Kurt Vonnegut Back in 1985, which doesn't sound that long ago until I realize that it's been nearly 20 years, Kurt Vonnegut published "Galapagos." I picked the book up at the library because we'd visited Ecuador a few years back. Ecuador laid claim to the Galapagos Islands in 1832. Vonnegut was a writer known for dark humor who said things like this:
The marine iguana "could be more than a meter long, and look as fearsome as a Chinese dragon. Actually, though, it was no more dangerous to life forms of any sort, with the exception of seaweed, that a liverwurst. Here is what its life is like in the present day, which is exactly what its life was like a million years ago:
"It has no enemies, so it sits in one place, staring into the middle distance at nothing, wanting nothing, worrying about nothing, until it is hungry. It then waddles down to the ocean and swims slowly and not all that ably until it is a few meters from shore. The it dives like a submarine, and stuffs itself with seaweed, which is at that time indigestible. The seaweed is going to have to be cooked before it is digestible.
"So the marine iguana pops to the surface, swims ashore, and sits on the lava in the sunshine again. It is using itself for a covered stewpot, getting hotter and hotter while the sunshine cooks the seaweed. It continues to stare in to the middle distance at nothing, as before, but with this difference: It now spits up increasingly hot saltwater from time to time."
Becky and I were talking about this particular passage as we drove from Sarasota to Orlando. She said something like this: "Staring off into the middle distance at nothing, eating a few times each day and then going to sleep at night -- that's not much different than what we do, is it?"
I said, "No, it's not. The time we spend awake each day, whether we're staring off into the middle distance at nothing or are supremely busy with our so-called lives -- loving, worrying, complaining, blaming, fearing, wondering, thinking and all the other things we do while we're awake -- those are the thing we call OUR LIVES. You're so right: We're really not that much different from the marine iguanas. We think our lives are important but we're really just staring off into the middle distance at nothing at all. This is all a dream, an illusion and matters not a bit."
Yes, it's really wonderful that the longer one studies A Course in Miracles the better one becomes at finding new ways to see things -- new ways for forgiving everything, paying less and less attention to the ego mind and more and more to the Holy Spirit Mind God provided to each of us who think and fear that we abandoned Him.
- I want to stay as close to the edge as I can without going over. Out on the edge you see all kinds of things you can't see from the center.
- Thanks to TV and for the convenience of TV, you can only be one of two kinds of human beings, either a liberal or a conservative.
- A purpose of human life, no matter who is controlling it, is to love whoever is around to be loved.
The marine iguana "could be more than a meter long, and look as fearsome as a Chinese dragon. Actually, though, it was no more dangerous to life forms of any sort, with the exception of seaweed, that a liverwurst. Here is what its life is like in the present day, which is exactly what its life was like a million years ago:
"It has no enemies, so it sits in one place, staring into the middle distance at nothing, wanting nothing, worrying about nothing, until it is hungry. It then waddles down to the ocean and swims slowly and not all that ably until it is a few meters from shore. The it dives like a submarine, and stuffs itself with seaweed, which is at that time indigestible. The seaweed is going to have to be cooked before it is digestible.
"So the marine iguana pops to the surface, swims ashore, and sits on the lava in the sunshine again. It is using itself for a covered stewpot, getting hotter and hotter while the sunshine cooks the seaweed. It continues to stare in to the middle distance at nothing, as before, but with this difference: It now spits up increasingly hot saltwater from time to time."
Becky and I were talking about this particular passage as we drove from Sarasota to Orlando. She said something like this: "Staring off into the middle distance at nothing, eating a few times each day and then going to sleep at night -- that's not much different than what we do, is it?"
I said, "No, it's not. The time we spend awake each day, whether we're staring off into the middle distance at nothing or are supremely busy with our so-called lives -- loving, worrying, complaining, blaming, fearing, wondering, thinking and all the other things we do while we're awake -- those are the thing we call OUR LIVES. You're so right: We're really not that much different from the marine iguanas. We think our lives are important but we're really just staring off into the middle distance at nothing at all. This is all a dream, an illusion and matters not a bit."
Yes, it's really wonderful that the longer one studies A Course in Miracles the better one becomes at finding new ways to see things -- new ways for forgiving everything, paying less and less attention to the ego mind and more and more to the Holy Spirit Mind God provided to each of us who think and fear that we abandoned Him.