Watch your.............................

Thanks Jan

Civilized...................................

“To accept injury without a spirit of savage resentment - to show ourselves merciful toward those who wrong us - being a source of good hope to them - is characteristic of a benevolent and civilized way of life.” 

-Gaius Musonius Rufus

cartoon via

Generally speaking............................

"Generally speaking, I believe Costco does more for civilization than the Rockefeller Foundation,” he said at a 2010 speech at the University of Michigan. “You get a bunch of very intelligent people sitting around trying to do good, and I immediately get kind of suspicious and squirm in my seat… I’ve seen so much folly and stupidity on the part of our major philanthropic groups, including the World Bank, that I really have more confidence in building up the more capitalistic ventures like Costco.”

-Charlie Munger

Library porn............................

...............................................it's enough to take your breath away.

Amen..................................

thanks Kurt

Obliged........................

We will freedom for freedom’s sake, in and through particular circumstances. And in thus willing freedom, we discover that it depends entirely upon the freedom of others and that the freedom of others depends upon our own. Obviously, freedom as the definition of a man does not depend upon others, but as soon as there is a commitment, I am obliged to will the liberty of others at the same time as my own. I cannot make liberty my aim unless I make that of others equally my aim.

-John-Paul Sartre

That "requires interpretation"......

.......................part is where it gets interesting:

All social values - liberty and opportunity, income and wealth, and the bases of self-respect  - are to be distributed equally unless an unequal distribution of any, or all, of these values is to everyone's advantage. Injustice, then, is simply inequalities that are not to the benefit of all. Of course, this conception is extremely vague and requires interpretation.

-John Rawls,  culled from The Main Idea Of The Theory Of Justice

Testing................................

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

“Whether you experience heaven or hell, remember that it is your mind which creates them.” 

-Timothy Leary

Change......................

There can be only one permanent revolution — a moral one; the regeneration of the inner man.
How is this revolution to take place? Nobody knows how it will take place in humanity, but every man feels it clearly in himself. And yet in our world everybody thinks of changing humanity, and nobody thinks of changing himself.

-Leo Tolstoy

On change...............................

via

Broken rules......................................

     If a complete book of surfing's rules could be written, it wouldn't necessarily help unless you could also learn the "know-how" that comes in faithful practice. You could read and understand all of its instructions, grasp them intellectually, and still not know how to put any rule into action.  As a new wave situation presents itself, you have to know how to go on in the next moment.  To borrow from Ludwig Wittgenstein, the enigmatic early mid-twentieth-century philosopher, if rules were all you had to go by, they couldn't tell you how to "go on" from what came before, even with suggestive coaching.  Given only rules, with no further sense of how to apply them to a fresh particular moment, you'd have to look to further rules to tell you which rules to follow and when.  But then you'd also need rules for following those rules, and so on, without end, ad infinitum, all the way up.   Which is absurd, or impossible, or just not what we do in learning to surf.


-Aaron James,   Surfing With Sartre:  An Aquatic Inquiry Into A Life Of Meaning

On "catching"...........................

Even during the depths of the depression, there were still people who became wealthy and even millionaires.  The thought of poverty was "catching" in those days, but somehow those people did not buy into it;  therefore, it did not apply to them.  For negativity to apply to our life, we must first subscribe to it and, secondly, give it the energy of belief.  If we have the power to make negativity manifest in out life, obviously our mind also has the power to make its converse come true.


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

Growing up with Willie.......................

     Music in the blood.  Music in the house and music in the fields.  Music in the air, in the songs sung by the birds flying through the clear blue Texas sky, in the sound of the wind and the thundering rain.  Music in the heart of my father, a fine fiddler, and my mother, a beautiful singer, who gave birth first to my sister, Bobbie, and wonder child of music, before two years later giving birth to me.
     Mother was Myrle, three-quarters Cherokee Indian, who'd traveled down from dirt-poor Arkansas with Ira, my father, who had followed his father, Alfred, and his mother, Nancy, to Abbott, Texas, where the land was dark and fertile and the farmland offered a degree of hope.
     When I came into this world on April 29, 1933, hope was a sparse commodity.  The Great Depression had hit the homeland hard.  As an adult, I realized that I had grown up in rural Texas during one of the worst periods in American economic history.  But that was something I learned out of books.  What I learned out of life was something entirely different.  What I learned was love.  Like music, love was everywhere I looked and everything I felt.  Fact is, I equated music with love, 'cause to hear or play or sing a song put me in a loving mood.

-Willie Nelson,  It's A Long Story:  My Life

Nature's way..........................

Well, isn't it..............................

Nowadays, in our more leisurely style of capitalism, the workaday surfer can be found at surf breaks the world over, stoked in gushing exuberance about the better waves of the day, feeling lighter about the stresses of work, acting as if the whole meaning of human existence can be found in the simple act of riding a wave.

-Aaron James,  Surfing With Sartre:  An Aquatic Inquiry Into A Life Of Meaning

Surf's up...................................

The Chantays..................................................................Pipeline

Child-like...............................

     The Warrior of the Light behaves like a child.

People are shocked;  they have forgotten that a child needs to have fun and to play, to be slightly irreverent and to ask awkward, childish questions, to talk nonsense that not even he believes in.

And they say, horrified: "So this is the spiritual path, is it?  He's so immature!"

The Warrior feels proud of such comments.  And he remains in touch with God through his innocence and his joy, without ever losing sight of his mission.

-Paulo Coelho,  Warrior Of The Light:  A Manual

Opening paragraphs.................

     A song is a short story.  It might have been my buddy Harlan Howard, a writer I met in Nashville in the sixties, who first said a song ain't nothing but three cords and the truth.
     Well, songs come easy to me.  I've written hundreds of them.  I see them as little stories that fall out of our lives and imaginations.  If I have to struggle to write a song, I stop before I start.  I figure if it don't flow easy, it's not meant to be.
     The truth should flow easy.  Same for songs and stories.  If you overanalyze or torture yourself to bring them to life, something's wrong.  Just the way a mountain stream, bubbling with fresh clean water, keeps flowing, stories need to flow free and easy.  The source of water, like the source of the songs, comes from on high.  It's a natural thing.  It's a beautiful thing.

-Willie Nelson, It's A Long Story:  My Life

The world's done gone crazy...............

Willie Nelson.........................................Come On Back Jesus



Come on back Jesus (Come on back Jesus)
Come on back Jesus
And pick up John Wayne on the way
The world's done gone crazy,
And it seems to get worse everyday
So come on back Jesus,
And pick up John Wayne on the way

Time to take off the glove
They just don't respect peace anymore
But if we have old John Wayne
We know he can swing from the floor
While he kicks their butt
We'll just stand there and watch him and pray

So come on back Jesus,
And pick up John Wayne on the way

Come on back Jesus (Come on back Jesus)
Come on back Jesus
And pick up John Wayne on the way
The world's gettin' crazy,
And it seems to get worse everyday
So come on back Jesus,
And pick up John Wayne on the way

It's getting real hairy
If only old duke man was here
He'd call me old bastard
From out past the atmosphere
Lord the news looked so scary
When I glanced at the paper today

So come on back Jesus,
And pick up John Wayne on the way

Come on back Jesus (Come on back Jesus)
Come on back Jesus
And pick up John Wayne on the way
The world's gettin' crazy,
And it seems to get worse everyday
So come on back Jesus,
And pick up John Wayne on the way
Come on back Jesus, come on back Jesus
Come on back Jesus
And pick up John Wayne on the way

Choose wisely.............................

     One of the laws of consciousness is:  We are only subject to a negative thought or belief if we consciously say that it applies to us.  We are free to choose not to buy into a negative belief system.

-David Hawkins