Looking at broader cultural trends, Murray Gell-Mann disputes the idea that we are living at a time of cultural decline.
"We're actually at a high point in our history, but we don't see it. You have to remember we live at a time when the ordinary person — the mass man, as
Ortega y Gasset wrote in La Rebelión de las Masas — has broken through."
In the short run, he concedes, we are seeing some discouraging developments: "The bonds of our society are loosening: values like peace, quiet, cleanliness, and civility — all the things that distinguish us from a banana republic."
But he thinks this may be a sort of temporary optical illusion: "In the long run, it's a remarkable thing to be living at a time when the ordinary person has a chance to be educated, to shape his own life, and take a part in political and even cultural affairs."
Here's to the crazy ones.
The misfits.
The rebels.
The troublemakers.
The round pegs in the square holes.
The ones who see things differently.
They're not fond of rules.
And they have no respect for the status quo.
You can quote them, disagree with them,
glorify or vilify them.
About the only thing you can't do is ignore them.
Because they change things.
They push the human race forward.
While some may see them as the crazy ones,
we see genius.
Because the people who are crazy enough to think
they can change the world, are the ones who do.
Timeless articles
~ Book of the month ~
~ A Few Words of Wisdom ~
Dreams are not made to put us to sleep, but to awaken us.
Every person has his or her own Annapurna.” I go on to explain that there were many Annapurnas in my life—challenges I wasn’t sure I could meet—but that “the real Annapurna was my last one.” For each of you out there, your Annapurna might be a tough project at work, a bad illness, or the breakup of a marriage, but the trick is to find a way of converting adversity into something positive, a challenge to look forward to.
There is nothing else in life like getting to the summit. What’s more, I’ve always felt that the greater the challenge, the greater the reward.
Safety is first; fun is second; success is third.
Although I remain uncertain about God or any particular religion, I believe in karma. What goes around, comes around. How you live your life, the respect that you give others and the mountain, and how you treat people in general will come back to you in kindred fashion. I like to talk about what I call the Karma National Bank. If you give up the summit to help rescue someone who’s in trouble, you’ve put a deposit in that bank. And sometime down the road, you may need to make a big withdrawal.
Getting to the top is optional. Getting down is mandatory.
I learned then what science was about: it was patience. If you looked, and you watched, and you paid attention, you got a great reward from it — although possibly not every time. As a result, when I became a more mature man, I would painstakingly, hour after hour, for years, work on problems — sometimes many years, sometimes shorter times; many of them failing, lots of stuff going into the wastebasket — but every once in a while there was the gold of a new understanding that I had learned to expect when I was a kid, the result of observation.
from What Is Science?
There is evidence to suggest that our situation is every bit as hopeful as it is desperate. As Alvin Tofller noted in his famous book Future Shock, there are more scientists alive and working today than in all previous history combined, and this means that we will see more changes in the next two decades than in any 1,000 years of the past.
from Ten Good Reasons To Get Out Of Bed In The Morning
The world looks so different after learning science. For example, trees are made of air, primarily. When they are burned, they go back to air, and in the flaming heat is released the flaming heat of the sun which was bound in to convert the air into tree, and in the ash is the small remnant of the part which did not come from air that came from the solid earth, instead. These are beautiful things, and the content of science is wonderfully full of them. They are very inspiring, and they can be used to inspire others.
from What Is Science?
Dr. Leary uses the symbol JZ (intelligence squared) to represent this new evolutionary factor; it stands for intelligence studying intelligence, the nervous system studying the nervous system. Dr. John Lilly refers to it as the self-metaprogrammer, the human brain feeding back self-change directions to the human brain scientifically. In simple language, man is graduating from being the conditioned animal in the behaviorist cage to becoming whatever he wills to become.
from Ten Good Reasons To Get Out Of Bed In The Morning
"The closed door is symbolic of a closed mind." I don't know. But I can say there is a pretty good correlation between those who work with the doors open and those who ultimately do important things, although people who work with doors closed often work harder. Somehow they seem to work on slightly the wrong thing — not much, but enough that they miss fame.
from You and Your Research
We need to remember that about 97 per cent of all humanity’s art, science, culture, and philosophy has come from economically secure aristocracies supported by human slaves. When all humanity becomes an economically secure aristocracy supported by mechanical slaves, Aristotle’s imagined utopia will be practical. Immeasurable intelligence will be released to seek goals even beyond immortality, perhaps beyond spacetime as we know it.
from Ten Good Reasons To Get Out Of Bed In The Morning
Objectivity and subjectivity were traps that people fell into. I prefer the terms "insanity" and "outsanity." Insanity is your life inside yourself. It's very private and you don't allow anybody in there because it's so crazy. Every so often I find somebody that I can talk to about it. When you go into the isolation tank outsanity is gone. Now, outsanity is what we're doing now, it's exchanging thoughts and so on. I'm not talking about my insanity and you're not talking about yours. Now, if our insanities overlap then we can be friends.
From here to Alternity and Beyond interview with John Lilly
Unlike imprinting which requires only one experience and sets permanently into the neurons, conditioning requires many repetitions of the same experience and does not set permanently. Behaviorists, also, know how to reverse conditioning by counter-conditioning, but only Dr. Timothy Leary has claimed to know how to reverse imprinting.
from Quantum Psychology by Robert Anton Wilson
There's an old Jewish story about a rabbi who instructed his pupils to always have two pockets, each filled with a different message. In one, they should have a paper that reads "for my sake the world was created." And in the other, "I am but dust and ashes."
Well, Patanjali, for instance, in 400 B.C. said, "When you reach the highest form of samadhi, you realize there are hundreds more beyond that." I agree; there's no limit.
from The Scientist video with John Lilly
Learn faster than the world changes.
In a world that never stops changing,
you can never stop learning and growing.