• The purpose of life is to give life purpose
• The most frightening mask is the one without a face
• Move or Die (cardinal rule on how to stay healthy)
• To be enlightened is to be intimate with all things. (Soto Zen)
• The way you do one thing is generally the way you do all things.
• There is no reality, only perception.
• Whatever situation you're in, it will eventually become the norm.
• Disbelief is the beginning of belief. (Cardus)
• The less you know, the more you believe.
• To grow old wisely and well is to understand the perspective of years. (Cardus)
• What lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us. (Ralph Waldo Emerson)
• What we do in life echoes in eternity.
• Quitting an addiction is hard, not quitting is harder.
• There comes a time when your mind outlives your desires.
• While I thought I was learning how to live, I was learning how to die. (Leonardo Da Vinci)
• The 5 stages in dying are: Anger - Denial - Bargaining - Depression - Acceptance.
• The closest definition of being good is not being greedy.
• Reality hits when you run out of excuses.
• Love, the one game you lose by refusing to play.
• Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. (Santayana)
• We promise according to our hopes and perform according to our fears. (Francois Duc De La Rochefoucauld)
• The universe is made of stories, not atoms. (Muriel Rukeyser)
• Every virtue is a means between 2 extremes, each of which is a vice. (Aristotle)
• What we observe is not nature itself, but nature exposed to our method of questioning. (Heisenberg)
• Teach us to care and not to care. (T.S. Elliot)
• Non-action does not mean doing nothing and keeping silent. Let everything be allowed to do what it naturally does, so that its nature will be satisfied. (Cuang-tzu)
• People complain about over-population but no one wants to leave. (Schulz in Peanuts)
• He calmly rode on, leaving it to his horse's discretion to go which way it pleased, firmly believing that in this consisted the very essence of adventure. (Cervantes, Don Quixote)
• A friend is someone you can share profanities with.
• Matter is what you view from the outside. Mind is what you view from the inside.
• He who has noble thoughts is never alone.

Conversation enriches the understanding, but solitude is the school of genius; and the uniformity of a work denotes the hand of a single artist.

Edward Gibbon

The capacity to be alone is based on the experience of being alone in the presence of someone, and that without a sufficiency of this experience the capacity of being alone cannot develop.

Winnicott

It is only when alone that the infant can discover his personal life.

Winnicott

The worst solitude is to be destitute of sincere friendship

Francis Bacon

The young individual's task is primarily to emancipate himself from his original family, establish himself in the world, and found a new family in his turn. The middle-aged individual's task is to discover and express his own uniqueness as an individual.

Jung

We only perceive instantaneously, in the close space-time vicinity around us.

The fact that objects are events can only be understood when it is realised that space and time are interpenetrating. (D.T.Suzuki)

The sun, moon and stars, which we see, are cross-sections of spirals which we do not see. These cross-sections do not fall out of the spirals because of the same principle by reason of which the cross-section of an apple cannot fall out of the apple. (Ouspensky)

I've always been fascinated by the Red Dye example:

One bottle of red dye is emptied and mixed in all
the oceans. One bottle of water from these oceans
still contains 5000 molecules of this red dye.
This is because there are many more molecules of red
dye in a bottle than there are bottles in the oceans.

This also relates to Avogadro's number, 6.022*10²³. This number corresponds to the number of atoms or molecules needed to make up a mass equal to the substance's atomic or molecular mass, in grams.

For example, Hydrogen has an atomic mass of 1. Therefore one gram of Hydrogen has 6.022*10²³ atoms. Oxygen has an atomic mass of 16. From this we can calculate that one molecule of water (H₂O) has a total atomic mass of 18. So we can conclude that 18 grams of water contains 6.022*10²³ molecules.

The atomic mass of a chemical element is the mass of an atom at rest, most often expressed in unified atomic mass units (AMU). 1 AMU is defined to be 1/12 of the mass of one atom of carbon-12.
For example, the atomic mass of iron is 55.847 amu, so Avogadro's number of iron atoms (i.e. one mole of iron atoms) have a mass of 55.847 g. Conversely, 55.847 g of iron contains Avogadro's number of iron atoms. This number is approximately 6.022*10²³.

Another common sense application shows that without determining the actual weight of a substance, a good rule of thumb to use is that a cubic centimeter of solid matter contains about 10²⁴ atoms

This means that, assuming the ocean's waters are propperly mixed, a glass of sea water contains a sample of virtually any solveable substance that exists in the oceans! That this complexity could give birth to living organisms makes the understanding as regards the origin of life a little less mind-boggling.

Why is there something instead of nothing? (Alan Sandage)

(from a radio interview with ABC radio presenter Philip Adams)
Consciousness has become too vague a word as it is commonly used both in terms of awareness and reflective awareness.

Awareness is the evolutionary derivitave of what is cell sensitivity. Single living cells are sensitive to the outside environment. They use photo -, kino -, pressure sensitivity, etc. in order to survive.
Once groups of cells combine into more complex organisms, the internal cells have to be included so that information of the outside environment becomes internalised and drawn together into a brain.
The brain synthesises all the incoming data into a multi-dimensional canvas (self: holonomic?). It informs the motor system what to do next, based on information derived from this multi dimensional canvas. This is awareness.

Reflective awareness is an extra layer on top of this. It has the concept of language at its roots.
The brain attaches word labels to stable precepts (concepts) in the brain; and by organising them, thinking them, uttering them, the brain generates internal experience, which it superimposes onto the original awareness.

Dreams are masters in metaphor. The metaphor is full of meaning because it isn't consciously constructed. The being which covers a certain range of emotions, constructs these dreams because this range of emotions is guiding it to do so, making it in a sense unavoidable. Dreams are an honest account of one's state of being. The true interpretation of a dream can be gotten from the emotions it invokes.

• To me, science comprises any field that attempts to comprehend reality. This may allude to fields of arts and philosophy, but generally it signifies that we have to apply some kind of reasoning ... not merely speculate and blindly accept dogmas by faith alone.
• The field of science is like a giant bubble of information that is slowly expanding. Nobody can fully comprehend all of it, let alone perceive all the possible links and combinations that even this limited bubble provides. Each person's contribution is expressed in the way we form our threads within this bubble of information. Some of us specialise, i.e. extend a particular thread or band of threads. Others create entirely new threads, some of which may actually lead somewhere. Others are more intrigued by the similarity of some threads and try to find a common explanation for this similarity, organising the treads into bands... The possibilities and combinations are as varied as there are scientists.
• As one grows up, it is not so much that we get answers to our questions, but that the questions change. In fact, our understanding of the world is reflected by the life cycle of the questions we ask. Real important life questions are never answered, we only see interpretations. Why did 15 million Jews get killled in WW2? What is love? A complex situation has too many changing variables.
• Equations define relationships.
• When a scientist talks about light, he doesn't claim to know what light is, instead, he builds upon former scientist's discoveries and theories, to describe the phenomena of light as far as we've grown to understand it. The power of science resides in the method it uses, which is mainly building on previously determined and proven solid foundation. Sometimes a quantum leap is made, but these are the exceptions, the milestones, the insights that often come out of necessity, rather than divine inspiration ...theories get stuck sometimes, and the subject can only be described in this new revolutionary way, which eventually has to be accepted ... The best proof is the one that has been tried to be disproved. That's why scientists who naturally cling to outdated concepts are part of the solution, they are proving the new concept by trying (and assumingly not succeeding) to disprove it. Einstein defending his non-quantum reality, Hawking defending his loss of information in the dying black hole.
• Any physical situation can be viewed as [the interaction of] forces whose consequences accumulate over time.
  Science can be beautiful. Take the concept of force, for example. One of the first concepts Galileo defined, (and Newton made abstract using mathematics). The changes of a moving particle's velocity is caused by force, and the interaction of those forces whose consequences accumulate over time constitutes a physical situation. These concepts are deep...

• Description, which is necessarily limited, demands abstraction. This enables us to conceptualise, which after all is the formation of ideas corresponding to abstract terms. Once we work with abstraction we can see the similarities in seemingly unrelated fields. In order to communicate, we need to get a good grasp of the language being used.
• I suspect many of us dream of ever writing a book, a chance of putting our thought processes, our feelings into the open, making them immortal. Like a multi-dimensional photograph, it would be a record of how we, as individuals, perceive the world. But those records of perceptions are not all that individual, they are largely society's perception. The language, the things we do, our culture, they're all part of the ether, the field in which we exist.
• Probably the hardest part in conceiving a book is to decide that you have the authority to write one.
• We all harness the same basic information, but structure it individually, according to our life experiences. And the sum of all these experiences represents the reality of the whole of mankind. In a way, mankind has as many dimensions as there are people.
• Knowledge is created by mankind, but only the individual can advance it. (Einstein)
• Even though the language we use is limited, the laws we discover provide us with insights consequently enhancing this language.

Writing is not a profession but a vocation of unhappiness

Simenon

It is creative apperception more than anything else that makes the individual feel that life's worth living.
[apperception: the process whereby perceived qualities of an object are related to past experience.]

Winnicott

Both Jung and Freud lived into their 80's and both almost abandoned interest in psychotherapy in favour of ideas and theories about human nature.

Anthony Storr

If something is heated up, it also becomes less cool. Numerous examples of this logic can be found in ancient Eastern philosophy. The most famous one being the I CHING, the Chinese Book of Changes. Also in the Tao Te Ching, and in the ZEN koans.

Emotions emanate, thus activating the same forces in the organisms it interacts with. We cry when others cry, we laugh when others laugh.

Emotions are not an indication of one's depth of being, they are a consequence of interactions.

First imagine your emotions when you think someone has done you wrong.
Then imagine the scenario where you find out the person actually didn't do wrong... your negativity will disappear. A shift in perception has erased or replaced all these little memories of negative emotions. The dye in the water can't be removed, but a dynamic entity, such as an emotion, can be switched off, or it can be redirected because we know the source responsible for it, us. The shift in perception erased the previous emotion, but knowledge and insight was required to enable this shift.

Knowledge and insight (intuition) can be regarded as two sides on the coin of wisdom.
Philosophers and mystics alike would call the ability to change perception will.
Will, then, is not brute denial. It has to do with harnessing energy through right living.

Personality is your shell. It is shaped in time and can't be erased. It is the memory of your existence. If a shift in personality is required, one needs to return to the source, and maybe that is pointless; whatever personality is wished upon oneself, it always will be a shell. Imperfections in personality are no big deal, awareness is, how deep do you experience reality? To experience deep reality, one has to have energy; and one accumulates energy by right (balanced) living, the golden mean between extremes. Living in a world of extremes demands energy. And one should only use those extremes when a boost is required. After that, a degree of self control (self observation) is required.

Personality is the supreme realization of the innate idiosyncrasy of a living being.
[Idiosyncrasy: Greek for "a peculiar temperament", "habit of body" (idios "one's own" and sun-krasis "mixture"). It is defined as a structural or behavioral characteristic peculiar to an individual or group.]

Jung

It is easier to facilitate self-assertion in the timid than it is to induce humility in the overwheening.

Anthony Storr

Life force is related to the organism's drive for individuation by means of standing out, excelling in something that separates it from the others. Hence flow the ideas of evolution, competition, and identifying oneself with one's virtue.

One is merely incarnation, merely mouthpiece, merely medium of overwhelming forces.

Nietzsche

Habitual attitudes and behaviour often receive reinforcement from external circumstances. [Give up smoking when on holidays].

Anthony Storr

The word religion originates from the Latin word religio, which means to establish an obligation. Religio in turn is derived from he verb religare meaning to tie back or to tie tight.
In light of this, the term religion can be interpreted as that which establishes a tight bond or an obligation between the human and Deity.
Quoted from What is Religion?

To me, religion seems to delve in two different areas, concerned with ...

• interpreting the world around you
• moral code based on this interpretation

...so in that light, religion can be seen as the force in you that tries to understand the relationship between you and all else in the universe on a scientific level and a philosophical level.

All things take on their existence from that which perceives them. (Upanishad)

Once you realise the approximate nature of all concepts, then you can really love them, because you love them without attachment. (Tibetan Buddhism)

Those who speak do not know, and those who know do not speak. (Lao Tzu)

Non-action does not mean doing nothing and keeping silent. Let everything be allowed to do what it naturally does, so that its nature will be satisfied. (Chuang-Tzu)

Not knowing that one knows is best. (Lao Tzu)

The way up and down are the same. (Heraclitus)

Leaves falling
Lie on one another
The rain beats the rain
(Zen)

All action takes place in time by the interweaving of the forces of nature, but the man lost in selfish delusion thinks that he himself is the actor. The man who knows the relation between the forces of nature and actions, sees how some forces of nature work upon other forces of nature, and becomes not their slave. (Gita)

Be bent, and you will remain straight.
Be vacant, and you will remain full.
Be worn, and you will remain new.
(Lao Tzu)

Love requires humiliation, which is its protection from destructive reaction. Without humiliation, love, when it enters the conditioned world, gets caught into the polarity of love and hate and finishes as its own opposite. (J.G.Bennett)

Love is the emotion one feels that accompanies the striving for completeness.

Is, as Einstein says, life lived without questioning and wonderment a life wasted? If we manage to have the discipline and luck to stay healthy, we each have about one thousand months of existence on this earth. While this does not seem much when put in this context, many of us aspire to make our existence on earth as meaningful as possible. Problem is: What constitutes a meaningful life? As a child we feel unique, but that soon disappears as we gain life experience. No matter what we experience, we eventually get used to it.

As a child, many of us question the amazing coincidence of existence - one sperm in 300 million - why me? Though soon the wonderment subsides to make way for the mundane issues life brings. And yet, existence is abundant; why, even in the most uninhabitable places on earth, such as in the cold darkness of the deep sea, at the edges of volcanoes - life manages to get a stronghold. Rather than a wholly sacred entity, life manifests itself excessively, and therefore seems redundant, if not accidental. But it only seems to be like that because the vastness in number.

I believe that number, which can express both multitude and proportion, is the one fundamental thing in life. For example, number bridges the vastly different fields of quantum and relativity: number is the one thing they have meaningfully in common. Unlike concepts such as mass, light, moisture, heat, love, colour, number has no grey fuzzy areas.

From number evolves reason, and from reason evolves wisdom; those intuitively knowings. All this, of course, was realized a long time before science came into existence (such as the wisdom of the Chinese I Ching and Lao Tzu), the Greek philosophers Pythagoras and Plato, the Australian Aboriginal dream time, every culture has its understandings.

Mathematics is the clue that the universe makes sense. And one of the clues that hints to this meaningfulness is metaphor. Metaphor implies structure. A great example of this is the helix (spiral): The double helix of DNA, the helix of space-time, the mechanical string, the electric coil - the mechanical pendulum and electronic coil/capacitor system are represented by the same equation. In mathematics, the Golden Ratio produces the spiral that represents the most irrational ratio. One can go on to the physical manifestations of tornadoes, all these can be represented by the same mathematical equation. This doesn't mean that mathematics explains these phenomena, but it functions as the language that describes these forces metaphorically. It shows the unity in the Universe, the factors common to all of these.

During my 'formative years' I went through a stage of reading all the books from Carlos Castaneda several times. So there's no denying that they have inspired me greatly - Like other 'spiritual writings' the point is not whether these tales really happened or not - but what you get out of them. The quote used in the first paragraph of this page: "There's no reality, only perception" aptly describes these works in a nutshell. This collection of quotes is a good compilation of Castaneda's philosophy as regards living the life of a warrior. The following excerpt attributed by Castaneda to his character, Don Juan is possibly his most quoted.

For me there is only traveling on paths that have heart, on any path that
may have heart. There I travel, and the only worthwhile challenge is to
traverse its full length. And there I travel looking, looking, breathlessly.