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Gain certainty in the fact that since the very beginning your own mind is the awakened state of buddhahood. Gain certainty in the fact that all phenomena are the magical display of your mind. Gain certainty in the fact that the fruition is present in yourself and is not to be sought elsewhere. Gain certainty in the fact that your master is the buddha in person. Gain certainty in the fact that the nature of view and meditation is the realization of the buddhas. To gain such confidence you must practice!

– Guru Padmasambhava

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From Anne Carson's April 2024 Paris Review interview (x)

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For one human being to love another human being: that is perhaps the most difficult task that has been entrusted to us, the ultimate task, the final test and proof, the work for which all other work is merely preparation. Loving does not at first mean merging, surrendering, and uniting with another person—it is a high inducement for the individual to ripen, to become something in himself, to become world, to become world in himself for the sake of another person; it is a great, demanding claim on him, something that chooses him and calls him to vast distance. Once the realization is accepted that even between the closest people infinite distance exists, a marvelous living side-by-side can grow up for them, if they succeed in loving the expanse between them, which gives them the possibility of seeing each other as a whole before an immense sky.

– Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

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It appears, however, that the oscillation is not equal, and that as a rule the schizoid pole is potential in relation to the actual paranoiac pole (how can we count on art and science except as potentialities, since their actuality is easily controlled by the formations of sovereignty?). This results from the fact that the two poles of unconscious libidinal investment do not maintain the same relationship, nor the same form of relationship, with the preconscious investments of interest. On the one hand, in fact, the investment of interest fundamentally conceals the paranoiac investment of desire, and reinforces it as much as it conceals it: it covers over the irrational character of the paranoiac investment under an existing order of interests, of causes and means, of aims and reasons; or else the investment of interest itself gives rise to and creates those interests that rationalize the paranoiac investment; or yet again, an effectively revolutionary preconscious investment fully maintains a paranoiac investment at the level of the libido, to the extent that the new socius continues to subordinate the entire production of desire in the name of the higher interests of the revolution and the inevitable sequences of causality. In the other case, the preconscious interest must on the contrary discover the necessity for a different sort of investment, and must perform a kind of rupture with causality as well as a calling in question of aims and interests. ...Subject-groups on the other hand have as their sole cause a rupture with causality, a revolutionary line of escape; and even though one can and must assign the objective factors, such as the weakest links, within causal series that made such a rupture possible, only what is of the order of desire and its irruption accounts for the reality this rupture assumes at a given moment, in a given place.

– Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia

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Fewer and fewer people believe in all this but it makes no difference, since capitalism is like the Christian religion, it lives precisely from a lack of belief, it does not need it—a motley painting of all that has been believed.

– Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia

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We have seen that the unconscious paranoiac investment was grounded in the socius itself as a full body without organs, beyond the preconscious aims and interests that it assigns and distributes. The fact remains that such an investment does not endure the light of day: it must always hide under assignable aims or interests presented as the general aims and interests, even though in reality the latter represent only the members of the dominant class or a fraction of this class. How could a formation of sovereignty, a fixed and determinate gregarious aggregate, endure being invested for their brute force, their violence, and their absurdity? They would not survive such an investment. Even the most overt fascism speaks the language of goals, of law, order, and reason. Even the most insane capitalism speaks in the name of economic rationality. And this is necessarily the case, since it is in the irrationality of the full body that the order of reasons is inextricably fixed, under a code, under an axiomatic that determines it. What is more, the bringing to light of the unconscious reactionary investment as if devoid of an aim, would be enough to transform it completely, to make it pass to the other pole of the libido, i.e., to the schizorevolutionary pole, since this action could not be accomplished without overthrowing power, without reversing subordination, without returning production itself to desire: for it is only desire that lives from having no aim. Molecular desiring-production would regain its liberty to master in its turn the molar aggregate under an overturned form of power or sovereignty.

– Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia

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But madness breaks through, beneath the reformist investments, or the reactionary and fascist investments, which assume a reasonable appearance only in the light of the preconscious, and which animate the strange discourse of an organization of society. Even its language is demented. Listen to a Secretary of State, a general, the boss of a firm, a technician. Listen to the great paranoiac din beneath the discourse of reason that speaks for others, in the name of the silent majority. The explanation is that, beneath preconscious goals and interests, a uniquely unconscious investment rises up that embraces a full body for itself, independently of all aims, and a degree of development for itself, independently of all reason: that very degree ad no other, don't take another step; that very socius and no other, hands off. A disinterested love of the molar machine, a veritable enjoyment, with all the hatred it contains for those who do not submit to the molar machine: the entire libido is at stake. From the point of view of libidinal investment, it is clear that there are few differences between a reformist, a fascist, and sometimes even certain revolutionaries, who are distinguished from one another only in a preconscious fashion, but whose unconscious investments are of the same type, even when they do not adopt the same body...As machines of subjugation, the social machines give rise to incomparable loves, which are not explained by their interests, since interests derive from them instead. At the deepest level of society there is delirium, because delirium is the investment of a socius as such, beyond goals.

– Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia

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The analyst talks about Oedipus, about castration and the phallus, about the necessity of assuming one's sex, as Freud says, the human sex, and the necessity for the woman to renounce her desire for the penis and for the man to renounce his male protest. We maintain that there is not one woman—more particularly, not one child—who can as such "assume" her or his situation in a capitalist society, precisely because this situation has nothing to do with the phallus and castration, but directly concerns an unbearable economic dependence. And the woman and the children who succeed in "assuming" do so only by detours and determinations completely distinct from their being-woman and being-child. Nothing to do with the phallus, but much to do with desire, with sexuality as desire. For the phallus has never been either the object or the cause of desire, but is itself the castrating apparatus, the machine for putting lack into desire, for drying up all the flows, and for making all the breaks from the outside and from the Real into one and the same break with the outside, with the Real.

– Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia

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"It cannot be said that we are lacking in faith. Even the simple fact of our life is of a faith-value that can never be exhausted." "You suggest there is some faith-value in this? One cannot not-live, after all." "It is precisely in this 'Cannot, after all' that the mad strength of faith lies; it is in this negation that it takes on form." There is no need for you to leave the house. Stay at your table and listen. Don't even listen, just wait. Don't even wait, be completely quiet and alone. The world will offer itself to you to be unmasked; it can't do otherwise; in raptures it will writhe before you.

– Franz Kafka, The Zürau Aphorisms

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The seductiveness of this world and the sign that warrants its transitoriness are one and the same. And rightly so, because only in this way can the world seduce us, and accord with the truth. The grievous thing is that after falling victim to the seduction, we forget the warranty, and so the Good has led us into Evil, the woman's smile has led us into bed with her.

– Franz Kafka, The Zürau Aphorisms

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We too must suffer all the suffering around us. We all have not one body, but we have one way of growing, and this leads us through all anguish, whether in this or in that form. Just as the child develops through all the stages of life right into old age and to death (and fundamentally to the earlier stage the later one seems out of reach, in relation both to desire and to fear), so also do we develop (no less deeply bound up with mankind than with ourselves) through all the sufferings of this world. There is no room for justice in this context, but neither is there any room either for fear of suffering or for the interpretation of suffering as a merit.

– Franz Kafka, The Zürau Aphorisms

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Sin always comes openly and can at once be grasped by means of the senses. It walks on its roots and does not have to be torn out.

– Franz Kafka, The Zürau Aphorisms

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Three Perfect Covers, presented in ascending order of how much they make the hair at the back of my neck stand up.

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"In addition to the process of mourning and self-forgiveness, another aspect of self-compassion I emphasize is in the energy that's behind whatever action we take. When I advise, "Don't do anything that isn't play!" some take me to be radical, even insane. I earnestly believe, however, that an important form of self-compassion is to make choices motivated purely by our desire to contribute to life rather than out of fear, guilt, shame, duty, or obligation. When we are conscious of the life-enriching purpose behind an action we take, when the sole energy that motivates us is simply to make life wonderful for others and ourselves, then even hard work has an element of play in it. Correspondingly, an otherwise joyful activity performed out of obligation, duty, fear, guilt, or shame will lose its joy and eventually engender resistance."

--Marshall B. Rosenberg, PhD, "Nonviolent Communication: A Language of Life"

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To say Israel’s economy is built on war and oppression is no more an exaggeration than to say that Israel’s science, technology, and industrialization have been built for the primary purpose of safeguarding western interests in the region of the Middle-East and North Africa (conveniently cleaved in half by the Zionist entity) as well as globally. First, as a cost-saving measure, an Israel industrialized around its own arms industry reduces the quantity of the still astronomically high amount of direct military aid from the west, while also appeasing Israel’s neighbors. Second, Israel’s export of weapons and other oppressive techniques served to cover up the dirty work of the western ruling class. Israel is the world center of counter-insurgency training and weapons provision, from the former Rhodesia and Pinochet’s Chile, to Marcos’s Philippines and Modi’s India today—neocolonial regimes that welcome the west to plunder its peoples and lands. Third, an economically and technologically advanced Israel propagates the ideology of developmentalism. Just as victims of capitalist exploitation are blamed for their own failure to correctly apply the bootstraps, victims of imperialist plundering are shown to be essentially backward, i.e., “racially/culturally inferior,” further justifying their subjugation by the west and occupation by “an army with a state.” In effect, Israel is part and parcel of US imperialism, as “the purest expression of Western power, combining militarism, imperialism, settler colonialism, counterinsurgency, occupation, racism, instilling ideological defeat, huge profitable war-making and hi-tech development into a manticore of destruction, death, and mayhem.”

Erica Jung and Calvin Wu, A Mirror of Our Immediate Future: On Green Imperialism and Palestine

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Think of a doughnut. If we think of humanity’s use of earth’s resources radiating out from the center of the doughnut, then the hole in the middle is a place where people are left falling short on the essentials of life. That’s where people don’t have the resources they each need for food and healthcare and education, housing, political voice, and income. So leave no one in the hole. Get everybody into that juicy doughnut itself. But as we collectively use earth’s resources, we know that we start to put pressure on our planetary home. And we can put so much pressure that we actually risk destabilizing the life-supporting systems of this planet. We know that we can cause climate breakdown, we acidify the oceans, we create a hole in the ozone layer, we destroy the integrity of ecosystems. So there’s an outer limit—as you said, you can have too little and too much. And I think we can leave no one in the hole falling short of the essentials of life, but don’t overshoot the limits of this life-supporting planet. So the shape of progress is no longer the ever-rising line of endless economic growth. It’s no longer forward and up through the ceiling. It’s balanced. And we already know this when it comes to health and our own bodies. We need food, but not too much. We need warmth, but not too much. We need oxygen. But actually too much of that will kill you. We need exercise, but not too much. We know that our personal health and our bodies are like little planets. They are delicately balanced, complex adaptive systems with a digestive and respiratory system, a skeletal, muscular, and nervous system, all interacting with each other. And they all need to be in balance. And that’s called health. We can take that understanding of health from the human body, now to the planetary body. Then, to me, the 21st-century shape of progress and the meaning of health and economic health lies in that balance of meeting the needs of all people but doing so within the means of the living planet. And then it’s an utterly different economics degree course. It’s utterly different from the economic advice we’re providing to ministers. It’s utterly different kinds of businesses that we’re running now that we’ve refocused around this goal that actually works for the 21st century.