More Wisdom, Less Thought

Remember the rule laid down by Pythagoras. It has been quoted again and again, but losses none of its beauty and profundity by repetition. It runs as follows:
     “Let not the setting sun reach the western horizon, nor close thine eyes in sleep, before thou hast gone over all the events of the day just past, and hast asked thyself this question: What have I done today that has been done amiss? What have I done today that has been done aright? Have I injured anyone? Have I failed in my duty? Let not the setting sun reach the western rim of space, nor let thine eyelids close in sleep ere thou hast asked thyself these questions.”
     If only men and women would conscientiously follow that simple rule, ninety-nine per cent of the world’s trouble, heartache, sin, and anxiety, would be non-existent, would never happen. And the reason is simple. The world’s troubles arise from our weaknesses, not from our strength; and if we would increase our strength, and do away with our weaknesses, every human being thereafter, in proportion to his inner evolution, would become a power for good in the world. And you see what that would mean. It cuts at the tap-root of most of the thoughts and feelings and acts that bring misery amongst us.
— G. de Purucker, Wind of the Spirit, p. 10.

You decline to write poetry, won’t listen to sutras,
Too lazy to visit the other peaks of Ch’an—
When at last your head is white and they question you,
What stories will you have to tell your students?
— Buddhist Poet Monks of China, The Clouds Should Know Me By Now, Red Pine/Mike O’Connor (eds.), p. 71.

Moonlight and the sound of pines are things we all know
Zen mind and delusion distinguish sage and fool
Go back to the place where not one thought appears
How shall I put this in words for you
— Ibid., p. 131.

Mountains and rivers: flowers of the Tao
But I, sadly, am a writer
No divine voice, talentless
Yet, lend me a brush; I’m off and running

Better an addiction to sunset clouds
To dispense with this sickness of words
Let wooded springs purify this old heart
Azure clouds burnish the sun red
— Ibid., p. 159.

     Synthetic thinking, generalized, led Fuller to the concept of ephemeralization — “doing more with less.” The tendency of technology, he showed us with graphs of various historical stages of machinery, always moved steadily toward greater and greater ephemeralization. Every step forward in information allowed us to do more and more with less and less energy. Economists, he said, were still thinking in terms of scarcity while science was inexorably moving the world toward abundance and super-abundance.
     Bucky [R. Buckminster Fuller] then spoke about the 92 natural elements, and I got a tingly feeling of strange intuition or “predestination” when he mentioned that the last of them was discovered the year I was born. These elements occurred at random around our planet, he said. Universe — a term he used the way theologians use “God” — would eventually force us to make a choice, as technology advanced, between two ways of getting maximum benefit out of these elements. We could follow traditional mammalian politics, in which one nation would try to dominate the others in order to access all 92 elements, which we now call a zero-sum game. Or we could choose a new synthetic path, a non-zero-sum game, in which all Terans cooperate to “advantage all without disadvantaging any.”
     Since war will continue to become more and more “omnilethal,” Bucky said, humanity would have to choose the latter cooperative path eventually, because “we always do the intelligent thing after we have tried every stupid alternative and none of them works.”
     Everybody at the seminar seemed as overwhelmed by Bucky as I was.
     “He puts you in a trance,” somebody said.
     “No,” somebody else said. “He wakes you out of your trance.”
— Robert Anton Wilson, Cosmic Trigger II, p. 47.