The unreal is more powerful than the real. Because nothing is as perfect as you can imagine it. Because its only intangible ideas, concepts, beliefs, fantasies that last. Stone crumbles. Wood rots. People, well, they die. But things as fragile as a thought, a dream, a legend, they can go on and on. If you can change the way people think. The way they see themselves. The way they see the world. You can change the way people live their lives. That's the only lasting thing you can create.

Chuck Palahniuk

Civilizationism is practically synonymous with industrialism, and the essence of industrialism is the machine; now the machine both produces and kills, at one and the same time: it produces objects and kills the soul, not to mention its practical, and in the long run extremely serious, disadvantages that are only too well known.

Frithjof Schuon

Get yourself a hut house not too far from town, live cheap, go ball in the bars once in awhile, write and rumble in the hills and learn how to saw boards and talk to grandmas you damn fool, carry loads of wood for them, clap your hands at shrines, get supernatural favors, take flower-arrangement lessons and grow chrysanthemums by the door, and get married for krissakes, get a friendly smart sensitive human-being gal who don't give a shit for martinis every night...

Jack Kerouac

art by Clinton Inman

Old man Gray Mountain telling his grandchildren legends about the early days of the Navajo people inside a traditional hogan in Coconino County, Arizona - Navajo - 1948

The development of consciousness is the burden, the suffering, and the blessing of mankind.

Carl Jung

Crow Chiefs in Washington. 1880. Standing - A. M. Quivey, Two Belly, A. R. Keller, and Tom Stewart. Seated - Old Crow, Medicine Crow, Long Elk, Plenticus [Plenty Coups], and Pretty Eagle. Photo by C.M. Bell.

You seem to want instant insight, forgetting that the instant is always preceded by a long preparation. The fruit falls suddenly, but the ripening takes time.

Nisargadatta Maharaj

Claim your place in the sun and go forward into the light. The tools are there; the path is known; you simply have to turn your back on a culture that has gone sterile and dead, and get with the program of a living world and a re-empowerment of your imagination.

-Terence McKenna

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What the modern world has striven after with all its strength, even when it has claimed in its own way to pursue science, is really nothing other than the development of industry and machinery; and in thus seeking to dominate matter and bend it to their service, men have only succeeded, as we said at the beginning of this book, in becoming its slaves. Not only have they limited their intellectual ambition—if such a term can still be used in the present state of things—to inventing and constructing machines, but they have ended by becoming in fact machines themselves.

Rene Guenon

The Crisis of the Modern World

Man is a thinking reed but his great works are done when he is not calculating and thinking. "Childlikeness" has to be restored with long years of training in the art of self-forgetfulness.

When this is attained, man thinks yet he does not think. He thinks like the showers coming down from the sky; he thinks like the waves rolling on the ocean; he thinks like the stars illuminating the nightly heavens; he thinks like the green foliage shooting forth in the relaxing spring breeze.

Indeed, he is the showers, the ocean, the stars, the foliage.

D.T. Suzuki