Whatever men chatter about these days, it is not love’s way.

God gave the blind man a stick so that he may grope
to a Jesus and gain sight.

Look at all the blind men bashing one another with the
stick of intellect!

Some even swing the stick at He who gave the stick!

How proud they are when they blacken a little page
with writing.

Their minds are so shabby that they must graft on a
hundred other minds to make them work, and this
they call "great learning."

They elucidate every sort of substance, but of their own
substance they are more ignorant than donkeys.

All of their sciences together are a little bunch of
posies from our garden.

All of their thoughts are but husks and leaves on a river
of mind that flows from a secret garden.

If the Houri of paradise should nibble his ear, he cries,
"Hey, what’s hurting my ear?"

If the sweet basil touches his face, he brushes it away saying,
"Hey, what’s bothering me now?"

He rides his horse from door to door, asking,
"Has anyone seen my horse?"

Jalal al-Din Rumi, Maulana 1207-1273.
from fragments, ecstacies
translation from Persian by Daniel Liebert
1981 SOURCE BOOKS, Santa Fe, New Mexico

"The Buddha asked his disciples how they would get across a river.
‘With a boat’, they replied.
The Buddha asked, ‘When you arrived at the other shore, would you carry the boat with you or would you leave it on the margin?’,
The disciples replied,’We would leave it on the margin and go on without it’.
The Buddha said,’In the same way, when you arrive at the other side of the river, you may leave the boat of doctrine and practice.’"

Here is the rest of the story:
Buddha and his disciples came to a river and taking a boat, crossed. The Buddha then delivered the parable given above. The disciples, understanding the meaning of the story, left the boat and followed Buddha on his journey. In a few hours they came to another river. Buddha sat under a tree laughing, and waited for his disciples to go back and fetch the boat they left on the shore of the first river.

It is not a "thing" that you get, it is a process.
It doesn’t matter what poetry you quote
The poet means what he means,
not what you wish he meant.

The saddest ones of all Are the ones who,
thinking they see the shore, Leave the boat in the middle of the
river.
And then tell us that breathing water
Is enlightenment.

(Anonymous)

Drugs of the mind are the same.
They aren’t chemicals that you ingest; they’re activities that you spend your time on, activities that give you the illusion of living but ultimately leave you empty and unfulfilled. The first one that comes to mind, of course is television. Sitting in front of the tube fools the mind into thinking you’re involved in an interesting community activity, fighting wars, getting to know cool people, or pursuing a romantic interest. But you’re not. You’re sitting in front of the tube. And 20 years later, IF you wake up, you realize that your few friends who didn’t watch TV are now 20 years ahead of you.

Even before television there was gambling. Now an enormous industry, gambling takes advantage of the fact that risk-taking can pay off big. Going out on the hunt can produce a kill that feeds a whole village and makes the hunter a VIP! But the gambling industry has harnessed that beneficial drive
and attached it to a can’t-win series of exciting, stimulating games designed to waste your time and soak up your money. And they keep evolving better and better ways to do it. …

Pornography is another drug of the mind, and the better video quality technology gives us, the better illusions we can fool ourselves with. Pornography is now so high-quality and so available on the Internet that some people seem to prefer it to real relationships because it’s not as messy. But 20 years later, what have you built other than an impressive collection of bitmap images?

For both types of drugs, the chemical and the mental, there’s only one solution. … People must be conscious of the lives they are living. Now more than ever, unless we have a clear sense of life purpose, we are all too easily led astray. Consciousness is what it’s all about,…

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Imagine a biotech company has invented a new drug that is cheap, completely
harmless, and induces such a feeling of pleasure that it quickly replaces
television as people’s favorite recreational activity. Would you take this
drug? Occasionally or all the time? Would you make it illegal? Remember,
studies of monkeys with electrodes hooked up to their pleasure centers
showed that the monkeys would rather starve to death than stop hitting the
button that activated those electrodes. How different are we from the
monkeys? We may find out sooner that you might think.

Drugs work by activating pleasure centers in the brain, bypassing the
survival- and reproduction- related activities that millions of years of
evolution attached to those pleasure centers to ensure the replication of
DNA. Some of them work by deactivating pain centers instead, or by
deactivating judgment faculties, or by providing exaggerated stimulation
that in turn activate the pleasure centers (or sometimes pain centers—hence
a “bad trip” on LSD). But the central point is that drugs bypass reality to
make people feel good without doing the things that evolution engineered us
to do in order to feel good. These things include:

· Eating
· Sleeping
· Working
· Achieving higher status in society
· Gaining approval of others

These activities and others trigger our psychological push-buttons and make
us feel good. In Paleolithic times, these activities were vital to
increasing our chances for survival and reproduction. Today, they’re still
vital. Only taking drugs lets you feel good without doing any of this stuff.
The problem is, 20 years later, you wake up and realize that your friends
who didn’t take drugs are now 20 years ahead of you. It’s tough to catch up.

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Meme Central has links to lots of interesting things having to do with
self-replicating ideas: http://www.brodietech.com/rbrodie/meme.htm

You can order books mentioned here and others through the Amazon.com
Memetics Bookstore at http://www.brodietech.com/rbrodie/books.htm

My book VIRUS OF THE MIND is now in its sixth printing! You can read the
first chapter on line at http://www.brodietech.com/rbrodie/votm.htm

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Six wise blind elephants had heard of human beings and wanted to know what they were.
The first elephant touched a human being and declared "Human beings are flat."
The other five elephants touched the human being and agreed "They are flat".

If your thought is a rose,

you are a rose garden;

if it is thorn,

you are fuel for the bath stove.

[RUMI, MTHNAWI, II, 278]

..just like to continue the clipping

Quote:

====================

Egotism is difficult to see when we most need to see it; this is because we are identified with it at the moment that it has its greatest effect on us. The ego has many modalities:

Some of us are performers; all we need is to have the attention of others and we begin to puff up with self-importance. The desire is to prove that we are better than others.

Some of us are martyrs who enjoy the wrongs we imagine others are doing to us because they feed the strangely pleasurable sensation of self-pity.

Some of us are always busy; we constantly pursue our mundane and heartless goals, which we consider more important than sharing time with others. We hide behind our busyness and, fixated on a limited, isolated self, we avoid relationships.

Some of us are cynics, never free of a critical attitude toward others. Perhaps frustrations have left us powerless, and our only defense is this cynicism.

Some of us are murderers, murdering others in our minds, thriving on anger and judgment, never willing to credit good to anyone.

Some of us are angry because others have not fulfilled our expectations. This usually means they have not shown us the degree of importance we feel we deserve.

…

Some of us use spirituality to increase self-importance and specialness. We cover egotism with the appearance of humility and selfishness with the appearance of generosity.

…We become free of the self-motive by becoming nothing. And we can become nothing by limiting our habitual self-centered thoughts. This will cut at the roots of our egotism, as ego exists in our thinking. Habitual, unconscious thought may be motivated by desire, fear, or frustration.

… Because we are filled with desire, anger, loneliness, and fear, our conditioned self cannot stop comparing, wanting, defending, resenting, and being afraid.

This state of compulsive living is so painful, and its loneliness is so great, that we do everything we can to escape it through dreams of it being otherwise – through entertainments, through self-gratification, through seeking in spiritual circles the love that we do not feel for ourselves. If we could just be, we would be able to relax from the anxiety of becoming something that we are not, getting something we don’t have, and trying to shape reality according to our own desires.

Too often we do not want to change, but instead want the pain to go away and allow us to remain the same with all our desires and with our image of ourselves intact. We will not be successful running to anything, because we cannot run away from ourselves. And yet what we most need is what we already are: our essential self. There is no escape; there is only coming home.

====================

,

In this world you have become clothed and rich,
but when you come out of this world, how will you be?
Learn a trade that will earn you forgiveness.
In the world beyond there’s also traffic and trade.
Beside those earnings, this world is just play.
As children embrace in fantasy intercourse,
or set up a candy shop, this world is a game.
Night falls, and the child
comes home hungry without his friends.

[Rumi, Mathnawi, II, 2593-99]

Alhamdulillah,

tomorrow would be the
start of the Fasting Month of Ramadhan.

One can says that
it’s a time for sacrifice. Sacrificing the desire of the body, to tune it and
in order to better control the ego/nafs.

It’s like
exercising the muscle on the gym to get a strong and good muscle.
One aspect of Fasting is
kinda exercising the will power, to overcome (over-ride ?) our programmed,
habitual, mind-numbing behaviour and action.

And hopefully by
the end of the day, one could get a little bit of will-power muscle that would
get stronger and better … but hopefully not the stronger egoism and nafs.

Quote:

=======================================================

So to be human –
one aspect of being human — is being able to sacrifice. Now, the ego
can sacrifice too. The ego can sacrifice for instance and say, I’m going
to work eighty hours a week and I’m going to save my money and I’m going to
take a trip to Las Vegas and win some more; maybe I’ll buy a Condo in Las
Vegas, maybe I meet a really sexy person; but for now I’m going to sacrifice
myself and work eighty hours a week and put it in the bank. That’s one kind of
sacrifice. But what is the sacrifice of a real human being. Parents sacrifice
for their children; there is an unselfishness in it because there is great
love. But still loving your children (as so beautiful, it teaches us, it’s a
model for us), but still there is a kind of egoism in it because after all our
children are us.

Ultimately we suppose that to be able to really sacrifice for other human
beings without seeing them all personally but in a sense, feeling love for all
manifestations of life, this would be the ultimate condition, the ultimate
state; we are not there yet by a long shot, but maybe the circle of our love is
widening and maybe, for instance, our love is not limited on the basis of the
mere likes and dislikes of our personality. Maybe we can step beyond the
temporary likes and dislikes of our personality, to look beyond and to see the
being behind the mask, to see the being of another through the distorting lens
of our own subjective egoism.

=======================================================

,