On seeking answers.....................

     How about the experts?  Their confusion is more sophisticated, wrapped in impressive jargon and elaborate mental construction.  They have predetermined belief systems into which they try to squeeze you.  It seems to work for a while and, then, it is just back to one's original state.
     It used to be that we could count on social institutions, but they have had their day;  nobody trusts them anymore.  We now have more watchdogs than institutions.  The hospitals are monitored by multiple agencies.  Nobody has time for the patients, who get lost in the shuffle.  Look down the corridors.  There are no doctors or nurses.  They are in the offices doing paperwork.  The whole scene is dehumanized.
     "Well,"  you say, "there have to be some experts who have the answers."  When upset, you go to a doctor or a psychiatrist, an analyst, a social worker, or an astrologer.  You take up religion, get philosophy, take the Erhard Seminars Training, tap yourself with EFT.  You get your chakras balanced, try some reflexology, go for ear acupuncture, do iridology, get healed with lights and crystals.
     You meditate, chant a mantra, drink green tea, try the Pentecostals, breathe in fire, and speak in tongues.  You get centered, learn NLP, try actualizations, work on visualizations, study psychology, join a Jungian group.  You get Rolfed, try psychedelics, get a psychic reading, jog, jazzercise, have colonics, get into nutrition and aerobics, hang up-side down, wear psychic jewelry.  Get more insight, bio-feedback, Gestalt therapy.
     You see your homeopath, chiropractor, naturopath.  You try kinesiology, discover your Enneagram type, get your meridans balanced, join a consciousness-raising group, take tranquilizers.  You get some hormone shots, try cell salts, have your minerals balanced, pray, implore, and beseech.  You learn astral projection.  Become a vegetarian.  Eat only cabbage.  Try macrobiotics, go organic, eat no GMO.  Meet up with Native American medicine men, do a sweat lodge.  Try Chinese herbs,  moxiocombustion, shiatsu, acupressure, feng shui.  You go to India.  Find a new guru.  Take off your clothes.  Swim in the Ganges.  Stare at the sun.  Shave your head.  Eat with your fingers, get really messy, shower in cold water.
     Sing tribal chants.  Relive past lives.  Try hypnotic regression.  Scream a primal scream.  Punch pillows.  Get Feldenkraised.  Join a marriage encounter group.  Go to Unity.  Write affirmations.  Make a vision board.  Get re-birthed.  Cast the I Ching.  Do the Tarot cards.  Study Zen.  Take more courses and workshops.  Read lots of books.  Do transactional analysis.  Get yoga lessons.  Get into the occult.  Study magic.  Work with a kahuna.  Take a shamanic journey.  Sit under a pyramid.  Read Nostradamus.  Prepare for the worst.
     Go on a retreat.  Try fasting.  Take amino acids.  Get a negative ion generator.  Join a mystery school.  Learn a secret handshake.  Try toning.  Try color therapy.  Try subliminal tapes.  Take brain enzymes, anti-depressants, flower remedies.  Look into strange fermented oddities from faraway places.  Hold hands in a circle and get high.  Renounce sex and going to the movies.  Wear some yellow robes.  Join a cult.
     Try the endless varieties of psychotherapy.  Take wonder drugs.  Subscribe to lots of journals.  Try the Pritikin diet.  Eat just grapefruit.  Get your palm read.  Think New Age thought.  Improve the ecology.  Save the planet.  Get an aura read.  Carry a crystal.  Get a Hindu sidereal astrological interpretation.  Visit a transmedium.  Go for sex therapy.  Try Tantric sex.  Get blessed by Baba Somebody.  Join an anonymous group.  Travel to Lourdes.  Soak in the hot springs.  Join Arica.  Wear therapeutic sandals.  Get grounded.  Get more prana and breathe out that stale black negativity.  Try golden needle acupuncture.  Check out snake gallbladders.  Try chakra breathing.  Get your aura cleaned.  Meditate in Cheops, the great pyramid in Egypt. ...
     Intuitively, we know that somewhere there is an ultimate answer.  We stumble down dark byways into cul-de-sacs and blind alleys;  we get exploited and taken, disillusioned, fed up, and we keep on trying.
     Where is our blind spot?  Why can't we find the answer? ...
     Maybe the solution is not "out there," and that's why we can'f find it.  Maybe we have so many belief systems that we are blinded to the obvious.

-David R. Hawkins,   Letting Go:  The Pathway Of Surrender

Ed Note:  Only tried twenty out of the more than 140 - so far.

Trying my best........................

“Every advance in information technology involves choosing what you want to preserve and what you want to ditch. Scanning rare books on to microfilm is a costly business. The library won't let you do it yourself - they decide first which books should be scanned and which should just rot away in the basement.   Against that eventuality, people should start hoarding the kind of books committees of rational people will decide against scanning into a database.” 

-Robert Twigger

Fifty years ago..........................

Interstellar Overdrive.....................................................Pink Floyd
                                     Probably should post the psychedelia warning.

When she is right, she is right...............

This intense policing of the virtue of others — it's not even virtuous. 

-Ann Althouse, from this post

It is actually our salvation........

And if we were all perfectly rational beings who have no behavioral flaws whatsoever...

But…

WE. ARE. NOT. RATIONAL.

-culled from this Investing in Yourself (Even When It Seems Irrational) post by Ben Carlson

Got this one mastered..................

5.  A challenge: Create time and space this weekend to do nothing.

-from this 25 x 5 from Nicholas Bate

Some good advice..............................

“Here's some advice. Stay alive.” 

-Suzanne Collins

advice via

Seriously....................................

The one important thing I have learned over the years is the difference between taking one's work seriously and taking one's self seriously.  The first is imperative and the second is disastrous.

-Margot Fonteyn

Fifty years ago.........................

At the book store....................................................

“I'm in a constant process of thinking about things. ” 
-Richard Brautigan

A likely path to happiness...........

rainbow photo via Man in The Wind

Asking the important questions............

Scott Adams knows a thing or two.....

If you are outside the mass hysteria bubble you might have noticed that President Trump never campaigned to be our moral leader. He presented himself as – in his own words “no angel” – with a set of skills he offered to use in the public’s interest. He was big on law and order, and equal justice under the law. But he never offered moral leadership. Voters elected him with that knowledge. Evidently, Republicans don’t depend on politicians for moral leadership. That’s probably a good call.

When the horror in Charlottesville shocked the country, citizens instinctively looked to their president for moral leadership. The president instead provided a generic law and order statement. Under pressure, he later named specific groups and disavowed the racists. He was clearly uncomfortable being our moral lighthouse. That’s probably why he never described his moral leadership as an asset when running for office. We observe that he has never been shy about any other skill he brings to the job, so it probably isn’t an accident when he avoids mentioning any ambitions for moral leadership. If he wanted us to know he would provide that service, I think he would have mentioned it by now.

-as culled from this blog post

Spengler knows some things too...........

The best solution is a compromise which removes the issue from politics altogether. ... That won't do much good, but there isn't much good to be done. The best outcome would be to defuse the issue, and hope that people can walk away from it and get back to the business of getting an education and making a living. Nothing will console Southerners for their defeat in the Civil War; nothing will compensate African-Americans for hundreds of lost years. The best anyone can do is to find a way to live with it and get on with life.

-as he concludes this blog post

Remember.......................

How are we doing..........................?

     The bedrock attribute of a successful city district is that a person must feel personally safe and secure on the street among all these strangers.  He must not feel automatically menaced by them.

-Jane Jacobs, The Death And Life Of Great American Cities

Nature......................

“The major problems in the world are the result of the difference between how nature works and the way people think” 

-Gregory Bateson

Must haves........................

Fifty years ago.......................

At the movies............John Wayne and friends.........War Wagon

On nothingness................................

The best sort of ruler promises nothing, and delivers on his promise every time. The worst sort of tyrant has “plans.”...

“That government is best which governs least,” said Henry David Thoreau. Well, yes and no. The statement is used to champion weak government. But I am for a government that is unbreakably strong.

Chinese sages understood this, too, including the mystical Lao Tzu and those old Tories, Confucius and Mencius: that it takes tremendous power to do nothing. Voting whittles that power away.

-as excerpted from this David Warren post

Consider...........................

Consider how the species we call whales have dwelled on this planet fifty-six million years longer than we have and yet they never found it necessary to invent Trident submarines and other fanciful ways of destroying life.

-Matthew Fox


pix via

Fifty years ago...................

The Sunshine Company.......................Back On The Street Again