""Many people, especially ignorant people, want to punish you for speaking the truth, for being correct, for being you. Never apologize for being correct, or for being years ahead of your time. If you're right and you know it, speak your mind. Speak your mind. Even if you are a minority of one, the truth is still the truth." -Gandhi

"Keeping Quiet"

By Pablo Neruda,

Now we will count to twelve

and we will all keep still.

For once on the face of the earth,

let's not speak in any language;

let's stop for a second,

and not move our arms so much.

It would be an exotic moment

without rush, without engines;

we would all be together

in a sudden strangeness.

Fishermen in the cold sea

would not harm whales

and the man gathering salt

would not look at his hurt hands.

Those who prepare green wars,

wars with gas, wars with fire,

victories with no survivors,

would put on clean clothes

and walk about with their brothers

in the shade, doing nothing.

What I want should not be confused

with total inactivity.

Life is what it is about; . . .

If we were not so single-minded

about keeping our lives moving,

and for once could do nothing,

perhaps a huge silence

might interrupt this sadness

of never understanding ourselves

and of threatening ourselves with death.

Perhaps the earth can teach us

as when everything seems dead in winter

and later proves to be alive.

Now I'll count up to twelve

and you keep quiet and I will go.

--Pablo Neruda, "Keeping Quiet'

Howard Zinn

"If you look for the truth outside yourself, it gets farther and farther away.  Today, walking alone, I meet him everywhere I step.  He is the same as me, yet I am not him.  Only if you understand it in this way will you merge with the way things are."

-- Tung Shan

Let your thoughts precede you

"The Western tradition represents body because it's always looking at things out here at arm's length. It's using microscopes, it using all kinds of tools to look at things, to take them apart. That's changing, but this has been the understanding. The Eastern approach uses Spirit - you meditate, you breath, you apprehend the nature of the Universe through your Spirit. I think the Native American tradition, at least the one that I understand and grew up in represents Mind. Because, as I say, you let your thoughts precede you. You let your thoughts flow into that circumstance to understand it."

-- Paula Underwood Spensor Oneida tradition.

Proverb

Nor does truth

"It is a bit embarrassing to have been concerned with the human problem all one's life 

and find at the end that one has no more to offer by way of advice 

than 'try to be a little kinder.' "

~ Aldous Huxley

"No revolution in outer things is possible without prior revolution in one's inner way of being. Whatever change you aspire to in your affairs must be preceded by a change in heart, an active deepening and strengthening of your resolve to meet every event with equanimity, detachment, and innocent goodwill. When this spiritual poise is achieved within, magnificent things are possible without."

--The Book of Changes, Chapter 40 (version by Brian Browne Walker)

Sacred Space

"To have a sacred place is an absolute necessity for anybody today. You must have a room or a certain hour of the day or so, where you do not know who your friends are, you don't know what you owe anybody or what they owe you. This is a place where you can simply experience and bring forth what you are and what you might be...This is the place of creative incubation. At first, you may find nothing happens there. But if you have a sacred place and use it, take advantage of it, something will happen."

--Joseph Campbell

Beginners

“Who is more humble? The scientist who looks at the universe with an open mind and accepts whatever the universe has to teach us, or somebody who says everything in this book must be considered the literal truth and never mind the fallibility of all the human beings involved?”
Carl Sagan

Milky Way Monument