Jack London Quotes and Links for Occupy Oakland

“Darn the wheel of the world! Why must it continually turn over? Where is the reverse gear?” -Jack London

“The proper function of man is to live, not to exist. I shall not waste my days in trying to prolong them. I shall use my time.” -Jack London

War of the Classes, How I became a Socialist, The Iron Heel by
Jack London, Socialist

"A bone to the dog is not charity. Charity is the bone shared with the dog, when you are just as hungry as the dog." -Jack London

"Man always gets less than he demands from life." -Jack London, The People of the Abyss

"You can't wait for inspiration. You have to go after it with a club." -Jack London

"To be sure, London found in socialism an outlet from the abyss" -some literary critic

Rimbaud vs. Baudelaire -- dueling quotes on genius as childhood

"Genius is the recovery of childhood at will" -Arthur Rimbaud

“Genius is no more than childhood recaptured at will, childhood equipped now with man's physical means to express itself, and with the analytical mind that enables it to bring order into the sum of experience, involuntarily amassed.”
― Charles Baudelaire, The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays

Yeats on Blake

“yet in his visionary realism, and in his enthusiasm for what, after all, is perhaps the greatest art, and a necessary part of every picture that is art at all, he forgot how he who wraps the vision in lights and shadows, in iridescent or glowing colour, having in the midst of his labour many little visions of these secondary essences, until form be half lost in pattern, may compel the canvas or paper to become itself a symbol of some not indefinite because unsearchable essence”
http://hermetic.com/yeats/ideas-of-good-and-evil/william-blake-and-his-illustrations-to-the-divine-comedy.html

Henri Corbin on imaginal forms

The immateriality of the imaginative power was already fully affirmed by Ibn 'Arabi when he differentiated between the absolute imaginal Forms, that is to say such as subsist in the Malakut, and the "captive" imaginal Forms, that is, those immanent in the imaginative consciousness of man in this world. The former are in the world of the Soul (âme) or Malakut, epiphanies or theophanies, that is to say, imaginalmanifestations of the pure Intellectual Forms of the Jabarut. The latter are in their turn manifestations of the imaginal Forms of the Malakut or world of the Soul to man's imaginative consciousness. It is therefore perfectly exact here to speak of metaphysical Images. Now these cannot be received unless by a spiritual organ. The solidarity and interdependence between the active Imagination defined as a spiritual faculty and the necessity of the mundus imaginalis as an intermediate world respond to the need of a conception which considers the worlds and the forms of Being as so many theophanies (tajalliyat ilahiya).



We thus find ourselves in the presence of a number of philosophers who refuse indifferently a philosophy or a theology which lacks the element of theophany. Sohravardi and all the Ishraquiyun who follow him have always considered the "Perfect Sage" as being the Sage who gathers to himself equally the highest philosophical knowledge and the mystical experience modelled on the visionary experience of the Prophet, the night of the Miraj. Now the organ of visions, of whatever degree they may be, whether in the case of the philosophers or of the prophets, is neither the intellect nor the fleshly eyes, but the fire of that imaginatio vera of which the Burning Bush is for Sohravardi the type. In the sensible form it is then the Imaginal Form itself which is from the very first and at one and the same time the pierceived form and the organ of visionary perception. The Theophanic Forms are in their essence Imaginal Forms.



~ Henry Corbin

[Towards a Chart of the Imaginal]

George Carlin on the existence of God / Higher Intelligence

[On the existence of God] No. No, there's no God, but there might be some sort of an organizing intelligence, and I think to understand it is way beyond our ability. It's certainly not a judgmental entity. It's certainly not paternalistic and all these qualities that have been attributed to God. It's probably a dispassionate... That's why I say, "Suppose He doesn't give a shit? Suppose there is a God but He just doesn't give a shit?" That's the kind of thing that might be at work.
The Onion A.V. Club, September 6, 2000 [3]
via Wikiquote

Alan Watts on Indra's Net

"Imagine a multidimensional spider's web in the early morning covered with dew drops. And every dew drop contains the reflection of all the other dew drops. And, in each reflected dew drop, the reflections of all the other dew drops in that reflection. And so ad infinitum. That is the Buddhist conception of the universe in an image."

Elaine Pagels on Gnosticism -- great interview!

http://www.realitysandwich.com/gnostic_interview_elaine_pagels

"Pagels stressed this issue throughout much of our discussion for the basic reason the terms "Gnosticism" and "Gnostic" hijack an individual's ability to fully retrieve the bounty found in the formative stages of Christianity. In essence, these terms are a sort of light pollution that has dazzled scholarly and religious minds but obfuscated an almost endless constellation of elemental Christian sects, each emanating from the same theological Big Bang but with their own unique and educational illumination.

Pagels perhaps went further than other academics in stating that even accepting Gnostic subdivisions such as Valentinianism and Sethianism was potentially falling into the mental quicksand of leaning too much on expedient but generalizing labels. Doing this inevitably creates a myopic projection into the Nag Hammadi library itself, conceivably aborting the possibility of taking accurate snapshots of youthful Christianity."

I've been a big fan of Pagels since I first read her in college and grad school.
I don't understand why she isn't more highly regarded by scholars--at least the
ones I've talked to. I like this notion of the concept of Gnosticism as "light pollution" very much. Much of the writing in the field of Renaissance Magic has been clouded or washed out by this optical phenomenon. In reconstructing the actual visionary practices of whatever "Gnostic" group we want to study, we must be very careful about imposing some external, anachronistic category of "Gnostic Myth." But I understand those who feel that it's necessary to have a post-Jonas category of gnosticism that doesn't fall into the same traps, while somehow managing to cover the different "Gnostic" groups. I think it's important to make tables like we see in Michael Williams' book so that we can keep track of these differences, and after ten years of study I'm afraid that I simply despair at the notion of trying to keep "Gnosticism," although I'm just as shy about simply discarding the category. From a scholarly point of view I'm stumped, but from a visionary magical point of view I would insist that we respect these mysteries for the sacred and terrible things they are. This goes for all historical practice, but we should be especially careful when dealing with actual esoteric enigmas.

On the other hand, when using tools like the concept of "Gnosticism" to develop our own contemporary visionary practices, these technical problems of definition can be more or less useful--and I don't see a problem with contemporary practitioners who simply stop worrying about the problem. It doesn't matter if the term "gnostic" equally applies to Agrippa and Hermes, let along the Sethians vs. some other gnostic sect, or whether there's a rigorous historical meaning informing one's understanding of "Hermetic visionary magic." So long as one is having successful visions, philosophical contemplations, ecstatic transports, or whatever results one needs, historical accuracy is merely the icing on the cake. Whether or not we can get in touch with the visionary practices of the ancients (and I'm much more skeptical than many of my peers in the magical community, although I am getting therapy for all the terrible abuses of grad school discourse!) we can still be inspired by the mysteries and texts they left to our own visionary experiences. I would love to be able to understand exactly how the experiences I've had "really" tally against the experiences of my favorite hundred or so notorious mystics, but I'm content to understand that we are all approaching the same divine mystery from different angles. I don't feel any need to control the mystery, and I can live with not knowing those things that the sacred evidence won't allow me to know.