Infinite Future

The Man in the Arena

Sat, 11 Oct 2008 09:26:34 +0200

It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.

— Theodore Roosevelt, Speech at the Sorbonne, April 1910

"If you really want to know who I am, you have to be as absolutely empty as I am. Then two mirrors..."

Tue, 02 Sep 2008 14:43:00 +0200

“If you really want to know who I am, you have to be as absolutely empty as I am. Then two mirrors will be facing each other, and only emptiness will be mirrored. Infinite emptiness will be mirrored: two mirrors facing each other. But if you have some idea, then you will see your own idea in me.”

- Osho

Don't believe anything

Fri, 29 Aug 2008 18:00:04 +0200

Don’t believe anything. Regard things on a scale of probabilities. The things that seem most absurd, put under ‘Low Probability’, and the things that seem most plausible, you put under ‘High Probability’. Never believe anything. Once you believe anything, you stop thinking about it. The more things you believe, the less mental activity. If you believe something, and have an opinion on every subject, then your brain activity stops entirely, which is clinically considered a sign of death, nowadays in medical practice. So put things on a scale or probability, and never believe or disbelieve anything entirely.

— Robert Anton Wilson

Breathless hearts

Thu, 28 Aug 2008 13:44:00 +0200

When our Conceptual Minds are “blown away” by the vast panorama of Mythic Intelligence, it’s up to us to re-stabilize our psychology by integrating the new outlook. The Mythic reveals the relatedness-of-allliving-things… much like the DNA codes the language of universal life. To the degree our concepts (of the world & ourselves) are obliterated by the impact of universal truths, we are obliged to adjust our thinking to include their reality, if only to put our minds at peace. If we attempt to ignore what we know to be true, well find out how long we can live a lie and maybe even suffer in the paranoid tradition of thinking the Universe to be an evil, threatening place to be… missing out, of course, on the Incredible Benevolence of Synchronicity. Who knows? Life may just be a Positive Conspiracy bent on putting us in the right place at the right time every living, breathing moment of the day. Realizing this can put our “analyzer” on hold, our interpretive mind on “ga-ga” and our hearts on breathless.

Teachers

Tue, 26 Aug 2008 21:52:31 +0200

Gas Station Attendants, Grandmothers, Stumbling Drunks, Astronomers, Cats, Landladies, Ferns, Newscasters, Mozart, Hardcore Punk Music, Madmen, Crystals, Children, Presidents, Indian Chiefs, Movie Stars, Plumbers, Telephone Operators and the list goes on forever. It’s all Spiritual and the Teachers are everywhere. It just takes a certain kind of perspective to see this.

Dream Hunter

Sat, 26 Jul 2008 16:24:49 +0200

Dream Hunter

RAW

Mon, 07 Jul 2008 12:25:15 +0200

OK, so at what point is Wilson kidding and at what point is he serious?

“The older I get, the less seriously I take anything,” says Wilson. “The Chinese say the wise become Confucian in good times, Buddhist in bad times and Taoist in old age. I’m old enough to be a Taoist. I don’t see anything very seriously.” Not even, as it turns out, mortality.

“I know I’m going to die sometime soon: five weeks, five months, five years,” says Wilson. “I don’t know, maybe 50 years if stem cell research moves along. But I don’t know and I don’t care. And I can’t take it seriously anymore. If George Bush is president of the free world, who can take anything seriously?

Men and women as friends

Sat, 05 Jul 2008 21:12:10 +0200

Billy Crystal (Harry Burns): You realize of course that we could never be friends.
Meg Ryan (Sally Albright): Why not?
Billy Crystal (Harry): What I’m saying is - and this is not a come-on in any way, shape or form - is that men and women can’t be friends because the sex part always gets in the way.
Meg Ryan (Sally): That’s not true. I have a number of men friends and there is no sex involved.
Billy Crystal (Harry): No you don’t.
Meg Ryan (Sally): : Yes I do.
Billy Crystal (Harry): No you don’t.
Meg Ryan (Sally): Yes I do.
Billy Crystal (Harry): You only think you do.
Meg Ryan (Sally): You say I’m having sex with these men without my knowledge?
Billy Crystal (Harry):: No, what I’m saying is they all WANT to have sex with you.
Meg Ryan (Sally): They do not!
Billy Crystal (Harry): Do too.
Meg Ryan (Sally): They do not.
Billy Crystal (Harry): Do too.
Meg Ryan (Sally): How do you know?
Billy Crystal (Harry):Because no man can be friends with a woman that he finds attractive. He always wants to have sex with her.
Meg Ryan (Sally): So, you’re saying that a man can be friends with a woman he finds unattractive?
Billy Crystal (Harry): No. You pretty much want to nail ‘em too.
Meg Ryan (Sally): What if THEY don’t want to have sex with YOU?
Billy Crystal (Harry): Doesn’t matter because the sex thing is already out there so the friendship is ultimately doomed and that is the end of the story.
Meg Ryan (Sally): Well, I guess we’re not going to be friends then.
Billy Crystal (Harry): I guess not.
Meg Ryan (Sally): That’s too bad. You were the only person I knew in New York.

Risks

Mon, 30 Jun 2008 12:52:54 +0200

We start running risks when we get out of bed in the morning. Risks are good for us, they bring out the best that’s in us. They brighten the eye and get the mind cooking. They put a new shiny look on our days. Human beings should never be settled, it’s ok for chicken, cows and cats, but it’s wrong for human beings. People start to die when they become settled. We need to keep things stirred up.

Mythogenetic Moment

Mon, 16 Jun 2008 13:18:00 +0200

Joseph Campbell had a term for the nodal moment or temporal vortex: he called it themythogenetic moment. On the first page ofCreative Mythology, he signaled the 12th century as the last great mythogenetic moment in the history of Western civilization. … Campbell felt passionately that the transition into the 21st century could be a mythogenetic moment morally and spiritually equivalent to the 12th century, and possibly even resonant with it.

— source

"Dream the dreams and then be foolish enough to make your dreams come true. That may not work for..."

Tue, 10 Jun 2008 16:49:00 +0200

“Dream the dreams and then be foolish enough to make your dreams come true. That may not work for everybody, but it did work for me. It was sort of the approach I used - it never was rational and it never made total sense.”

- Vinod Khosla, Sun

"You don’t solve all of the problems before jumping into a new situation. You just sort of..."

Tue, 10 Jun 2008 16:47:00 +0200

“You don’t solve all of the problems before jumping into a new situation. You just sort of believe in yourself enough to say: I’ll figure it out… one way or another! And I did figure it out… It wasn’t easy, but it all worked out.”

- Vinod Khosla, Sun

"We were building a team for a Zero Billion dollar company."

Tue, 10 Jun 2008 16:41:39 +0200

“We were building a team for a Zero Billion dollar company.”

- Vinod Khosla, Sun

"Sometimes simplicity is more complex than complexity."

Sun, 08 Jun 2008 23:56:24 +0200

“Sometimes simplicity is more complex than complexity.”

- (I’d say not sometimes, but always!)

source

Tue, 03 Jun 2008 22:26:23 +0200

source

5 Simple Advices for thinking Simple and Big

Sat, 24 May 2008 16:59:57 +0200

5 Simple Advices for thinking Simple and Big

"But rare is the man or woman who can take an idea and transform it into a sharply defined product..."

Fri, 23 May 2008 21:48:12 +0200

“But rare is the man or woman who can take an idea and transform it into a sharply defined product and then sell it to top-level prospective hires, investors and customers. An Entrepreneur as opposed to his lower-case counterpart is a product picker and a market visionary.”

- source

"A company is more likely to be burried by a new technology than by its existing competitors."

Fri, 23 May 2008 02:08:21 +0200

“A company is more likely to be burried by a new technology than by its existing competitors.”

- Kotler on marketing

"It seems undeniable that most people are drawn to better themselves economically, given the chance...."

Thu, 08 May 2008 01:15:22 +0200

“

It seems undeniable that most people are drawn to better themselves economically, given the chance. But what is often overlooked is that this is only part of a much broader human desire for more. We can and do seek more in material terms. But if we find more only in material terms then most of us are left with a sense of lack. To put it generally, human wellbeing requires something other than just more material prosperity.

That something else is the more that humans seek to gain in art, science and language - more feeling, more insight, more knowledge. It is why relationships are key to wellbeing too: in friendship and love, we reach out and find more to life in others. It is why religion, in its various guises, is more or less universal: the transcendent might be thought of as the ultimate “more”.

”

- Source

Follow your bliss

Tue, 15 Apr 2008 22:10:49 +0200

BILL MOYERS: Do you ever have the sense of… being helped by hidden hands?

JOSEPH CAMPBELL: All the time. It is miraculous. I even have a superstition that has grown on me as a result of invisible hands coming all the time - namely, that if you do follow your bliss you put yourself on a kind of track that has been there all the while, waiting for you, and the life that you ought to be living is the one you are living. When you can see that, you begin to meet people who are in your field of bliss, and they open doors to you. I say, follow your bliss and don’t be afraid, and doors will open where you didn’t know they were going to be.