• There was a spontaneous genius in the Big Bang, which reverberates in all the little bangs that open new worlds through “blown minds” or insight. *
  
  
• The desire for a deathless state (an unending Heaven of one sort or another) is an unintentional desire for lifelessness, for a static and inanimate repetitiveness. *
  
  
• Even if I can’t hear the deep bass of the elephant and the whale echoing across the Savannah or the ocean, I’ll hear their silence. And then I’ll know the real meaning of alienation and loneliness, guilt and sorrow. *
  
  
• Panic is a dog chasing its tail. Funny if I can see the whole dog, and not so funny if I’m caught up in the chase.
  
  
• The question, “what is real?” can only be answered with a sense of humor.
  
  
• Most schools teach only a short-term open-mindedness in order to gain, in the end, conclusive confidence in what is “real.” But a conclusion closes the mind and ends learning. Few schools help students discover a more ineffable confidence in what always exceeds our conclusions.
  
  
• Scientists might cringe, but electrical or nuclear power could be described as hidden forces charmed into being by the magical formulas of math. These invocations isolate attributes of an undifferentiated whole, giving these forces an independent existence and practical purpose they never had. *
  
  
• The scientist can become bewitched into a materialist vision; the salesperson can end up thinking that everyone is selling something. We’re made gullible by any story conflated with fact. *
  
  
• Error is how reality makes itself known. It’s a ceaseless trade wind of correction. Embracing this slant on error, theories no longer strain to be perfect. (A “perfect answer” would put an end to learning). Learning requires riding that current. So, stories flex and shift like sails, catching whispers of larger worlds. Now the wind exceeding the sail is beautiful. *
  
  
• There’s no greater comic relief than recognizing one’s inner demons as fools on the level of Curly, Moe and Larry. *

• What hasn’t changed is this phony sense of a divided consciousness, this feeling of being the better half of a Siamese twin; the other a dummy of a nincompoop dragging along beside me; a co-creation of my own desired destiny divided by the destiny friends and enemies consider more within my grasp. Probably this Siamese self is nothing more than my own recollected behavior sloughed off on an imaginary scapegoat.
  
  
• Too often, the inner voice (the “I”) escapes into the delusion of being the better angel, who can look back at his dim-witted past from an improved distance. As if I were superior to my own immediate past. And these internal revolutions from dimwit to angel and back again occur in quick succession, like a dog chasing its tail. *

• For no sooner do I act in the world then I become immediately annoyed by what I’ve done, rising in opposition to this now utterly deposed former incarnation who had been in his own day (of a moment or two ago) an equally enraged monster with regard to previous incarnations.
  
  
• “When I get mad or frustrated with myself I notice that the voice (the “I”) feels distinctly superior to the lout I call myself. It’s a kind of voice-throwing trick, placing “me” perpetually outside the scene of my own error, gazing back at my failures like the lab-coated know-it-all, not like the dummy in the wreck. *
  
  
• Hear me complain about my gaffs with the sternness of an English school-master, condemning what I’ve done from a morally superior third person’s perch (disguised under first person pronouns): “I’ll never forgive myself for what I’ve done!” Or listen as I express the frustrations of an injured party — “there I go again, spilling milk all over myself!” — in this way sidling over to gaze at my wrong-doing as the victim instead of the perpetrator. *
  
  
• The key to learning is being edified and bemused by our own stupidity. *

•  Learning requires a love of anomaly, incompletion and mystery. Training requires a faith in authorities, ideals and dogmas. The first uses error as a lodestar; the second uses error to bludgeon us.
  
  
• The work ethic masks a deeper laziness, or reluctance to face the ambiguity, uncertainty, and “error” of myself; a reluctance to do the “real work” of giving up the façade of identity and status that represents my collusion with this way of life. *
  
  
• Maturation doesn’t mean outgrowing being playful, errant and mischievous. It simply means learning to play in ever more subtle fields. *
  
  
• By denigrating profound play, society suffers the consequences of leisure, which is little more than a gaudy parole from the everlasting chain of workdays. *
  
  
• Learning (maturing) isn’t a path to perfection, but a surrender to an ever more daring honesty about all our glaring imperfections. *
  
  
• All interpretations are lopsided depictions of reality. The whole is out of reach, so our vision of life is inevitably distorted.  But this distortion helps us recognize (utilize, develop and appreciate) elements of an otherwise undifferentiated whole. The danger is taking the interpretations too seriously; forgetting that every story is not only valid but also at some point invalid. *
  
  
• We have lost our sensitivity to the small tug of error that shadows our every move, which is our own wisdom. *
  
  
• It might not be death we fear, but the revelation that we don’t really exist enough yet to die.
  
  
• Balance is sensitivity to imbalance. Anyone who tries to stand perfectly still on one leg, for instance, will need to be alert to the first inklings of imbalance. And that relationship to Imbalance is what balance feels like. This awareness is not primarily cognitive, but physical. The Tao is a physical insight. *
  
  
• Balance is the absence of any resistance to error. This sensitivity to over-reach, limitations and imbalance becomes so subtle and fast that language stops being necessary, and becomes, in fact, much too slow to keep pace with the shifts of insight that occur. Imagine if you had to narrate every shift of your body in standing still. It’s not possible. Likewise, it stops being possible to think as fast as insight, or shifts in meaning. *
  
  

• Meaning that moves too quickly for words to keep pace could be seen as a movement towards equilibrium from always slightly imbalanced perspectives. A constant movement of seeing through one’s own perceptions. Not seeing through to some solid ground of truth, but seeing the loose ends that hint at larger questions.
  
  
• The genius of science is that it replaced dogma with theory. But does science embrace this original insight? It would mean embracing the fact that science tells stories – honest stories, but not True ones. *
  
  
• If, for instance, I say “the map is not the territory” or “everything is a story” this doesn’t replace one dogma with another; it strips the mind of a debilitating assumption and leaves it in a pregnant void, a neutral position, which is self-awareness, or self-transparency, which is honesty, which is intelligence. *
  
  
• Almost every young child in this culture has already gotten deeply entangled in a poisonous web of values and beliefs; and is forced to disentangle themself from this web. And it may be this process of disentanglement that Wilber and others interpret as stages of development. *
  
  
• Everyone’s probably heard Korzybski’s “the map is not the territory”. If this is understood as a concept then it’s not really understood at all. As a concept it’s merely another “map.” To really understand what he means the statement has to initiate a full stop, which is an action, not an idea or concept, not another map. *
  
  
• Intelligence is the realization of stupidity.
  
  
• In trying to be courageous, I run in fear from my own cowardice. In trying to be kind, I hate my own selfishness; in striving to be more honest, it’s the false ideal of honesty that I try to maintain; in trying to be tranquil, I slap at every wave, roiling the surface of consciousness.
  
  
• I entertain the idea that we’re all mildly schizophrenic. We mistake our thoughts for what is actual. We are hallucinating a divided world and running amok in this imagination. *
  
  
• I’m not looking at schizophrenia for the moment as a sickness, but as a more or less inevitable consequence of a species that refines thought to such an extent that it becomes confused by its own images and beliefs and mistakes them for reality itself. *
  
  
• No matter how subtle the thought may be in one sense, in a functional sense, the thought is only a static construct, or a dead conclusion. *
  
  
• The only real solid ground or certainty in a world of hallucinations is negative, which is to say, corrective error. Errors are the bread crumbs that lead us out of our hall of mirrors. *
  
  
• At any consistent depth of perception, I’m honest to the degree allowed by that particular depth. At a certain depth, the honesty may be only verbal. At another it may be more behavioral (trying to live up to moral codes and such). Or at still another it might be ability to recognize the persistent failure to live up to codes, and the kindness inherent in not trying to be perfect anymore, which is an honesty that exceeds morality. They’re all forms of honesty, but some reach deeper. *
  
  
• Perhaps a different kind of honesty is initiated when encounter the lie that claims it’s possible to “tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.” Because we can’t know the whole truth. We can only know part of an ever-developing reality. *
  
  
• I’m talking to that impersonal (non-defensive) honesty, which is the seedling of a truer life in me and you. It grows from a shared ground; although each person becomes an idiosyncratic expression of that ground. *
  
  
• It’s the wider perspective that holds the intelligence, not the brain itself. *
  
  
• Something is slowly distinguishing itself within us from the illusions of who we think we are. And we can’t point to it and say “that is my truer Self emerging”, because everything I identify so positively and with such conviction, is another illusion. *
  
  
• You might say, the honest person is covered in filth. Honesty is the awareness of dishonesty. The honest person is not an idealist.
  
  
• I can’t “try” to be honest or even good, because in straining for such an ideal I have already unconsciously shifted from the insubstantial, morphing substance of who I actually am to the idealized representation of that actuality. So, the ideal leads to dishonesty. *
  
  
• A predatorial spirit has infected the system of thought, making the surface of thought sticky, preventing the idea from dissolving and releasing its full charge of meaning. *
  
  
• If there is any prolonged nursing of guilt this means the message failed to fully release its charge of meaning and bring about that centered, non-defensive and impersonal alertness to the nature of one’s own corruption. *
  
  
• The reflex tendency is to remain identified with the wrong-doing I’ve committed in order to “show” remorse. But constant remorse requires a constant attachment to one’s own image. Not identifying with the guilty act ends up looking like an escape from responsibility for this reason. And this compels me to retain my white identity, for example, as a penance of sorts. It creates a double-bind where I have to identify as a white man to avoid the pretense of innocence. *
  
  
• Nobody will ever find the originator of a deception or brutality. The deceiver and the brute were already deceived and brutalized. There is no human origin to this confusion. It’s a predatory energy that traps us, and wants us to feel weak and guilty, trapped in identifications that discourage empathy. *
  
  
• And what is this strange capacity to see through thought, this new intelligence, this part of us that can’t be captured or known? What is this force that seems to charge into the world like lightning, illuminating the structures it confronts, but which has no structure itself? *
  
  
• Nothing we say is even Close to being Right, because what we Say about life and life itself are composed of utterly different substances.  The map can’t get closer to being the place itself, no matter how precise it tries to be. They are different substances entirely and never the twain shall meet. *
  
  
• We never choose what we’re going to think, do or feel. It’s an illusion of control. We think we’re choosing, but the desire to choose already arose automatically. So, we’re only reacting mechanically to outside forces. Our thoughts are not our own. *
  
  
• A real predator has coalesced around these qualities. But our description of it is only metaphoric. *
  
  
• Insight is not a flash ending in words, but words and ideas that explode with meaning and leave nothing but a changed way of being. *
  
  
• This body becomes an aspect of its surroundings the moment the assertion of my differences ceases. if I’m not constantly thinking about myself, I dissolve into the world itself. *
  
  
• People often find it hard to imagine how tribal people could see “spirits” in trees. But it’s more amazing that our culture tends to see spirits in corporations and flags. *
  
  
• When we’re honest we have no motive. We only have a motive to be dishonest. Honesty is merely being without duplicity. There’s no effort involved if there’s no duplicity. *
  
  
• There’s no great accomplishment in being honest. I do nothing and I’m honest. If I do something about it, then I’m squirming, looking for an advantage, an improvement, anything but the truth. *
  
  
• Self-consciousness is a pain in the ass.
  
  
• Now you think you know me. Impossible, I don’t even know me. But if I can speak from a voice that is obviously a fiction, then ironically, I’m free to speak candidly. Nothing I say can be attributed to me. And then the voice is free to say things beyond its normal reach. *
  
  
• An honest actor needs the limelight, not in order to become a famous movie star, but in order to see their character as others would see them. What actor in their right mind stays at home their entire life to act out plays for their own private amusement in front of a mirror? What comedian stays in their bedroom telling themselves jokes and laughing hysterically at themselves? *
  
  
• It’s far more egotistic of an actor, musician or comedian to stay at home and amuse themselves. It takes courage and honesty to step outside yourself and engage the audience. *
  
  
• It’s the imagination of a sympathetic ear that creates sympathy; and the imagination of an honest reader that allows me to speak from the heart. *
  
  
• It’s a communal mind. Words are nature’s natural-born socialistic constructions. Every definition is communal or it has no meaning. *
  
  
• In realizing that there is no exit from thought’s illusions, thought quiets, which stops the creation of illusion. But you can’t reverse engineer this. *
  
  
• It doesn’t matter what happens (or happened), it only matters if we’re honest about what is happening. *
  
  
• We don’t decide our direction. We’re already heading where we’re looking. And every new discovery merely alters that trajectory.
  
  
• Our thoughts are magical formulas that pull from the amorphous and unknowable hat of this universe various rabbits and cats that otherwise would not exist (for better or worse). *
  
  
• We can’t just make up anything we want. There is a difference between a theory and a wishful thought. A theory remains a fiction, but it’s an honest fiction that opens up a way to relate to the world on a deeper level. *
  
  
• It’s easy to believe that theories are an attempt to ascertain something with final certainty. But we can’t know the ultimate nature of what we’re seeing; we’re only making a coherent fiction out of what our senses make available from within a particular orbit. *
  
  
• We are patients in a psych ward of sorts, requiring empathy, not punishment. *
  
  
• The military is designed to squash human bodies in order to stop the spread of disagreeable ideas. The ideas survive because the dead are breeding grounds for vengeful thoughts. *
  
  
• “Guns may not kill; people do.” But the world’s arsenal still shouldn’t be trusted to a schizophrenic populace. *
  
  
• The very effort to not make mistakes is itself a deep mistake, because if I try to prevent myself from making mistakes, I’m preventing myself from learning and maturing. *
  
  
• We can’t hide behind the excuse of human nature. Nature is not causing our problems. The imagination is doing that. *
  
  
• The best we can do with language is bend words to reach perspectives that lie beyond the reach of tired definitions.*
  
  
• The collapse and utter destruction of a too-literally imagined world implies the birth of a metaphoric and prismatic perspective. The problem implies its own resolution. *
  
  
• There is no problem with the world. Every single human problem is only the result of how we imagined the world in a crazy way. *
  
  
• Even if the tragedy is this unspeakable horror of a paradise of earth destroyed, the path we took to this tragedy has been nothing but a comedy of errors, falling over problems that are entirely imaginary – problems that are so utterly non-existent that we might as well be tripping over our own shadows. *
  
  
• We’ve entered into a predator/prey developmental relationship with our own imagination, inventing new forms to solve the problems caused by unforeseen complications arising in previous forms. *
  
  
• Relativity isn’t reducible to “my truth” and “your truth”, and to the uneasy toleration of these differences. Relativity is itself a Universal Insight, linking all of us in a nested hierarchy of meaning. *
  
  
• On the right, common cause (or responsibility to the collective) is feared as a repression of individuality; on the left it’s seen as a repression of diversity. *
  
  
• What is Not True is the only real truth that doesn’t end in reductive dogma. It’s the only truth that loosens our attachment to particular perspectives. *
  
  
• Negative awareness is wider than the widest interpretation, because it only identifies overreach in every interpretation. It provides no interpretation of its own. The wider interpretations that form as a result of this sensitivity to limits tend by default to be broader and more empathetic. But they too will become dogmatic if this negative (or relativistic) vision isn’t always active. *
  
  
• This perspective starkly differs from most perspectives in not being a creed, opinion or dogma. It’s not trying to end error with a perfect answer. It relies on error to provide its bearings in the world. *
  
  
• The Self doesn’t evolve, it dies. *
  
  
• Even if we don’t do anything to reverse climate change, this isn’t a static situation. We’re rolling along on a conveyor belt of momentum, “deciding what to do” by inertia. *
  
  
• We might point to developments such as the Magna Carta as signs of human evolution, but there was no need for a Magna Carta until populations lost their autonomy and became subjects. *
  
  
• We behave according to how we think the world is organized. So, this change in the quality of attention is a stark change in what we call “human nature”. *
  
  
• Higher forms of intelligence encompass and precede the material and mechanical world, preceding and encompassing the intelligence of thought and language, too, just as water vapor encompasses and precedes the more material form of rain. *
  
  
• There are larger orders which go unnoticed, out of which the more material worlds of matter, biology, imagery and language condense, like rain condensing from invisible air. *
  
  
• Some believe that the task of education is to indoctrinate children into holding tight to these cultural myths, because these define shared identities and values. That’s why some don’t want to teach children our full and honest history, preferring the white-washed versions that encourage a population’s willingness to maintain historical privileges. *
  
  
• Honesty is not a moral value. It’s merely eyesight that isn’t obscured by our own lies – not other people’s, but our own. If we can’t face our own duplicity, we can’t see clearly. And no animal survives if its senses are distorted in this way. *
  
  
• Honesty is the capacity to see through our own deceptions and wishful thinking. It’s not “telling the truth.” We don’t know the truth in that positive, assertive, conclusive sense. And that’s the first honest thing we realize. *
  
  
• Negation provides an orientation to the world in the absence of certainty. It goes only far enough to unmask old convictions, leaving questions more open-ended and nuanced. It’s not the certainty of conclusion, but the certainty of something more. *
  
  
• This is the real motivation of psychopaths, escaping the terrors a fiction gone mad, and they can’t admit this horror, this loss of any connection to a reality beyond the fictions of themselves, so they are driven relentlessly to act in ways that sustain their illusions of self-importance and power. *
  
  
• There is a slapstick error at the heart of human misery. *
  
  
• The Ego would rather sink back into that oozing pool of self-pity than experience the cold splash of an honest moment. *
  
  
• The potential for mere sanity shouldn’t be confused with becoming better angels. It’s closer to falling from the high horse into a common mud. *
  
  

• Any species caught in its own vicious circles doesn’t need to be “empowered” with new efficiencies and technologies. All that’s going to do is drive us more efficiently and powerfully in circles. *
  
  
• Thought, image, and drama will all still have a role to play in our lives, but our relationship to them changes and eventually reduces their centrality of importance, which quiets them (but that’s later). *