Tag Archives: metaphysics

Dharma is Quality itself, the principle of ‘rightness’ which gives structure and purpose to the evolution of all life …

The mythos is the social culture and the rhetoric which the culture must invent before philosophy becomes possible

Just as mystics traditionally seek monasteries and ashrams … so are the insane treated by isolation in places of relative calm and austerity and silence.

The value of shock treatment is not that it returns a lunatic to normal cultural patterns. It certainly does not do that. It’s value is that it destroys all patterns … cultural and private, and leaves the patient temporarily in a Dynamic state …

Religious mysticism is one of those delusions that isn’t called insane only because there are so many people involved …

Dynamic Quality is a higher moral order than scientific truth, and it is as immoral for philosophers of science to try to suppress Dynamic Quality as it is for church authorities to suppress scientific method. Dynamic value is an integral part of science. It is the cutting edge of scientific progress itself.

Sometimes the insane and the contrarians and the ones who are closest to suicide are the most valuable people society has …

… the insane person is running a private unapproved film which he happens to like better than the current cultural one …

When a cartoonist wants to show someone getting a great idea he puts an electric bulb over the character’s head. Everybody understands … Why?

Your static value system filters out the undesirable opinions & preserves the desirable ones … it isn’t just opinions that get filtered out. It’s also data.

Insanity isn’t an ‘object’ of observation. It’s an alteration of observation itself …

Today we are living in an intellectual and technological paradise and a moral and social nightmare.

The intellect’s evolutionary purpose has never been to discover an ultimate meaning of the universe. That is a relatively recent fad. It’s historical purpose has been to help a society find food, detect danger, and defeat enemies.

Paradise was always at the end of some intellectual, technological ride, but you knew that when you got there paradise wouldn’t be there either.

The moral values that were replacing the old European Victorian ones were the moral values of American Indians: kindness to children,maximum freedom, openness of speech, love of simplicity, affinity for nature.

When the social climate changes from preposterous social restraint of all intellect to a relative abandonment of all social patterns, the result is a hurricane of social forces.

Biology beat death billions of years ago. Society beat biology thousands of years ago. But intellect and society are still fighting it out…