I think that a conscious decision was made by the American establishment at the close of the 1960s, and what they said to themselves was, “This idea of universal education, and an educated citizenry, this, we don’t like. We see now what happens when you educate your citizens: they figure out the game, and they come to you with their plans for reform, and how to make it better.” So I was, at least at the University of California, I was among the last people to go through that university where the goal was to inform you about the nature of the enterprise called “Western Civilization.” And after that, what they got into was this MBA, data entry, all this stuff. The universities became trade schools, and what they give you is video games. They give you TV, video games, and they give you a skill. They say, “You’re a level three data enterer. We’re gonna give you $35,000 dollars a year, and please shut up about it. That’s it. You’ve been brought inside. But we’re not interested in your opinions. We’re giving you a life, we’re giving you a trade, and we’ll be giving you some orders downstream, and by God you better snap to when the moment comes.” This has nothing to do with democracy. This is fascism, is what it is….Everything is commoditized. People these days want to be secure. I don’t really understand that. You need a certain critical mass to give that up. It’s great when you and all your friends agree you don’t care whether you starve or not because you’re going to have so much fun doing it, but it’s hard to reach that place by yourself, because it’s not very much fun. There is a problem in that we are manipulated, and we are not empowered, and those who are empowered, it wouldn’t be so bad if they had a plan. But their plan is, you know, another house, another Mercedes, a deeper swimming pool. This is no plan. And so it’s up to the creativity of ordinary people.
Terence McKenna
Category: Stolen Valor
Helena Blavatsky on creativity
As God creates, so man can create. Given a certain intensity of will, and the shapes created by the mind become subjective. Hallucinations, they are called, although to their creator they are real as any visible object is to any one else. Given a more intense and intelligent concentration of this will, and the form becomes concrete, visible, objective; the man has learned the secret of secrets; he is a MAGICIAN.
Isis Unveiled
Kerouac’s “Belief & Technique for Modern Prose”
- Scribbled secret notebooks, and wild typewritten pages, for yr own joy
- Submissive to everything, open, listening
- Try never get drunk outside yr own house
- Be in love with yr life
- Something that you feel will find its own form
- Be crazy dumbsaint of the mind
- Blow as deep as you want to blow
- Write what you want bottomless from bottom of the the mind
- The unspeakable visions of the individual
- No time for poetry but exactly what is
- Visionary tics shivering in the chest
- In tranced fixation dreaming upon object before you
- Remove literary, grammatical and syntactical inhibition
- Like Proust be an old teahead of time
- Telling the true story of the world in interior monolog
- The jewel center of interest is the eye within the eye
- Write in recollection and amazement for yourself
- Work from pithy middle eye out, swimming in language sea
- Accept loss forever
- Believe in the holy contour of life
- Struggle to sketch the flow that already exists intact in mind
- Dont think of words when you stop but to see picture better
- Keep track of every day the date emblazoned in yr morning
- No fear or shame in the dignity of yr experience, language & knowledge
- Write for the world to read and see yr exact pictures of it
- Bookmovie is the movie in words, the visual American form
- In Praise of Character in the Bleak inhuman Loneliness
- Composing wild, undisciplined, pure, coming from under, crazier the better
- You’re a Genius all the time
- Writer-Director of Earthly movies Sponsored & Angeled in Heaven
Nick Mullen on nostalgia
People were deliberately stunted by both their parents and marketing. In the late 80s and early 90s, they started really fucking aggressively pushing that fucking like, “Tell your parents ‘Buy me Bonestorm or go to hell,'” that classic Simpsons bit we all know and love, and that created this fucking generation. And it’s not just marketing, it’s also, you know, the school system and, you know, people, fucking, telling their children they could be president before they knew the fucking alphabet in kindergarten, and it does create a sense of entitlement. I think that does create a lot of problems with cultural narcissism across the board….You created an inverse system where the best time in someone’s life is between the ages of five and fifteen….Honestly, [the idea of getting off work to play video games and eat Hot Pockets] feels like being plugged into a fucking dialysis machine and laying down on a fucking deathbed. All that regressive shit gives me, like, sincerely, a fucking weird nausea. Like, I can’t even, I have trouble watching old Simpsons episodes. We had one night where…we were watching season 5 or whatever, and I’m laughing at the jokes, but it’s almost like, triggering in the sense that it’s like, you know, life goes on, you can’t keep clinging to these things that were around 20 years ago. You need to find some way to make this moment in my life substantial or mean something, and outside of doing a shit ton of drugs, I really don’t know how to do it.
Sir James Frazer on Christmas
two quotes on writing
A novel will be the higher and nobler the more inner and less outer life it depicts… The art lies in setting the inner life into the most violent motion with the smallest possible expenditure of outer life: for it is the inner life which is the real object of our interest. – The task of the novelist is not to narrate great events but to make small ones interesting.
Arthur Schoepenhauer
Write the things which thou hast seen, and the things which are, and the things which shall be hereafter
Revelation 1:19
Mary Oliver on the poet’s ambitions
Various ambitions—to complete a poem, to see it in print, to enjoy the gratification of someone’s comment about it—serve in some measure as incentives to the writer’s work. Though each of these is reasonable, each is a threat to that other ambition of the poet, which is to write as well as Keats, or Yeats, or Williams—or whoever it was who scribbled onto a page a few lines whose force the reader once felt and has never forgotten. Every poet’s ambition should be to write as well. Anything else is only a flirtation.
Mary Oliver
Madame Blavatsky on Destiny
Yes: “our destiny is written in the stars!” Only, the closer the union between the mortal reflection MAN and his celestial PROTOTYPE, the less dangerous the external conditions and subsequent reincarnations—which neither Buddhas nor Christs can escape. This is not superstition, least of all is it Fatalism. The latter implies a blind course of some still blinder power, and man is a free agent during his stay on earth. He cannot escape his ruling Destiny, but he has the choice of two paths that lead him in that direction, and he can reach the goal of misery—if such is decreed to him, either in the snowy white robes of the martyr, or in the soiled garments of a volunteer in the iniquitous course; for, there are external and internal conditions which affect the determination of our will upon our actions, and it is in our power to follow either of the two. Those who believe in Karma have to believe in Destiny, which, from birth to death, every man is weaving thread by thread around himself, as a spider does his cobweb; and this Destiny is guided either by the heavenly voice of the invisible prototype outside of us, or by our more intimate astral, or inner man, who is but too often the evil genius of the embodied entity called man. Both these lead on the outward man, but one of them must prevail; and from the very beginning of the invisible affray the stern and implacable Law of Compensation steps in and takes its course, faithfully following the fluctuations. When the last strand is woven, and man is seemingly enwrapped in the net-work of his own doing, he finds himself completely under the empire of this self-made Destiny. It then either fixes him like the inert shell against the immovable rock, or carries him away like a feather in the whirlwind raised by his own actions, and this is—KARMA.
The Secret Doctrine, H.P. Blavatsky
