Apropos

EAVEN PHOTOGRAPHED BY HUBBLE TELESCOPE. Special news bulletin from NASA: "We found where God lives," says scientist! -- Supermarket tabloid Weekly World News, April 30, 1996 The galaxies exist in you, not printed as mere images within your skull, but in your every cell, your every atom. -- George Leonard * * * . . . why Homo sapiens should carry the spark of rationality that provides the key to the universe, is a deep enigma. We, who are children of the universe -- animated stardust -- can nevertheless reflect on the nature of that same universe, even to the extent of glimpsing the rules on which it runs. How we have become linked into this cosmic dimension is a mystery. Yet the linkage cannot be denied. What does it mean? What is Man that we might be party to such privilege? I cannot believe that our existence in this universe is a mere quirk of fate, an accident of history, an incidental blip in the great cosmic drama. Our involvement is too intimate. The physical species Homo may count for nothing, but the existence of mind in some organism on some planet in the universe is surely a fact of fundamental significance. Through conscious beings the universe has generated self-awareness. This can be no trivial detail, no minor byproduct of mindless, purposeless forces. We are truly meant to be here. -- Paul Davies * * * Be in touch with excellence. Don't get lost in your own moods; they wear out too easily. -- Theodore Weiss It is certain that no culture can flourish without narratives of transcendent origin and power. -- Neil Postman Truth is not loved because it is better for us. We hunger and thirst for it. -- Saul Bellow he central teaching of mysticism is this: Reality is One. The practice of mysticism consists in finding ways to experience this unity directly. The One has variously been called the Good, God, the Cosmos, the Mind, the Void, or (perhaps most neutrally) the Absolute. No door in the labyrinthine castle of science opens directly onto the Absolute. But if one understands the maze well enough, it is possible to jump out of the system and experience the Absolute for oneself . . . But, ultimately, mystical knowledge is attained all at once or not at all. There is no gradual path. -- Rudy Rucker Keep away from people who belittle your ambitions. Small people always do that, but the really great make you feel that you, too, can become great. -- Mark Twain Discipline is the refining fire by which talent becomes ability. -- Roy L. Smith Be regular and orderly in your life, so that you may be violent and original in your work. -- Gustave Flaubert How may a mystic communicate his vision? We are faced with the same inadequacy of language when we try to tell you of the superlative qualities of the Citro‘n D.S.19. -- Advertisement in the Sunday Times, April 13, 1958 Into the face of the young man who sat on the terrace of the Hotel Magnifique at Cannes there had crept a look of furtive shame, the shifty, hangdog look which announces that an Englishman is about to talk French. -- The Luck of the Bodkins, Sir Pelham Grenville Wodehouse, 1881Đ1975 * * * he next greatest rapture to the love of God is the love of God in men; there, too, one has the joy of multiplicity. For monogamy may be the best for the body, but the soul that loves God in men dwells here always as the boundless and ecstatic polygamist; yet all the time -- that is the secret -- it is in love with only one being. -- Sri Aurobindo When thou affirmest thy soul-experience and deniest the different soul-experience of another, know that God is making a fool of thee. -- Sri Aurobindo

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