Michael Fogleman

Can we find a way to mobilize, afresh, the force of what was once called God, as a way of helping us to recreate the beauty of the Earth?

A Joke

Half the people in the world think that the metaphors of their religious traditions, for example, are facts. And the other half contends that they are not facts at all. As a result we have people who consider themselves believers because they accept metaphors as facts, and we have others who classify themselves as atheists because they think religious metaphors are lies.

In actual fact it would seem that during the Cold War, if not during World War II, this country has become frankly a warfare state built on affluence, a power structure in which the interests of big business, the obsessions of the military, and the phobias of political extremists both dominate and dictate our national policy. It also seems that the people of this country are by and large reduced to passivity, confusion, resentment, frustration, thoughtlessness and ignorance, so that they blindly follow any line that is unraveled for them by the mass media.

He spent the bulk of his Swiss account on a new pancreas and liver, the rest on a new Ono-Sendai and a ticket back to the Sprawl.

...if we apply our new function readers-digest-condensed-version to the entire text of James Joyce's _Finnegans Wake_ (treating it as a big long list of words), we will obtain the shorter list (riverrun the)... It would be nice as well as useful if we could create an inverse operation to readers-digest-condensed-version called rejoyce that, given any two words, would create a novel beginning and ending with them, respectively—and such that James Joyce would have written it (had he thought of it). Thus execution of the Lisp statement (rejoyce 'Stately 'Yes) would result in the Lisp genie generating from scratch the entire novel _Ulysses_. Writing this function is left as an exercise for the reader. To test your program, see what it does with (rejoyce 'karma dharma).

Wishing for enlightenment, as in Rinzai Zen, is still based on dualistic thinking. Just to sit quietly in Zazen like a rock or a block of wood is all there is to it! Zazen is not a means to an end called enlightement, Zazen is enlightenment.

Here as in Europe, in America, it is as if the young, a mutation were taking place, as if from unsuspected depths a wave were rising, a mass movement without cohesion, without center. Their generation, invaded by the noise of radio and television from its first day, brainwashed without pause by the most pervasive commercial and political propaganda, should have been poisoned to its very core. Yet, suddenly, many, many among them show that something inside has hardly been touched, has remained immune to it all. In Japan too they confront their own lives, see their dehumanized future in a computerized society and ask in horror the eternal questions: Why am I here? Who am I? Who are you? What is the meaning of our lives? Where the concentration of poison is greatest, the Spirit seems to manifest itself, where dehumanization is almost complete, the specifically human within to assert itself.

The new cities, the suburbs of America, England, France, Italy, Holland, India, Japan, Hong Kong are unrelated to human need, human reality, spirit, life. Totally deficient in what the old cities have in abundance, they lack architectural and human differentiation, atmosphere, fail to stimulate and nourish the imagination. They are the perfect expression of a totalitarian perversion that provides cages for dehumanized cattle, overpopulated, uninhabitable places of exile, joyless deserts in which there is nothing to be experienced and where television and mechanical noise and violence offer the substitute for a life not lived, a death not died. There is no force strong enough to defeat the institutionalized egoism, barbarism, cynicism, and contempt that impose this environment on humans who lost—exploiters and exploited alike—all criteria of what it means to be human. Only a counterculture based on such a criterion could break this tyranny of heartlessness, where people are tolerated only as auxilaries to industrial enterprise.

Deep below in the valley, lights are twinkling. Claske picks up a dead bird among the leaves. The Buddha married too young. He left his wife when he was twenty-eight. He missed knowing the married path, where even the eyes can become one.

It is the interior that calls us, pilgrims, on pilgrimage.