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Swami
Vrhka Baba
MAXIMS
PART
FOUR
S.
Radhakrishnan
click here for
Hungarian
translations
301.
Only beasts sleep 'the sleep of the just'.
302.
The more freedom you have, the lonelier you get.
303.
Freedom's
just a feeling that you've everything to lose.
304.
The irony of
evolution: the most sophisticated species is the crassest.
305.
"Insight" is only the removal of blinkers and rose-tinted
glasses.
306.
There
is no cure for us few who can see, who are not in retreat from reason.
307.
If we had souls, we would not have property: property is what we
use to try to fill the holes where our souls could be.
308.
Obsessed by the fiction of purity (as by superiority)
we decline to see it outside ourselves, and refuse to recognise
that soul also is part of soil.
309.
The World presents itself as a fairground filled with booths. And
behind the booths lurk reality: the starved and beaten dog, the
cancerous, toothless tigress who is the last member of her species.
310.
The sad truth about dogs is that they find our world not just strange
and terrible - but acceptable. They are 'superior' to us in their
unconditional and interminable gratitude. In human beings, gratitude
quickly transmutes to oblivion or resentment.
311.
If only man were wolf to man there would be neither overpopulation
nor war.
312.
The only species to be aware of (and have words for) empathy and
altruism
has almost none for other species.
313.
Man
is the only species whose concentration on detail results in a desertifying
refusal to see the wood for the trees.
314.
Armless, legless,
deaf and nearly blind:
the snake calls into question all the powers of Man.
315.
Civilisation is a process of progressive infantilism: this is the
only progress.
316.
Television is a paradigm of capitalism: it sells back to you a sickly
substitute for the possibilities that it takes away.
Freedom of Speech in the West: It is illegal in the USA to
publish
criticism of the appalling, environmentally-catastrophic methods
of
agricultural production and criminal contempt for animals.
317. To be taken seriously is the beginning of death - if you haven't
died long ago from taking yourself seriously.
318.
Christianity:
the Religion of Death that denies death and many of the natural,
spontaneous expressions of life.
319.
The mind's desire for order is frustrated by its own chaos.
320.
The 'Expulsion from Eden' - to agriculture, hierarchies, civilisation,
and the galloping nomadism of the dispossessor.
321.
Civilised people will kill for any reason - except compassion.
322.
The Truest Soldier:
the Serb conscript who fought first for the Serbs, then defected
to the Bosnian Muslims, then stood in No-Man's-Land and shot himself.
323.
Religion is the poetry of the anti-poetic.
324.
Just as religion's by-product is unbelievers, so employment manufactures
the unemployed. Unemployment can no longer be a religious vocation.
325.
All art is sentimental.
Despair is the only genuine emotion.
326.
Sincerity is the enemy of art, said Oscar Wilde.
But art and artefacts are the enemy of life.
And life is pain.
327.
Perhaps the reason why people do all the crazy things that are called
"normality" is because they really long to be Lower
Beings.
328.
Sex is the attempt to turn the mechanical into the transcendental.
Thus it is the
most compelling, most destructive and least imaginative of human
activities.
329.
When I see a sculpture or a palace
I think how cramped and cramping are the works of Man.
The Buddha smiled at the smashing of his statues
and maybe also at the motives of the Taliban.
330.
Dangerous Fanaticism: the craving for maximum profit at minimum
cost in the minimum time.
331.
Childish Superstition: belief in Continual Economic Growth.
332.
Maimed motions and self-interest - not Reason - seek absolute certainty.
333.
When there was a Lumpenproletariat there seemed to be hope.
But since Mikhail Gorbachov - through kindness or despair - abolished
it in 1989, there is now only the global Lumpenbourgeoisie.
And there is no hope.
334.
Culture is the decay of life into half-life.
335.
The truth is what people believe in but do not believe..
336.
Every map is a description of destruction.
337.
"I have never known anything to happen." - 'Dan Rooney'
in Sam Beckett's All That Fall.
338.
If dogs were so unevolved as to judge us, we should be fried upon
eternal fires.
This Chinese bear, captured while a cub,
will have spent almost its entire life in an iron straitjacket
while a dirty metal tube inserted by "superior" animals
directly into its liver drips "magic" bear-bile like
rubber to be sold as a fortifier to the rich...
But hundreds of thousands of animals suffer just as much mindless
cruelty in Western laboratories. In the "democratic"
USA no figures for animal torture can legally be published, for
free speech on animal welfare has been criminalised there.
339.
Have we no respect for misery ?
340.
Gazing into a dog's eyes I am appalled by the burden of being.
341.
Man
is God's original sin: life-abuse.
We think we're improvement on Nature.
342.
How many of us are contented before we are nothing ?
343.
Language, culture and philosophy are bridges between the deepest
lies and the shallowest truths.
344.
The beginning of wisdom is knowing that no-one's worth knowing.
345.
Man is, says Dr Jekyll in R.L. Stevenson's STRANGE
CASE OF DR. JEKYLL & MR. HYDE, "a disease of the agglutinated
dust".
Later on in the book two comparable phrases ring out:
"the womb of consciousness" and "the fortress of identity".
With these two images Stevenson summed up Man's brief history.
346.
'Original Sin' is not so much the consciousness of self
as taking oneself seriously.
347.
Foucault said that at the bottom of our dreams lies death.
Choosing one's death - dying justly - is, in the end, a true expression
of justly living.
348.
Governments are not interested in people, only in categories. Through
categorisation they can control.
349. Life (like a job) is just a passport to futility.
350.
The whole world is trussed up like a chicken with our wires.
351. Being in a crowd: a lump of meat in a stew.
352.
If home is where the heart is, most of us are homeless.
353.
"Environmentalism": salvaging bagfuls of sawdust while
the forest is cut down. Now we can't see the wood for the splinters.
354.
The bleak and bland totalitarianism of lawns.
355.
One's idea of 'love' might be another's idea of sewage.
356.
Because it is theft (mainly from life)
property is aggression, property is war against the world.
357.
It is no more cruel to expose children on a hillside (as in Ancient
Greece and many other places) than to expose them to television
and schooling.
358.
The blasphemy of gardens:
we think we can improve on nature!
359.
The only devil is what we call
intelligence.
Thus we are indeed - so to speak -
Satan's Spawn !
360.
The problem with ideals is hypocrisy.
The only human virtue is Humility.
361.
Infatuation brings a brief elation.
"Love" brings dependency and desolation.
For "happiness"
we need to practise hopelessness.
362.
Nationality - like life - only diminishes and demeans people.
363.
It is a terribly easy mistake to believe what you want to hear.
364.
Each technological advance makes more and more of us autistic.
365.
The capitalist pretence of libertarian democracy depends on the
undemocratic compulsion of employment, and thus offers only the
freedom to make and spend money.
366.
We adopt an attitude when we are young - and spend the rest of our
lives concocting justification.
367.
Are fire-arms to the man the same consolation that embracing arms
are to the woman ?
368.
Which comes first - our admiration or our imposition of pattern
?
369.
Plausibility is the most insidious source of injustice.
370.
The difference between animals and humans is that we have turned
ourselves into monsters.
371.
Sex is a cul-de-sac - and man is a dead end.
372.
'Progress': from integrity to vanity.
Christianity
- at best - is vanity,
and all the -isms & Islam
also are hypocrisy and sham...
Except, of course,
for Cannibalism, the only honest and ecological religion.
373.
One of the most vicious effects of religions is that they erode,
discredit, destroy and replace our inherited altruism. (And they
steadily reduce the number of natural things to worship.)
Religion, cities, and schooling destroy our inborn connectibility.
374.
The world was always open - and we have shut it down.
375.
Everything on television is equally true.
376.
We have turned the Planet of Miracles into the Planet of Holocausts.
377.
Blind Arcades: the "Open Society" is walled in by McDonald's
"golden" arches.
378. Happiness is blind, which is why, Dear Rilke, happiness
falls.
379.
The end of utility and use is uselessness. (Understanding the
sadness of things makes me sad.)
380.
Knowledge destroys wonder.
Without wonder we become desperate robots -
like Schopenhauer's porcupines rushing together and separating
in pain.
381.
The only voice worth listening to is the voice "crying in the
Wilderness". Now everything is wilderness of our own making,
artificial, while true wilderness has been almost completely wiped
out.
382.
The greatest malignance of the USA (as heir to European empires)
is not its global tyranny of competitiveness (=inequality), nor
that it is an empire of greed seeking to dominate the entire world,
the oceans, and the very air itself, but the unbelievable hypocrisy
of its belief that it was ever, once or recently, in a state of
innocence.
383.
Suffering: the most enduring creation by the only superstitious
species.
384.
As far as Nature is concerned, we are all war criminals.
385.
Wild animals rarely experience the squalor that humans create for
themselves. (So much for civilisation: 98% smash-and-grab and 2%
art.)
386.
Most of us aren't born with a vacuum inside us.
The vacuum is inserted by upbringing.
Our whole lives are then devoted to filling that vacuum - stupidly.
387.
To be respectable is only a little bit better than being a child
molester. (In Ancient Greece the one implied the other.)
388.
Globalisation: the admission that the only history is the history
of desire.
389.
Those who talk of objectivity are careful to apply it only to a
very narrow sector of their lives - otherwise they might be forced
to act with compassion - or consider suicide.
390.
The Descent of Man: what is the virtue
of intelligence when it produces unending demand
and uncontrolled desire ?
391.
The trickster-words Why? and How? invent false categories
such as meaning and truth and invest us with vast - but false -
powers.
392.
Beauty is much more common (and much less fragile) than integrity.
Amnesia is the best revenge.
393.
Better to be condemned for what you are
than admired for what you are not.
99% of everything is nothing.
394.
The grudging total of all human love is not sufficient for a single
dog.
395.
The philosophical basis for Western science is:
The end justifies the means.
And science is the opposite of acceptance.
396.
Television: everybody watches, almost no-one sees.
397.
The most inescapable slavery is servitude to ideas - especially
meretricious ones like
progress and
the soul.
398.
Such a totalitarian word and concept: 'Peace'...
399.
It is obtuse to think of the 'human spirit' triumphing over disaster.
The human spirit is disaster.
400.
All we ever see - but cannot understand - is who we are.
Because I see the course of things I do not care to live.
Maxims are continued on the
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to 
part one
Better, oh better cancel from the Scroll
of Universe one luckless Human Soul,
than, drop by drop, enlarge the Flood that Rolls
hoarser with Anguish as the Ages Roll!
- Omar
Khayyám, as translated
by Edward FitzGerald
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