Every interpersonal situation has a solution in which everyone wins.
And to my lips' Bright crimson rim The passion slips, And down my slim White body drips The shining hymn.
The dead don't die. They look on and help.
This is the very worst wickedness, that we refuse to acknowledge the passionate evil that is in us. This makes us secret and rotten.
For man, as for flower and beast and bird, the supreme triumph is to be most vividly, most perfectly alive.
Patience! Patience! The world is a vast and ghastly intricacy of mechanism, and one has to be very wary, not to get mangled by it.
In masturbation there is nothing but loss. There is no reciprocity. There is merely the spending away of a certain force, and no return. The body remains, in a sense, a corpse, after the act of self-abuse. There is no change, only deadening. There is what we call dead loss. And this is not the case in any act of sexual intercourse between two people. Two people may destroy one another in sex. But they cannot just produce the null effect of masturbation.
Being God is not all it's cracked up to be, and it's not as easy as one would think it would be. You'd think the deck would be really stacked in your favor as God, but of course, I've run into some pretty big obstacles and problems.
I was born in England and brought up in London. When I was 18 I read a book and came across the Dharma. I was halfway through the book when I turned to my mother and said, "I'm a Buddhist," to which she replied, "Oh are you dear? Well finish the book and then you can tell me about it. " I realised I'd always been Buddhist but I just hadn't known it existed, because in those days not even the word 'Buddha' was ever spoken. This was in in the 1960s, so there wasn't that much available, even in London.
According to polls, a majority (around 60+ percent) opposes the radar base. But it's not necessarily the sensible part of the Czech population. The demonstrations against the base are usually organized by communists, Islamists, and "peaceful feminists" (which is fortunately not a numerous group).
I'm not the kind of person who gives up without a fight.