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“Early Christians transformed the world by thinking different and living different, not by complaining about everybody else’s morals.”

—Alan Wilson

“‘You are destroying yourself,’ he cried. ‘You have the inclination to be alone and to dream and you are afraid of dreams. You want to be like others in town here. You hear them talk and you try to imitate them.’”

—Sherwood Anderson

“On earth we are wayfarers, always on the go. This means that we have to keep on moving forward. Therefore be always unhappy about what you are if you want to reach what you are not.”

—St. Augustine

“In the third month they began to pile up the heaps, and finished them in the seventh month.”

—2 Chronicles 31:7 (ESV)

“There would so much less laughter in the world if evil people stopped talking.”

—MadPriest

“Then I commended mirth, because a man hath no better thing under the sun, than to eat, and to drink, and to be merry…”

—Ecclesiastes 8:15

“Did they teach you how to question when you were at the school? Did the factory help you grow? were you the maker or the tool?”

—Ewan MacColl

“Happiness happens when you are not thinking about it, when you are inhabiting your body comfortably…when you feel at peace with yourself and the world. When we live overprotective, overstimulated lives we expect more all the time, we find it hard to be unself-conscious and just do what we do; we overanalyse.”

—Rowan Williams

“You can never win a war against terror as long as there are conditions in the world that make people desperate—poverty, disease, ignorance, et cetera….I think people are beginning to realize that you can’t have pockets of prosperity in one part of the world and huge deserts of poverty and deprivation and think that you can have a stable and secure world.”

—Desmond Tutu

“The distrust of wit is the beginning of tyranny.”

—Edward Abbey
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Black Iron Prison

A friend recommended Philip K. Dick’s Valis to me, and I’ve been reading it sporadically the last couple of weeks. Today, I came across this:

Prior to that, during the interval in which he had experienced the two-world superimposition, he had seen not only California, USA, of the year 1974 but also ancient Rome, he had discerned within the superimposition a Gestalt shared by both space-time continua, their common element: a Black Iron Prison. This is what the dream referred to as “the Empire.” He knew it because, upon seeing the Black Iron Prison, he had recognised it. Everyone dwelt in it without realizing it. The Black Iron Prison was their world.

Who had built the prison—and why—he could not say. But he could discern one good thing: the prison lay under attack. An organization of Christians, not regular Christians such as those who attended church every Sunday and prayed, but secret early Christians wearing light gray-colored robes, had started an assault on the prison, and with success. The secret, early Christians were filled with joy.

I can imagine reading that while seriously drunk and under the influence of who-knows-what-else, and writing The Matrix the next day. In fact, I’m pretty sure that’s how it happened.

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