A Dictionary of New Epigrams – Imagination

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An unlimited mind, Epigrams, Freedom from reality, Imagination, Source of action

A Dictionary of New Epigrams

Imagination

1. Every time we review our life, we will make those things we remember more real in our memory and imagination; thus, to improve our future life, we should intentionally improve our past life.

2. The infinite is here in our present reality every bit as much as it is in faraway places and faraway times of our imagination

3. The world that we live within is in the imaginations of our minds, but the source of these ideas comes mostly from the world outside of our bodies.

4. The mind is capable of infinite new ideas, and these can be projected into the infinity of time and space, so long as the brain is available to process the ideas.

5. A mind is capable of going anywhere; even when the body is imprisoned and unlimited by the  normal reality, it flies to an infinity of unregulated weirdness and appears insane.

6. To function well in the future, imagine yourself in a time and place in the future, and ask what tools and preparations do I need to perform my task well.

7. Most people suffer more in the imaginations of their minds than in the realities of their bodies.

8. Both imagination and facts are important for accomplishment. Facts get things done, but imagination improves them.

9. Your imagination has control of your mind, but your environment has control of your body, and your mind is embedded in your body.

10. The imaginary travel on Google Earth is often as good as physical travel and much less destructive to the resources of the world.

11. Imagination always controls our actions, and until worldly facts convince the imagination of their functionality, imagination based on random experience will always control our actions.

A Dictionary of New Epigrams – Ignorance

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Action, Epigrams, Foolishness, Ignorance, Properly motivated actions, Wisdom

A Dictionary of New Epigrams

Ignorance

1. One who refuses to observe reality will always be ignorant, and one who bases his actions on ignorance will always behave foolishly.

2. Observe where others observe their reality accurately, for it is there that they will be wise and will be acting wisely.

3. A great deal of keen intellect is required when the lies needed must be profound.

4. Better to live quietly with a few good books than with a gaggle of talkative fools.

5. Everyone makes mistakes, even Einstein, so be careful that your mistakes don’t precipitate disasters.

6. An ignoramus is a person who doesn’t have the facts, a fool is one who doesn’t bother to look for truth, a man who refuses to look is about to die, and a corpse is one who can no longer look.

7. A wise man can often know what is on the other side of a brick wall, but a fool sees only the wall, and a dead man sees nothing.

8. Please tell me the truth; please tell me where I am ignorant?

9. No two people see the same reality, but the reality of the fool injures him.

10. Men’s lives are shortened by their risky behavior based on ignorance.

11. The ultimate root of knowledge is gravity. If a man doesn’t understand gravity and that falling from high places is dangerous, he may rightly be called a fool.

12. People act as if the perceived quality is the character of the whole. It isn’t.

13. To understand and to not respond properly is not to properly understand.

14. If every person who ever lived believed something that wasn’t true, that something is false, but a deeper truth may be underlying the words may be giving the consistent effects.

15. Truth and wisdom are very different concepts. Truth is an accurate verbal description of reality, but wisdom is based on a record of positive outcomes of relationships with reality.

16. It is easy for wise men to avoid the folly of fools, and they may grow old comfortably.

17. The greatest of follies is to cultivate self-destructive habits.

18. A fool today will be a fool tomorrow. It takes a long time to overcome foolish habits.

19. Confirmation bias is fancy wording for not learning because we don’t want to know.

20. An evil worse than ignorance is willful ignorance.

21. There is nothing to be gained by arguing with a foolish man; just ask a few questions and quietly move on.

A Dictionary of New Epigrams – Death

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A goodbye to the world, Death, Epigrams, Kelsey Collins, Living to the end

A Dictionary of New Epigrams

Death

This morning my email informed me that a friend, Kelsey Collins, had just died.

Kelsey Collins of Sisters, Oregon

I immediately wrote the following thoughts and read it to my Tuesday morning discussion group, of which she was a deeply loved member. My image at the moment of writing was of her passing the gates of life and being asked a question, to which she responded:

---

I lived well. I do not need to live again.

I brought children into the world. I brought laughter and good feelings to my friends. I helped people, many unknown to me, find a better way through their life.  I helped dying people find comfort in their departure from their lives, and I departed my own life when I chose to, and I returned to the cosmos from which my being arose.

I lived well, I do not need to live again.

---

A Dictionary of New Epigrams – Death

1. That was enough of that! I’m moving on.

2. I wasn’t. I am. I will cease to be. I’m content with that. A Classic Roman saying

3. When death comes to you, participate with all your being for it will not come to you again.

4. When you choose to stop participating in the moment, it’s time to die.

5. The instant a being is conceived it is old, old enough to die.

6. I too will soon be dead, but why should that bother me, as I have known since I was a child that it was coming.

7. Darwin said, the goal of life is to survive and reproduce, and then to get out of the way.

8. Our friend being dead is our problem not theirs.

9. The fear of making fools of ourselves keeps us from living fully, and the fear of appearing foolish makes us conform to the foolishness of fools.

10. At the moment of death one must feel as if their life was but a moment.

11. At death I return to participating fully in the physical reality of the cosmos, without disturbing it with my thoughts and motivated actions.

12. Living is the astonishing thing in the Universe, as non-life is the default condition.

13. It is inevitable that our life work is incomplete, as there is always some little thing that we could change, but to be content we must accept the fact that at every instant our work is finished.

14. With death we are forever gone, we are just not aware that we are gone.

A Dictionary of New Epigrams – Gratitude

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Epigrams, Gratitude, Kindness, Virtue, Wisdom

A Dictionary of New Epigrams

Gratitude

The main difference between a man and a dog is that the dog doesn’t bite the hand that feeds him.

Show gratitude for the good things that come to you, and contentment for the rest.

Demonstrate gratitude by being kind to all providers.

A well said “Thank you!” is to acknowledge gratitude, but it is even better when it is followed by a kind act.

Giving a thank you to a non-existent supernatural being is good because it does create a habit of being aware of the many gifts that come our way.

Whatever we demonstrate our gratitude toward grows in healthy vigor.

Demonstrate gratitude for the life you have been granted.

You may reasonably feel gratitude for the supernatural creation of the Universe, but to show gratitude to the people who are kind to you will be more appreciated.

The habit of thankfulness makes kindness easy.

Gratitude for others’ helpful actions pulls in gratitude for one’s own helpful actions.

Create a flow of good feelings in others and good feelings will wash back over you.

Show gratitude to reality for providing you with consciousness of your own being by using it wisely.

Say thank you to your own body, and to your parents, and their parents, and their parents all the way back to the first being. Without them you wouldn’t be here.

The modern world of commerce cultivates the feeling of dissatisfaction that they claim can only be cured by buying their products, but it is identifying oneself with unsatisfiable desires and with ingratitude with what one is.

Often a demonstration of gratitude is but a sneaky request for more goodies.

Thanksgiving day should be every day of your life.

Gratitude is the activity of allowing ourselves to be grateful for whatever happens in our life. Look at the sky and smile, look at everything and smile. What wonderful gifts they are.

He who is not grateful for his life has lost it.

When you eat a meal, pause and consider the vast number of people who made it possible for that food to be in your body.

Even in the worst of times we are buoyed up by a vast network of previous good deeds.

Make your acts of gratitude habitual.

Give thanks to the actions, and gratitude to their source.

Be thankful, even for the roses’ thorns, for they protect the beauty and fragrance.

A demonstration of gratitude is a sure sign that a person is awake.

A Dictionary of New Epigrams – Love

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Epigrams, Feeling warm isn't deep love, Kindness is love made real, Learning to love, love

A Dictionary of New Epigrams

LOVE

1. Love is an expression in patterns of respect for another’s intentions.
2. Love isn’t some drugs, even natural ones, sloshing around in your brain; love is a set of helpful actions of thoughtful attention directed at another being.
3.To be loved, you must express qualities that are lovable.
4. From the first moment with a new person, be who you really are because first impressions must be followed up, or there will always be unresolvable tensions.
5. Everything can be loved when it is accepted as it is.
6. The past is constantly being changed into a fixed permanent thing; we can choose to accept it now as it is now, and love it, and live in tranquility or choose to reject it and live in constant stress.
7. We have no choice but to live in the moment, in the inertia of the past, and that is our reality of the eternal now. We have no choice but to obey it, and we live more tranquility if we choose to love it rather than oppose it.
8. “The only certainties in life are death and taxes,”it has been said, and if we accept those as certainties, we can choose to be comfortable with them, even to love them.
9. Grasping for something you can never have is certain to give you pain; loving what you do have is certain to give you pleasure.
10. Giving our total attention to another is our highest form of love.
11. Attention directed totally to oneself is like looking at parallel mirrors where our image recedes into the infinite distance, growing ever smaller until it seems an invisible nothing.
12. The Universe is constantly doing exactly what it does and lives on in its own inertia, and if it had consciousness of its actions, it would continue to do exactly what it’s doing. It is a form of infinite self-love.
13. The most important statement ever created is – He’s lovable.
14. Giving your full attention to helping another person trains you to give your full attention to helping yourself. Thus, being kind to another person is the most intense form of self-love.
15. To love fully is to be as the Universe and to permit all things that can be done and prevent all things that can not be done.
16. Love that is not expressed in kind actions is only thoughts and emotions that evaporate into time and space, but if they are manifest, they become a part of the real Universe.
17. We learn to love by loving, and that is done by discovering another’s needs and helping them to fulfill those needs. Thus, love is a habit that can be learned.
18. Love is always available; just say yes to what is here.

A Dictionary of New Epigrams – Ethics

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Epigrams, Ethical, ethics

A Dictionary of New Epigrams

ETHICS

1. Being ethical means doing the right thing at the right time for the right reasons.

2. It is unethical to promise to do things that are impossible.

3. Lying is easy to do, but hard to maintain except with another lie.

4. Truth is difficult too, because it requires a statement of testable fact, and words are inherently imprecise.

5. Liars have unlimited opportunities, because they are limited only by their imagination and the gullibility of their listeners.

6. Being ethical is an action of personal character; it is a habit that has been intentionally cultivated by being ethical at every opportunity. Creating that habit requires a thoughtful consideration and action at appropriate opportunities.

7. It is the little unconsidered actions where habitual character is exposed, because in the big things, where others are watching, there is opportunity to pretend.

8. Your character is the result of your practice of ethical conduct. You decide your actions and build your habits and thus create your character.

9. Use of time, attention and action are the foundation of our real ethics, and words are only playthings of our minds. Actions are the measure of all things human.

10. Honesty is speaking the truth; integrity is performing the truth; both are driven by the habitual core of one’s ethics.

11. When someone is compelled to perform some action it doesn’t show his character or ethic, but when he is free to act as he chooses his ethics are revealed.

12. We form our habits to fit our situations, thus we must be careful as to what situations we let ourselves be subjected to; if we want to become ethical, we must practice being ethical.

13. To know a person’s character observe them when they have freedom of action relative to a given type of situation.

14. A person’s inner ethic isn’t revealed in their words, but in their unconstrained actions.

15. Our previous thoughts influence our conscious actions, and out of these actions we form our unconscious habits, and from our abundance of habits our character is formed, and from our character our goals, and from these our accomplishments and our effect on ourselves and our society.

A Dictionary of New Epigrams – Desire

Tags

Desire, Epigrams

A Dictionary of New Epigrams

DESIRE

1. The sage’s desire is to help another being find their way.

2. Our attention is reflexively attracted to potential threats and desires.

3. Desiring what you can’t have causes pain.

4. Continuing to desire impossible things is certain to cause permanent pain.

5. The fewer the desires of those in power the more peace there is for those they rule.

6. The creation of habits that direct our attention, and thus our desires, is what controls our actions and thus our accomplishments.

7. Everyone is compelled to obey natural laws, and our goals are best fulfilled when we get our desires into agreement with the natural laws of our personal situation.

8. Desire is extinguished by the shifting of our attention to something different, or by getting the desired thing, but shifting attention is usually easier.

9. Desires are always with us, because to have attention is to have a quest to find something, some kinds of relationships.

10. To desire a reward for some action is to make your actions dependent on the one creating and giving the award.

11. Awards coming from a beautiful person are more desirable than the same award coming from an ugly person.

12. People desire to know what you are talking about, so make that clear from the first word by starting with the name of your subject.

13. We can place things in our environment that push and pull our attention and desires toward our thoughtful goals.

14. To see your distant goals is to see your immediate desires.

15. Desires are bound in a positive feedback cycle, but their satisfaction is a momentary event. Thus, desire is a source of constant anxiety.

16. Oscar Wilde’s famous quote about reaching for the stars, left him living in a gutter.

17. When one desire is satisfied it is soon replaced by another, and if we don’t choose it someone else will eagerly supply one for us.

18. Choose your desires so they will bring you to a place where you will be in conformity with your nature and your situation.

19. To avoid the desires of grasping people with greedy habits, let them see nothing they value near you, but show them a way to get something elsewhere.

20. People who desire the impossible will grasp tightly to beautiful lies.

21. You may chose to desire to be tranquil with yourself and content with the Universe.

22. Tranquility is found in all-out action when your actions are in agreement with contentment.

23. Consciously renounce unattainable desires, and do it repeatedly until it becomes a normal habit.

24. The desire of anything in excess will bring disappointment, pain, depression, and failure.

25. When you desire something to be true you will find reasons for to be true, and to be defended, no matter how absurd the reality of your desire.

26. When you choose to see something as good, you will see its opposite as bad.

A Dictionary of New Epigrams – Reliability

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Epigrams, Reliability, Self-Reliance

A Dictionary of New Epigrams

RELIABILITY

1. No one is reliable who is expected to act against their own self-interest.

2. You must rely on your own feet to do the walking.

3. The one who chooses the route must have experience carrying the heaviest load on a similar route.

4. It is easy to demand the rights of free speech when everyone agrees with you.

5. You are the only person who reliably seeks your own well-being, and even that is inconsistent; so how can you depend on another for your security?

6. The only person in control of your behavior is you, and you are in control only part of the time.

7. We are dependent on many things for our well-being. Many of them are reliable like gravity, but some are fickle like yourself and others’ selves.

8. Only you can control your arbitrary actions.

9. You are the only one responsible for your reliability, because at any moment you can choose to do something different from what everyone expects.

10. The man who is in total control of himself knows what is going to happen, and he who knows how the world is going to behave is content with himself and the world.

11. Life is a difficult problem with many disasters and few pleasures for a fool, but it’s one with few disasters and many pleasures for one reliably on the path of wisdom.

12. Our happiness is at risk when it is dependent on the actions of unreliable others, and everyone is unreliable.

13. No one can save you, not even Jesus. You must do the work.

14. Those who think they will lose, will surely lose, and those who think they will win, and work to win, often do win.

15. To succeed in anything requires you to act, and to act with the self-reliance that your actions will create the intended effect.

16. Reliable actions are based on practiced actions created by habits that at one moment in time were intentional actions. Habits are created out of repeated intentional actions.

17. It is the keeping of your wants within your own control that makes your actions reliable.

18. Why ask supernatural spirits for help, when they have proven themselves to be so arbitrary, unresponsive and unreliable?

19. It appears that people turn to spiritual help when they can no longer rely on their own efforts.

20. Failures are those individuals who have cultivated poor habits.

A Dictionary of New Epigrams – Kindness

Tags

Cultivating the habit of kindness, Epigrams, Kindness

A Dictionary of New Epigrams

KINDNESS

The greatest acts of wisdom are simple acts of kindness.

Kindness costs nothing except for philosophical forethought, thoughtful preparations, cultivated habits, careful attention to another person’s moment, opportunity to clear an obstacle, a thoughtful decision to act, and an unremarkable action.

Kindness is difficult because it is always in the moment and requires anticipating the other person’s approaching problems.

It requires practice to be kind, so practice as much as possible on tiny things, and when great opportunities come along you will be able to respond instantly.

Kindness lights the way for those traveling in darkness.

When you see a potential kindness do it instantly, for that opportunity can never return.

Being kind is clearing the way for others to proceed, in such a way they themselves feel all the credit for their progress.

Kindness helps others to grow.

My duty is to cultivate kindness in myself and show the way to others.

Courtesy is easy; it’s just behaving in the proper ways you have been trained to do, but kindness is difficult because it is always unique, and has unique precursors.

To cultivate our ability to be kind is the most important action we can watch for.

Kindness goes far beyond being socially pleasant and giving polite responses.

A successful kindness is a demonstration of wisdom.

The best of any person’s life is their acts of kindness.

Wherever there is a living thing there is an opportunity for kindness.

 

 

Some thoughts on history

Tags

Aphorisms, Epigrams, history, Hope of humanity, humanity

All history is bunk, but then so is prophesy and today’s news.

We remember and lionize those things that make us feel superior.

History like our DNA is written by the survivors.

Why believe historians when you refuse to believe testable evidence.

History is forgotten Rois, herstory is remembered boys.

Staged history is better than real history because it tries to avoid the boring parts.

History makes dead people live again, but only in our perceptions.

History makes some people appear much better than they were, and others much worse.

History is a dead dry thing read by dead-dry people.

Fiction is only different from history, in that it’s admittedly false.

History is mostly stories puffing up already puffed up people.

If one could make alive again for other people some cobwebbed skein of old dead intrigues and breathe breath and character into dead names and stiff portraits.  That is history to me!  George Macaulay Trevelyan — (Arthur Conan Doyle’s goal in, The Tangled Skein)

Are we prisoners of history or creators or fabricators of everything.

Even God can’t alter the past, present or future, and that’s the difference between God and Me. (and you.)

History is mostly dry ink, hidden on unseen paper.

Who reports the world better, and who can you trust, a historian, a news reporter, a stand-up comic or your own eyes? Who can you trust becomes who can you test? Trust those you can test.

The goal of most people is to avoid being involved in history making events.

People love seeing criminals exposed because they can then feel superior to those in charge of our lives.

History is written by people, too lazy to be out making it.

Reading diaries gives more the flavor of why historical mistakes were made, because at the time the diarist were not making mistakes they were making optimum adaptations.

Exciting history is mostly about homicide and reproduction the rest is boring.

History? It’s little more than flowing blood and sand.

What is all humanity to a mosquito, but a source of blood?

The past is history, but history is not the past.

A library is a heap of history waiting to be burned; if not by men, then by time.

It’s a collection of epigraphs and epitaphs.

Take the curiosity out of the past and apply it to the present.

History doesn’t repeat itself but humans do respond in similar ways to similar situations.

The present is a mirror which we may look forward and see into the past, but it blocks our view of the future.

Most history is about people taking other peoples stuff.

History demonstrates how people much smarter and better informed than we are about certain things, behaved in some really stupid ways.

In our high school history books the good guy always win in the end, and it couldn’t have ended in any other way.

Underdogs with a glorious myth of history in their belly and the fire of repression in their ears can commit hideous acts with impunity, and thus become tomorrows victors and next year’s heroes and next centuries honored elders.

Every time a history is told it’s a whole new history.

History is an accumulating pile of cast off love-hate and other stuff made by crazy people seeking greater love-hate and other stuff.

History is only a flickering light cast off by the flickering of the shadowed wall of distant actors.

It’s equal parts human stupidity and violence.

These are epigrams! They have nothing to do with reality.