Kilroy J. Oldster Quotes - Page 3

Lies, greed, pettiness, and ugly emotions ensnare a person. We are free people whom construct our own cages that we allow to suppress our vital instinct to live a wholesome life. Truth telling demands an awareness of what sins cage a person in. Truthfulness also commands that a person fess up to the role that he or she played in scripting unpleasant scenes in a tarnished personal history.

We cannot replicate other people’s lives. We must each institute and broker a personalized meaning to our exclusive existence. We must each serve as our own Zen master, awaken to our inviolate personal truth, and strive to fulfill our sui generis (unique) nature.

Parents’ transmit their attitude towards education to children via soundless, aphonic messages.

Only the shallowest person believes that they can attain true happiness by maximizing their wealth at any cost. In absence of morality, ethics, and a sustainable philosophy to guide us in an ethical search for happiness, we will always perceive life’s random countervailing forces of adversity and unpleasantness as inflicting a great personal injustice upon us. Through application of a deeply embedded personal philosophy, we can push back against the negative implications of a life of suffering. We can use a philosophical stance to gain the perspective needed to say 'yes' to all of life, both its rosy path of ineffable joys and a blackened trail of tears. We must learn to accept life as it truly is and not waste precious time in wistfulness.

All philosophical and inquisitive men share doubts, experience dread, endure pain, and suffer loneliness. The thinking man accepts that the quest is as much a part of life’s adventure as the final destination. The journey we take is as critical to experiencing a meaningful existence as is our actual arrival at the sought after objective. Whether we successfully arrive at our sought after designation, is only part of the equation. The ultimate objective is not reaching some point on the faraway hills, but gaining self-knowledge and increasing self-awareness on the long trek through time.

Writing is a solitary venture. Making use of a soundless void in the vortex of time the author enters the realm of restoration, an undertaking where he or she explores that private psychic space of the self. In this mystical state of heightened awareness, the writer investigates the soul’s grievances, and diagnoses and treats their grim afflictions.

Conflicting egos destroy many relationships. Lasting, stable marriages are a true treasure because they demand that both parties adjust to the constant cellular flux of their partner as they metaphase through changing seasons of life.

At some point in life every person encounters haunting feelings of loneliness, because the feeling of being alone and withdrawing deeply into the inner self is part of the human condition. A person might choose to countenance or even cultivate their loneliness and turn the poignant hours of unerring solitude into poetry of their soul.

We fear change because it insists we discard long held structures that no longer function suitably.

The ego with its protective defense mechanisms is the biggest impediment to attaining spiritual growth.

A person whom writes begins by putting down what they know about loneliness, shame, love, and heartache. In writing fully, they discover many other aspects of themselves that they never suspected including doubts, beliefs, ironies, and farcicalities.

At the inauguration of each sentence, the writer commences with an optimistic sense of curiosity. Similar to an inquisitive explorer, a writer begins each thoughtful decree with an appreciative sense of the unknown and ends with a reverent regard for the unanswerable. Repeating this instigating act of discovery by placing a combination of sentences down on paper creates a unique verdict. The writer’s compilation of pronouncements expresses their interpretation of life. Replicating this creative endeavor in the futile effort to say it all imitates the revolving mystery of life where physical reality and mysterious forces of nature operate upon humankind.

Each of us experiences the perpetual revival of the self. We constantly recast our connate emotional index by perceiving each encounter in life as a marvel, impedance, problem, disaster, or nothing at all. Living in the moment allows us to escape the lonely landscape of self-interest and be part of a larger world filled with beauty, reverence, and adoration.

It is easy to hate and it is difficult to love. Wisdom, compassion, and courage are essential ingredients for love. To love other people we must begin by forgiving them. If we do not bring forth the part of us that is capable of love and compassion, it will destroy us.

Life presents innumerable possibilities for love, friendship, compassion, and self-fulfillment, but we must be willing to give in order to receive. Persistence, sacrifice, a quest for knowledge, along with acquaintance with our true self is essential in order to achieve our dreams. Panic, fear, worry, doubt, anger, and a negative attitude are the biggest impediments to self-realization. The most important battle we undertake in life is not with other people; rather it takes place in the human mind.

People whom live in a world dominated by science and technology are losing belief in God and turning away from religion. Science eliminated the traditions that formerly made living an art form including the rain celebration of spring and traditional harvest festivals.

Writing about oneself is an egotistical adventure unless the act of self-exploration revolves around the distinct goal of heightening a person’s cache of knowledge, ideas, and level of self-awareness.

Our life force is a form of flowing energy, a blast of verve renewed through our ongoing daily interactions and the inevitable collisions between the id and the ego.

Art translates human souls. Each passing eon’s public display of sophisticated hieroglyphics cast a unique depiction upon the rudimentary art of survival. Humankind cannot exist without the makeshift paradigm of innovative art, which genuine amoeba expresses elusive and unsayable thoughts. Humankind’s gallery of artistic impressions ranges from the starkness of personified cave drawings to the free ranging lexis of modern art. Collection of multihued stories of the ages portrays the vivid panoply of enigmatic vitas etched by humankind’s self-imposed sense of urgency. Each passing generation’s effusion of trope offerings seamlessly folds its shared renderings into the shimmering panorama of the cosmos, the sparkling nightscape that houses the intangible life force all communal souls.

A living philosophy entails a conscious act of awareness. Without a living philosophy to guide and support us, we are not living as receptive, thinking, and emotionally responsive human beings; we are merely surviving as people.

Virtually every tribe in the march towards civilization developed its tailored made initiation practices. In America, sports are part of the test for a young man’s initiation into manhood.

We are what comes to us and by what we choose to fulfill. We learn love by experiencing other people loving us and by cultivating compassion for all humankind.

The psyche of some people, whether through innate structure or via adaption to personal experiences, is uniquely adept for absolute aloneness.

Making art requires a degree of intentionality. All works of art require a contemplative individual drawing from their bank of knowledge and immersion into the realms of memory and imagination in order to make an outward, communicative expression. Only human beings can draw upon the dialectical tension between memory and imagination to create artistic renderings.

The fresh and crisp air of the country reminds us that our blood surges from of the natural world and how tied we are to the sprung rhythms of earth and sky, weather and season.

Scholars postulate that the only thing that does not change is the every varying world. Other renowned thinkers postulate that the natural state of all things is to remain the same. Perhaps both propositions are vital. Perhaps it is normal to resist change because it threatens our present state of being. Perhaps it is natural to attempt to preserve the status quo because we are part of the external world and we wish to persevere, not expire. Perhaps it is inevitable that we all change. The natural forces are impossible to blunt.

Every book adds a grain of humility and humanity to the communal ground that we tread. Writing is the one method that the modern shaman employs to interpret reality and create messages that will provide a beacon of light to other members of our tribe. So long as ignorance, misery, and confusion remain on earth, and people look to expand their state of awareness, books that contribute to the aesthetics of despair, a world composed of mist and shadows cannot be useless. Writing is a personal effort to coexist with the banality, tedium, and anguish of living a fated life. Writing is a shamanistic act of faith because seeking to link thoughts together in order to understand how one fits into nature’s wonderland is a quest for unity and wholeness, the ultimate medicinal poultices that all self-disciplined shaman and alchemistic writers aspire to achieve.

A person archives self-realization by engaging in deliberate contemplative acts that serve to unify of all aspects of the self. To deny part of the self, a person risks spiritual decay.

Although we amplify our cognitive degree of awareness and enhance our appreciation for life experiences by maturing, it also brings us death. Facing a certain death forces a person to examine the worthiness of continuing to live.

Necessary features of the human mind impose structure upon our experiences. Language acts as a gatekeeper for the mind. We learn and embark on personal transformation by formulating, revising, and refining our conception of the world each time that we encounter new facts, experiences, ideas, and viewpoints. To understand the world a person must employ reason and organize their episodic personal experiences into a system of narrative thought. The language that we employ to internalize our personal experiences constructs our mental system, and our mental thoughts in turn regulate us. We become of a personification of our language, as expressed in narrative stories of the self.

The undeniable paradox of human existence is that a person seeks closeness with other people while protecting his or her sanctified right of privacy. Each person must carefully guard their personal identity in order to give their life a unique purposefulness. Loving other people and nature is not mutually exclusive of a person maintaining independence of thought and action. A person need not surrender his or her own pursuit of personal excellence when maintaining a respectful and reciprocal relationship with a life mate.

People undergo several sequential steps in maturing from infancy including childhood, adolescences, young adulthood, middle age, and old age. Each stage presents distinct challenges that require a person to amend how they think and act. The motive for seeking significant change in a person’s manner of perceiving the world and behaving vary. Alteration of person’s mindset can commence with a growing sense of awareness that a person is dissatisfied with an aspect of his or her life, which cause a person consciously to consider amending their lifestyle. The ego might resist change until a person’s level of discomfort becomes unbearable. A person can employ logic to overcome the ego’s defense mechanism and intentionally integrate needed revisions in a person’s obsolete or ineffective beliefs and behavior patterns. The subtle sense that something is amiss in a person’s life can lead to a gradual or quick alteration in a person’s conscious thoughts and outlook on life. Resisting change can prolong unhappiness whereas

The evil components of our shadow are the part of us that we deplore, the part of us that we prefer not to admit. One must set themselves free from all inhibitions in order to initiate close encounters with their innermost monster. By standing toe-to-toe with the part of ourselves that we most detest, a person is in a position to slay their fiendish sense of self and, by doing so, undergo a soulful transformation.

A shaman and a writer each serve as their communities’ seers by engaging in extraordinary acts of conscientious study of the past and the present and predicting the future. An inner voice calls to the shaman and an essayistic writer to answer the call that vexes the pernicious spirit of their times. Shamanistic writers induce a trance state of mind where they lose contact with physical reality through a rational disordering of the senses, in an effort to encounter for the umpteenth time the great unknown and the unutterable truths that structure existence. An afflicted person seeking clarification of existence cannot ignore the shamanistic calling of narrative exposition. Thus, I shall continue this longwinded howl – making a personal immortality vessel – into the darkness of night forevermore.

Large families are communities unto their own.

Embracing human frailty, fallibility, and heartbreaking aloneness is crucial for any person seeking to attain self-actualization and self-realization.

Condemning war has not curbed armed conflict. Religion and education did not eliminate war. Warfare did not terminate more wars. Armed combat simply breeds endless wars.

In our formative years, every person begins creating a self that can keep him or her company through later stages in life. It requires concentrated effort to create self-hood. The task of creating a fully developed human being is an ongoing process, an open-ended assignment. The goal of self-hood is to evade slipping into a state of thoughtlessness, where we fail to take ownership of our thoughts, deeds, and lifestyle.

Self-questioning is bound to arise at the outset of any worthy quest attempting to gain self-knowledge, and this disconcerting sense of uneasiness will continue to surface akin to a petulant sea serpent until a person undertaking a vision quest either discovers a safe haven or perceptively changes the trajectory of their destructive life.

One redeeming feature of human beings is that we must work to sustain our survival. Working attaches people to reality; it creates a survival identity, and provides structure to our life. Work provides a person with a temporary purpose and an accompanying sense of security that there is a fitting place in this world for a person of their temperament and talent.

Reading, writing, and personal introspection will not protect us from hardship and suffering, but they might introduce us to critical thinking and expose us to what is good in humankind and beautiful in the world that we share with all of nature. Contemplative thought, especially that supplemented with reading literature and attempting to write our own replies to the echoing voices of writers whom preceded us provide us with the potentiality for change, the possibility of personal illumination that enables us to experience a heighted quality of life.

We inhabit an internal world that is subject to diversification. Every day we undergo personal transformation based upon experiences, thoughts, and feelings.

Feelings and emotions as well as thoughts and opinions are evanescent; they change over time because they reflect our transient being. Feelings and emotions are judgments that spring from the hidden source of the unconscious mind, and only take on power whenever the conscious mind acknowledges them, and then chooses to convey an idea in some format that shares the rhythm of a person’s own being with another person. Unuttered thoughts and inexpressible feelings experience a short half-life. Without proper nourishment, voiceless thoughts wither and indefinable feelings wane. Lucid thoughts and inexpressible feelings form imperceptible currents that propel us along in our inimitable journey exploring the tributaries of the stream of life.

Novel ideas are unsettling, innovative concepts about important matters in human affairs is disruptive of the internal harmony that people prefer. There is a tendency even for the most logical and classically educated people steeped in rational scholastic traditions to assume that if any new hypothesis were correct, a scholar would already written it in a book.

A storm-filled life replete with piercing and unearthly sounds ravages the soul of any thoughtful person. In contrast, the genteel wind of restoration moves silently, invisibly. Renewal is a spiritual process, the communal melody that sustains us. Inexpressible braids of tenderness whispering reciprocating chords of love for family, friends, humankind, and nature plaits interweaved layers of blissful atmosphere, which copious heart song brings spiritual rejuvenation. For when we love in a charitable and bountiful manner without reservation, liberated from petty jealously, and free of the toxic blot of discrimination, we become the ineluctable wind that vivifies the lives of other people. The mellifluous changes in heaven, earth, and our journey through the travails of time, while worshiping the trove of fathomless joys of life, constitute the seeds of universal poetry.

As we go through life, we essentially grow a personality. Our personality branches out in many directions to assist us organize our thoughts, feelings, values, ideas, and coping mechanisms. Our exhibited behavior – the way we organize and deal with life – becomes an external representation of our central self.

One of the salient facts of a self is that a person is constantly undergoing a series of actions in the immediacy of time that they must later reflect upon and synthesize new experiences, thoughts, feelings, and mental impression along with their latent memories into a collaborative sense of being.

The metaphysical poetry of our innovative life springs from the aesthetic, scenic, and systematic processes of inventiveness, the creative impulse of an active mind generating aesthetical intuition.

A person who finds grace never lacks the courage to endure, remain resolute in principles and action in the face of an easy collapse into anger, insanity, and self-destruction when living in an increasing chaotic world filled with armed conflict, terrorism, and cultural discord.

Writers cheat death by constructing an immortality vessel.

We earn the respect of our peers by laboring to quell our critics’ justified disapproval. We earn self-respectability by schooling the wisdom to ignore unfair condemnation. We learn goodness by witnessing other person’s lives and by performing unsolicited acts of kindnesses.

We all act as independent learners in charge of designing our autodidactic curricula. Reading the books written by the prophetic genius of history including the literary masterpieces and philosophical treatises awakens the mind. Reading can act as a gateway drug leading to writing and expansion of a personal state of conscious awareness.

A person without a philosophy for living is at the tender mercy of other people.

The whole of eternity is present now. We apprehend eternity through our senses and mental imagination. We can never recapture lost time. Memory allows us to taste the scintillating experience of living by recollecting our past in a series of sequential personal events and an orderly arrangement of a linked series of cultural happenings. Writing our personal story calls for us to remember the sensation of what it entails to live tactilely before losing lucidity of the mind.

In the wink of an eye, all quaint days of the past, the present, and future will meld together into the bottomless unknown of perpetuity. Only trace evidence of our invertebrate existence will anoint future generations. In the crinkle of time, our houses will crumble apart. Companies that we worked for will go out of business or merge with other nameless conglomerates. What will survive us are our children and our words.

Writing a sincere narrative account of personal adversities and misfortunes is one way to become acquainted with the rifts of a person’s inmost self, the smothered pieces of want that lie separate and undetected amid the customs, habits, vices, and tedium that encases us in the hubbub of daily living.

Through our work and play, each of us eventually becomes a personification of what we cherish in life.

We develop our whole character from our thoughts, actions, attentive observations, and from the resolute pursuit of our inspirational dreams.

Everyone who loves life is an artist at heart. Although it is sometimes difficult to love our world and our lot in life, failure to find the ability to love life and express appreciation for our world is tantamount to not existing at all.

Every human being asks pertinent questions regarding how to live, what to believe in, and what we aspire to become. Throughout life, we question what desires and principles to value and prioritize – love, friendship, freedom, happiness, creativity, wealth, security. We make difficult decisions based upon what we trust constitutes ethical behavior. We balance out work and play by considering what a person’s time is worth. We encounter both joyful and unpleasant physical experiences. As we age, we modify some of our youthful assumptions and question the existence of a mystical and divine world. We engage in formal and informal educational activities, which edifying foundation support modest or dramatic shifts in our instinctive and learned behavior patterns, and alter our intellectual and emotional perspective. Each person aspires to live honorably and age gracefully despite encountering physical adversity, financial hardships, sickness, or injury.