Reclusland

I seem to be on a classic sci-fi kick lately, and I just finished reading The Lathe of Heaven.  Making up for all the classics I never read when I was younger.  Quite an interesting novel, and I wanted to post a few quotes from it that particularly struck me.

The epigraph for Chapter 3:
Those whom heaven helps we call the sons of heaven.  They do not learn this by learning.  They do not work it by working.  They do not reason it by using reason.  to let understanding stop at what cannot be understood is a high achievement.  Those who cannot do it will be destroyed on the lathe of heaven. - Chuang Tse: XXIII

From Chapter 5:
“Sleeping people are so remote,” she said, still looking at Orr.  “Where are they?. . .”
“Right here,” Haber said, and tapped the EEG screen.  “Right here, but out of communication.”

The epigraph for Chapter 5:
We may have to learn that the infinite whirl of death and birth, out of which we cannot escape, if of our own creation, of our own seeking. – Lafcadio Hearn, Out of the East

From Chapter 6:
Your own ideas are sane and rational, but this is my unconscious you’re trying to use, not my rational mind. . . . (Y)ou’re handling something outside of reason.  You’re trying to reach progressive, humanitarian goals with a tool that isn’t suited for the job.

From Chapter 10
He knew that in so far as one denies what is, one is possessed by what is not, the compulsions, the fantasies, the terrors that flock to fill the void.

From Chapter 10:
Language used for communication with individual-persons will not contain other forms of relationships.

So a couple of things popped into my Facebook feed yesterday, and I wanted to collect them together here:

“Boredom is a bottomless pit. As long as you think that there is something more interesting, more purposeful, more meaningful to do than what you are actually doing, you have no way of freeing yourself from boredom.” – U.G. Krishnamurti (via this dude right here)

“The search for inner unity, which is that of the monk — monos meaning precisely that which is unified, note — does not mean a disengagement from the world. I believe that the more one approaches the Father, the more one is open to others.”