"Holy macaroni. Why is the official news agency of the People's Republic of China posting a whole bunch of nude body-painting? Have they lost all their little gray Mao suits over at Xinhua? What gives? A couple of these pics are Veruschka Lehndorff art-shots from the mid-1980s. Some official Chinese web-guy has been collecting these things. What could this be about?"

We are born into a vast room whose walls consist of a thousand doors of possibility. Each door is flung open to the world outside, and the room is filled with light and noise. We close some of the doors deliberately, sometimes with fear, sometimes with calm certainty. Others seem to close by themselves, some so quietly that we do not even notice.

- Terry Teachout

"I’ve been feeling oddly ill-at-ease for the last week or so, and couldn’t figure out why. Disconnected, running on autopilot, remote from experience; definitely a few cards short of a full deck. I’ve been bouncing half-formed ideas around my head trying to figure out the cause of the malaise; I started writing blog posts several times but abandoned them every time - the words kept falling into one of a number of stereotyped patterns, running away with themselves, finding their own course like heavy rain falling on a dusty hillside.

But I think the penny has finally dropped. It’s this blogging business, or rather the effects it has.

I had grown used to living in a rut. It may not have been perfect, but after a while you don’t notice the imperfections; it’s just not quite uncomfortable enough to warrant changing anything. Hankering after things that are out of reach only makes you dissatisfied, so after a while you build a high wall so that you can’t see them any more and that way you don’t get so dissatisfied. You don’t notice the rut, because everyone living your side of the wall has their own rut. Life goes on, day follows day and we all get a little older, a little more sure that our reality only extends as far as that wall, but since we do those things together, no-one really notices. And so the wall gets a little higher, a little thicker.

But then along comes blogging and it starts knocking holes in that wall, through which you can glimpse exquisitely tantalising thumbnails of the view on the other side; it creates links, threads that pass through those holes and start to exert a tug that’s almost physical. People, places, ideas, challenges – suddenly they’re all around in glorious technicolour and by contrast this side of the wall is grey, shabby, lifeless, dull.

So what’s been knocking those holes?"

"Answering myself, I said: "The individual can take initiatives without anyone's permission."

I told myself: "You do not have the right to eliminate yourself, you do not belong to you. You belong to the universe. The significance of you will forever remain obscure to you, but you may assume that you are fulfilling your significance if you apply yourself to converting all your experience to the highest advantage of others." So I vowed to keep myself alive, but only if I would never use me again for just me - each one of us is born of two, and we really belong to each other. I vowed to do my own thinking instead of trying to accommodate everyone else's opinions, credos and theories. I vowed to apply my inventory of experiences to the solving of problems that affect everyone aboard planet earth.

I didn't want to waste a second, so I slept that way that certain animals sleep: lying down as soon as I was tired, sleeping a half hour every six hours. I also decided to hold a moratorium on speech. It was very tough on my wife, but for two years in that Chicago tenement I didn't allow myself to use words. I wanted to force myself back to the point where I could understand what I was thinking.

I decided to forget about earning a living. It seemed to me that humans are honey-money bees, doing the right things for the wrong reasons, just as the bee pollinates the flower.

Released from the idea of earning a living, I was able to address problems in the biggest way. I decided to commit myself to the invention and development of physical artifacts to reform the environment. I decided that a plurality of such artifacts had the potential to evoke humanity's most intelligent, interconsiderate qualities. It became obvious that if I worked always and only for all humanity, I would be optimally effective. I'd be doing what nature wanted me to do, and nature would literally support me."

"My reasons for writing this book are fourfold:

(A) Because I am convinced that human knowledge by others of what this book has to say is essential to human survival.

(B) Because of my driving conviction that all of humanity is in peril of extinction if each one of us does not dare, now and henceforth always to tell only the truth, and all the truth, and to do so promptly—right now.

(C) Because I am convinced that humanity’s fitness for continuance in the cosmic scheme no longer depends on the validity of political, religious, economic, or social organizations, which altogether heretofore have been assumed to represent the many.

(D) Because, contrary to (C), I am convinced that human continuance now depends entirely upon:

(1) The intuitive wisdom of each and every individual.
(2) The individual’s comprehensive informedness.
(3) The individual’s integrity of speaking and acting only on the individual’s own within-self-intuited and reasoned initiative.
(4) The individual’s joining action with others, as motivated only by the individually conceived consequences of so doing.
(5) And, the individual’s never-joining action with others, as motivated only by crowd-engendered emotionalism, or by a sense of the crowd’s power to overwhelm, or in fear of holding to the course indicated by one’s own intellectual convictions."

"Though in the course of my lifetime I have encountered many of the most venerable progenitors of the Tathagata's teaching, never have I met one so skilled at awakening others to their intrinsic Buddhahood as this wonderful fool Wu-ming. His spiritual non-sequiturs were as sparks, lighting the flame of illuminating wisdom in the minds of many who engaged him in dialogue.

Once a monk approached Wu-ming and asked in all earnestness, "In the whole universe, what is it that is most wonderful?" Without hesitation Wu-ming stuck a cucumber before the monks face and exclaimed, "There is nothing more wonderful than this!" At that the monk crashed through the dualism of subject and object, "The whole universe is pickled cucumber; a pickled cucumber is the whole universe!" Wu-ming simply chuckled and said, "Stop talking nonsense. A cucumber is a cucumber; the whole universe is the whole universe. What could be more obvious?" The monk, penetrating the perfect phenomenal manifestation of Absolute Truth, clapped his hands and laughed, saying, "Throughout infinite space, everything is deliciously sour!"

On another occasion a monk asked Wu-ming, "The Third Patriarch said, "The Great Way is without difficulty, just cease having preferences." How can you then delight in eating cucumbers, yet refuse to even take one bit of a carrot?" Wu-ming said, "I love cucumbers; I hate carrots!" The monk lurched back as though struck by a thunderbolt. Then laughing and sobbing and dancing about he exclaimed, "Liking cucumbers and hating carrots is without difficulty, just cease preferring the Great Way!""

"The conventional wisdom, during the Tech Boom, was that what drove innovation was the lure of giant piles of cash. That idea now rubs shoulders with the Berlin Wall. What makes creative people tingle are interesting problems, the chance to impress their friends and caffeine. Freed from the pursuit of paper millions, geeks are doing what geeks, by nature, really want to be doing: making cool stuff.

Not just making it, but giving it away. Saying the Tech Bloom is not commercially driven is like saying Mother Teresa had an interest in the poor.

Which may be why the media haven't quite gotten the magnitude of what's happening here: It's not about investments. If the Tech Boom had a graven image, it was the bull on Wall Street. The Tech Bloom is more likely to be found dancing around the desert at Burning Man, the annual festival where money is taboo, everything's a gift and creative participation is synonymous with cool."

The truth of the matter is that there's nothing you can't accomplish if:
(1) You clearly decide what it is that you're absolutely committed to achieving,
(2) You're willing to take massive action,
(3) You notice what's working or not, and
(4) You continue to change your approach until you achieve what you want, using whatever life gives you along the way."

"This entire globe, this star, not being subject to death, and dissolution and annihilation being impossible anywhere in Nature, from time to time renews itself by changing and altering all its parts. There is no absolute up or down, as Aristotle taught; no absolute position in space; but the position of a body is relative to that of other bodies. Everywhere there is incessant relative change in position throughout the universe, and the observer is always at the center of things."

"The universe comprises all being in a totality; for nothing that exists is outside or beyond infinite being, as the latter has no outside or beyond."

"Libertes philosophica"

"We are living full of stress... Natural disasters, economical, political, social problems... My aim is to minimise this stress. Please let us communicate by smiling," he said. "Our slogan is 'laughter, love, peace for all human beings'."

"Touch a pencil with all five fingertips of one hand, close your eyes, and ponder: If each fingertip forms a distinct tactile "image" of the pencil, why do you perceive a single pencil instead of five unconnected pencil fragments? The answer is that your brain has special circuits that help you build complete pictures from fragmented sensory information. In effect, these gap-filling circuits induce your brain to perceive what it expects to see, instead of what it actually sees. When these expectations accurately reflect the objective world around you, your perceptions will be on target. Sometimes, however, what your brain expects to see is far from an accurate representation of reality."

The way that expectations shape perceptions has important implications for education. The developing brain processes complex perceptions, such as how difficult an academic subject is, in much the same way it handles simpler sensory information. If a student is led to expect that mathematics is difficult, even simple numerical problems may be perceived as unsolvable. Plain as the nose on your face, what you believe determines what you achieve.

"Here are some exercises that I've found can help left-brainers to 'really see':

• Move in close, so you divert attention from individual objects and start to see instead colour, texture, shape, shadow, reflection, pattern
• Find an unusual perspective from which to look -- get down on the ground and look up, look at something through trees, through a microscope, or by candlelight, anything that will let you see things differently from usual
• Look at things under unusual conditions -- in the fog, at night, right after a heavy rain, just at dawn or dusk
• Stimulate your other right-brain senses -- get your nose up close to things, listen to birds, or insects, or train whistles, or music, walk in your bare feet
• Walk or bicycle without a pre-determined destination, direction or time limit
• Study something -- birds at your bird-feeder, time-lapse of a flower over the course of a day or a week, a spider-web, how moving or dimming the lights in a room changes its character, how a bottle looks different when viewed from different angles

In the book Easy Travel to Other Planets, Ted Mooney describes a future world where people are so bombarded with meaningless information, abstract facts that don't really matter, that they become psychologically paralyzed, unable to focus on anything, and succumb to what Mooney calls 'information sickness'. In some ways we are already there. The trappings of our society and culture have already separated us from, and deadened us to, most of what is real in this world, and surrounded us instead with artifice -- bland, manipulative, numbing 'entertainment', office and home lighting (and air conditioning, and jobs) that are artificial, news that shows wars as light-shows instead of people dead and dying, cars that insulate us from any exposure to real people or real weather."

Then, a while later, in the far, far, away country, the silent voice talked to him again: "my son, so far, so good. But there is a secret you apparently are not quite aware of. If you want to feel true power and nothing but true power, you must start with nothing, absolutely nothing! This is the deepest of the secrets of all Emperors. So, if you don't mind, I'll arrange that you lose your remaining funds and income from the old new world while being back in the new old world. Just leave it up to me!"

Our friends are dead.

In despair, we seek power,
Thinking to be free by ruling.
But power is guns and jails,
Threats of death and cages.
Power kills spirits,
Turns flowers to iron.

Power scorns boundaries,
Invades life,
Conceives ends and offers death
To those who will not be means.
Power is stupidity imposed by force,
Stone without mind.

Conflict is the health of the State.
Power set against power
Forges chains of slavery,
Enshrines authority.
Swords against stone,
The sparks to burn a world.

Shall we honor the dead
By howls of grief?
No! By songs of triumph.
Free men, you are invincible.
Laugh at power,
Spring will conquer stone.

A seed shall be thought in each mind,
To grow in memory of heroes
And certainty of victory;
The greatest idea - Freedom:
An agreement among men
To live within boundaries.

Four boundaries:
A body;
Nature found and used;
Fruits of thought and labor;
Things of matter and spirit,
Freely exchanged.

The seed grows into a vision.
The structure of power is displaced;
Spontaneous order emerges.
Men living in renaissance
Cover the winter of power
With the spring of freedom.

Swords are dulled on stone,
But grass shall break it.

We're starting to get settled in to Rarotonga. I had to pay NZ$525 (US$300) to get an Internet account and it is really really slow. It's mind-boggling to be here, on this emerald speck full of life: the sounds of roosters and motor scooters, the smell of burning palm fronds, the sight of the stars at night, the beautiful green mountains, and the ocean and sand. Carla and I still aren't sure what we've gotten ourselves into, but the weirdness factor makes it all worth it. We have a deal with a publication to post weekly online dispatches, and I'll announce it as soon as the deal is finalized. In the meantime, you can see some pictures, inlcuding one of our new home.

Each morning is the open door to a new world - new vistas, new aims, new plans, new thoughts...and whether one is twenty, forty, sixty, or eighty; whether one has succeeded, failed or just muddled along - life begins each morning! - L. M. Hodges