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Sunbeams

Do not believe that he who seeks to comfort you now lives untroubled among the simple and quiet words that sometimes do you good. His life has much difficulty and sadness and remains far behind yours. Were it otherwise, he would never have been able to find those words.

Rainer Maria Rilke

In The Spirit Of Philosophy

An Interview With Jacob Needleman

The more you realize what it actually means to be awake, the more alive all your functions will be. New thoughts, new visions, and new insights come to you, and those can be seductive; so you have to remember that awareness is the vehicle for all of them. That’s why the great spiritual traditions tell us not to get swept away even if someone like the Buddha appears to us; the smart thing may be to tell him to go away. It’s your own consciousness that counts. That’s the Buddha-nature within you.

Duty

A rhinestone butterfly pin, an appointment for next Saturday, “Louie Louie”

Little Lies

The Lilliputians, Jesse Helms, the birds and bees

Sunbeams

Life is a maze in which we take the wrong turn before we have learned to walk.

Connolly

A Simpler Life

Wrapping things up, being a post-menopausal woman, seeing the northern lights

Sunbeams

The best politics is right action.

Gandhi

On The Duty Of Civil Disobedience

I have paid no poll-tax for six years. I was put into a jail once on this account, for one night; and, as I stood considering the walls of solid stone, two or three feet thick, the door of wood and iron, a foot thick, and the iron grating which strained the light, I could not help being struck with the foolishness of that institution which treated me as if I were mere flesh and blood and bones, to be locked up. . . . I saw that, if there was a wall of stone between me and my townsmen, there was a still more difficult one to climb or break through before they could get to be as free as I was.

Sunbeams

Empires rise and fall like the abdomen of God. It’s just the universe breathing.

Scoop Nisker

Teaching, And The Mood Of Relativity

Many years ago when I first taught college English, I made a discovery in the first or second week of teaching, namely, that the main obstacle to instruction, to one’s ability to teach someone something they don’t already know, is the mood and spirit of relativity.