Stuck right with me this week, these four:
Compassion is not about kindness. Compassion is about awareness.
~Khandro Rinpoche
— — — — — — —
Religious suffering is, at one and the same time, the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions.
~ Karl Marx
— — — — — — —
“But say a man does know. He sees the world as it is and he looks back thousands of years to see how it all came about. He watches the slow agglutination of capital and power and he sees its pinnacle today. He sees America as a crazy house. He sees how men have to rob their brothers in order to live. He sees children starving and women working sixty hours a week to get to eat. He sees a whole damn army of unemployed and billions of dollars and thousands of miles of land wasted. He sees war coming. He sees how when people suffer just so much they get mean and ugly and something dies in them. But the main thing he sees is that the whole system of the world is built on a lie. And although it’s as plain as the shining sun — the don’t-knows have lived with that lie so long they just can’t see it.”
~ Jake Blount, local madman, in Carson McCullers’ novel The Heart Is A Lonely Hunter
— — — — — — —
When you plant seeds in the garden, you don’t dig them up every day to see if they have sprouted yet.
~Bhikshuni Thubten Chodron.
— — — — — — —
That’s all for now, friends. Take care; see you next week!
Kloncke 
Excellent words, Thank you.
each is fabulous. marx? really? and what’s the lie, jake? love how the quotations are bookended by dhamma. love it. thanks.
Glad y’all are feelin ’em. Yeah, kimberly, Marx — who knew?!
It’s kind of hard to completely follow Jake’s line of thought, since he’s often drunk and somewhat incoherent, but I think the lie he’s talking about is more like a myth: the aggregate myth of freedom, justice, and equality in a fundamentally unfree, unjust, and unequal political and economic system.
After talking about how he, at one point, had tried to organize a Communist group in his hometown — “Our motto, ‘Action,’ signified the razing of capitalism. In the constitution (drawn up by myself) certain statutes dealt with the swapping of our motto from ‘Action’ to ‘Freedom’ as soon as our work was through” — he fumes more about the hypocrisy he sees in society:
The fourth quote is about faith :) the kind we discussed last Sunday.