Methinks we have hugely mistaken this matter of Life and Death. Methinks that what they call my shadow here on earth is my true substance. Methinks that in looking at things spiritual, we are too much like oysters observing the sun through the water, and thinking that thick water the thinnest of air. Methinks my body is but the lees of my better being. In fact take my body who will, take it I say, it is not me.
Chapter 3 – The Chapel, Moby Dick by Herman Melville
Is it worth while in any individual case to look for the meaning of a dream, supposing that dreams have any meaning at all and that this meaning can be proved?
Dream life amplifies & compensates for the good encountered in previous days, and those aspects of reality that are bad experiences.
Man must part company with the inferior & superficial. The important thing is to remain firm.
Accomplish one’s task – Courage, no matter what happens.
The I Ching or Book of Changes
With a neurophysical/biological computer embedded inside our skulls, we are fields of consciousness transcending time & space. Consciousness is an expression of a cosmic intelligence that permeates the entire universe and all of existence.
The Holotropic Mind by Stanislav Grof
Who but an atheist could think of leaving the world without having first made up his account?
It is then he will find in what mighty stead that heathen goddess, that virtue, which you and all other deists of the age adore, will stand him.
Tom Jones (1749) by Henry Fielding
Avoid at all cost the priorities in your life that aren’t in your top five, because they’re the ambitions insufficiently important to form the core of your life, yet seductive enough to distract you from the priorities that matter most.
Oliver Burkeman
I glanced round the bus.
Though the windows were closed, and soon muffed, the bus was full of light. It was cruel light.
I shrank from the faces and forms by which I was surrounded. They were all fixed faces, full not of possibilities but of impossibilities, some gaunt, some bloated, some glaring with idiotic ferocity, some drowned beyond recovery in dreams; but all, in one way or another, distorted and faded.
One had a feeling that they might fall to pieces at any moment if the light grew much stronger. Then-there was a mirror on the end wall of the bus – I caught sight of my own.
And still the light grew.
The Great Divorce by C. S. Lewis
The world is a post-apocalyptic ecocide desert wasteland caused by societal collapse and warfare, where petrol and water are scarce resources.
Copperplate engraving on paper, hand colored from the Atlas Coelestis seu Harmonia Macrocosmica (Amsterdam, 1660)