“It's just that I don't want to be somebody's crush. If somebody likes me, I want them to like the real me, not what they think I am. And I don't want them to carry it around inside. I want them to show me, so I can feel it too.”
― Stephen Chbosky, The Perks of Being a Wallflower

So relatable

“Instead of things I'm good at, it might be faster to list the things I can't do. I can't cook or clean the house. My room's a mess, and I'm always losing things. I love music, but I can't sing a note. I'm clumsy and can barely sew a stitch. My sense of direction is the pits, and I can't tell left from right half the time. When I get angry, I tend to break things. Plates and pencils, alarm clocks. Later on I regret it, but at the time I can't help myself. I have no money in the bank. I'm bashful for no reason, and I have hardly any friends to speak of.” -Murakami

“Imagine you are sitting down in a chair and on a screen before you you are shown a bloody, ripping film of yourself undergoing surgery. The surgery saved your life. It was pivotal in making you you. But you don't remember it. Or do you? Do we understand the events that make us who we are? Do we ever understand the factors that make us do the things we do?
When we sleep at night - when we walk across a field and see a tree full of sleeping birds - when we tell small lies to our friends - when we make love - what acts of surgery are happening to our souls - what damage and healing and shock are we going through that we will never be able to fathom? What films are generated that we will never be shown?”
― Douglas Coupland, Shampoo Planet

Western Prison of Mind

Possibly the worst part of Westernism is the onslaught of introduced, embraced and abandoned ideas. There is never a resting moment from the jostling that we are pestered with from sunup to sundown. Whether you want to go in the direction of Westernism or not is irrelevant. Thinking outside of it presents us with nonsense. There is no language inside Westernism to catalog what is outside of it.

As an empire, it’s impenetrable. All other concepts and ways of life are filtered through it, so that those of us inside of it have no hope of seeing anything more than shadows on a wall. Our narcissism prevents a true representation of anything “other” getting into our minds. We immediately recognize ourselves when we look outside at other faces – just as when we look at the distant stars, the only faces that are presented to us are our own.

There is not a thought that we think that gets us outside of the Big Brother prison. All of our thoughts are Western-filtered, and America is a model picture of this Western prison of the mind.

How can we think outside the only language we know?

The more artwork I look at, the more I see the fad in the fade-out scheme – so many wonderful ideas that are barely examined before the never-ending caucus race begins again. Ideas and artists are devoured, digested and reconstituted, all in a day’s work. We’re all bytes of information in a large Western server. It processes all of us in less time than heartbeats.

And yet, there are so many who are tired of feeling the Western hand on our collective pulses, but there is no avenue of escape that we might pursue. Every cry of foul is met with a sneer and a clever dig, “So you’re the different one and the rest of us are sheep, are we?”

That’s it right there.

I’m afraid there isn’t any other option than being a sheep, and I’m not sure that not wanting to be a sheep does one any good, but there it is. How do you change out of your sheep uniform when it’s all you have? I suppose the solution would be to run naked and embrace insanity, but that’s hardly a solution.

-Adbusters-Kami Galeana

Two ideologies that keep us going Economics, and Therapy.

"There are therapists throughout the country, and they’re very important, because they pick up the refuse of the economic-political system.

We have mental health clinics all over the nation, in every city and county. And they all produce pamphlets about how to deal with the problems of addiction, battered wives, childhood disorders. Someone has to pick these people up, and therapy does it. But therapy operates with an ideology – an individualistic, must-learn-to-cope ideology. The individual has to learn how to cope, and the therapist helps that person stay in control. This ideology is based on the idea of individual growth and potential.

Most schools of therapy share the idea that there’s an inner world that can be made to expand and grow, and that people are living short of their possibilities, and that they need help to… what she we call it? Fulfill their potential. Therapy has become a kind of individualistic, self-improvement philosophy, a romantic ideology that suggests each person can become fuller, better, wiser, richer, more effective.

I believe we now have two ideologies that run this country. One is economics, and the other is therapy. These are the basic, bottom-line beliefs that we return to in our private moments – these are what keeps us going.


Sy Safransky is the editor and publisher of The Sun Magazine. This is an excerpt from “Conversations with a Remarkable Man: Honoring the late James Hillman,” The Sun Magazine, by Sy Safransky, Scott London and Genie Zeiger."

You sit at the edge of the world,
I am in a crater that's no more.
Words without letters
Standing in the shadow of the door.

The moon shines down on a sleeping lizard,
Little fish rain from the sky.
Outside the window there are soldiers,
steeling themselves to die.

(Refrain)

Kafka sits in a chair by the shore,
Thinking for the pendulum that moves the world, it seems.
When your heart is closed,
The shadow of the unmoving Sphinx,
Becomes a knife that pierces your dreams.

The drowning girl's fingers
Search for the entrance stone, and more.
Lifting the hem of her azure dress,
She gazes --
at Kafka on the shore”

― Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore

“You shall be my roots and
I will be your shade,
though the sun burns my leaves.

You shall quench my thirst and
I will feed you fruit,
though time takes my seed.

And when I'm lost and can tell nothing of this earth
you will give me hope.

And my voice you will always hear.
And my hand you will always have.

For I will shelter you.
And I will comfort you.
And even when we are nothing left,
not even in death,
I will remember you.”
― Mark Z. Danielewski, House of Leaves

"This world has no marks, signs, or evidence of existence, nor the noises in it, like accident of wind or voices or heehawing animals, yet listen closely the eternal hush of silence goes on and on throughout all this, and has been gong on, and will go on and on. This is because the world is nothing but a dream and is just thought of and the everlasting eternity pays no attention to it. At night under the moon, or in a quiet room, hush now, the secret music of the Unborn goes on and on, beyond conception, awake beyond existence. Properly speaking, awake is not really awake because the golden eternity never went to sleep; you can tell by the constant sound of Silence which cuts through this world like a magic diamond through the trick of your not realizing that your mind caused the world."

Jack Kerouac, The scriptures of golden eternity

“When we meet somebody whose separate tunnel-reality is obviously far different from ours, we are a bit frightened and always disoriented. We tend to think they are mad, or that they are crooks trying to con us in some way, or that they are hoaxers playing a joke. Yet it is neurologically obvious that no two brains have the same genetically-programmed hard wiring, the same imprints, the same conditioning, the same learning experiences. We are all living in separate realities. That is why communication fails so often, and misunderstandings and resentments are so common. I say "meow" and you say "Bow-wow," and each of us is convinced the other is a bit dumb.”
-Robert Anton Wilson, Prometheus Rising

BEST GIF EVA

I heart Breaking Bad

Eating us

The Heart is an Involuntary Muscle quotes

"once you figure it out, that it's all in your head, all the dreams, all the love, once you know everything is created in the huge, high voltage workshop of our minds, you're saved. You switch off the turbines, turn off the fantasy machine before it gets out of control. You can turn it on for a test run just to see what it'll do, the flush of new blood, the trembling, the hammering heart."

"in my unoffensive state of neutrality, she imprisoned me with her calm voice and watch tower eyes, and forced me to swallow all her bitter bile"

"In our heads ghosts lurk, so unobtrusive we forget they're there. We walk around, eat, all the while we're carrying them with us, weightless as angels, enveloped in the silent sheets of our nerve endings. Then a holy place looms up before us, a place of the accursed, a place that belongs to them but we've intruded, out of absentmindedness or stupidity, and suddenly rouse themselves and come tumbling from our heads, hitting the ground with a ferocious roar, the din of awakened ghosts"

“The media landscape of the present day is a map in search of a territory. A huge volume of sensational and often toxic imagery inundates our minds, much of it fictional in content. How do we make sense of this ceaseless flow of advertising and publicity, news and entertainment, where presidential campaigns and moon voyages are presented in terms indistinguishable from the launch of a new candy bar or deodorant? What actually happens on the level of our unconscious minds when, within minutes on the same TV screen, a prime minister is assassinated, an actress makes love, an injured child is carried from a car crash? Faced with these charged events, prepackaged emotions already in place, we can only stitch together a set of emergency scenarios, just as our sleeping minds extemporize a narrative from the unrelated memories that veer through the cortical night. In the waking dream that now constitutes everyday reality, images of a blood-spattered widow, the chromium trim of a limousine windshield, the stylised glamour of a motorcade, fuse together to provide a secondary narrative with very different meanings.”

― J.G. Ballard, The Atrocity Exhibition

Actually, Satan doesn’t want souls. What in the Hell would he do with them? They’re an invention of priests of the other religions. They have no substance, and Satan is only interested in that which can be felt, tasted, seen, smelled and heard —consciously or unconsciously — in other words, what is REAL!