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When I set out to lead humanity along my Golden Path I promised a lesson their bones would remember. I know a profound pattern humans deny with words even while their actions affirm it. They say they seek security and quiet, conditions they call peace. Even as they speak, they create seeds of turmoil and violence.
The person who takes the banal and ordinary and illuminates it in a new way can terrify. We do not want our ideas changed. We feel threatened by such demands. “I already know the important things!” we say. Then Changer comes and throws our old ideas away.
Rules build up fortifications behind which small minds create satrapies. A perilous state of affairs in the best of times, disastrous during crises.
We tend to become like the worst in those we oppose.
You cannot know history unless you know how leaders move with its currents. Every leader requires outsiders to perpetuate his leadership. Examine my career: I was leader and outsider. Do not assume I merely created a Church-State. That was my function as leader and I copied historical models. Barbaric arts of my time reveal me as outsider. Favorite poetry: epics. Popular dramatic ideal: heroism. Dancers: wildly abandoned. Stimulants to make people sense what I took from them. What did I take? The right to choose a role in history.
If I am to die, I must pass along a transcendental lesson. I must leave with serenity.
You cannot manipulate a marionette with only one string.
Hey, God! I hope you’re there. I want you to hear my prayer. That graven image on my shelf; Is it really you or just myself? Well, anyway, here it goes: Please keep me on my toes. Help me past my worst mistakes, Doing it for both our sakes, For an example of perfection To the Proctors of my section; Or merely for the Heaven of it, Like bread, for the leaven of it. For whatever reason may incline, Please act for yours and mine.
Confine yourself to observing and you always miss the point of your own life. The object can be stated this way: Live the best life you can. Life is a game whose rules you learn if you leap into it and play it to the hilt. Otherwise, you are caught off balance, continually surprised by the shifting play. Non-players often whine and complain that luck always passes them by. They refuse to see that they can create some of their own luck.
All governments suffer a recurring problem: Power attracts pathological personalities. It is not that power corrupts but that it is magnetic to the corruptible. Such people have a tendency to become drunk on violence, a condition to which they are quickly addicted.
The writing of history is largely a process of diversion. Most historical accounts distract attention from the secret influences behind great events.
Education is no substitute for intelligence. That elusive quality is defined only in part by puzzle-solving ability. It is in the creation of new puzzles reflecting what your senses report that you round out the definition.
Many things we do naturally become difficult only when we try to make them intellectual subjects. It is possible to know so much about a subject that you become totally ignorant.
Religion (emulation of adults by the child) encysts past mythologies: guesses, hidden assumptions of trust in the universe, pronouncements made in search of personal power, all mingled with shreds of enlightenment. And always an unspoken commandment: Thou shalt not question! We break that commandment daily in the harnessing of human imagination to our deepest creativity.
“Trying to avoid complications often creates them.”
“I stand in the sacred human presence. As I do now, so should you stand some day. I pray to your presence that this be so. Let the future remain uncertain for that is the canvas to receive our desires. Thus the human condition faces its perpetual tabula rasa. We possess no more than this moment where we dedicate ourselves continuously to the sacred presence we share and create.”
Laws to suppress tend to strengthen what they would prohibit. This is the fine point on which all the legal professions of history have based their job security.
“Show me a completely smooth operation and I’ll show you someone who’s covering mistakes. Real boats rock.”
Point of view? Are we no more than sensory windows on our universe, each with only a point of view?
We do not teach history; we recreate the experience. We follow the chain of consequences—the tracks of the beast in its forest. Look behind our words and you see the broad sweep of social behavior that no historian has ever touched.
Power attracts the corruptible. Suspect all who seek it.
“We should grant power over our affairs only to those who are reluctant to hold it and then only under conditions that increase the reluctance.”
“Laws convey the myth of enforced change. A bright new future will come because of this law or that one. Laws enforce the future. Regulations are believed to enforce the past.”
“Hah! And I thought you would tell me something new. We know that one: ‘Power corrupts. Absolute power corrupts absolutely.’” “Wrong, Dama. Something more subtle but far more pervasive: Power attracts the corruptible.”
Some never participate. Life happens to them. They get by on little more than dumb persistence and resist with anger or violence all things that might lift them out of resentment-filled illusions of security.
Face your fears or they will climb over your back.
Most of us choose our companions and surroundings to reflect ourselves.
Storms. She felt one approaching that no meteorologist could anticipate. Storms beget storms. Rage begets rage. Revenge begets revenge. Wars beget wars.
To know a thing well, know its limits. Only when pushed beyond its tolerances will true nature be seen.
Do not depend only on theory if your life is at stake.
“Sympathy for the enemy—a weakness of police and armies alike. Most perilous are the unconscious sympathies directing you to preserve your enemy intact because the enemy is your justification for existence.”
“Facts are fragile. A Mentat can get tangled in them. Too much reliable data. It’s like diplomacy. You need a few good lies to get at your projections.”
Ready comprehension is often a knee-jerk response and the most dangerous form of understanding. It blinks an opaque screen over your ability to learn. The judgmental precedents of law function that way, littering your path with dead ends. Be warned. Understand nothing. All comprehension is temporary.
Major flaws in government arise from a fear of making radical internal changes even though a need is clearly seen.
Time does not count itself. You have only to look at a circle and this is apparent.
She dares to instruct me? But was it not said by wiser men that knowledge can come from a weed?
“Our gods should mature as we mature.”
A major concept guides the Missionaria Protectiva: Purposeful instruction of the masses. This is firmly seated in our belief that the aim of argument should be to change the nature of truth. In such matters, we prefer the use of power rather than force.
“Thinking you know why you behave as you do gives you all sorts of excuses for extraordinary behavior.”
“I suppose you can rationalize almost anything by laying it on some trauma.”
“Humans can balance on strange surfaces,” Odrade said. “Even on unpredictable ones. It’s called ‘getting in tune.’ Great musicians know it. Surfers I watched when I was a child on Gammu, they knew it. Some waves throw you but you’re prepared for that. You climb back up and go at it once more.”
The best art imitates life in a compelling way. If it imitates a dream, it must be a dream of life. Otherwise, there is no place where we can connect. Our plugs don’t fit.
You often knew them by their defects. The glittering surface told you too little. Good identification required you to look deep inside and see the impurities.
“Moral decisions are always easy to recognize,” Odrade said. “They are where you abandon self-interest.”
Souvenirs of memory must be only that. Things to be taken up and fondled occasionally for evocation of past joys. No joy can be permanent. All is transient. “This, too, shall pass away” applies to all of our living universe.
Uproot your questions from their ground and the dangling roots will be seen. More questions!
Humans are born with a susceptibility to that most persistent and debilitating disease of intellect: self-deception. The best of all possible worlds and the worst get their dramatic coloration from it. As nearly as we can determine, there is no natural immunity. Constant alertness is required.
Give me the judgment of balanced minds in preference to laws every time. Codes and manuals create patterned behavior. All patterned behavior tends to go unquestioned, gathering destructive momentum.
No sweeteners will cloak some forms of bitterness. If it tastes bitter, spit it out. That’s what our earliest ancestors did.
“The difference between sentiment and sentimentality is easy to see. When you avoid killing somebody’s pet on the glazeway, that’s sentiment. If you swerve to avoid the pet and that causes you to kill pedestrians, that is sentimentality.”
