In this way it begins to appear that instead of knowers and knowns there are simply knowings, and instead of doers and deeds simply doings. Divided matter and form becomes unified pattern-in-process. Thus when Buddhists say that reality is "void" they mean simply that life, the pattern-in-process, does not proceed from or fall upon some substantial basis. At first, this may seem rather disconcerting, but in principle the idea is no more difficult to abandon than that of the crystalline spheres which were once supposed to support and move the planets.Eventually this unified and timeless mode of perception "caps" our ordinary way of thinking and acting in the practical world: it includes it without destroying it. But it also modifies it by making it clear that the function of practical action is to serve the abiding present rather than the ever-receding future, and the living organism rather than the mechanical system of the state or the social order.In addition to this quiet and contemplative mode of meditation there seems to me to be an important place for another, somewhat akin to the spiritual exercises of the dervishes. No one is more dangerously insane than one who is sane all the time: he is like a steel bridge without flexibility, and the order of his life is rigid and brittle. The manners and mores of Western civilization force this perpetual sanity upon us to an extreme degree, for there is no accepted corner in our lives for the art of pure nonsense. Our play is never real play because it is almost invariably rationalized; we do it on the pretext that it is good for us, enabling us to go back to work refreshed. There is no protected situation in which we can really let ourselves go. Day in and day out we must tick obediently like clocks, and "strange thoughts" frighten us so much that we rush to the nearest head-doctor. Our difficulty is that we have perverted the Sabbath into a day for laying on rationality and listening to sermons instead of letting off steam.If our sanity is to be strong and flexible, there must be occasional periods for the expression of completely spontaneous movementfor dancing, singing, howling, babbling, jumping, groaning, wailingin short, for following any motion to which the organism as a whole seems to be inclined. It is by no means impossible to set up physical and moral boundaries within which this freedom of action is expressiblesensible contexts in which nonsense may have its way. Those who provide for this essential irrationality will never become stuffy or dull, and, what is far more important, they will be opening up the channels through which the
formative and intelligent spontaneity of the organism can at last flow into consciousness. This is why free association is such a valuable technique in psychotherapy; its limitation is that it is purely verbal. The function of such intervals for nonsense is not merely to be an outlet for pent-up emotion or unused psychic energy, but to set in motion a mode of spontaneous action which, though at first appearing as nonsense, can eventually express itself in intelligible forms.Our language almost compels us to express this point in the wrong wayas if the "we" that must be sensitive to the organism and respond to it were something apart. Unfortunately our forms of speech follow the design of the social fiction which separates the conscious will from the rest of the organism, making it the independent agent which causes and regulates our actions. It is thus that we fail to recognize what the ego, the agent, or the conscious will is. We do not see that it is a social convention, like the intervals of clock time, as distinct from a biological or even psychological entity. For the conscious will, working against the grain of instinct, is the interiorization, the inner echo, of social demands upon the individual coupled with the picture of his role or identity which he acquires from parents, teachers, and early associates. It is an imaginary, socially fabricated self working against the organism, the self that is biologically grown. By means of this fiction the child is taught to control himself and conform himself to the requirements of social life.At first sight this seems to be an ingenious and highly necessary device for maintaining an orderly society based upon individual responsibility. In fact it is a penny-wise, pound-foolish blunder which is creating many more problems than it solves. To the degree that society teaches the individual to identify himself with a controlling will separate from his total organism, it merely intensifies his feeling of separateness, from himself and from others. In the long run it aggravates the problem that it is designed to solve, because it creates a style of personality in which an acute sense of responsibility is coupled with an acute sense of alienation.The mystical experience, whether induced by chemicals or other means, enables the individual to be so peculiarly open and sensitive to organic reality that the ego begins to be seen for the transparent abstraction that it is. In its place there arises (especially in the latter phases of the drug experience) a strong sensation of oneness with others, presumably akin to the sensitivity which enables a flock of birds to twist and turn as one body. A sensation of this kind would seem to provide a far better basis for social love and order than the fiction of the separate will.The corporate worship of churches might have been the natural answer to this need, were it not that church services follow the crowd pattern instead of the group pattern. Participants sit in rows looking at the backs of each other's necks, and are in communication
only with the leaderwhether preacher, priest, or some symbol of an autocratic God. Many churches try to make up for this lack of communion by "socials" and dances outside the regular services. But these events have a secular connotation, and the type of communion involved is always somewhat distant and demure. There are, indeed, discussion groups in which the leader or "resource person" encourages every member to have his say, but, again, the communion so achieved is merely verbal and ideational.The difficulty is that the defended defensiveness of the ego recoils from the very thing that would allay itfrom associations with others based on physical gestures of affection, from rites, dances, or forms of play which clearly symbolize mutual love between the members of the group. Sometimes a play of this kind will occur naturally and unexpectedly between close friends, but how embarrassing it might be to be involved in the deliberate organization of such a relationship with total strangers! Nevertheless, there are countless associations of people who, claiming to be firm friends, still lack the nerve to represent their affection for each other by physical and erotic contact which might raise friendship to the level of love. Our trouble is that we have ignored and thus feel insecure in the enormous spectrum of love which lies between rather formal friendship and genital sexuality, and thus are always afraid that once we overstep the bounds of formal friendship we must slide inevitably to the extreme of sexual promiscuity, or worse, to homosexuality.This unoccupied gulf between spiritual or brotherly love and sexual love corresponds to the cleft between spirit and matter, mind and body, so divided that our affections or our activities are assigned either to one or to the other. There is no continuum between the two, and the lack of any connection, any intervening spectrum, makes spiritual love insipid and sexual love brutal. To overstep the limits of brotherly love cannot, therefore, be understood as anything but an immediate swing to its opposite pole. Thus the subtle and wonderful gradations that lie between the two are almost entirely lost. In other words, .the greater part of love is a relationship that we hardly allow, for love experienced only in its extreme forms is like buying a loaf of bread and being given only the two heels.I have no idea what can be done to correct this in a culture where personal identity seems to depend on being physically aloof, and where many people shrink even from holding the hand of someone with whom they have no formally sexual or familial tie. To force or make propaganda for more affectionate contacts with others would bring little more than embarrassment. One can but hope that in the years to come our defenses will crack spontaneously, like eggshells when the birds are ready to hatch. This hope may gain some encouragement from all those trends in philosophy and psychology, religion and science, from which we are beginning to evolve a new image of man, not as a spirit imprisoned in incompatible flesh, but as
an organism inseparable from his social and natural environment.This is certainly the view of man disclosed by these remarkable medicines which temporarily dissolve our defenses and permit us to see what separative consciousness normally ignoresthe world as an interrelated whole. This vision is assuredly far beyond any drug- induced hallucination or superstitious fantasy. It wears a striking resemblance to the unfamiliar universe that physicists and biologists are trying to describe here and now. For the clear direction of their thought is toward the revelation of a unified cosmology, no longer sundered by the ancient irreconcilables of mind and matter, substance and attribute, thing and event, agent and act, stuff and energy. And if this should come to be a universe in which man is neither thought nor felt to be a lonely subject confronted by alien and threatening objects, we shall have a cosmology not only unified but also joyous.Alan Watts
"The Way has no map, the Way is not charted, the Way is not such that you can follow somebody and find it. The Way is not like a super highway, the Way is more like a bird flying in the sky - it leaves no marks behind. The bird has flown but no marks are left. So the Way is a pathless path. It is a path, but it is a pathless path. It is not ready made, available, you can not decide to walk on it, you will have to find it. And you will have to find it in your own way, nobody else's is going to function. Buddha has walked, Lao Tzu has walked, Jesus has walked, but those ways ar not going to help you because you are not Jesus, you are not Lao Tzu, you are not Lieh Tzu. You are you, a unique individual. Only by walking, only by living your life will you find the Way. This is something of great value.That's why Taoism is not an organised religion. It can not be. It is an organic religion, but not an organised religion. You can be a taoist if you simply live your life authentically, spontaneously; if you have the courage to go into the unknown on your own, individual, not leaning on anybody, not following anybody, simply going into the dark night not knowing wether you will arrive anywhere or you will be lost. If you have courage, that risk is there - it is risky, it is adventurous.Christianity, Hinduism, Mohammedanism are super-highways: you need not to risk anything, you simply follow the crowd. you go with the mob. With tao you have to go alone, you have to be alone. Tao respects the individual and not the society. Tao respects the unique and not the crowd. Tao respects freedom and not conformity. Tao has no tradition. Tao is rebellion and the greatest rebellion possible.That's why I call Tao the pathless path. It is a path, but not like other paths. It has a very different quality to it, the quality of freedom, the quality of anarchy, the quality of chaos. Tao says that if you impose a discipline on yourself you will be a slave. The discipline has to arise out of your awareness, then you will be a Master. If you impose an order on your life this will just be a pretension: the disorder will remain deep in the very core of your being; the order will be on the surface, at the center there will be disorder. This is not going to help. The real order arises not from the outside, but from the innermost core of your being. Allow disorder, don't repress it. Face it, take the challenge of disorder - and by taking the challenge of disorder and living it, living dangerously, an order arises in your being.""Of course, freedom is dangerous because there is no security in it, no safety in it. There is great safety when you are following the crowd; the crowd protects you.
There is great safety when you are fooling the crowd; because of the vey presence of so many people you feel that you are not alone - you can not be lost. Because of this security you are lost. Because of this security you never search and you never seek and you never enquire. And truth can not be found unless you have enquired, unless you have enquired on your own. If you take borrowed truths you become knowledgeable, but to be knowledgeable is not to know.Tao is very much against knowledge. Tao says that even if you're ignorant and the ignorance is yours, it is good, at least is yours. And it has an innocence to it. But if you are burdened with accumulated knowledge, scripture, tradition, then you are living a false, pseudo life. Then you are not really living, you are just pretending that you are living. You are making impotente gestures, empty gestures. Your life has not the intensity, the passion - can not have the passion. That passion arises only when you move on your own, alone, into the vast sky of existence.Why can't you move alone? Because you don't trust life. (...)Man has created these ideologies just to hide the fact that he does not know, to hide the fact that he is ignorant. Man is cunning and he can create rationalisations, but these rationalisations are bogus - you can not move with them into the truth. You will have to drop them. Tao says that ignorance is not the barrier against truth - knowledge is the barrier.""So the difference between the poet and the mystic is not much. The poet is coming closer, the mystic has arrived. For the poet, there are only glimpses of truth; for the mystic, truth has become his very life. The poet is only transported to the world of truth and then falls back again. For the mystic, truth has become his abode: he lives there, he lives as truth.""Tao means to exist on the Way and to exist in such a way that the Way and you are not two. This existence is one - we are not separate from it. The separation, the idea of separation is very illusory. We are joined together, we are one whole. We are not islands, we are one continent. You are in me, I am in you. The trees are in you, you are in the trees. It is an interconnected whole.The whole is one - separation is not possible. The very idea of separation is the barrier. The idea of separation is what we call the ego. If you are with the ego, you are not on the path, you are not in Tao. When the ego is dropped, you are in Tao. Tao means an egoless existence, living as part of this infinite whole, not living as a separate entity."Osho - Tao The Pathless Path Volume I
"The environment is no longer just a rallying cause for the counterculture, but has come to the forefront as a major national and international concern.(...)Another major source of the global-warming effect is the wanton destruction and burning of our Central and South American rainforests. Rainforests account for an outstanding 80 percent of the Earth's vegetation, and are critical to our ecosystem.Trees absorb the toxic gases of excess carbon dioxide that we release into the atmosphere, and convert it to breathable oxygen. Trees are our ultimate rejuvenators: without them, life on earth as we know it, could not exist. Rainforest trees also provide an environment for the largest diversity of animal and insect species in the world. By burning our rainforests, not only do we destroy the oxygen-producing vegetation and the environment in which the animals and plants live, but we release huge amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere and hasten the deleterious global-warming effect.With all their importance, why are the rainforests being cleared so relentlessly? The answer is simple matter of pain and pleasure: economics. Huge tax breaks have been given in these countries as incentives for ranchers to clear the land. Is it to make room for more housing? Of course not. It's to clear grazing land for cattle to be exported as beef... (...)The inefficiency of the use of this land for grazing is one of the most destructive, short-term decisions that man can make. We're bulldozing the source of our survival. Do you realize that every time you buy a quarter pound burger using rainforest beef, it represents the destruction of fifty-five square feet of rainforest? Once destroyed, it can never be replaced. Further, the current rate of species extinction is 1000 per year due to the destruction of the rainforests - an unimaginable assault to our ecosystem.What's the point of it all? It's solely for the purpose of cycling more meat through our bodies, which medical science has already established is directly related to the top killers in this nation: heart disease and cancer. (...) Ultimately, we can not destroy the external environment without destroying our own internal environment.Do you want to stop the destruction of our rainforests? Do you want to help restore the delicate balance of our ecosystem? (...) the most powerful thing you can do is to link pain to any of your personal behaviours that perpetuate the ill use of our planet. Clearly, one step would be to reduce or eliminate the consumption of hamburger meat. (...) The earth itself is at stake. Know that the decisions you make about what to put on your dinner plate determine, in a small yet undeniable way, such things as how much carbon dioxide is released into our atmosphere and how many plant and animal species will die each day.(...) It's been said that water will be the gold of the future. How can this be true, on a planet that is predominantly covered with water? The reason can be found in our incredibly poor management of this vital resource. Specifically, it's related to the meat
industry. Consider this: the amount of water that is used to raise one single steer is enough to float an american destroyer.(...)Did you know it takes 5214 gallons of water to produce one pound of California beef? This means that you can save more water by not eating one pound of beef than you could by skipping showers for an entire year!(...)Did you know that more energy is consumed by the beef industry than any other single industry in the United States?(...)It would be wiser to drive your car to the restaurant down the block than if you walked there, fueled by the calories you consumed from a quarter-pound of beef or chicken raised by the energy-inefficient standard of the industry.(...)One final issue we're all concerned about is world hunger.(...)The amount if food produced on any prime acre of land is markedly reduced when that food is beef. The same acre of land that would produce 250 pounds of beef would produce 40000 pounds of potatoes- roughly the difference between feeding one person and 160 persons! The same resources that are used to produce one pound of beef can produce sixteen pounds of grain. The land required to feed one meat eater for a year is three and a quarter acres; for a lacto-ovo-vegetarian one-half acre; and one complete vegetarian one-sixth acre. In other words one acre can feed twenty times as many people if they eat a vegetarian diet.(...)What's more, if every american were to reduce his or her meat intake by just 10 percent, the number of people who could be fed using th resources that would be freed from growing livestock would be 100 million! Thid is enough to feed every single starving man, woman and child on earth - and have a surplus.(...)As John makes clear, the decision about what to put on your dinner plate tonight is one that has profound processional effects. It sets in motion a whole series of events and activities that are shaping the quality of life on earth. You may ask "how can one person hope to turn the tide of such an enormous challenge?" John maintains that this battle will be won not on Capitol Hill or in boardrooms, but by individuals: "the shopper in the supermarket stopping at the meat counter , picking up that chuck steak marked 3,98 a pound and realizing that they're holding in their hand a very costly illusion. Behind that little price sticker hides the forests that have been cut down, our children's food and water supply, our children's topsoil, their future environment. And we have to look at that steak and say "that costs too much". Real power lies in the decisions you make in the supermarket and in restaurants and in your kitchen.TAKE A STANDBy taking a stand, you not only stop participating in the misuse of our resources, but you send a clear message to big businesses whose lifeblood is tied to hamburger. In recent years, food-service companies have begun to respond to changes in consumer tastes by featuring salads and other