Island

by Aldous Huxley

He remembered it all—the white sail curved by the wind into the likeness of a huge magnolia petal, the water sizzling at the prow, the sparkle of diamonds on every wave crest,

Sailing!

“That’s what you always forget, isn’t it? I mean, you forget to pay attention to what’s happening. And that’s the same as not being here and now.”

Mindfulness...

the whole universe seemed to be fairly splitting its sides over the enormous joke of existence.

He laughed again, then brought out one of his well-tried witticisms. “I’m the man who won’t take yes for an answer.”

The journalist

Just imagine,” he went on, “preaching sermons to perfectly good thrushes and goldfinches and chiff-chaffs! What presumption! Why couldn’t he have kept his mouth shut and let the birds preach to him?

St Francis

He’s a military dictator. That means there’s death in the offing. And death is always news. Even the remote smell of death is news.”

Dictators = death

“Coolness. Coolness and sleep. Through coolness into more life. Through sleep into reconciliation, into wholeness, into living peace.”

Susila teaching meditation.

Nobody needs to go anywhere else. We are all, if we only knew it, already there.

Yes!!

So be aware—aware in every context, at all times and whatever, creditable or discreditable, pleasant or unpleasant, you may be doing or suffering. This is the only genuine yoga, the only spiritual exercise worth practicing.

Mindfulness, every moment of the day.

Will questioned with that innocent air of total ignorance which he had found by long experience to be the best way of eliciting information from the simpleminded and the self-important.

It's useful to assume this air.

But still, high or low, true or false, happiness is happiness and freedom is most enjoyable.

One doesn’t have to be much of a prophet to foretell that Murugan is going to succeed. He’s riding the wave of the future. And the wave of the future is undoubtedly a wave of crude petroleum. Talking

Ugh.

Her smile was charged with a sweetness that Will found positively menacing.

The Rani

“How difficult it is,” said Will, “to understand another man’s vices!”

Sex

It’s fifty percent terrific and fifty percent nonexistent.

Health system sounds like Jamaica

Twenty-nine hundred millions of us at the mercy of a few scores of politicians, a few thousands of tycoons and generals and moneylenders. Ye are the cyanide of the earth—and the cyanide will never, never lose its savor.”

The elite

Just men and women and their children trying to make the best of the here and now,

Mindful

“It isn’t a matter of forgetting. What one has to learn is how to remember and yet be free of the past. How to be there with the dead and yet still be here, on the spot, with the living.” She gave him a sad little smile and added, “It isn’t easy.”

Not easy at all

“one has no right to inflict one’s sadness on other people. And no right, of course, to pretend that one isn’t sad. One just has to accept one’s grief and one’s absurd attempts to be a stoic.

Grief

Perfect faith is defined as something that produces perfect peace of mind. But perfect peace of mind is something that practically nobody possesses. Therefore practically nobody possesses perfect faith.

Peace of mind

People, he was beginning to understand, are at once the beneficiaries and the victims of their culture. It brings them to flower; but it also nips them in the bud or plants a canker at the heart of the blossom.

The sword of culture has several blades.

Armaments, universal debt, and planned obsolescence—those are the three pillars of Western prosperity.

Prosperity

You can expect one Peter Pan among every five or six male children.

Boys who never grow up.

Hitler’s the supreme example of the delinquent Peter Pan. Stalin’s the supreme example of the delinquent Muscle Man.

Two types of dictator.