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Swami Vrhka Baba
MAXIMS
PART FOUR
Click on the picture below to go to the most recent aphorisms.
Freedom of Speech in the West:
It is illegal in the USA to publish
criticism of the appalling, environmentally-catastrophic methods of
agricultural production and criminal contempt for animals..
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301. Only beasts sleep 'the sleep of the just'.
302. Foot-and-Mouth Disease: all political parties are parties of slaughter.
303.
Aimer la vie ? Moi, non plus!
304.
"A writer is a fool who thinks he understands some bit of life".
-
Maxim Gorky
305. "Insight" is only the removal of blinkers and rose-tinted glasses.
306. Armless, legless, deaf and nearly blind:
the snake calls into question all the powers of Man.
307. If we had souls, we would not have property: property is what we use to try to fill the holes where our souls could be.
308. Obsessed by the fiction of
purity
(as by
superiority
) we decline to see it outside ourselves, and refuse to recognise that soul also is part of soil.
309. The World presents itself as a fairground filled with booths. And behind the booths lurk reality: the starved and beaten dog, the cancerous, toothless tigress who is the last member of her species.
310. The sad truth about dogs is that they find our world strange, and terrible - and acceptable. They are 'superior' to us in their unconditional and interminable gratitude. In human beings, gratitude quickly transmutes to oblivion or resentment.
311. If only man were wolf to man there would be neither overpopulation nor war.
312. The only species to be aware of (and have a word for) empathy has none for other species.
313.
Man is the only species whose concentration on detail results in a desertifying refusal to see the wood for the trees.
314. Control destroys respect - including self-respect.
315. Civilisation is a process of progressive infantilism: this is the only progress.
316. Television is a paradigm of capitalism: it sells back to you a sickly substitute for what it took away.
317. The progress of capitalism and the nation-state will ensure that all unbought and unsold pleasure will be illegal.
318. Christianity: the Religion of Death that denies death and most natural, spontaneous expressions of life.
319. As soon as we think we are superior to people or to animals or trees we reveal how much we are inferior.
320. The 'Expulsion from Eden' - to agriculture, hierarchies, civilisation, and the galloping nomadism of the dispossessor.
321.
Civilised
people will kill for any reason - except compassion.
322. The Truest Soldier:
the Serb conscript who fought first for the Serbs, then defected to the Bosnian Muslims, then stood in No-Man's-Land and shot himself.
323. Just as religion's by-product is unbelievers, so employment manufactures the unemployed.
324. Unemployment can no longer be a religious vocation.
325. Freedom's just a feeling that you've everything to lose.
326. "Environmentalism": salvaging bagfuls of sawdust while the forest is cut down. Now we can't see the wood for the splinters.
327. Perhaps the reason why people do all the crazy things that are called "normality" is because
they really long to be Lower Beings
.
328. Life dances - but we are forced to be rows of tombstones.
329. When I see a sculpture or a palace
I think how cramped and cramping are the works of Man.
The Buddha smiles at the smashing of his statues
but not the motives of the Taliban.
330. Dangerous Fanaticism: the craving for maximum profit at minimum cost in the minimum time.
331. Childish Superstition: belief in Continual Economic Growth.
332. Maimed motions and self-interest - not Reason - seek absolute certainty.
333. When there was a
Lumpenproletariat
there seemed to be hope. But since Mikhail Gorbachov - through kindness or despair - abolished it in 1989, there is now only the global
Lumpenbourgeoisie
. And there is no hope.
334. Culture is the decay of life into half-life.
335. Cities are the obsession of cities.
336. Every map is a description of destruction.
337.
"I have never known anything to happen."
- 'Dan Rooney' in Sam Beckett's
All That Fall
.
338. If dogs were so unevolved as to judge us, we should be fried upon eternal fires.
This Chinese bear, captured while a cub, will have spent almost its entire life in an iron straitjacket while a dirty metal tube inserted by "superior" animals directly into its liver drips "magic" bear-bile like rubber to be sold as a fortifier to the rich...
But hundreds of thousands of animals suffer just as much mindless cruelty in American laboratories. In the "democratic" USA no figures for animal torture can legally be published, for free speech on animal welfare has been criminalised there.
339. Have we no respect for misery ?
340. Gazing into a dog's eyes I am appalled by the burden of being.
341.
Man is God's original sin: life-abuse.
We think we're improvement on Nature.
342. How many of us are contented before we are nothing ?
343. Language, culture and philosophy are bridges between the deepest lies and the shallowest truths.
344. The beginning of wisdom is knowing that no-one's worth knowing.
345. Man is, says Dr Jekyll in R.L. Stevenson's
STRANGE CASE OF DR. JEKYLL & MR. HYDE
, "a disease of the agglutinated dust".
Later on in the book two comparable phrases ring out:
"the womb of consciousness" and "the fortress of identity".
With these two images Stevenson summed up Man's brief history.
346.
-Isms
make people stretch their hands to Heaven while trampling the flowers at their feet.
347. Foucault said that
at the bottom of our dreams lies death
. Choosing one's death - dying justly - is, in the end, a true expression of justly living.
348. Governments are not interested in people, only in categories. Through categorisation they can control.
349. Life (like a job) is just a passport to futility.
350. The whole world is trussed up like a chicken with our wires.
351. Being in a crowd: a lump of meat in a stew.
352. If home is where the heart is, most of us are homeless.
353.
Sincerity is the enemy of art
, said Oscar Wilde.
But art and artefacts are the enemy of life.
And life is pain.
354. The bleak and bland totalitarianism of lawns.
355. One's idea of 'love' might be another's idea of sewage.
356. Because it is theft (mainly from life)
property is aggression, property is war against the world.
357. It is no more cruel to expose children on a hillside (as in Ancient Greece and many other places) than to expose them to television and schooling.
358. The blasphemy of gardens:
we think we can improve on nature!
359. The only devil is what we call
intelligence.
Thus we are indeed - so to speak
- Satan's Spawn !
360. The problem with ideals is hypocrisy.
The only human virtue is Humility.
361. Infatuation brings a brief elation.
"Love" brings dependency and desolation.
For "happiness" we need to practise hopelessness.
362. Nationality only diminishes and demeans people.
363. It is a terribly easy mistake to believe what you want to hear
.
364. Each technological advance makes more and more of us autistic.
365. The capitalist pretence of libertarian democracy depends on the undemocratic compulsion of employment, and thus offers only the freedom to make and spend money.
366. What is Liberty when we are the slaves of our thoughts ?
The fear of freedom is the normalising terror of no longer having the drug of mind.
367. Are fire-arms to the man the same consolation that embracing arms are to the woman ?
368. Which comes first - our admiration or our imposition of pattern ?
369. Plausibility is the most insidious source of injustice.
370. The difference between animals and humans is that we have turned ourselves into monsters.
371. Sex is a cul-de-sac - and man is a dead end.
372. 'Progress': from integrity to vanity.
Christianity
- at best - is vanity,
and all the -isms & Islam
also are hypocrisy and sham...
Except, of course, for Cannibalism, the only honest and ecological religion
.
373. One of the most vicious effects of religions is that they erode, discredit, destroy and replace our inherited altruism. (And they steadily reduce the number of natural things to worship.)
Religion, cities, and schooling destroy our inborn connectibility.
374. The world was always open - and we have shut it down.
375. Everything on television is equally true.
376. We have turned the Planet of Miracles into the Planet of Holocausts.
377. Blind Arcades: the "Open Society" is walled in by McDonald's "golden" arches.
378. Only the State succeeds in subverting - and overturning - the State.
379. The end of utility and use is uselessness.
380. Knowledge destroys wonder.
Without wonder we become desperate robots -
like Schopenhauer's porcupines rushing together and separating in pain.
381. The only voice worth listening to is the voice "crying in the Wilderness". Now everything is wilderness of our own making, artificial, while true wilderness has been almost completely wiped out.
382. The greatest evil of the USA (as heir to European empires) is not its global tyranny of competitiveness (=inequality), nor that it is an empire of greed seeking to dominate the entire world, the oceans, and the very air itself, but the unbelievable hypocrisy of its belief that it was ever, once or recently, in a state of innocence.
383. And why have no Americans (such as Henry Kissinger) been indicted by the War Crimes Tribunal at The Hague for crimes against humanity in Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Guatemala, Honduras, Colombia, Chile and perhaps even in the United States itself ?
384. As far as Nature is concerned, we are all war criminals.
385. Sex is the most compelling, most destructive and least imaginative of human activities.
386. The wisest person in the world is a childish fool (with nobody to talk to).
387. To be respectable is only a little bit better than being a child molester. (In Ancient Greece the one implied the other.)
388. Globalisation: the admission that the only history is the history of desire.
389. Those who talk of objectivity are careful to apply it only to a very narrow sector of their lives - otherwise they might be forced to act with compassion - or consider suicide.
390. The Descent of Man: what is the virtue
of intelligence when it produces unending demand
and uncontrolled desire ?
391. The trickster-words
Why?
and
How?
invent false categories such as meaning and truth and invest us with vast - but false - powers.
392. Beauty is much more common (and much less fragile) than integrity.
Amnesia is the best revenge.
393. Better to be condemned for what you are
than admired for what you are not.
99% of everything is nothing.
394. The grudging total of all human love is not sufficient for a single dog.
395. The philosophical basis for Western science is:
The end justifies the means.
And science is the opposite of acceptance.
396. The more you think you know, the less you should want to know.
397. The most inescapable slavery is servitude to ideas - especially meretricious ones like
progress
and
the soul.
398. Such a totalitarian word and concept:
'Peace'...
399. It is obtuse to think of the 'human spirit' triumphing over disaster. The human spirit
is
disaster.
400. All we ever see - but rarely recognise - is who we are.
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part one
