“But what I hope is this: that you find a few [recipes] that will add to the wonder, love, and sacredness of your life. Those are the ones to follow. Those are the ones to keep.”
“Trying to build the world’s largest telescope atop the most sacred mountain in Hawaii is a cultural violation to the Hawaiian’s.”
“The truth is raining down on the biologically toxic Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT) atop the sacred Hawaiian mountain of Mauna Kea.”
“1.4 billion dollars can buy 1.4 million teachers $1,000 of classroom supplies, 14 million free computers for students, or 1 biologically toxic telescope atop the sacred mountain of Mauna Kea in Hawaii.”
“To build the world’s largest telescope atop the sacred mountain of Mauna Kea in Hawaii requires getting past me, and I do not think professional astronomers will be successful in doing so.”
“Professional astronomers should consider their tenure atop the sacred mountain of Mauna Kea temporary, as biological science is in the process of characterizing Mauna Kea Sickness in the summit workers.”
“The man-worshipers, in my sense of the term, are those who see man’s highest potential and strive to actualize it. . . . [Man-worshipers are] those dedicated to the exaltation of man’s self-esteem and the sacredness of his happiness on earth.”
“Many Monk, Sadhus and Yogis have been saying that if you do good karma after you die you will get a good place in heaven. I can say there is no other heaven than the beautiful earth. So welcome to heaven, save and cherish it. Live here to fullest because you have got this chance once in this heaven. You must have done something very good.”
“Yeah. It s a metaphor. Jess and I are partners. I point across the bay at nearby San Francisco. Look at that city, I say. That s society. It s Out There. I this its own illusions, its own abilities, its own tasks. We used to be a part of it. Oh, we are, in some way, but now we are something else. We are a distinct culture, a separate island. To get to Us, you have to swim across a bay in cold ocean waters. By the time you get here, you would have come to respect the ocean and the waters and the waves—and the beaches of this island would remind you of how great it is to be on land, to be in the presence of a great, married couple. Jack laughs. Now you really are a megalomaniac. A true idealist. I don t know, Jack, I say. I think marriage is sacred. I can tell. He pulls out a cigarette and lights it. He blows smoke around and then looks at me. You want one? he asks. This one s not a metaphor.”
“Joy is finding the holy in the small and the sacred in the everyday.”
“May you find your sacred way in the world.”
“The Lord God alone is a sacred lover.”
“That, I think, is the power of ceremony. It marries the mundane to the sacred. The water turns to wine; the coffee to a prayer.”
“This decorum and etiquette, the whole self-stylization of the upper class, demand among other things that one does not allow oneself to be portrayed as one really is, but according to how one must appear to conform with certain hallowed conventions, remote from reality and the present time. Etiquette is the highest law not merely for the ordinary mortal, but also for the king, and in the imagination of this society even the gods accept the forms of courtly ceremonial.”
“It is easy to see all that separates this mode of being in the world from the existence of a nonreligious man. First of all, the nonreligious man refuses transcendence, accepts the relativity of reality, and may even come to doubt the meaning of existence. The great cultures of the past too have not been entirely without nonreligious men, and it is not impossible that such men existed even on the archaic levels of culture, although as yet no testimony to their existence there has come to light. But it is only in the modern societies of the West that nonreligious man has developed fully. Modern nonreligious man assumes a new existential situation; he regards himself solely as the subject and agent of history, and he refuses all appeal to transcendence. In other words, he accepts no model for humanity outside the human condition as it can be seen in the various historical situations. Man makes himself, and he only makes himself completely in proportion as he desacralizes himself and the world. The sacred is the prime obstacle to his freedom. He will become himself only when he is totally demysticized. He will not be truly free until he has killed the last god.”
“You know, it is one of the most marvellous things in life to discover something unexpectedly, spontaneously, to come upon something without premeditation, and instantly to see the beauty, the sacredness, the reality of it. But a mind that is seeking and wanting to find is never in that position at all.”
“Donating to religious institutions, charity organizations, etc, is a noble thing. What makes it sacred is that the left hand does not know what the right hand gives.”