Quotes from Brad Blanton

The best people in a dying culture are the outcasts considered crazy by the leaders; the ones most disillusioned with their own culture. In Yeats' phrase, "the best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity." Intense emotional attachment to any value, any virtue, any set of "shoulds" is a disease, a mental illness, a condition of self-murder and cultural assassination.

The problem is that ideas about forgiveness are not forgiveness. They don't even help. What you are left with is the experience of resentment and the concept of forgiveness and a deteriorating relationship.

It may feel less secure than if everyone agrees on what is true, but the feeling of security is just that - a feeling, not the real thing. Less secure is often more reliable.

Bullshit is a sales pitch for an interpretation of reality that comes with any interpretation of reality. All interpretations of reality are bullshit. Freedom is not being dominated by your own bullshit.

They concluded that every suicide can be explained as "an attempt to maintain or enhance the self." The mind is maintained at the expense of the life of the being. The mind survives by being right. The mind would rather be right and die than be wrong and live.

Integrity, wholeness, at-one-ness, is the opposite of moralism. Having integrity is the opposite of being moral. If one has integrity, one doesn't need morals. People with integrity operate with rules of thumb, not morals.

When you speak descriptively about a present-tense experience, and it changes, you have spoken the truth. It's okay that it is no longer true. Don't worry about it. It is the way things are, and it is fine that they are that way. It's more fun and less boring than trying to keep track of everything. It's called freedom.

These fantasies about the future, based on the past, are the hope and hype we con ourselves with. Even if we get what we always wanted it never looks like we thought it would when it arrives.

You can be really mad at someone and hurt by him or her and stay stuck there. Or you can tell them and express it out loud and what was true a moment ago becomes no longer true.

The ultimate detachment includes detachment even from the ideal of detachment. This is the kind of thing that can make you lose your mind … and come to your senses. The

Taking responsibility means a person no longer blames outside circumstances, or other people, or past events for the conditions of his own life.

Telling stories about your memory of what happened may be entertaining for a while, but if that is all you can do it gets boring pretty fast.

We would rather be sure of a correctly predicted negative outcome than face the realistic uncertainty of an unpredictable future even if it includes the possibility of great joy and success.

It's probably the meaning of the Resurrection: love dies to be reborn. When we let die our attachments to remembrances, expectations, moral imperatives, evaluations, comparisons, self-images, beliefs about how others should behave, ideals, and even romance, we make ourselves clearings for love's rebirth.

One of these games is called, "Okay, okay, I'm guilty." This game is to make it look like you have taken responsibility for yourself when you haven't. Admitting you are guilty is a great way to avoid being responsible.

When we learn to live in the present we are no longer chained to the past. We say to each other: "I am a being who notices. I have a particular psychological history but it doesn't have to dictate the rest of my life. I can choose how I live, rather than just react from my past the rest of my life." If people don't like that, we saym "Fuck 'em if they can't take a joke!

Yesterday's truth is today's bullshit. Even yesterday's liberating insight is today's jail of stale explanation.

You can still tell the truth by "pointing to" an abstraction or assessment of your mind, if your intent is simply to point out your thought, rather than to make the other person believe your thought to be the "right interpretation" of reality.

We are against politeness as a substitute for the truth because that politeness kills. Politeness and diplomacy are responsible for more suffering and death than all the crimes of passion in history. Fuck politeness. Fuck diplomacy. Tell the truth.

Climate is what we expect. Weather is what we get." Robert A. Heinlein

Dean Rusk never beat his wife. He was a decent man. He was a liberal. He was head of the Ford Foundation. And as Secretary of State during the Vietnam war, he killed over a hundred thousand people in a useless, wasteful, unnecessary, stupid war. We would all be better off if he had found a better way to express his anger. His time is passing with the turn of the century.

The most wonderful thing about this whole process is that people's contributions to the lives of others become the primary means of getting the results they want in their own lives.

Most suffering is generated by the tendency of the mind to moralize and judge, and to mistake belief for reality. 4.

You were right, Brad, in that I did find that Mark is not as evil as I had believed and a lot more desperate than I had thought. And it's not my problem anymore. I told him I'd be as good a friend to him as I could, and that I couldn't rescue him. I had tried, and it just hadn't worked.