Driven by the force of love
the fragments of the world
seek each other that the world
may come into being.
When a dog runs at you, whistle for him.
Spring was never what it used to be; if only I were somewhere else perhaps it would be better; and I would plunge into aching envy of others who were where I would like to be, in the country, beside the Mediterranean, looking at mountains. But whenever I could remember to relax, then the glory of my childhood had not departed, time and place did not matter anymore, one sniff of the morning air brought the distilled essence of all my Springs. Looking out of a London window, clear sun with a touch of frost, there flooded into me all the sunlit frosty mornings on still commons, with little panes of crackling ice in the horses’ hoofmarks. And again, one day in the Luxemburg gardens when narrow focus had made me feel tiresomely uneducated, wishing I knew more history so that I could understand more about what I was seeing, I remembered to relax; at once I knew that I needed no history in order to understand what the races of men had felt about fountains.
We are what we imagine. Our very existence consists in our imagination of ourselves. The greatest tragedy that can befall us is to go unimagined.
Close your hand — do you feel an absence or a presence?
Most lives are a flight from selfhood. Most prefer the truths of the stable. You stick your head into the stanchions and munch contentedly until you die. Others use you for their purposes. Not once do you look outside the stable to lift your head and be your own creature.
War is sex perverted.
And I remembered The Fourteenth Book of Bokonon, which I had read in its entirety the night before. The Fourteenth Book is entitled, “What Can A Thoughtful Man Hope For Mankind on Earth, Given the Experience of the Past Million Years?” It doesn’t take long to read The Fourteenth Book. It consists of one word and a period.
This is it.
“Nothing.”
. . . here we are in Science Fiction History, in the age of Hydrogen Bomb Apocalypse, the very Kali Yuga wherein man’s stupidity so overwhelms the planet that ecological catastrophe begins to rehearse old tribe-tales of Karmic retribution, Fire and Flood and Armageddon impending.
Peace is not an absence of war, it is a virtue, a state of mind, a disposition for benevolence, confidence, justice.
Remember that you came to bring the peace of God into the world.
Thinking about interior peace destroys interior peace. The patient who constantly feels his pulse is not getting any better.
There is no evil in the universe which is not the result of ignorance, and which would not, if we were ready and willing to learn its lesson, lead us to a higher wisdom, and then vanish away.
The atomic bomb is the real Buddha of the West, a perfect detached sovereign apparatus. Unmoving, it rests in its silo, purest actuality and purest potentiality. It is the embodiment of cosmic energies and the human share in these, the highest accomplishment of the human race, and its destroyer; the triumph of technical rationality, and its dissolution into paranoia. Its repose and its irony are endless. It is the same to the bomb how it fulfills its mission, whether in silent waiting or as a cloud of fire. For it, the change of conditioned states does not count.
As with a Buddha, all there is to say is said by its mere existence. It is not a bit more evil than reality, and not a hair more destructive than we are. It is already completely incarnate, while we in comparison are still divided. In the face of such an instrument, great listening is called for. Rather than strategic considerations, the bomb requires from us neither struggle nor resignation, but experience of ourselves. We are it.
