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"You may have noticed that the questions asked are better than the answers given. What do you expect? Perhaps we could submit these answers in a game and see if anyone could figure out what the hell the question was. "Ahh, how to be happy?"
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"I feel very strongly about putting questions; it partakes too much of the style of the day of judgement. You start a question, and it's like starting a stone. You sit quietly on the top of a hill; and away the stone goes, starting others; and presently some bland old bird (the last you would have thought of) is knocked on the head in his own back garden, and the family have to change their name. No, sir, I make it a rule of mine: the more it looks like Queer Street, the less I ask."
"Do you train for passing tests or do you train for creative inquiry?"
"In rational inquiry, we idealize to selected domains in such a way (we hope) as to permit us to discover crucial features of the world. Data and observations, in the sciences, have an instrumental character. They are of no particular interest in themselves, but only insofar as they constitute evidence that permits one to determine fundamental features of the real world, within a course of inquiry that is invariably undertaken under sharp idealizations, often implicit and simply common understanding, but always present."
"We may differ on many things, but what we respect is freeinquiry, openmindedness, and the pursuit of ideas for their own sake.We do not hold our convictions dogmatically: the disagreement betweenProfessor Stephen Jay Gould and Professor Richard Dawkins,concerning "punctuated evolution and the unfilled gaps in post-Darwinian theory, is quite wide as well as quite deep, but we shallresolve it by evidence and reasoning and not by mutual excommunication."
"Assumptions can be dangerous, JUST ASK!!"
"One of the greatest tragedies I can think of is for a person to die having never fully questioned the life he was born into."
"Comparing what we're looking for misses the point. It's wanting to know that makes us matter. Otherwise we're going out the way we came in. That's why you can't believe in the afterlife, Valentine. Believe in the after, by all means, but not the life. Believe in God, the soul, the spirit, the infinite, believe in angels if you like, but not in the great celestial get-together for an exchange of views. If the answers are in the back of the book I can wait, but what a drag. Better to struggle on knowing that failure is final."
Explore more quotes by Darrell Calkins
"My take on personal evolution is largely about the spirit of connecting and disconnecting things, relating to what I call "the gap or time and space between things. It is also about becoming practical in all this, developing the power and precision to simply bring the grand ideas home, to compress the paradigm of perception/choice/action/result into a single gesture."
"Transformation, on the other hand, is creating beauty from horror or destruction (or, for beginners, an actually pleasant evening with the usual family problems)."
"One of the great images to come down to us through Zen Buddhism is the encounter between an enlightened master and an advanced apprentice during the course of a shared meal. The apprentice, becoming fed up with the stress and waiting and the master's apparent disregard for him, demands an explanation without complication of exactly how to become enlightened. The master asks, "Have you finished your rice? "Yes, says the apprentice. "Then go wash your bowl."
"Well-being, or wholeness, implies integrity and harmony between all existing elements, providing freedom for the whole."
"Whether or not we personally do impact some ultimate evolution beyond ourselves, we can definitely influence what happens today. To choose to waste a day, or a lifetime, is opposed to the essential spirit of life, expressed, sacrificed for, and upheld through every perceivable interaction in nature. It's also opposed to every human expression of spirit throughout history. We know to live up to our potential, to fulfill the trust of creation by moving forward, even if we don't believe it or feel like it or know why."
"In the quest for a functional and direct interaction between imagination and reality, and the evolution of them both, there is in place a natural resistance, which I have referred to as Creative Resistance, because it demands just that: creativity. Much of this calls for redefining, or refining, one's relationship with time, and all the qualities and skills that will only come from engaging time more creatively and effectively. As such, part of the bargain is about acquiescing to a rhythm that is subtler and has more definite purpose to it than one's subjective preferences."
"Forgiveness is really about absolution: to set free. But if you look carefully at the dynamic, the one you're setting free is yourself."
"Like everyone on the planet, one identifies and looks toward a vision of improvement or refinement, but/and one has to find a way to engage both of those-what is so, and what can be-with an appropriate harmony that is itself the hallmark of wholeness. In essence, we are looking to create a harmony between the existing elements, not a more severe dichotomy between what we want and what we should be doing."
"My intention is not to define a perfect life and then cause an unhappy analysis of what you are not doing correctly or are incapable of doing."
"We do have some capacity to determine how things evolve, and how we evolve, individually and as a community or race. That's a tremendous freedom and a tremendous responsibility."
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