Linguistics

George Carlin – The American Dream

Awareness, Consciousness, Existence, Experience, Identity, Linguistics, Love, Peace, Perception, Power, Reality, Society

“They don’t want people who are smart enough to sit around a kitchen table and think about how badly they’re getting fucked by a system that threw them overboard 30 fuckin’ years ago. They don’t want that. You know what they want? They want obedient workers. Obedient workers, people who are just smart enough to run the machines and do the paperwork. And just dumb enough to passively accept all these increasingly shittier jobs with the lower pay, the longer hours, the reduced benefits, the end of overtime and vanishing pension that disappears the minute you go to collect it. And now they’re coming for your Social Security money. They want your fuckin’ retirement money. They want it back so they can give it to their criminal friends on Wall Street. And you know something? They’ll get it. They’ll get it all from you sooner or later ’cause they own this fuckin’ place. It’s a big club and you ain’t in it. You and I are not in the big club. …The table is tilted, folks. The game is rigged and nobody seems to notice. …And nobody seems to notice. Nobody seems to care. That’s what the owners count on. The fact that Americans will probably remain willfully ignorant of the big red, white and blue dick that’s being jammed up their assholes every day, because the owners of this country know the truth. It’s called the American Dream, ’cause you have to be asleep to believe it.”
– George Carlin

Related – Extreme Human Behaviour – Crazy People – The American War Machine

Alan Watts – Wholeness

Awareness, Consciousness, Energy, Existence, Experience, Identity, Linguistics, Love, Nature, Peace, Perception, Philosophy, Psychonaut, Unity

“We do not “come into” into this world; we come out of it, as leaves from a tree. As the ocean “waves,” the universe “peoples.” Every individual is an expression of the whole realm of nature, a unique action of the total universe. This fact is rarely, if ever, experienced by most individuals. Even those who know it to be true in theory do not sense or feel it, but continue to be aware of themselves as isolated “egos” inside bags of skin.”
– Alan Watts

Alan Watts – Existence Is Weird

Awareness, Consciousness, Energy, Existence, Experience, Identity, Linguistics, Love, Metaphysics, Nature, Perception, Philosophy, Power, Reality, Society, The Unknown, Unity

“It is a special kind of enlightenment to have this feeling that the usual, the way things normally are, is odd – uncanny and highly improbable. G. K. Chesterton once said that it is one thing to be amazed at a gorgon or a griffin, creatures which do not exist; but it is quite another and much higher thing to be amazed at a rhinoceros or a giraffe, creatures which do exist and look as if they don’t. This feeling of universal oddity includes a basic and intense wondering about the sense of things. Why, of all possible worlds, this colossal and apparently unnecessary multitude of galaxies in a mysteriously curved space-time continuum, these myriads of differing tube-species playing frantic games of one-upmanship, these numberless ways of “doing it” from the elegant architecture of the snow crystal or the diatom to the startling magnificence of the lyrebird or the peacock?”
– Alan Watts

Cornel West – Truth

Awareness, Consciousness, Existence, Experience, Film, Identity, Linguistics, Love, Nature, Perception, Philosophy, Psychonaut, Reality, Society, The Unknown

“The language of failure and disappointment, disenchantment, disillusionment, is a little bit Romantic for me…. Why not have a sense of gratitude that you’re able to do as much as you did? That you’re able to love as much and think as much and play as much? Why think you need the whole thing? Where’s the expectation that you need the whole thing coming from?…

America’s a very fragile, democratic experiment predicated on the disposition of the lands of indigenous people and the enslavement of African people and the subjugation of workers and women and the marginalization of gays and lesbians. It has great potential, but this notion that somehow we had it all or ever will have it all, that’s got to go, you’ve got to push it to the side.

And once you push all that to the side, then it tends to evacuate the language of disappointment and the language of failure. And you say, OK, how much have we done? How have we been able to do it? Can we do more? In some situations you can’t do more. It’s like trying to break-dance at seventy-five, you can’t do it anymore! You were a master at sixteen; it’s over! You can’t make love at eighty the way you did at twenty, so what? Time is real!”
– Cornel West

Clips from “Examined Life” by Astra Taylor – Trailer