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Swami
Vrhka Baba
MAXIMS
(Latin: Maxima Sententia - "greatest
pronouncements")
"EVERY
MAN TALKS - IF TALK HE MUST - THE SAME TRIPE."
Samuel Beckett
1. I think
- therefore I do not understand.
2. Mankind's destiny
and motto:
to change the world and not ourselves.
3. "Perfection
of the life or of the art" precludes - as does our civilisation
- perfection of the art of life.
4. Just how 'superior'
is our abuse of our 'superiority' to Nature ?
5. Machines and
institutions grind on while we do all the work
of failing to live well.
6. The people we
call 'great' are just the most-noisily dissatisfied.
7. The worst of
us are good citizens.
8. The only Pillar
of Wisdom: There is no human wisdom.
9. Humans have
'suceeded' because we perform so well in crises.
So we have turned the world into a permanent crisis.
10. Religion: institutional
conspiracies to cut us off from Nature and ourselves,
and efficient means of bending reality.
11. Desire is both
a form and a creator of suffering.
12. We who have
not killed ourselves know nothing of self-respect.
13. The examined
life may also not be worth living.
14. The profoundest
oppression is aspiration.
In a "free society" the most difficult freedoms are
freedom from
envy and disappointment.
15. From the Indus
to Silicon Valley, the most "successful" societies have
been the most dysfunctional.
16. Physics and
Philosophy are offshoots from Religion,
and religion is the supernatural justification of power
and power-structures.
17. Love is like
faith: not so much a leap in the dark as a windowless room with
daubed walls. It is also appropriation.
18. Evil prospers
- because prospering is malign.
19. Man
is God's Original Sin, and farmers are his Cherubim.
20. In
a world devoured by his demons, the best of Man is his ruins.
21. After
conquering America the goddess Avaritia stepped out of the closet
and became Queen of Heaven.
22. The
past is an odourless lie - sanitised meat-dust and pain.
23. The
American Dream: globalising hallucination.
24. Only
self is shallower than mind.
25. When
the only spiritual value is Liberty, all falls apart
just as all falls apart when the only social value is Normality.
26. The
Outsider defines himself not by inclusion in any group but by
exclusion from all.
27. The
greatest artists remain unknown.
28. Without
farmers there would be no armies.
Without armies there would be no farms.
29. Depression,
apathy, rage cruelty: what we are controlled into.
30. You
cannot be smart and have a pure heart.
31. All
institutions are malignant because they quickly come to exist
only for their own perpetuation. Even if, like the French National
Assembly, they vote themselves out of existence, something worse
will take their place.
32. Nelson
Mandela spent a fifth of his life in solitary confinement. A thousand
million creatures spend their whole lives solitary confinement
and torture, as 'pets' and 'food' and laboratory animals.
33. Progress
is a kind of retrovirus.
34. There
is no narrative but that which we impose:
the destruction of Nature through Reason.
35. Those
who do not worship trees and mountains
are already dead.
The universe is living - but for us whose consciousness
is a greed-hole in the head.
36. An
"Otherworld" is not another place or time or state of
consciousness, but another attitude.
37. Just
as most pædophilia is parental
most murderous terrorism is governmental.
38. The
Nation State shrinks people into mere function
(within 'Normality'). Thus Gypsies and 'vagrants' cannot be tolerated
- and freethinkers must be ignored.
39. We
cannot afford to understand that other mammals might communicate
rather better (and more economically) than we do.
40. Humans
do not so much communicate as create communication-problems.
41.
The offer of 'personal salvation' by Religion is at best irresponsible,
and at worst cynical. 'Salvation' can only be global - and hence
is impossible. In any case, we have fully demonstrated that we
have no souls.
42. Men without
beards have an extra job to 'prove their masculinity'!
43. Information
is a dangerous myth, and the desire for it is just another aspect
of our galloping greed.
44. The more technology
we have
the more infantilised we get.
45. Only the dead
are wise. And, as Samuel Beckett said,
"The living wash in vain."
46. You rarely
see a man in public joy except at some kind of victory.
47. The most spiritual
beings are icebergs.
48. Men are good
a making structures.
Women are good at getting out of the way when they collapse.
49. There are a
few sages - but not one stupid tree.
50. The oldest
trap of consciousness is Novelty.
51. Self-contradiction is the hallmark of wisdom.
52. Western civilisation
has always been mechanistic:
e.g .the mechanical procession of the Saved to Heaven
and of the Damned to Hell.
53. Every time
I turn on a tap - or my computer - a piece of world dies.
54. Most of us
are too clever to understand that our intelligence is our stupidity
and Nature's mistake and misery.
55. To a dog all
the world is dog, but to us it is fragments of a dream that we
cannot reassemble.
56. All of us behind
windows, shut in by doors, ignore the crucifixion of a tree.
57.
It is perversely unfair to reward success -
which is surely its own reward.
58. If you want
to be happy - stop wanting.
59. Our culture's
obsession with success ensures our failure- and the Sixth Extinction.
60. Humanity
is a word for the heartless. Whenever I hear it, I feel sick.
61. The only limit to human horror is human imagination.
62.
The great human sharing: unacknowledged shame.
63. 'The
Deep' is a fantasy that we shallow beings place inside our heads.
64. Culture: a
thousand subtle forms of shallowness.
65. Ritual: pompously-shared
routine.
66. Our brains
are hooligans' footballs.
67. An interesting
accident of language:
fiction is the major part of crucifixion.
68. Who now knows
the difference between Thalamos and Thanatos (Marriage
and Death) ?
69. Death is not
dearth but payment to the earth.
70. The answer
to Chuang-tzu's question Where can I find someone who has forgotten
language so that I can have a word with him ? is: Listen
to a dog.
71. Knowing my
dog is like knowing God: a liminal being beyond world.
72. The creator
of Anti-Memes: doomed to failure!
73. What we are
is how we think and thought is only words.
74. Explanations
(the obsession of our culture) also are only words. Having moved
from cultures of miracles to a monoculture of explanation, we
now prefer words to miracles.
75. Nationality
is one of the most poisonous and lethal concepts of the European
mind.
76. Farming: the
first, greatest - and last - malignance.
77. Employment
is both the most trivial and the most dangerous form of work.
78. 'What oft
was thought, but ne'er so well express'd...'
What rubbish! Poetry is the opposite of the obvious.
79.
Because vision does not depend on light but on sensitivity, there
is no such thing as darkness.
80. Culture is
awareness-abuse as "education" (which has long since
been only schooling) is childmind-abuse.
81. The chief function of culture is, by restricting our awareness,
to prevent us from committing suicide.
82. We
are indoctrinated with a belief in our superior power of reason
- but we abandon reason at the slightest and most unreasonable
excuse - and use reason to justify ourselves. Indeed the main
use of reason is self-justification.
83. They
think they have it - but there is no key to the Terrible Parade.
84. The
world is nearly 100% non-human. What is human is surely only slightly
interesting.
85. Our
brains are clever condoms filled with demented sperm.
86. Most
of us are too clever to understand that our intelligence is our
stupidity.
87. The
cruel, complicated shallows of that little reification, the human
'soul'.
88. The
comfort of houses is the rape of the world.
89. In
the war against happiness
that is humanity, Man
has won: we are the sunset of the world.
90. The
greater the technology, the smaller the consciousness.
91. Holocaust:
The worst that we do to each other is nothing compared with that
we do to mammals, fish and birds.
92. Outliving evolution,
we are all idiots-savants
stupefied by the tyranny of our concocted words.
93. Civilisation:
the Experiment against Nature.
94. Those most afraid of death are those who never even thought
of beginning to live.
95. Evolution is
not just a one-way-street - but a cul-de-sac.
96. Senseless to
weep for the end when the whole of it calls for tears.
97. The
people who are lovelier than their bodies, the people who are
uglier than their bodies, and the people who are at least as ugly
as their bodies...
98. Sex
is the exchange of spiritual disability within a physical connection.
99. Men's
seed is tears rolling back into navel-tight eyes, into rotwork.
100.
How to cut the crap, knowing that we are crap in the Empire of
NothingButConsumption ?
continued on
Speak out - but do nothing!
'Better, oh better cancel from the Scroll
of Universe one luckless Human Soul,
than, drop by drop, enlarge the Flood that Rolls
hoarser with Anguish as the Ages Roll!'
- Omar
Khayyám, translated by Edward FitzGerald
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