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Essays, Memoirs & True Stories
Thoughts On Censorship
What is true for a person, in other words, is not true for a republic; from our private life we can, like a dictator, ban anything which offends us; but in our life as a citizen in a democracy not only can we not ban from the public realm that which offends us, but for our own protection we must fight for its right to exist.
June 1985More Than A Rumor
I watched a slide show prepared by a women-against-pornography group from New York. The bulk of the images were presumably the most startling pages from hard-core pornography magazines though they didn’t include the issue of Hustler which our narrator described as having drawn her into this fight.
June 1985Words
The words pornography, obscenity, and erotica — and the emotions they evoke — create an endless debate which quickly twists into confusion when terms are vague and law is complex.
June 1985Notes Toward A Theory Of Pornography
I don’t believe that pornography creates a problem (that is, it doesn’t create a need for sexual fantasy) but that it reflects a problem, or rather, for me, not a problem but simply a fact: that a part of man’s make-up, a part of his sexual being, is this fantasy element.
June 1985The Message Of St. Francis
In the power of the song of that bird, he understood, and what he understood is that the way to love God, and the only way, is to hear his voice in everything — in the song of a bird, in the cry of the dying, in the scream of the mad, in the despair of the leper, in the embrace of the lovers, in the rattle of the hooves of horses on the street.
May 1985Cousin Hans
Buddy has to cry out with all his force in his seven-year-old body, trying to get his father to believe that he has done nothing wrong, nothing wrong at all; and in this act of trying to convince him that he is not wrong, he is wrong, and must get punished for that.
May 1985Meanwhile
At 10 a.m. Saturday, April 9, the Felt Forum was like an enormous party. Thousands of people were standing around talking. Me and Eddie passed a man doing a crossword puzzle. Waiting to see Krishnamurti, doing a crossword puzzle!
April 1985The Inner Sky
This, then, is the real purpose of astrology: to hold a mirror before the evolving self, to tell us what we already know deep within ourselves. Through astrology we fly far above the mass of details that constitutes our lives.
April 1985The Art Of Gratitude
Surprise is the starting point. Through surprise our inner eyes are opened to the amazing fact that everything is gratuitous. Nothing at all can be taken for granted. And if it cannot be taken for granted, it is gift.
March 1985Nuclear Mirror
It is time to go beyond the usual parameters of the nuclear debate. It is time to begin asking ourselves how The Bomb has affected the human soul itself. By exploring The Bomb as symbol, we can penetrate more deeply into the amazing mirror nuclear weapons have created. Extraordinary changes in society, in attitude and in values have emerged world-wide since Hiroshima, changes that show us a thousand ways in which The Bomb has become the guiding metaphor of our time.
February 1985
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